Pierre Frei - Berlin - A Novel

The boy was standing beside the bookcase when she came into the living room, now dressed. He wore shorts and knee socks. His bare thighs were red from the cold, wet weather outside. He didn't seem to mind. He was a strong lad with dark, curly hair. 'Oh, look, Karl May!' he said reverently. Jochen had kept all twenty books of May's stories from his youth. They were on the shelves between the Brockhaus encyclopaedia and the Muret-Sanders dictionary.

'What's your name?'

'Paul Grabert.'

'How old are you?'

'Eleven.'

'In your second year at the school?'

'Yes.'

And you've come for English coaching?'

Jochen arrived, putting an end to the laborious exchange of questions and answers. 'The meeting went on longer than planned,' he apologized.

'Well, I'll leave you two alone now. Goodbye, Paul.' She shook hands with him.

'Goodbye, Frau Weber.' He bowed.

A nice lad.' Laughing, she told the tale of her open dressing gown over supper.

Jochen didn't make an big issue of it. 'Well, at least he has something pretty to think about while he's masturbating.'

'Do all boys masturbate?'

'Most of them.'

And men?'

'Sometimes.'

She went around the table and put her arms round his neck. 'Will you show me?' she whispered in his ear. It was the signal for passionate erotic games. She couldn't get enough of them.

They got new furniture a year later. Pale wood, modern, just what Jutta liked. Frau Gerold had given her a rise. Her parents had contributed too. Jochen was saving hard for the Volkswagen.

'Save up for our son instead. A child costs money.'

'We'll have a big vacation in the new car first.' He was already planning that for the summer of 1939, three years away. He'd got brochures and maps from the Italian travel agency in Friedrichstrasse. 'We'll conceive our son beside Lake Garda, and then of course you'll give up work.' He took another slice of roast beef, and beer from the siphon he fetched from the bar every Sunday.

He isn't even asking me, she thought in amazement. He just decided it all ages ago. She watched him pour gravy over the roast meat. He liked it rich and well-seasoned.

After dinner they spoke English for half an hour. Jochen needed the practice for his weekly conversation lessons with the class taking its schoolleaving exam. Jutta used the opportunity to improve her own schoolgirl English. She enjoyed it, and it took her mind off other things, like her anxiety about herself and Jochen.

For he had changed in these last few months. Not so much outwardly, although he had put on some weight. She could put up with his no longer being the passionate lover of their early days together. They led a satisfactory married life and could still enjoy some good times. You couldn't ask too much.

No, it wasn't that. It was the comfortable complacency he had begun to show, which threatened to include her too. What she missed was a challenge.

When Jutta went to buy rolls for breakfast on Tuesday morning, the front garden at Brumm's was filled with agitated people. 'Dead, strangled, right there at that table. Blood all over the place,' she heard. 'No, not the redhead, the blonde. Annie, that was her name.'

'Strangled?' someone repeated. 'Nonsense. A haemorrhage. She had TB. Imagine someone like that serving in a cake shop!'

Rumours about a serial killer of women didn't last long. Since the newspapers published nothing, it seemed that no crime had been committed. Anyway, the Olympic Games held everyone spellbound. Illustrated books about previous Games sold like hot cakes. Frau Gerold couldn't get them delivered to the bookshop fast enough.

'Drechsel and his Pimpfs are going to form the guard of honour outside the Fuhrer's box,' Jochen told his wife, impressed.

Jutta felt anxious. 'I hope those poor children don't keel over in the heat.'

'Oh, they'll hold out.'

'Little Muller too?' Dieter Muller was one of the pupils Jochen coached, a slight lad who was known as Didi. Jutta had a soft spot for him.

'He's as tough as the others. The young people of today aren't mollycoddled the way they used to be.' His tone was new to her.

'Tough as leather and hard as Krupp steel,' she quoted Hitler's saying with irony. 'Sorry, I forgot — fast as greyhounds too, of course. Specially your head Pimpf, Drechsel. Has it ever occurred to you that he isn't exactly the living image of the ideal young Germanic male?' Jochen's colleague was a thin man with a vacant, infantile face and sandy hair.

'Drechsel's all right. He's offered to back my application to join the National Socialist party. As a Party Comrade I'll get promotion faster. We could do with the salary of a teacher on the next stage up the scale — what do you think?'

'I think you're a good teacher anyway. Your pupils and your colleagues like you. You'll get promotion without the Party.'

She was right. Jochen was duly promoted. It happened just before the summer holidays of the year 1937, when the former King Edward VIII of Great Britain married Mrs Simpson after abdicating, when the Japanese conquered Peking, and the airship Hindenburg exploded on landing at Lakehurst near New York. There was lively discussion in Frau Gerold's bookshop. Was it an accident or an assassination attempt? Herr Lesch knew who to blame. 'The Americans, of course. It wouldn't have happened if they'd sold us helium gas. But instead we had to fill the buoyancy cells with highly explosive hydrogen, and then a spark was enough.' Where that spark came from, Herr Lesch couldn't say.

He knew who to blame next year, too. 'Joe Louis's Jewish promoter, of course. He put a horseshoe in the black's left boxing glove. Otherwise our Max Schmeling would never have been knocked out, he'd be world champion now.'

If Jutta had been asked what event she remembered most vividly from the last years before the war, she would immediately have said the German Book Trade Association ball in the summer of 1939. Jochen had hired tie and tails from Koedel in Kantstrasse and looked fabulous. Her own long, white evening dress was a dream.

Jutta's boss had invited the young couple. She and her ash-blonde girlfriend went entirely in black. They created quite a sensation, and several gentlemen showed an interest in them, but Diana Gerold and Anja Schmitt had eyes only for each other. All we need is for them to dance together,' Jochen said mockingly.

'You're getting more narrow-minded all the time,' she exclaimed. Injured, he was about to say something, but the orchestra started to play. Jutta clapped her hands, delighted. 'The Lambeth Walk — the latest thing from London. Isabel showed me how you do it.' She led her husband on to the dance floor. Jochen soon got the hang of the simple steps — somewhere between the Tiller Girls and a Prussian military march — and enjoyed the dance. Suddenly he was the carefree young man she loved again.

Then Kurt Widmann and his band played a hot foxtrot. 'Oh, wow, wonderful jazz, or degenerate Negro music to you!' cried Jutta exuberantly. To Jochen's relief, her words were drowned out by the percussion. Some things were better left unsaid.

Frau Gerold bought them each a ticket for the sweepstake. Drinking sparkling wine and eating lobster mayonnaise, they waited in suspense for the draw. Diana Gerold laughed till she cried. She had won a book by Beumelburg. Jochen won a Waterman fountain pen.

And now, ladies and gentlemen, for the main prize. A red fox fur donated by Kaiser Furriers. If you please. Nadja Horn!' The popular actress, laughing, put her hand in the tub and told the announcer the number of the ticket she had drawn. He spoke in a theatrical voice: And the big prize, ladies and gentlemen, please listen carefully now, the big prize goes to number 1481. I repeat: one — four — eight — one. Who has the winning number 1481?'