Robert Lautner - The Draughtsman

‘This will do well. Sander will be pleased. Well done. Now, tell me what you might think of something.’

He went to his desk and with anything that came to hand weighted down another plan. I crossed the room, looked down at the paper spread as large as a tablecloth, a cog-like mechanism its centrepiece. Prüfer did not wait for any query.

‘The problem with the camp ovens, Ernst, is that they run on coke. It is inefficient to run and damages the ovens quickly. It takes much longer to reduce the matter than our gas ovens – such as your friend probably has in Weimar. One of ours no doubt.’ He was pleased at this. He may have installed them himself.

‘The SS will go for nothing less than coke. For cost. Yet they want more efficient ovens every year. They are wrong of course. Although more expensive to build, a gas oven is more economical. But they think like old men. Coal, coal, coal. Coal is cheap, the oven must be cheap. But now it is not so cheap.’ He tapped the cog on the drawing. ‘But see here, see here. The problem is that an oven must be a regulatory size if it is to work correctly. And they simply do not have the space for anything larger than the eight-door muffle oven in any building in Auschwitz. I know. I built them. If they build another crematoria, again no more than an eight-door, otherwise the heat will be too great. The men operating it would burn. By the end of the year there will be fifty-two ovens in these camps. They don’t listen. That will take enough coal to run a railway. But see here, see here.’

I turned my head to the diagram, like a dog trying to comprehend another’s bark coming from the radio.

‘Is this one of Herr Sander’s designs, sir?’

‘No. It is my own. It is a circular oven.’ He indicated the protrudes of the wheel that made me perceive the drawing as a cog-piece. ‘These are the muffle doors. Instead of having ovens in a line, each creating its own heat, you have a central furnace. Eight doors all around.’

I could see it then. Pictured the special unit of prisoners, a trundle, the sliding bed for the body, for each, standing in front of their oven door, trying not to look at each other across Prüfer’s central furnace as they loaded their burden.

‘They would have to remove the old ovens of course but it would double the capacity and – with a single larger furnace – it would be more efficient. The problem with each muffle having its own furnace is it negates the savings of using coke. If they had gone with gas jets from the start it would be cheaper overall. But they have made their bed.’

I saw the single massive furnace roar before me.

‘But how would you determine the ashes? From each other, sir? To send to their relatives? For interment?’

He stared at me, and then back to his crude design.

‘I don’t think you understand, Ernst. Do you think Kori of Berlin are not working on furnaces to improve efficiency? Marketing such to the SS? How are we to compete if it is not by better design?’

I had disappointed him. Could feel it. All design, all invention falling to the same adage:

Build a better mousetrap. It did not say build a bigger one.

*

‘Thank you for your efforts today, Ernst. Your plans must be brought to my office every night,’ he ordered, ‘for security. One of the reasons for hiring you is that many of the older men are ex-union men. They still hold socialist ideals. And there are many communists amongst them.’

I kept hearing these words. They were being drilled into me from every office in the building. I began to think that I was not so talented or wanted. Just local. And young. New.

‘And we have communists on the factory floor. Sure of it. From our own workforce and from the camps. But without knowing who they are we do not get rid of skilled men when we have need of them. We could not fulfil our contracts without. But we have been instructed by the SS that the men who work on these plans must be totally trustworthy. Must have no communist ties. It is easier to use new men.’ He took the plans from the board and folded them into his safe.

‘The new ovens are … important … to the SS. Not for communist eyes.’ He winked his cherubic smile. ‘You will have them waiting for you every morning. Good night, Ernst.’

I bowed and left, cursed myself. I should not have opinions. A man should admire everything from his superiors, not question. I passed Klein’s office, the sound of him laughing down the telephone at my back as I walked.

My ISIS machine was the last one on my row, no-one behind me to see, my co-worker beside me too engrossed in his own work and I was sure he would not know what I was permitted to do and not do, but still, I waited until he took a pipe break to copy the Auschwitz plan from memory. A scaled version in my pocket. Take it home. To show Paul at the weekend. Working at home a good habit for an ambitious man.

When I first met Etta she was that entrancement of a typical zaftig Austrian woman. Curls and curves. City life and style had near straightened her red curls and she maintained them religiously. I imagined that as a child her auburn hair had set her out when all her classmates would have been as shining blonde as the brass in an orchestra.

Her figure too gone the way of a city girl walking to work, and the privations of war had slimmed her so that her nightwear no longer clung but draped, flowed like water about her. Every year she became a new woman before me. Every year a new bride. I envied even myself over my fortunes with her. We argued because we were so similar. We made up because we were so similar. I had known women before her but all I learned from them was how to erase the errors of arrogant youth so I could correctly love this one. I met her at an Erfurt fair, she had tripped, and I caught her and her soup bowl over my shirt. It was dark, the only light from the bulbs of the market stalls selling pretzels and hot chocolate. I never saw she was a redhead until the next day when we met for lunch. I never looked at another woman after that. My youth had been only training to get to that point, sure that some higher power had closed his book and said, ‘I’m done with this one. Next.’

We married in Switzerland, where her parents had moved to in ’39. We were twenty-one. I was ending my last year at university. Etta had been coming to the library there for years. We had never met.

Her parents had rented her an apartment and I advantaged on that to leave my parents, to leave my small box room where I had grown up. This was not a sudden thing. We had courted for months. Needed more time together. It was like playing at house. Decorated the place like a child’s birthday party. Never made the bed up. No point. Ate meals on our laps. Listened to the radio that grew worse every week. Even the music controlled. Everything on it decades or centuries old or just shrill speeches from names we did not know. They took the long-wave from us, took music from us. We shrugged. The country shrugged.

Etta had married a poor Erfurt boy. No reason to. She could have had anyone. Any of those rich boys her father knew. Sometimes the bafflement of this needed reassurance and she would touch me, would smile as at a child.

‘There’s no such thing as a good rich man, Ernst. No-one ever got rich being a good man. I would rather trust a poor honest one. One without a mistress.’

‘And how do you know I don’t have a mistress?’

‘Because you can’t afford one.’

We moved into that one-room apartment next to the hotel that summer. Her father no longer able to pay for hers from Switzerland as the banks consolidated under government control. Only internal transactions permitted. I signed on for the married man’s subsistence. She took a waitress job. But we were never happier. Until a month became three years. Until the war became three years. People wore it on their faces. The people in their maps that they pushed their tiny markers of planes and battalions over like croupiers dragging away your losses. Thin as paper maps. The bed got made. Ate at table.