Juan Gomez-Jurado - The Traitor's emblem

Alys didn’t reply. She looked at him carefully, focusing on his shoulders and the pronounced muscles of his sinewy arms. Without the coal dust, his skin was very fair.

“Anyhow, thanks, Alys,” said Paul, taking her silence to be a mute reproach.

“You remember my name.”

Now it was Paul’s turn to be silent. The shine in Alys’s eyes was striking, and he had to look away.

“You’ve bulked up quite a bit,” she continued after a pause.

“It’s those baskets. They weigh a ton, but carrying them about makes you stronger.”

“How did you end up selling coal?”

“It’s a long story.”

She took a stool from the corner of the bathroom and sat down close to him.

“Tell me. We have time.”

“Aren’t you afraid they’ll catch you here?”

“I went to bed half an hour ago. The housekeeper checked on me. But it wasn’t difficult to sneak past her.”

Paul picked up the bar of soap and began turning it around in his hand.

“After the party I had a nasty argument with my aunt.”

“Because of your cousin?”

“It was because of something that happened many years ago, something to do with my father. My mother told me he’d died in a shipwreck, but on the day of the party I learned that she’d been lying to me for years.”

“It’s something adults do,” Alys said with a sigh.

“They threw us out, me and my mother. This job was the best I could get.”

“You’re lucky, I suppose.”

“You call this luck?” said Paul, wincing. “Working from dawn till dusk, with nothing to look forward to except a few pfennig in your pocket. Some luck!”

“You have a job; you have your independence, your self-respect. That’s something,” she replied, upset.

“I would swap it for some of this,” he said, gesturing around him.

“You have no idea what I mean, Paul, do you?”

“More than you think,” he spat, unable to contain himself. “You have beauty and intelligence and you spoil it all by pretending to be unhappy, a rebel, spending more time moaning about your luxurious position and worrying about what other people think of you than taking risks and fighting for what you really want.”

He fell silent, suddenly conscious of everything he’d said, and saw the emotion dancing in her eyes. He opened his mouth to excuse himself but thought that it would only make things worse.

Alys slowly got up from the stool. For a moment Paul thought she was going to leave, but this was just the first of many times he would fail to interpret her feelings correctly over the years. She came to the bathtub, knelt down beside it, and, leaning over the water, kissed him on the lips. At first Paul froze, but soon he began to respond.

Alys drew back and stared at him. Paul understood where her beauty lay: it was in the glimmer of challenge that blazed in her eyes. He leaned his body forward and kissed her, but this time he opened his mouth slightly. After a while she broke away.

Then she heard the door.

Alys jumped to her feet at once and backed away from Paul, but it was too late. Her father had entered the bathroom. He barely looked at her; he didn’t need to. The sleeve of her dress was completely soaked, and even a man of Josef Tannenbaum’s limited imagination could get some idea of what had been happening only a moment before.

“Go to your room.”

“But, Papa…” she stammered.

“Now!”

Alys burst into tears and ran out of the room. On the way she almost tripped over Doris, who flashed her a triumphant smile.

“As you can see, Fraulein, your father came home earlier than expected. Isn’t that marvelous?”

Paul felt totally defenseless, sitting there naked in the rapidly cooling water. As Tannenbaum approached, he tried to get to his feet, but the businessman gripped his shoulder cruelly. Though he was shorter than Paul, he was stronger than his chubby appearance suggested, and Paul found it impossible to get purchase on the slippery tub.

Tannenbaum sat down on the stool where Alys had been seated only a few minutes earlier. He didn’t lessen his grip on Paul’s shoulder for a moment, and Paul was afraid that he would suddenly decide to push him down and hold his head under the water.

“What’s your name, coal man?”

“Paul Reiner.”

“You’re not a Jew, Reiner, are you?”

“No, sir.”

“Now, pay attention,” said Tannenbaum, his tone softening, like a trainer speaking to the last dog in the litter, the slowest to learn its tricks. “My daughter is heir to a large fortune; she’s from a class far above your own. You’re just a piece of shit that got stuck to her shoe. Understand?”

Paul didn’t reply. He managed to overcome his shame and stared back, his teeth clenched in fury. At that moment there was no one in the world he hated more than this man.

“Of course you don’t understand,” Tannenbaum said, releasing his shoulder. “Well, at least I returned before she did something stupid.”

His hand went to his wallet, and he drew out an enormous fistful of banknotes. He folded them carefully and placed them on the marble washbasin.

“This is for the trouble caused by Manfred’s ball. And now you can go.”

Tannenbaum headed for the door, but before he left he looked at Paul one last time.

“Of course, Reiner, though you probably wouldn’t care, I’ve spent this afternoon with my daughter’s future father-in-law, finalizing the details of her wedding. In the spring she will marry an aristocrat.”

You’re lucky, I suppose… you have your independence, she’d said to him.

“Does Alys know?” he asked.

Tannenbaum gave a snort of derision.

“Never say her name again.”

Paul got out of the bathtub and dressed, hardly bothering to dry himself. He didn’t care if he caught pneumonia. He took the wad of banknotes from the sink and went into the bedroom, where Doris was watching him from across the room.

“Allow me to show you to the door.”

“Don’t trouble yourself,” the young man replied, turning into the corridor. The front door was clearly visible at the far end.

“Oh, we wouldn’t want you to pocket anything by accident,” the housekeeper said with a mocking grin.

“Give this back to your master, ma’am. Tell him I don’t need it,” Paul replied, his voice cracking as he held out the banknotes.

He almost ran to the exit, even though Doris was no longer watching him. She was looking at the money and a crafty smile flashed across her face.

The following weeks were a struggle for Paul. When he showed his face back at the stables he had to endure the forced apologies of Klaus, who had escaped a fine but still bore the remorse of having left the young man in a lurch. At least this mitigated his anger at Paul’s broken arm.

“The middle of winter, and only me and poor Hulbert to do the unloading, with all the orders we have. It’s a tragedy.”

Paul refrained from mentioning that they had so many orders only thanks to his scheme and the second cart. He didn’t feel like talking much, and he sank into a silence every bit as deep as Hulbert’s, freezing his backside off for long hours on the driver’s seat, his thoughts elsewhere.

Once he tried to return to Prinzregentenplatz when he thought Herr Tannenbaum wouldn’t be there, but a servant slammed the door in his face. He slipped various notes to Alys through the letterbox, asking her to meet him in a nearby cafe, but she never turned up. Other times he would walk by the gate of her house, but she never appeared. A policeman did, doubtless instructed by Josef Tannenbaum; he advised Paul not to return to the neighborhood if he didn’t want to end up picking his teeth off the pavement.