3

As the evening wedded with night, Thomas and Erich went drinking in the bars of Potsdam town. After the artistic gathering on the terrace earlier, they had accepted Käthe’s offer of a bed for the night and decided to remain in Potsdam until morning. Tonight they would cement their friendship afresh, talk about themselves and each other, and celebrate the events of the day just passed.

As they settled into another bar, this one by the name of Clärchens, with two glasses of wine before them, Erich stubbed out a cigarette to begin another one of his stories. He crossed his legs. ‘Are you listening?’

Thomas pushed his drink to one side and focused his attention on his friend. The bar they were in receded into the background.

‘He was neither tall nor short,’ Erich started. ‘He was slim, hard-working, honest, the sort of man you could be friends with. He went off to the war with a happy heart. It seemed like a good thing, a heroic thing, to take his place in the trenches with his fellow soldiers.

‘Life on the battlefield was hard, of course. The stench of death lay like a fog over the wide span of dismal earth, growing heavier and thicker by the day. But our man was resolute. He held his nerve, undaunted. He fought the good fight. That is until one day when he saw a rainbow flare above the land on a stormy day. It was beautiful and surprising. From that moment on, as if from nowhere, he was afraid of dying. It came on suddenly and intensely. Not miraculously but like a terrible burden. It felt like a ghoul was clinging to his back. His response was to run away. He fled his regiment and hid among the low-lands, in the bogs and canals, too afraid to go home. He stayed out of sight for nearly three years, living like a wild animal, stealing food and sleeping in woods. The news that reached his family told that he’d gone missing in battle. His mother and sister, with whom he lived, took to their mourning clothes and slowly accepted their loss.

‘Three years later, the soldier finally decided it was safe to go home. By now, his appearance was so wretched that it was hardly surprising he wasn’t recognised. His mother and sister, doubtless alarmed by the disturbance, took to the shadows. When they saw the silhouette of a man coming towards them, they combined their strength and struck the intruder down with one blow of a hefty wooden mallet. Killed him outright. It was only when they lit their lamps and looked into his eyes that they recognised him as their own kin. Which was worse, they had only just surfaced from three years of grieving from the news of his death. Now they would have to grieve all over again, only this time with themselves to blame.’

Erich adjusted the parting in his hair, marking the end of the story. He paused for a moment, waiting for Thomas to respond. He uncrossed his legs and went to take another cigarette, but changed his mind.

‘It’s just like a Greek tragedy,’ Thomas eventually offered.

‘Why so?’

‘Families turn on themselves, everyone is in a state of confusion. That’s how war affects things.’

Erich nodded, gave a half-smile. He seemed oddly agitated, as if Thomas had given the incorrect answer.

Thomas watched his friend, believing he was replaying the tale in his mind, reworking the parts he thought failed to draw a good enough response. Next time he told it, it would be honed and polished, the weaker passages dropped, the highlights exaggerated.

Thomas said. ‘Fate is out of our hands. That’s the lesson, is it not?’

‘Yes, sort of,’ Erich said with more than a hint of disapproval. He seemed to want Thomas to catch hold of something more, to see a meaning that he wasn’t prepared to say out right.

Erich was like that. Full of tales and declarations that he expected others to learn from. It was like he was trying to guide Thomas to a more enlightened view of the world.

It felt paternal. It also felt condescending.

For Thomas could never quite rid himself of the thought that Erich was a better man. He was wealthier, more secure in his life, and he possessed an inner confidence that Thomas could only wish for.

What’s more, he had his beautiful fiancé, Ingrid. And he had his family, that old Berlin family with roots in the ground as deep as an oak tree, as wealthy as a family could be in these times. Erich had been groomed to take up a position in Germany’s burgeoning colonies, and would have done so had the war not intervened. Erich’s father continued to support his son with a monthly allowance, tolerating the extravagances that Erich was well-known for. Next to him, Thomas felt condescended to even if the intention wasn’t there.

They were so different. Thomas didn’t quite earn his living in a factory, but it wasn’t far off: the print rooms of the Berliner Tageblatt newspaper where he worked as a typesetter, arranging letter-blocks on the presses ready for the midnight copy run. The work was quick and unforgiving. It had taken him three years to feel at ease in his post, by which time he had become one of the more adept compositors there.

Whereas Erich – well, what did Erich actually do? He did all the things that the son of a grand family did: he stepped in and out of ‘positions’, he advised on boards, consulted, lent his support, sponsored others. The last time he was known to have an actual job it was working at the Reichstag as part of the legislature. Any more details, he was never in the mood to reveal.

Did anyone else see what Thomas so keenly felt? Did anyone else see that Erich was a cut above and had every means to stay there? Thomas hated his paranoia on the subject – but still, those stories that educated him also belittled him, and paranoia – like a cliché – tends to carry at least some truth to it.

It was at that moment that a young man approached. He had a beard and wire-rimmed spectacles.

‘I’m sorry to bother you,’ he said. ‘I thought I recognised you.’