Robert Wilson - A Small Death in Lisbon

'I'm trying to find Eva Brücke.'

'Frau Brücke was arrested by the Gestapo months ago.'

The girl stopped singing the grating song.

'What for?' asked Felsen.

'Judenrein, judenrein, judenrein, ' chanted Traudl.

'Harbouring illegals,' said the woman. 'This one turned up some days after. She won't move, not even for air raids. I bring her something to eat now and again. But she'll have to move soon with this winter.'

Felsen took her to his apartment which had been requisitioned by the Organization Todt and filled with Speer's construction workers. He gave one of the women there all his ration cards and some money and left Traudl with her.

Felsen told the driver to take him to Wilhelmstrasse and booked himself into an absurdly luxurious room in the Hotel Adlon.

By 8.30 the next morning he was at No. 8 Prinz Albrechtstrasse sitting in the office of SS Sturmbannführer Otto Graf. They were waiting for the file to be delivered and Graf was enjoying one of Felsen's cigarettes and staring out into the still dark morning.

'What is your interest in this case, Herr Sturmbannführer?'

'I knew her.'

'Intimately?'

'She'd been running clubs and bars in Berlin for years. A lot of people knew her.'

'But you, what about you?'

'I knew her well enough to know that she wouldn't let herself be known.'

'Maybe… what she was doing, you have to be.'

'I knew her before the war. She was always like that.'

The file arrived. Graf looked at the photograph and remembered her. He flicked through the pages.

'Yes, yes, I know the type,' he said. 'She looks as if she'll snap like a pencil on the first morning and three weeks later she's told us nothing. Not that…'

'Three weeks?'

'It was a very serious matter. She was smuggling Jews out. Sending them in rail cars of furniture to Gothenburg.'

'And after the three weeks?'

'She was lucky. If the presiding judge had been Freisler she would have hanged. As it is she's been sent to Ravensbrück for life.'

Felsen offered another cigarette which was taken. They were American, Lucky Strikes he'd brought over from Lisbon. He gave Graf the packet and another one from his pocket. He said he could arrange a carton, two cartons. Graf nodded.

'Come back at lunchtime, I'll have a visiting permit ready for you.'

It wasn't difficult to arrange a car, but it took all afternoon and another two cartons of cigarettes to get the petrol for it. He could have taken the train up to Fürstenberg but someone had told him the railway station was a long way from the camp and transport not always available.

In the evening he went to the back of the burnt-out Reichstag building and bought four bars of chocolate on the black market. He didn't sleep much that night but lay on his luxurious bed in the Hotel Adlon, drank far too much and swelled his chest with fantasies of rescue. He could see Eva and himself climbing the steps up to the aeroplane in Tempelhof airport and flying out of the bomb-shattered Berlin to the blue sea, the wide Tagus and a new life in Lisbon. It was the closest he'd come to crying, emotional crying, as a grown man.

The next morning was cloudless, the landscape on the sixty-kilometre drive north of Berlin was frozen still and dusted white with an iron-hard frost that the low winter sun would never burn off. Felsen's eyeballs felt hot and were cracked with red lines. His stomach was burning sour, but he still managed to feel some of the heroicism of the night before. He parked outside the camp and was admitted through the barbed-wire walls into a compound consisting of low wooden huts. He was taken into one of these and left alone with four lines of wooden benches. Time passed. Hours of it. No other visitors came in. He sat on the bench and moved with the sunlight coming in through the window to keep warm.

At lunchtime a female guard came into the room in a grey greatcoat and side cap. Felsen stood to complain but saw that she was followed by a figure in a striped prison uniform about three sizes too big with a green triangle on the breast pocket. The guard sent the shaven-headed prisoner down the benches towards Felsen. The prisoner marched like a soldier on drill.

'You have ten minutes,' said the guard.

Felsen was not prepared for this. The prisoner's appearance was so dislocated from the human beings beyond the barbed-wire periphery that he wasn't sure if his language would be the same. It took a full half-minute to find the vestiges of Eva Brücke, Berlin nightclub-owner, in the sunken, grey, papier-mache skull. He had thought for a moment that this prisoner was going to take him to Eva-blonde, white-skinned and smoking somewhere else in the camp.

'You came,' she said, flatly, and sat down next to him.

He held out his massive hand. She folded her shrivelled, blackened monkey's paws in her lap. He broke off a piece of chocolate, she took it whole and swallowed it. The chocolate combusted inside her instantly.

'You know,' she said, 'I used to have dreams about my teeth falling out. Nightmares. People would tell me it was because I was worried about money. But I knew it wasn't that. I've never cared that much about money. Not like you. I knew that I was petrified of losing my teeth because I'd seen all those toothless women in villages, their faces fallen in, their beauty gone, their personality diminished. I have eight left, Klaus, I am still human.'

'What happened to your hands?'

'I make uniforms all day, every day. It's the dye.'

She looked at his hand still held out for hers and then at his face. She shook her head.

'I'm going to…'

'This is my lunch break, Klaus,' she cut in on him savagely. 'Give me some more chocolate, that's all I'm interested in. Not hope, not promises and certainly not sentimentality. Just chocolate.'

He broke off another piece and gave it to her.

'And I won't waste your time either,' she said. 'I presume you've come for an explanation. Well, you did see me that night in Bern. That pig Lehrer… he was such a bad loser. I warned you about him, didn't I?'

'Why Lehrer?'

'I knew him. I knew him before you, years before. He came to all my clubs. I was surprised you'd never met. He asked me one night if I knew anyone who could speak languages and was good at business, good at making things happen. And it all just fell into place. You, him and what I was doing. You should consider yourself lucky. If he hadn't sent you to Lisbon, you'd probably be in Dachau. It was a solution-Lehrer removed you from the scene and my involvement with him meant that people didn't look at me so closely.'

'But why didn't you tell me?'

He was angry He looked into her ruined face, the prominent craters of her eye sockets, the remaining yellow teeth blackened by molten chocolate, the veins standing out on her shaved head, the scabs from shaving nicks in the down forming over her china-thin cranium. And she saw that he was angry.

'More chocolate,' she said, not bothering to answer the question from the man in an SS uniform, the man who had been a Förderndes Mitglied of the SS, the man who'd made couplings for the SS, for God's sake, the man who bought wolfram for the SS so that the Nazi war machine could thunder on. Why hadn't she told him?

He broke off another piece.

'Don't think I was being brave, Klaus. It all happened by accident… after what happened to those two Jewish girls, you remember that, I told you everything about that, didn't I, the ones I sent to Lehrer and his friend, that was a risk me telling you that… a risk I did not repeat when I saw…' she stopped, and controlled herself. 'So, I moved the other two Jewish girls I had out of Berlin and that was it, I was involved. They kept coming to me and I couldn't turn them away. I'd become a link in the chain.'