Ice Cold (10 page)

T
uesday passes much like Monday. Kathie wanders around the city during the day. For a moment she toys with the thought of looking for a job as a maid after all. Had she been too quick to crumple up the piece of paper with the address in her coat pocket? Should she go to the employment office and ask them where she can find a place? But then she doesn’t after all. What else could she do, go to the hotels and boarding houses, ask if they need a chambermaid or a general skivvy? No, she doesn’t want to work as a maid. She’ll be sure to find something else. She’ll find something better than working as a servant for other people, kowtowing to them all the time. She only has to look at Mitzi, she’s done it, and she, Kathie, would manage too. Mitzi lives very comfortably on the money she gets from her fiancé, the man in Gelsenkirchen. Why shouldn’t she try the same thing? Hadn’t Hans said what a nice clean girl she is? The city itself entices her, the sweet life of the city. Walking about, going for a stroll, looking at all the people. She’ll make it, she’s sure of that. And hasn’t she
managed very well so far? She’s wanted for nothing yet, even without working she’s had enough to eat and a place to sleep. She’s young, her life lies ahead of her.

She strolls through the city. She buys herself a patent leather belt in a shop in the city centre. It’s black. She puts it on at once. She’s seen other girls wearing belts like this, city girls. It’s modern. She puts her old belt away in her handbag. The new one looks much better. The blond man had given Kathie the money for the belt. Not that she’d asked him for anything, she wouldn’t do that, but he just gave her the money in the morning, telling her to buy herself something pretty. It wasn’t much, but enough for the black belt and something to eat, and Kathie was happy with that.

In the evening she goes back to Soller’s. By now she knows almost everyone there. The local pedlar, Limping Anton, who does his rounds at Soller’s every evening with his vendor’s tray slung around him, is making eyes at her again. ‘So here’s our pretty Kathie back. Don’t you think we’d make a good couple?’ he calls out as she comes in through the door, winking his one eye and pursing his lips into a kissing shape.

Kathie laughs at him. ‘Oh, go along with you! You’re far too old for me’, she tells him. She felt like saying: you limp, and you have a glass eye, and you’re a pauper, going around with your tray of shoelaces. But then she didn’t like to.

Mitzi is there with dark-haired Hans, and she joins them. Anna only looks in for a little while this evening. But it’s
still fun even without Anna, with just Hans and Mitzi. And it’s Hans who suggests that Kathie could go and sleep at Mitzi’s place tonight, since the blond man hasn’t turned up and Kathie has nowhere else to go. She’s happy with the idea, she doesn’t have to think twice about it, so she goes to Mariahilfplatz with the two of them. They leave Soller’s before closing time.

As they unlock the apartment, there’s Anna already lying on the sofa in the kitchen-living-room. Anna is fast asleep, however hard Kathie shakes her she just keeps on sleeping. So she simply goes into the bedroom with the others. She sleeps on the join where the twin beds are pushed together, in between dark-haired Hans and Mitzi.

In the middle of the night Hans puts his hand out to Kathie, and she doesn’t push it away. She says nothing, doesn’t move, just lies there. Keeps still. He caresses her body with his hand.

The way Kathie lies so still is to strike the driver too, later. The driver she meets at Soller’s on Wednesday evening.

He’s sitting at the next table, and keeps looking across at the girl sitting between dark-haired Hans and Mitzi. There’s a blond man at the table with them too. His back is turned to the driver.

The girl keeps looking at him as well, and he smiles back. Raises his glass to her. Never takes his eyes off her. She has long, dark hair, plaited into a braid. A round girlish face
with rosy cheeks and round dark eyes. A big mouth with firm, full lips. He liked the look of her at once when he saw her sitting at the next table.

Some time during the evening she stands up and goes towards the door. Just before she gets there she turns to him. He thinks she is smiling at him, just him. With her full lips and her brown eyes. Gives him a sign, a little nod, barely visible. She wants him to follow her.

He drinks some more of his beer and then goes out. She is waiting for him there. He feels uncertain, hardly knows what to say to her. Finally he asks if that fellow at her table, the one with the fair hair, is her boyfriend?

