A Future Arrived (22 page)
Authors: Phillip Rock
“How many do you think?”
“Oh, twenty or so from the Communists ⦠perhaps as much as fifty from the Nazis. Goebbels and Hitler have pulled out all stops this time. Posters and pamphlets blanketing the country, mass meetings and speeches every night ⦠in the cities, the small towns ⦠everywhere. God knows where they get the money. And then all this Horst Wessel nonsense of Goebbels ⦠the first Nazi saint!”
“Horst Wessel?”
“A young storm trooper thug in Berlin who was living with a prostitute. He got into an argument one night with the girl's ex-pimp who just happened to be a communist. They both drew guns and Wessel wasn't quick enough. He died a few weeks later and Goebbels sent him to heaven with a roll of drums, calling him a National Socialist Christ! That was in February. The fellow had written a poem about the glory of being a Brownshirt street fighter and Goebbels had it set to music. You hear it everywhere these days. They have all the trappings now; flag, armbands, song,
and
a martyr. A perverse sort of genius, Herr Goebbels. Did you know that he once worked for INA as a stringer? Dix told meâback in nineteen twenty-oneâbut he had to let him go for grossly embellishing his stories. The novelist
manqué
. He's never forgiven Dix for that ⦠or INA for that matter.”
The schnapps was mellow. Pigeons cooed on the window sill. “My problem, Emil. Can you help me at all?”
“Oh, yes. I can give you the names of half a dozen men, good reporters and broadcast people. After the elections ⦠well, we shall see. I might be able to join your group.” His eyes looked troubled. He stared out across the rooftops. “It all depends how the wind is blowing.”
A column of young Nazis marched across the Schillerplatz, none of them much older than boy scouts and just as courteous. They toted bulging knapsacks and a few carried the flag of the Hitler Jugend on long poles. One boy played a guitar as they marched toward the Swabian hills. The boys began singing â¦
   Â
Comrades shot dead by Red Front and Reaction
   Â
march in spirit within our ranks!
   Â
Raise high the flag!
“ âThe Horst Wessel Song,' ” Emil said in a flat voice. “One hears it everywhere now.”
T
HE
E
NGLISH TEAM
that Karl Voegler, the sports editor, wanted interviewed at the Sportpalast before the start of the six-day bike races turned out to be two Scots; short, sandy-haired men from Aberdeen with burrs so thick Albert could barely make out half of what they said. It was his first lesson in creative journalism and he made the most of it, typing up the story from shorthand notes and his imagination.
HIGHLANDERS VOW SIX-DAY FLING AT RACES
“Catchy,” Voegler murmured. His eyes flicked over the copy, his blue pencil slashing here and there. “Not bad. Give it to Kerner ⦠and then go down to Peli's and bring me back an apple strudel and coffee. Quick now!”
From a reporter to an office boy with the flick of a hand. He complained bitterly to Rudy Kessler when they left the office that evening.
Rudy laughed and retrieved the cigarette he had been keeping behind his ear most of the day. “What did you expect? A Pulitzer prize or something?” He grinned and lapsed into his terrible English. “
Bad sport, old chap! Not cricket!
You'll never get a pat on the back from Voegler, or any of the old-timers. It's the sad lot of the flunky, let me tell you.” He snapped a match with a fingernail and lit his smoke. “Tradition, my man, tradition. Treat the copyboys like dog droppings. We underlings also have our traditions ⦠first one to get a writing assignment must buy the beer and sausages. How much money do you have?”
“Ten or twelve marks,” Albert muttered.
“A fortune! I'm walking with a Rothschild! We'll go to the Kurfürstendamm and watch the girls.” He gave Albert a hearty poke in the ribs. “Maybe even latch on to a couple. Sixteen is too old to be a virgin.”
The ten days that he had worked for INAâsix days a week, twelve to fourteen hours a dayâseemed more like ten weeks to Albert. He had become immersed totally in both job and city. A true journalistâKarl Voegler's attitude notwithstandingâand a real Berliner. He lived in a large boardinghouse for men, where Rudy stayed, a place popular with young men who worked in the newspaper and publishing business and the nearby stock exchange. A substantial dinner came with the price of a room, but neither he nor Rudy ate there often, preferring the small, smoky cafés frequented by actors, writers, painters, and all the polyglot intelligentsia of this teeming, restless city.
They squeezed their way into the Romanische Café on the Tauentzienstrasse. Two blond girls in tight dresses who might have been actresses, or young whores, or both, sat at a table with two empty chairs.
“Mind if we sit down?” Rudy asked with almost Prussian correctness.
One of the girls gave him a hard stare. “Piss off, sonny.”
Rudy, not at all abashed, moved on through the crowd. “I didn't like their looks anyway. Too skinny. I like girls with lots of moving parts on them.”
