After Midnight (3 page)

Then Algin married Liska, because she’s so tall and lovely that even women who don’t like her say she really is quite something. He also married her because she admired his divine gift for language, and because you need a wife as well as an apartment if you’re going up in the world. They furnished the apartment with expensive rugs and cushions, and furniture which is so low it makes you feel somebody sawed the legs off the chairs and tables one cold winter and fed them into the stove. Although the apartment has central heating. Alcoves have been built into some of the walls for books. Algin saw this apartment as a magnificent stage setting for a theatrical show performed by himself. He wanted people to come and applaud, and be aware that Algin was playing a leading part.

Algin isn’t happy any more. Liska isn’t happy any more. I love them both. When I came here they gave me board and
lodging just like that, and now I’m running the household for them. All Liska can do about the house is create chaos and stuffed toy animals. She used to work with handicrafts in Berlin, and she still does. It even earns her a little money. Her soft toys are silly, daft—but amusing and appealing too.

Oh dear, now Herr Kulmbach’s ordering yet another round of kirsch. And I’ve got an incredible amount of work to do tomorrow, because tomorrow evening is Liska’s big party.

Gerti called for me at noon today, because she was going to buy a pink blouse and wanted me to come along to the shops and tell her which suited her best. Even Liska says I have good taste in clothes, and people are always wanting me to knit them sweaters. Actually I can knit fast, and well. If I really do marry Franz, I can always earn us a little money by knitting. However, here in Frankfurt I’ve been moving in circles which are quite different from anything Franz is used to. I mix with high-class, rich, intelligent people here. Franz wouldn’t know what to say to them.

Well, anyway, we were out in search of a blouse, Gerti and myself. We looked in Goethe Street and the Zeil. Then Gerti said why didn’t we go and have a coffee in the café in the Rossmarkt, so we did. Jews sometimes use this café, because unlike nearly all other bars and restaurants, it doesn’t have a notice up saying
JEWS NOT WELCOME
.

The better class of Jews mostly stay at home anyway. If they do want to go out in public there are still three cafés in Frankfurt they can visit. These happen to be the three best cafés, which is hard luck on Aryans, who are afraid of going there too, with good reason. The good reason is that the
Nazi paper, the Stürmer, will write about them if they do and call them lackeys of the Jews. And if they have official positions they get sacked. Only a very few brave Aryans dare go in, people without jobs to lose.

Similarly, a few brave Jews venture into the Rossmarkt café. They drink light beer which they don’t really like, so as to look inconspicuous and Aryan. Whereas in this particular café Aryans don’t happen to drink beer.

Gerti said why didn’t we have a vermouth with our coffee, and then another one, and I was her guest. She kept looking at the door. Her neck must have hurt from all that turning to look. She was hoping Dieter Aaron would come in.

Goodness knows how often I’ve told her, “Gerti, don’t make yourself and Dieter unhappy.” Dieter is what they call a person of mixed race, first class or maybe third class—I can never get the hang of these labels. But anyway, Gerti’s not supposed to have anything to do with him because of the race laws. If all Gerti does is simply sit in the corner of a café with Dieter, holding hands, they can get punished severely for offending against national feeling. Still, what does a girl care about the law when she wants a man? And if a man wants a girl, it’s all the same to him if the executioner’s standing right behind him with his axe, so long as he gets one thing. Once he’s had it, of course, it is not all the same to him any more.

I don’t mean that Dieter Aaron is a totally unacceptable sort of mixed-race person. He’s polite, and nice, and young, with soft, brown, round, velvety eyes. He’s never been very energetic or competent, and his father has never been happy about him. Old Aaron
is
very competent, and rich, and he has a fine, grandly decorated detached house with
a garage. He sells curtains and furnishing fabrics abroad. Gerti says it’s an export business, and Jews can run export businesses; they aren’t banned. So old Aaron has no problems with his business although he is a full Jew. However, he doesn’t like people to call him a Jew. He says he’s not a Jew, he’s a non-Aryan.