‘No, just someone I know. He comes in here at Soller’s quite a bit.’

‘Then you could move over to my table, what do you think?’

‘No, you move over to us.’

‘But will that be all right with the others at your table?’

‘It’ll be fine with Hans. I’d have moved to your table before, but Hans thought I ought to wait. And he said if you liked me you’d move to our table. Otherwise it wouldn’t do.’ As she speaks she plays with the braid hanging over her shoulder. Keeps passing it through her fingers. Her eyes are on him all the time. Smiling at him.

‘I’m going back inside now. You wait here a moment and then come in too.’

He does as she says. Stays in the middle of the path up to
the inn. Waits, counts up to sixty the way kids do when they’re playing hide and seek, and only then does he go back to where he was sitting. He finishes his beer and looks across at the girl as he drinks it.

Putting his hand in his pocket, he takes out the money for his drink, counts it, and puts it down beside the glass. Only then does he go over to the next table.

May he join them? His voice sounds to him strange and wooden. And the dark-haired man says, ‘Yes, of course, just sit down. So long as you’re not the sort to put on airs you’re welcome. All alone at your table, eh?’

He even gives up his place beside the girl so that the driver can sit down beside her. And then they talk to each other all evening.

She tells him she’s from Wolnzach. Her father deals in hops, her mother runs a general store. She’s looking for a job here in Munich. Wolnzach was too countrified for her. She’d been working in a hotel there, that was her last job, she’d like one the same in Munich. She was really supposed to be staying with family, that had all been agreed, but they didn’t have room for her, so she’s putting up at Hans and Mitzi’s place. They live in Mariahilfplatz.

He keeps looking at her as she tells him all this. He looks into her big dark eyes, he looks at her full lips. She has pretty teeth. Her voice is soft and gentle.

She goes on talking and talking. About her home in Wolnzach, how her father didn’t want her living there any
more, so that’s why she was here to look for a job.

Only much later does he ask what her name is. Katharina, she says. Katharina Hertl. But he can call her Kathie, everyone does.

They all stay late this evening, they don’t leave until nearly midnight. The driver asks Kathie if he can come back to Mariahilferplatz with her.

‘Yes, I don’t mind.’

The night outside is starry, you can smell autumn already, taste it in the cold air. They cross the Viktualien-markt, the big Munich produce market, passing the stalls, all now closed down for the night. Mitzi and Hans are ahead of them.

First the driver just walks along beside Kathie, then in Reichenbachstrasse he takes her arm, she feels a little cold, and they cross the Reichenbach Bridge arm in arm. When they reach the lodging-houses in Ohlmüllerstrasse, Hans turns to the pair of them. He calls back, over his shoulder, ‘Come on, time you two said goodnight.’

Kathie stops. She goes quite close to the driver. She whispers in his ear: will he be coming back to Soller’s again tomorrow? He feels her breath on his skin, her warm breath.

‘At nine’, he hears her saying.

And when he nods Kathie kisses the driver goodbye. He feels her lips on his. They are soft, warm and full.

I work for BMW in Munich. Running in the cars. My name is Georg Spielberger. I’m Erna’s fiancé.

Erna and me, we met in February at the Salvatorkeller ball. It was 3 February 1934, Carnival Saturday.

I’d be lying if I was to say I didn’t fancy her straight off. The moment I first set eyes on her. I’d gone along with my friend Arthur Vogel and a few other guys. We were all dressed up as chimney sweeps. ‘Then the girls will kiss us for good luck and so on.’ It was Arthur’s idea, he’s always getting brainwaves like that. Erna was there with her girlfriend.

She came up to our table because she knew Arthur. She’d met him through her brother. I liked the look of her at once. She was dressed in a Pierrot costume, with a little cap on her head and a red heart painted on her cheek.

The two girls sat down at our table. I made sure
she was sitting next to me, didn’t want to give the other fellows a chance. I never took my eyes off her all evening, and I didn’t dance with anyone else.

When she told me she was in the office at the BMW works, I said to her, ‘What a coincidence! I work at BMW too.’

