Julia Franck - The Blind Side of the Heart

Your hands are so soft, nurse, they do me good. I always ask after you and whether you’re on duty. You were born for this profession, did you know, Nurse Helene? The old man lying on his bed with his back to Helene — she would have thought he must cry out with pain when she touched his sore flesh — twisted round so that he could at least look her way. He put out his hand and pulled her sleeve. There, he said, pointing to the bedside table. Look in the drawer, Nurse Helene, there’s some money there, do take it.

Helene shook her head and thanked him, but said she didn’t want his money. Whenever anyone gave her a present she returned it. Just sometimes she found coins in her apron pocket that someone had dropped into it unnoticed. This old man had been in the ward for two weeks and his condition was deteriorating. He was disappointed that Helene didn’t want his money. Take it, he insisted, if you don’t take it someone else will steal it.

Let them. Helene put the lid on the powder box, spread the covers over him, and took the basin to throw away the water and clean both it and her hands. Another patient, behind her, was groaning, saying he couldn’t wait any longer. She went over to the man’s bed; he needed the bedpan and asked Helene to stay with him, because he couldn’t manage on his own. A man in the next bed was wailing with pain in a strained, hoarse voice, to attract Helene’s attention. Then he pulled himself together as well as he could.

Two hours later, when Helene had hung up her overall in the locker and put on her skirt, pullover and jacket, Wilhelm was still waiting patiently on the bench in the corridor.

Would she like to come and have coffee? Helene agreed, not that she wanted to, but it seemed the course of least resistance. Outside the door she tried to put up her umbrella, but it stuck. Laughing and ignoring the rain, not to mention her struggle with the umbrella, Wilhelm was telling her something about feedback on the People’s Wireless, a radio device to be unveiled and demonstrated to the public in a few months’ time at the Great German Wireless Exhibition. From amplifier to amplifier, said Wilhelm, spreading his arms wide to show her how many of these new technological developments there were, more than would fit between them. Helene liked his enthusiasm. They walked to the bank of the Spree Canal. You could create the necessary sensitivity by feedback to the high frequency stage, he said. Helene didn’t understand, but she stood there with him out of civility as he stopped in mid-sentence to show her, by gestures, how she must imagine the construction of the device.

Helene now knew that he was an engineer, but it wasn’t clear whether he was talking about inventions of his own or other people’s. She still didn’t understand what he was talking about, but she liked hearing him and watching as he mopped the rain from his brow with his handkerchief. After all, he said, he was sure she couldn’t imagine the extent of possible communication and the amount of information that could be transmitted. In the end everyone would be able to receive the same information at the same time, learning about events that otherwise they would have heard of only by going to some trouble or from reading the newspaper days later — and which newspaper anyway? There were far too many newspapers now. Wilhelm’s dismissive gesture was friendly but determined. There was something infectious about his pleasure and Helene had to smile. She had managed to open the umbrella. Would he like to come under it?

Of course, said Wilhelm, taking the umbrella from Helene’s hand so that she wouldn’t have to reach too high. Sweet girls, he knew, need sweet cakes, said Wilhelm, making straight for a little café. They had apple cake and coffee. Helene didn’t like either, but she didn’t want to be difficult or attract any unnecessary attention. Wilhelm said, and there was no missing the pride in his voice, that within weeks they’d be able to go into full production of wireless sets, so that enough of this new invention could be sold at the Wireless Exhibition. What did she think of naming it Salvation Wireless, asked Wilhelm, laughing. Just my little joke, he added, there are better names. Helene didn’t understand his joke, but she liked to hear him sound so pleased with himself.

She hid her weariness behind her smile. After her long day’s work at the hospital, exhaustion was now spreading through her as she sat eating cake and drinking coffee. She felt she was behaving properly to Wilhelm if she looked attentive, sometimes raising her eyebrows as if in surprise, and nodding now and then. The words transmitter and receiver took on a significance of their own as she listened to him. A newspaper boy came into the café. There were not many people here, but he took off his cap and cried his wares. The headlines of the evening papers were speculating on the identity of those behind the fire in the Reichstag building.

Over these last few weeks a mood of gloomy indignation had been abroad in the trams and underground trains. Wherever people met, their faces reddened by the cold, their coats sometimes not long enough because fabric taken from them had been needed to make a child a jacket, there was complaint, discontent and argument. They weren’t going to put up with this much longer, they said. No one could be expected to take this kind of thing lying down, not any more, they weren’t going to let the authorities do as they fancied with them. Men and women alike were upset.

Wilhelm fetched Helene from the hospital as often as he could. Communist after communist was arrested. Wilhelm went walking with his blonde Alice and took her to the café. He said he liked to watch her eating cake, she always looked as if she hadn’t eaten properly for days. Helene stopped eating in alarm. She wasn’t sure that she wanted to know what Wilhelm thought when he saw her eating. Eating had become a mere nuisance to her, and she often forgot about it until evening. She didn’t like the apple cake, she just swallowed it as quickly as possible to get it over with. Wilhelm asked if he could order her another slice. Helene shook her head and said no, thank you. Her dimples were so pretty, said Wilhelm, beaming as he looked her in the face. To her own annoyance, Helene was embarrassed. Did she like the theatre, the cinema? She nodded. It was a long time since she’d been to the cinema; she didn’t have the money, and she had only once agreed to go with Leontine and Martha when they asked her. During the picture she’d found herself crying, which she didn’t like. She never used to cry in the cinema. So she shook her head.

Yes or no, asked Wilhelm.

No, said Helene.

Wilhelm asked Helene to go dancing with him. One day it seemed like too much trouble to turn him down, so she agreed. They went to a dance, and he took her face in his hands, kissed her forehead and told her he was in love with her.

Helene was not pleased to hear it. She closed her eyes so as to keep him from looking at her. Wilhelm thought that was charming and took it as agreement, an announcement that she would soon be ready to be his. It was a good thing Wilhelm didn’t know about the passion with which Helene had invited and responded to Carl’s kisses. SA troops stormed the ‘Red Block’ of the artists’ colony in Wilmersdorf, where writers and artists were arrested and some of their books were burned. Spring came, and there were more book-burnings. Helene heard from Martha that the Baron was among those who had been arrested. Pina was trying to find out the reasons for his arrest; she was desperate to know; she visited all his acquaintances asking them to help her. One day rumour said that he was in contact with the Communist Party, the next that he had been distributing Social Democrat leaflets. Wilhelm wasn’t waiting to find out whether Helene returned his feelings; his own desire filled him and that was enough. He called her Alice, although he knew now that she was Helene. But Alice was his name for her.