“A good country girl who milks the cows.”
“Exactly! I should have stayed in Regensburg.”
They managed to grab a small table, to the annoyance of a waiter who grudgingly took their order for two small beers and a plate of bratwurst.
“This is the life,” Rudy said, looking around the café. “Rubbing shoulders with celebrities and then on to more exciting things. What shall we do tonight? Piscator's theater? Another stab at some girls?”
“How about a flick?
All Quiet on the Western Front
opens at the cinema on Nollendorfplatz.”
“We'll never get a seat. Sold out completely, I hear.”
“We could try. No harm in that.”
H
E WENT UP
the stairs to his room on the top floor after making sure Rudy was all right. The side of his face throbbed and he wondered if his jaw was broken. The top-floor bathroom was unoccupied and he went in, turned on the light, and locked the door behind him. He studied his face in the glass above the sink. A purple bruise flowed like a wine stain from his right ear to the point of his chin. He moved his jaws from side to side and then opened and closed his mouth. There was no increase in the pain when he did so. He remembered the agony Tim Pakenham had felt when his jaw had been broken playing football ⦠Morborne versus Winchester. No, he decided, not broken, thank God. He ran water into the sink up to the brim and then bent low, turning his head, and immersed the side of his face. He winced at the pain, especially from his ear, but after a few minutes of ducking in and out of the icy water his face felt better. He patted himself dry with a towel and went to his room.
He lay on his bed in pajamas, stared at the ceiling, and fought back tears, his throat aching with the effort to keep from sobbing. Then he sat up with a start. Damn! Mr. Rilke wouldn't lie on his bed and bawl. No
real
journalist would. He switched on the bedside lamp, found his notebook and pencil in the top drawer of the bedstand, and began to write in Pitman â¦
Berlin, Friday night, September 12, '30
The usual crowds along the Kurfürstendamm and in all the streets leading off from it. Rudy Kessler and I made our way to the Romanische where we had beer and wurst. A waiter gave us cold stares and tried to hurry us out because he could sense he wouldn't get so much as a pfennig tip from us. He was right, of course, but we would have sat there all night if there had been nothing better to do with our time. There isn't a waiter alive who can intimidate Rudy Kessler.
I read
All Quiet on the Western Front
at school. I think Mr. Remarque's book is better than Barbusse's
Le Feu
, despite the fact that Barbusse had fought in the trenches and Remarque had not. It's odd how some of the best books about war and man's courage in the face of death were written by men who had never heard a shot fired in anger. Stephen Crane ⦠Count Tolstoy ⦠although I believe Tolstoy served briefly with the Russian army when quite young, but on the frontier, protecting villages from Tartar banditsâhardly the type of provincial service to serve as inspiration for Borodino! Rudy lent me his copy of Remarque in German â¦
Im Westen Nichts Neues
⦠and I felt it was even more powerful than the English translation. Simon Kahr, INA's motion-picture and theater critic, had seen the American picture while in London. He told all of us in the office that it is the most stunning war flick ever made, better by far than
The Big Parade
.
There was such a large crowd in the Nollendorfplatz, jamming the pavement in front of the theater and spilling out into the street, that police had been called to keep the traffic moving. A good deal of shouting, pushing, and shoving was taking place under the marquee and it seemed obvious that Rudy had been right, that we wouldn't have the remotest chance of buying tickets. Rudy suggested we go around the corner to the UFA house which was showing
The White Hell of Pitz Palu
with Luis Trenker and Leni Riefenstahl, but I'm not fond of mountaineering flicks.
“Something is up,” Rudy said. “Too many cops.”
As we walked closer we could see a solid line of policemen in front of the theater; tall, imposing men in buckled greatcoats and leather-and-brass helmets. Lights from the marquee gleamed off their shiny boots, belts, and holsters. They stood as a wall between two groups of peopleâmen and women going into the theater and a much larger group, men only, milling around in the street, waving their arms and shouting. All of the latter were wearing white shirts.
“Storm troopers,” Rudy said. “Brownshirt bastards.”
It has become the costume of the Nazi SA since the government forbade the wearing of uniforms in Berlin until after the elections. On the second button of every white shirt dangled a brown rubber band so everyone would know who they were.
A White Shirt stepped out of a doorway and stood weaving in front of us. He was a short, thick-set man with a grizzled face and breath like a brewery.
“Where are you two going?” he shouted.
“See a flick,” Rudy said casually.
The man jerked a thumb at the marquee. “Not that one.”
“What's wrong with it?” I asked.
The man spat at our feet. “A rotten pack of lies. A Jew in Hollywood made that shitâone of our own Jew boys, tooâfrom Laupheimâmy townâmay the son-of-a-bitch roast in hell!”
