August Schlegel flew into Berlin from Budapest via Vienna on the regular Lufthansa flight on the evening of Wednesday, 19 July, after what looked like another stinking hot day. Berlin was no longer the city it was. The extent to which it had been knocked about was more visible from the air, with flattened industrial outskirts as grey and pitted as a moon landscape. No air raids for most of the summer but destruction was a fact of life. Rubble, shortages and dust, the city more stuffed than ever with foreign workers in their wooden huts, sprung up like weeds on waste land.
The plane banked and Schlegel watched one train beetle-crawl past another on its elevated track. The city still functioned but not like Budapest where waiters continued to serve real coffee and cream. A cabin attendant handed out boiled sweets. Schlegel sucked hard on his, depressed at being back. BERLIN spelled out in huge letters on the runway struck him as faintly ominous.
The aeroplane wallowed in to land, engines whining in protest.
They all disembarked and walked across the wide concrete apron to the arrivals hall.
Passport control was a formality. Customs on the other hand singled him out, two badly shaven elderly goons keen to make the most of their authority. Open the bag. Close the bag. Papers. Purpose of trip. Open the bag again. Schlegel supposed it amused them. He was asked if he was carrying any gifts and to state the purpose of his visit.
‘No gifts. Courier,’ he said.
He had to show them the papers. ‘Inventory of art works for sale,’ he said and pointed to the signed documents, stamped by the SS and Hungarian customs.
Still they detained him with their pointless questions. For two minutes it was funny then Schlegel started to sweat. Did they know something he didn’t?
The folder and papers were taken away for copying. Something seemed odd about them when they were returned. Schlegel flipped through the document. It seemed to be all there. The two goons looked at him. Authority confronted by another authority was always an uncomfortable experience. But they said he could go. Schlegel stuffed the folder back in his case, wondering if the men had been tipped off. As the waiter in Budapest’s Gerbeaud café had said to him, not so many young men with white hair.
*
Much later he would try to decide the best point of entry into the events that were about to unfold. He could have cut the cake at any point really. What he didn’t understand then was how deep correlations of historical coincidence could turn out to be so personal.
The one lesson Schlegel would learn was that you have to understand how the past telescopes into the present.
*
By that troubled summer of 1944 there was no past in the sense of lives being joined up by the usual connections of memory or nostalgia. If one did look back, it was only over one’s shoulder, to check no one was following.
Anyone observing Schlegel on that evening of 19 July would have seen a tall, ordinary young man still in his twenties, wearing a hat and a suit too hot for the weather, carrying an overnight valise. His shoes were in a state of poor repair. He looked like he got not enough sleep and too little to eat, but by then sleeplessness, hunger and shoes with holes were the norm.
The city lay baked by the oppressive heat. Even the language was a welcome return after Hungarian, not a word of which Schlegel had recognised, not even the one for beer (sör). He took the S-bahn to Ostkreuz, changed and got off at Alexanderplatz. His apartment was a twenty-minute walk, through quiet dusty streets. He crossed a small square of trees with tired leaves and peeling bark. Cafés and restaurants were gone, their staff and owners long since mobilised, practically cheered off, given their reputation for universal rudeness. What was left was not worth patronising. The Hungarians were still serious about their cafés. The Gerbeaud was like a salon, with its formal layout of separate tables and heavy brocade.
Schlegel walked past mostly young women sitting on doorsteps, watching what was left of life go by. One saluted him with a beer bottle. He experienced a stab of desire at the sight of her skirt pulled up over her thighs to catch the last of the sun. Who might she think he worked for, he wondered; Ministry of Propaganda?
His tiny lodgings were up five flights, above a closed dance hall. The climb still left him breathless. He counted the ninety-six steps and paused as always on the third turn. The letdown of homecoming, he thought, as he entered his little box that stood alone at the top of the stairs.
He paused, alert. Something intangible in the dead air made him think it had been disturbed during his absence.
It was still light outside, the start of getting dark.
Everything was where he had left it: his service pistol, not taken to Budapest, under the floorboards; a heel of a stale loaf in the bread bin. The feeling of disturbance persisted.
