Robert Lautner - The Draughtsman

I could no longer refrain from pulling out my sweepings of tobacco. His observations needed a deliberating smoke. Paul watched me roll a cigarette before he went on. I do not think he judged my cheap simulation of smoking, as Klein would have done.

‘I would like to copy this plan, Ernst. I could maybe help with its improvement. Make suggestions. One friend to another.’

‘You have helped, Paul. I did not notice there were no chutes. And you are right. It makes no sense to wheel the dead through a shower room.’ I struck a match and lit up, to think on my next words as I folded the plan away from him. ‘I’m sure that it is an SS request rather than an error of our engineers. No need to trouble yourself further.’

The plan would stay with me. Paul had once been a stonemason. In my innocence, my naivety, I could only think of Freemasons. Of unions and communists. And I had been warned often enough. And I had copied this plan without permission.

‘It is no trouble, Ernst,’ he said. ‘Perhaps you and Etta could come to supper one evening? Catch up properly.’

‘I would like that. We would like that.’ I stood. ‘Thank you, Paul.’ We shook hands.

‘Is there anything else I can help you with, Ernst? A long way to come for so short a visit.’

‘Actually there is. While I’m here.’

‘Of course. Anything.’

‘Could you direct me to the Party office? We have none in Erfurt.’

Paul’s hand dropped from mine, went to hold his pipe in his mouth.

‘An office? Headquarters, Ernst. Weimar has an NS headquarters. The Gauforum. A whole square of them.’

I think he wanted me to react, to check something in me. As if our handshake had been a secret sign.

‘Just an office would do. Thank you.’

The office in Rittergasse, behind the Herderplatz, had both the Party flag and the yellow and black-eagle standard of the Republic, the Weimar Republic, for Weimar was the city, the heart, of constitution. All but gone now, a memory. The red, white and black flag was twice the size, ridiculous on the small medieval building, the bottom of it almost stroking people’s heads as they passed underneath. Reminding them as they passed. This was the small face of the Party. Where ordinary citizens could pay to join. Weimar’s Party headquarters and buildings not for the public.

‘ Ernst! ’

That familiar call again. The one from across a square, from a crowded fair while courting, from a balcony as you go to work. That courting call. The red hair loose about her shoulders, not curled. Etta only ever walked in public with her hair curled. Curled and warmed as if she had paid for it and had not spent the morning making it so. She had hurried. A green woollen hat hiding the care she had not taken.

‘Ernst!’ she cried again, waving, and stopping with her hand to her face as a bicycle bell cut her path and the rider cursed as he swerved from her. And then she was at my shoulder, her gloved hand upon me, green, like her hat, no matter her hurry Etta could match her clothes from the pile that fattened in the bottom of our wardrobe before washday with ease. I could not match socks.

‘Ernst. Don’t do this,’ she said. A hoarseness as if she had screamed this a dozen times on her way here.

‘Etta? How are you here?’ All I could say.

‘Frau Klein came for her rent. I knew you had ten marks in your old cigar box. Your papers were missing from it. Your birth certificate and mine.’ Her hand to her mouth again. ‘Please don’t do this, Ernst.’

‘You followed me here? I was only seeing Paul.’

She looked over my shoulder to the flags. ‘And coming here. I knew you were coming here.’

‘You said I could. If I wanted. For my career.’

‘I thought you wouldn’t. If I said I didn’t mind, I thought you wouldn’t.’

The minds of our women. The hand left my shoulder.

‘Buy me a tea,’ she said, took my hand. ‘We have to talk.’

*

A teapot for two in the restaurant of the Elephant Hotel. Weimar had a hundred places we could have gone and I would have preferred the Black Bear Inn next door, but I guessed that Etta thought the hotel would be quieter during the day. This was a grand place on the cobbled market square, the Party’s favourite adopted hotel. They had it redesigned several years ago and built balconies front and rear where our leader and other dignitaries could give speeches to the multitudes that gathered in the square or privately behind the hotel; for speeches that were not for the public.

There was an amusing rumour that the leader himself had called for the remodelling as his regular rooms did not have their own WC. This meant that every time he left to visit the one at the end of his corridor he would re-emerge to rapturous applause from the throng that had heard that their leader was up and about. He would have to salute as the toilet flushed gratefully in the background while he walked back to his rooms in his pyjamas. Not so many parades this year. Everything now centred on Berlin.

I thanked the waitress for the biscuits she placed beside the tea. The biscuits welcome for we could not afford to eat here. Etta thanked her warmer and the girl smiled back as she bowed away. Etta also a waitress. People who worked in service always warm to each other. They know the rest of us are the worst.

‘Do hotels have rationing?’ I asked no-one, looking around, feeling awkward in the company of my own wife. As if we were both someone else’s partners.

‘I don’t know, Ernst,’ she said, patting the back of her hair. ‘Does it matter?’

‘No.’ I smiled, hoped she would meet me with it. ‘Why did you not want me to go in, Etta? To the Party office?’

She tried to dab at her eyes without disturbing her make-up. I waited for her to finish and for the teapot to cool. The handkerchief and compact away to her handbag, its clasp’s click punctuating her talk.

‘I have to tell you something, Ernst. But promise me that you will not think that I have lied to you. Please don’t feel that. It is not personal.’

All the dread thoughts that husbands have when this conversation comes ran through my heart before my head. A flutter in my chest. She saw my consternations and her face became gentle again.

‘Ernst. My birth certificate is not my own. My parents paid for it years ago. When I was a girl. To change my name and theirs.’

‘What?’ I exclaimed this more with relief than surprise. ‘Why?’ Relief that it was not another lover. That I had not been betrayed. ‘Is your name not Etta?’

‘Of course it is. But not Etta Eischner. It is Etta Kirch. And now Etta Beck so probably none of this matters anyway.’ She poured the tea, the chime of china as she trembled.

‘I have three Jewish grandparents. My mother and father are Jewish. But they do not practise. But I do not think that matters any more. Jewish by birth is still Jewish. But – under the law – you are married to a Jewess, Ernst. Our marriage is invalid.’

My thoughts and words stumbling. ‘But we were married in Switzerland? Does that not count for something?’ Gibberish. ‘You’re not Jewish. You were born here.’ Nonsense from the boy.

‘Do you think that concerns any of them now? They still take you away in the night. Camp first. Questions later. That is why I had to be married at my parents’ villa. Safer for us all. And I’m sure there were plenty of Armenians in the last war that were married Protestant in Paris. Do you think that mattered to the Turks?’

We sipped our tea as other guests went past our little table, our little tableau.

Strange how the most shocking things are revealed in congenial places and moments. I imagine it is God’s amusement. Everything we touched cool white. Everything above us gold plaster. We apart from it all.