We brushed past him and he made no move to stop us. He stood swaying in the shadows, cursing Carl Laemmle, spitting obscenities about the international Jewish bankers who had stabbed the German army in the back.
A policeman gave us a cold stare when we said we had tickets to the showing. Rudy told me that most of the Berlin police are sympathetic to the Nazis. They do their job because Germans obey orders, but they find it mortifying that their commissioner of police is a Jew and that the Nazis taunt them as “Isador's Army.” We had no tickets, of course, but figuredârightlyâthat in all the confusion we could slip by the doorman. As it turned out, there was no one at the door and the box-office window was shuttered.
Groups of people in the lobbyâsome angry and defiant, others clustered in tight, nervous groups. The theater seats well over a thousand people, but we could see no more than a few hundred. Along one wall there was a long bannerâ
NO MORE WAR INTERNATIONALâBERLIN CHAPTER.
Beneath it was a table piled high with Erich Maria Remarque's book in both English and German, and Mr. Rilke's book,
An End to Castles
, in English only. I bought a paperbound copy for Rudy for a mark fifty and told him I would have Mr. Rilke autograph it for him, that it might serve as an incentive to learn English.
A tall, white-haired man wearing a dinner jacket thanked everyone for coming and spoke angrily of the intimidation they had faced “⦠from a mob of ignorance and unreasoning hate.” He then asked us all to take our seats and the motion picture would begin. Frightened ushers closed the front doors on a final howl of invective from the streets.
It was the book, alive on the screen. I knew them allâsquat, ugly, powerful Katczinsky; thin, lugubrious Tjaden; and boyish Paul. I mouthed the dialogue in the darkness as though I, too, stood weary and hungry in front of the field kitchen demanding that the rations be servedâthe double rationsâfor we are the Second Company even if half the men the cook has prepared to feed lie in the dressing stations or dead in no man's land. And I could feel the terror as the shells howled down from the night sky as we strung barbed wire. And the agony of the wounded was my pain. My palms were damp as I clutched the armrests on the seat. I glanced at Rudy, and his face was pale in the flickering light from the projector and his eyes were fixed on the terrible images of war. And the young soldier Paul, who is no one and everyone, reached a gentle hand through the wire to cup the delicate butterfly ⦠and the hand closed so softly in death.
The Nazi mob was gone when we left the theater, but a few knots of police could be seen standing about on the far side of the square or in the center of the traffic circle. Taxis lined the curb and our fellow moviegoers hurried to them. Rudy and I walked slowly toward the Kurfürstendamm subway station, our collars turned up against the wind. We did not speak, both of us lost in our own thoughts.
“Enjoy the show, Jew boys?”
We had not heard the footsteps behind us. We stopped and four men in shabby raincoats faced us in a semicircle. One was not much older than we, the other three had the hard, craggy look of ex-soldiers. We could see their dirty white shirts beneath their coats, the rubber bands looped on the buttons.
“I'm not a Jew,” Rudy said.
“You think like a Jew,” one of the men said with a quiet intensity.
We tried to move on but they crowded in on us, forcing our backs to the metal grille of a shuttered store window. One of them stuck his face close to mine.
“I read that damn book, sonny. Not a word of truth in it. We never broke ⦠we never cried for our mothers. Give us guns and we'd go back tomorrow and finish the job. Do you think I wept when I stuck a goddamn Frenchie in the guts? Shit, boy, pure shit.”
“Get away from us,” Rudy said.
“You whine like a Hebe.” The youngest of the group licked his lips and glanced nervously up and down the street. “You're nothing but a red-headed turd, that's what you are.”
“Call me that when your friends aren't around! I'd kick your fat ass all the way to Potsdam!”
The three older men chuckled softly. “Go for a walk, Hans,” one of them said. “Wait for us around the corner.”
The man who had his face close to mine smiled. “Kids today. All talk and no balls. You look a good sort. Act like a real German and don't fall for that pacifist turn-the-other-cheek crap.”
I didn't want to tell him I was English. Maybe he bore a grudge against the tommies. I could only stare into his eyes. It was like looking into dark water.
“Kids like you don't know what to believe. The Bolshie Jews tell you what to believe. No one to set you straight. If you were my son and went to see shit like thatâ” He moved his hand back a few inches and slapped me on the side of the face. It was like being struck with a hard leather strap. My head snapped back against the grille. Rudy shouted something and one of the other men drove a fist into his belly. I must have turned toward himâto help himâI can't rememberâand the man slapped me again, putting his strength behind it this time. Lights exploded in my eyes and the next thing I can recall is being on my hands and knees on the pavement. The men had gone. Rudy was kneeling by the curb, bent forward, vomiting in the gutter.