Juan Gomez-Jurado - The Traitor's emblem

Paul began to feel that his life was falling back into some order. A precarious order, but order nonetheless. Gradually he began to forget the mystery surrounding his father’s death, whether because of the difficulty of the task, his fear of confronting it, or his growing obligation to take care of Ilse.

One day, however, in the middle of a morning rest-the very time of day when he’d gone to ask for work-Klaus pushed away his empty beer mug, balled up his sandwich wrapper, and brought the young man back down to earth.

“You seem like a smart kid, Paul. How come you’re not studying?”

“Just because of… life, the war, people,” he said, shrugging his shoulders.

“There’s nothing to be done about life or the war, but people.. . you can always strike back at people, Paul.” The coal man exhaled a cloud of bluish smoke from his pipe. “Are you the type to strike back?”

All of a sudden Paul felt frustrated and powerless. “And what if you know that someone’s struck you, but you don’t know who it is or what they’ve done?” he asked.

“Well, then you leave no stone unturned until you’ve found out.”

All was quiet in Munich.

In a luxurious building on the east bank of the Isar, however, a gentle murmuring could be heard. Not loud enough to wake the house’s inhabitants; just a muffled sound coming from a room that overlooked the square.

The room was old-fashioned, childish, ill-suited to the age of its owner. She had abandoned it five years earlier and hadn’t yet had time to change the wallpaper; the bookcases were filled with dolls and the bed had a pink canopy. But on a night like this one, her vulnerable heart was grateful for the objects that took her back to the security of a long-lost world. Her nature cursed itself for having regressed so far in its independence and resolve.

The muffled sound was crying, smothered in a pillow.

On the bed was a letter, only the opening paragraphs visible amid the tangle of bedsheets: Columbus, Ohio, April 7th, 1920 Dearest Alys, I hope that you are well. You can’t imagine how much we miss you, as the dancing season is due to start in only two weeks! This year we girls will be able to go together, without our fathers, but with a chaperone. At least we’ll be able to go to more than one dance a month! The big news of the year, however, is that my brother Prescott is engaged to a girl from out east, Dotty Walker. Everyone is talking about the fortune her father, George Herbert Walker, has, and what a good couple they make. Mother couldn’t be happier about the wedding. If only you could be here, as it will be the first wedding in the family and you’re one of us.

The tears rolled slowly down Alys’s face. With her right arm she clung to a doll. Suddenly she was about to hurl it to the other side of the room, when she realized what she was doing and stopped herself.

I am a woman. A woman.

Slowly she let the doll go and began to think about Prescott, or at least what she remembered of him: they were together under the oak bed in the house in Columbus, and he was whispering as he embraced her. But when she looked up she discovered that the boy wasn’t tanned and strong like Prescott but fair and thin. Wrapped in her reverie, she was unable to recognize his face.

It happened so quickly that not even destiny could have prepared him for it.

“Damn you, Paul, where the hell have you been?”

Paul had arrived at Prinzregentenplatz with a full cart. Klaus was in a foul mood, as he always was when they worked the wealthy areas. The traffic was terrible. The cars and trolleys waged an endless war against beer sellers’ wagons, handcarts piloted by crafty deliverymen, and even workers’ bicycles. Policemen crossed the square every ten minutes, trying to impose order on chaos, their faces inscrutable beneath their leather helmets. They had already warned the coal men twice that they should hurry up with the unloading if they didn’t want to get an enormous fine.

The coal men certainly couldn’t afford that. Although that month, December 1920, had brought them many orders, encephalomyelitis had carried away two of the horses only a fortnight earlier and they had had to replace them. Many tears had been shed by Hulbert, for those animals were his life, and as he had no family, he even slept with them in the stables. Klaus had spent the last pfennig of his savings on the new horses and any unexpected expense could now ruin him.

It was no wonder, then, that on that afternoon the coal man started yelling at Paul the moment the cart came around the corner.

“There was a huge snarl-up on the bridge.”

“I don’t give a damn! Get down here and help us with the load before those vultures come back.”

Paul jumped down from the driver’s seat and started lugging baskets. It took much less effort now, though at sixteen, almost seventeen, his development was still far from complete. He was rather thin, but his arms and legs were pure sinew.

With only five or six baskets left to unload, the coal men sped up as they heard the rhythmic, impatient clip-clop of the policemen’s horses.

“They’re coming!” yelled Klaus.

Paul descended with his final load almost running, dropped it into the coal cellar, the sweat pouring down his forehead, then ran back up the stairs to the street. Just as he emerged, an object struck him full in the face.

For a moment the world around him froze. Paul noticed only that his body spun in the air for half a second, his feet trying to find purchase on the slippery steps. He flailed and then fell backward. He didn’t have time to feel any pain, because the darkness had already closed over him.

Ten seconds earlier, Alys and Manfred Tannenbaum had come into the square after a walk around a nearby park. The girl had wanted to take her brother out for some exercise before the earth became too frozen. The first snows had fallen the previous night, and although they hadn’t yet settled, the boy would soon be facing three or four weeks when he couldn’t stretch his legs as he might like.

Manfred was savoring these last moments of freedom as best he could. The previous day he had retrieved his old soccer ball from his wardrobe and was now kicking it along and bouncing it off the walls, under the reproachful stares of passersby. In other circumstances Alys would have scowled at them-she couldn’t bear people who thought children were a nuisance-but that day she felt mournful and insecure. Lost in thought, her eyes fixated on the small clouds her breath made in the freezing air, she was paying little attention to Manfred, except to make sure he picked up the ball when crossing the road.

Just a few meters before the door to their home, the boy noticed the gaping cellar doors and, imagining that they were in front of the goal in the Grunwalder stadium, kicked with all his might. The ball, which was made from extremely tough leather, traced a perfect arc before hitting a man square in the face. The man vanished down the stairs.

“Manfred, be careful!”

Alys’s angry shout became a scream when she realized the ball had hit someone. Her brother stood frozen on the pavement, terrified. She ran to the cellar door, but one of the victim’s colleagues, a short man wearing a shapeless hat, had already run to his aid.

“Damn it! I always knew that stupid idiot would have a fall,” said another of the coal men, a larger man. He was still standing by the cart, wringing his hands and glancing anxiously toward the corner of the Possartstrasse.

Alys stopped at the top of the cellar steps, but she didn’t dare descend. For a few awful seconds she looked down into the rectangle of darkness, but then a figure appeared, as though the color black had suddenly assumed human form. It was the coal man’s colleague, the one who had run past Alys, and he was carrying the fallen man.