Perhaps it was a result of now working for the Gestapo.
He knew as well as anyone that people had grown most afraid of themselves.
He resolved to go out and get drunk. His own form of deviancy amounted to seeking out illicit roving venues where forbidden music was played and teenagers – mainly boys with long hair – gathered to get high and enjoy the last of their freedom before conscription.
His purpose was to go in undercover to expose the scene he was patronising, though he had done nothing about that, having rather fallen for this forbidden world.
He’d hung around student venues, claiming to be a freelance photographer on a ministry grant, compiling an archive of endangered frescoes. Schlegel had once met such a fellow, who couldn’t believe his luck: excused active service for undemanding work, with travel and accommodation thrown in. Schlegel told the students he was back from Köln where he had come across hot jazz parties. Thanks to Gestapo files, he knew what he was talking about. One gang called itself the Edelweiss Pirates, another the Raving Dudes.
Inside the venues, usually cellars of bombed-out buildings, maybe thirty to fifty kids crammed into a dark, sweaty space where they drank and smoked and necked and danced. A basic sound system amplified the gramophone and the tinny rhythms of crude, urgent music were transmitted like messages from another planet.
*
On the night of the nineteenth, Schlegel went looking for such a club. These visits had been going on for about six weeks. He knew he was playing a dangerous game. By then he was going for the pleasurable distractions of Gerda, who was a bit older than the general crowd. He didn’t know what she did, other than postgraduate work connected to the university. Like many young women in Berlin, she was sexually generous.
They hadn’t talked much or introduced themselves rather than bump into each other and start jigging to the music. Then it was first names and kissing in the dark and a few times after that easy gratification in shadows and doorways before going their separate ways. The blackout encouraged casual sex. Schlegel would have liked to get to know her better – she seemed lively and interesting – but it was an unwritten code that such encounters took place apart from the rest of life.
That night the local venues he tried weren’t being used. It was dark with almost no moon and when he cracked his shin on a concrete pillar he gave up and went home.
*
He checked his mailbox. A couple of envelopes, one a bill, the other plain and unaddressed. Inside he found a folded sheet of foolscap and a list of names.
Upstairs, Schlegel looked at it properly – a column of typed names and initials, single spaced, with nothing to say what they meant; perhaps thirty in all. None of the names he recognised. He was irritated more than puzzled, until down near the end he saw his own.
‘Schlegel’.
And his initial.
‘Schlegel A’.
Above his name: ‘Stempfle B.’ Below: ‘Zehnter K.’ He had never heard of them but finding his own name on a list was bound to rack up a man’s persecution complex. The regime specialised in secret lists. List after list. Was it a warning?
He slept badly and got up in the night, more worried about the Budapest documents. Papers in order; he decided the folder was wrong – it looked the same, but not quite: marbled paper, two ribbons for tying, a standard product. It felt newer. Sloppy fuckers, not bothering to return the original folder, he thought, and told himself it was just another irritating detail in an irritating day. As for the real point of the trip, Schlegel hadn’t a clue, but more had been going on than he knew. He sighed. No use wasting time on imponderables. Some mysteries weren’t there to be solved.
He went back to bed, slept badly and this time got up and inspected the foolscap list. The creases, folded for the envelope, looked new but the page itself felt old. He stared at his name and thought that was what had woken him. Whether he had been dreaming about his long-lost father – however hard that was when he knew nothing of the man or even what he looked like – somewhere in the depths of his unconscious he had made the connection.
Schlegel was August, his father Anton. Both Schlegel A.
Was it his father’s name on the list rather than his?
But his father had gone to Argentina in the early 1920s never to be heard from again, or to be mentioned by his mother, except once when Schlegel was fifteen to announce she had been told by the German embassy he had drowned in Argentina, swimming in a river. By then Schlegel remembered nothing of the man, so he didn’t miss him. He was annoyed to be reminded of this vague, forgotten presence, like the first ripple of a breeze that brings bad weather, and he recalled a dim childhood memory of imagining him working for the Argentinian railway, building high spectacular bridges that spanned wild gorges over tumbling rivers. Why he should think his father had built bridges, he had no idea.