‘You must be joking! I don’t believe it,’ she said.

Arthur, who was standing behind me, had to back me up or she’d never have credited it.

She added, ‘How funny we’ve never met in the canteen or around the place somewhere else.’

‘It’s certainly funny, because I’d have noticed you right away,’ I answered her back. ‘A pretty girl like you would catch anyone’s eye.’

She laughed heartily. She laughs a lot anyway, she likes laughing. She’s a girl who enjoys life. That’s why I liked her so much from the start. She’s pretty too. That long, dark hair. Those black eyes. She really does have black eyes, and when she laughs they begin to sparkle. And she has a perky, heart-shaped little mouth. When she laughs you can see all her teeth.

I took her to her tram stop, it was Tramline 1 on the Landsberger Bridge. And before she got on the tram I plucked up all my courage and gave her a hug
and a kiss. I thought to myself, this is the girl I’ve been looking for and I’m never going to let her go.

The very next day we met again, and then it was every day after that. We meet at work anyway, and I always wait for her outside the BMW gate after work.

The girls that Erna works with up in the bookkeeping department all know me. And if she’s rather late coming out, I go up to her office and wait there.

Then after work we go to the cinema, or for a walk, or just to my place. I’m still living with my parents, and when Erna realized that my mother always comes home from her job very late, she said, ‘I tell you what, I’ll cook for you.’ And that’s what we did. My Erna is a good cook.

She stays the night most weekends, and sometimes during the week too. Whenever we can’t stop talking and telling each other stories and it’s very late. Or when we’ve been to the cinema.

She likes going to the cinema, my Erna does, so we see almost all the new films they show at the cinema. She can sing the songs from the films as soon as she’s heard them. My Erna has a lovely voice. I always like listening to her. I’ve often said to her, ‘How can you remember that? You’ve
only just heard it. I could never do it, honest.’

Then she just laughs and shakes her head. ‘Oh, it’s easy.’

Quarrel? No, we never really quarrel. Now and then we exchange a few words, about some small thing, but no, we never have anything you might call a quarrel.

Last Saturday she came to my place around five-thirty. And around seven we started out. We went into town on the tram.

Erna wanted to go to the Buttermelcherhof restaurant where her friend is a waitress. The friend’s first name is Fanny. I’m afraid I don’t know her surname or her address. Erna told me Fanny was at school with her, and they’ve been friends ever since. Every day in the morning Erna used to call for Fanny, she lived on her way to school. There were lots of other children in Fanny’s family, Erna told me, and they had a billy-goat, one of her brothers was always setting it on the girls.

And we did have a word with Fanny in the restaurant, but then we decided to leave because it was very full. First we tried to find a place to sit, but we soon saw it was hopeless, so we left again after a few minutes.

I said to Erna why didn’t we go to the cinema,
but she didn’t want to, not that evening, so we went to the Wartburg in Auenstrasse to dance. Erna didn’t dance with anyone but me all evening, she didn’t dance with anyone else. We danced almost all the dances. I thought I’d never seen my Erna look lovelier than she did that evening. She was wearing her red dress with the white dots, and the yellow silk cord necklace with the little beads in it. I gave it to her for her birthday. On 13 August, a day before the Ascension of the Virgin Mary. We got engaged that day, Erna and me.

We left the Wartburg bar around eleven-thirty. Then we walked almost as far as the Ludwig Bridge and sat down on a bench there.

I put my arm around her, and she leaned against me. We stayed sitting on that bench for quite a while. We still had plenty of time before the tram left.

We agreed that next day, Sunday, she’d come to my place by two o’clock and we’d go out to Pasing, to see friends of ours. There’s a fair on in Pasing at the moment.

‘Wouldn’t you rather stay here, or why don’t I take you all the way home?’ I asked Erna, but she just laughed at me, she said I was fussing like a mother hen, and she could find her own way home even if she was blindfolded.

‘It’s all brightly lit,’ she said, ‘and it’s not so very far to my place. You know how fast I walk, it won’t take me fifteen minutes.’