I’ve sometimes been invited to the Aarons’ with Algin and Liska, and Algin almost always quarrels with the old man. Because Algin is against the National Socialists and old Aaron isn’t. Old Aaron thinks the Nazis have put the German mentality in order and saved him from the Communists, who would have taken away all he has. He never has any trouble in big, grand hotels; indeed, he gets excellent treatment, and they even offer him a chair at the Revenue offices. There are some very inferior riffraff among the Jews, he says, so he can understand anti-Semitism, and as for the armed forces, there are some fine fellows among
them
, it’s a pleasure to look at them. Frau Aaron is not Jewish. She is dry and hard as old straw, and she dominates her husband. Young Aaron is of mixed race because of his non-Jewish mother, who loves him so madly it’s practically indecent.

Dieter is in love with Gerti, but he’s scared stiff of his mother. He used to work in a chemicals factory, a job obtained by much effort and expense on his father’s part, but now he can’t do it any more. Nobody knows what will become of him. For the time being, he drives his father to business meetings and takes the Dobermans out for walks. He also goes looking for Gerti, and she goes looking for him.

And then the pair of them sit in a bar looking at each other, the air around them positively quivering with love-sickness. Everyone in the bar must notice; no good can
come of it. They just live for the moment, and cause the air to quiver, and don’t stop to wonder what next. Gerti thinks the good Lord will help them, because she’s so beautiful, and the good Lord is a man. Dieter thinks, by turns, what his mother thinks and what Gerti thinks. Also, he is afraid of his father.

Sometimes Gerti and Dieter do try to plan for the future, but then they look into each other’s eyes, and all thought fades away. Sometimes I keep them company, so that the impression they make in the bar won’t be quite so dangerous. I don’t like doing this, and I always feel very foolish. I could weep with the worry of it. They’re both so pretty and so nice, and they may be hauled off to jail tomorrow. Why are they so crazy? I can’t understand it. Other people dance, but they can’t. The radio is playing string music, soft as a feather bed. Bright light shimmers in the wine. The wine is sour, but they are drinking hot, bright radiance. I long for Franz, and Gerti’s voice grows thin and faltering. The proprietor of the place keeps glancing at us—perhaps he knows Gerti from her parents’ shop and he’ll inform on her tomorrow. Dieter’s well known in Frankfurt too, through his father. There are people wearing Party badges at the next table—oh, dear God, we must get out of here! We must find another bar, and yet another, and some time disaster will strike.

Perhaps the two of them wouldn’t love each other so much if they were allowed to. However, there’s nothing more idiotic than wondering why people love each other when they
are
in love.
So when Gerti and I were sitting in the Rossmarkt café this afternoon, she thought Dieter might turn up because she’d been there with him once or twice, around this time in the afternoon. They hadn’t made a date. All the same, Gerti was nearly weeping with fury because Dieter didn’t come in. Now she won’t see him again until tomorrow, at Liska’s party; the Aarons are invited. And then they will have to be very careful, because of the old Aarons and because of Betty Raff. And I’m not sure that all the other guests are entirely safe, either.

Gerti wanted to have one more vermouth. She suddenly looked dead and drained. The way a woman looks when she’s been waiting with all her might, waiting and longing, and all for nothing. Gerti did not want to buy a pink blouse any more, and anyway there wouldn’t have been enough money left. We decided to go home without the blouse. It was five in the afternoon. There was turmoil around the Opera House. People, and swastika flags, and garlands of fir, and SS men. The place was in confusion, all excited preparations, much like preparations for the handing out of Christmas presents in a prosperous family with quantities of children. You get used to feverish celebrations of something or other going on all the time in Germany, so that you often don’t stop to ask what it is this time, why all the fuss and the garlands and the flags?

Suddenly we felt cold. We were in a hurry to get home. But the SS wouldn’t let us cross the Opera House Square to get to the Bockenheim Road. We asked why not; what was going on? But the SS are always arrogant and inclined to put on airs. This lot had nothing better to do than stand around, but they still couldn’t find time to answer us. Possibly their minds were working away so frantically that they
could only manage to give a contemptuous shrug of their military shoulders.

Gerti’s eyes went dark as coal with rage. I know her in that mood: it makes her dangerous, and then of course she’s the greatest danger of all to herself. So I asked one of the SS men again, sweet as sugar, very humbly, as if I thought he was one of the greatest rulers of Germany—well, that’s the way men like a girl to treat them.

So then the SS man said the Führer would be coming down the Mainz Road to the Opera House at eight. If we wanted to get to the other side of the square we’d have to go round. Yes, of course the Führer was coming! How could I have forgotten? After all, little Berta Silias was due to break through the crowd with flowers, and Frau Silias had talked of nothing else for days.

It was beginning to rain. People were gathering in the square, more and more of them all the time. It looked quite dangerous, as if they’d crush each other to death. Everyone wanted to see something, some of them may not even have known what there would be to see, but all the same they were risking their lives.

Possibly the Führer thought, afterwards, that the people had come flocking up out of love for him. No, being the Führer he’ll be too clever to think that. Thousands more people join the carnival parade in Cologne, and clamber up on lampposts and high rooftops, breaking arms, legs, anything—they don’t mind. It’s just a kind of sport: they’re proud to have got a good viewpoint, so they can say, and believe, they were in the carnival. And classy people always want to have been at something classy—like Press balls and first nights. But as those things cost a lot of money, there isn’t usually such a dangerous crush as in the enormous
crowds of people who don’t have any money and can only go to shows that don’t cost them anything.

We reached the Mainz Road. It was officially lined the whole way down by SA men, who always look broader than usual on these important occasions. Mostly they don’t have anything much to do these days, and go about looking as if they’ve shrunk a bit. Kurt Pielmann and Herr Kulmbach, for instance, resent the fact that there isn’t a campaign on any more. Today, however, they could form an imposing cordon, which puts new life into them.

A thin, grey man with a bicycle was going on angrily about not being allowed through. He had finally got a new job, he said, and he had to be on time. Unpunctuality could mean bad trouble for him. And even if his employers did realize he couldn’t help being late, they might still be angry with him. Life’s nearly always like that: you put difficulties in a person’s way, and a slight aura of something dubious and unpleasant still clings to him whether it is his fault or not. “Look, be reasonable, will you?” a fairly high-up SA man, drinking coffee from his flask, told the thin, grey cyclist. “Don’t bleat on like that! Just you be thankful to the Führer for his high ideals!”

“That’s right,” said the thin, grey man, “the Führer gets to have the ideals and we get to carry the can.” His voice was trembling; you could tell his nerves were worn to a shred. The people who’d heard him were struck dumb with alarm, and the SA man went red in the face and could scarcely get his breath back. All at once the grey man looked utterly broken, extinguished. Three SA men led him away. He didn’t put up a struggle.

His bicycle was lying on the ground. People stood around it in a circle, staring in nervous silence. It shone dully in
the rain, and had a subversive look about it; nobody dared touch it. Then a fat woman made an angry face, flung her arm up in the air in the salute of the Führer, said, “Disgusting!” and kicked the bicycle. Several other women kicked it too. And then the cordon opened and let us through.

The Esplanade café is diagonally opposite the Opera House. It has pansies flowering outside it in summer time, and its customers are nearly all Jews. Gerti and I ought to have gone on down the Bockenheim Road, but there was a cordon blocking that road off too, so we went into the Esplanade. The first thing I did was phone Liska, who said that was all right, she’d make a bite of supper, and Betty Raff could lend a hand too. Gerti rang her mother. Her mother said Kurt Pielmann had come from Würzburg and would be meeting her in the Henninger Bar about nine this evening.

Kurt Pielmann’s in love with Gerti and wants to marry her. His father has put a lot of money into Gerti’s parents’ shop. If he takes it out now, the business will fail. You can’t help understanding them and seeing their point. I persuaded Gerti to keep the date with Kurt Pielmann. She can be friendly to him, after all; that doesn’t mean she has to marry him, and she certainly does not,
not
have to kiss him. With a man like that, all she has to do is say she’s glad there are people like him around, and she’d like him to tell her about National Socialism and introduce her to a wonderful world of ideas. And she isn’t mature enough yet to be the lifelong companion of a National Socialist and old campaigner, but she would like to improve her mind until she is, and the way he can help her is by sending her constructive literature. The likes of Kurt Pielmann will be sure to send her the constructive literature, if only because then he can believe he’s read it himself. I know about this sort of thing
through my father, and Aunt Adelheid, and a good many other people too. They find reading far too much of a strain, far too boring. You can bet your sweet life they haven’t read
Mein Kampf
from beginning to end yet. Not that I have either. But they’ve bought it, and glanced at it now and again, and in the end they believe they’ve read the whole thing.