Get Lenin (2 page)

Across Weimar Germany this scene was repeating itself, the nation’s intelligentsia being singled out for ‘enlightenment’ in National Socialism by Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels. Manuscripts, paintings and etchings marked as ‘un-German’ were being incinerated in an orgy of destruction. Student leaders wearing swastika armbands directed more groups of SA to rooms and lecture halls that had been under surveillance for months. The libraries were stripped of their contents and precious tomes were earmarked for destruction in a clinical manner, impelled by the day long radio broadcasts and posters plastered up all over the city.

Across from the platz where the inferno raged, in the basement theatre space of Humboldt University, Eva Molenaar put her dog-eared script down. She could hear the roar of the crowd drifting into the room. In the small rehearsal space she stood with her fiancé and fellow actor, Jonas Zamoyski, and the director, Herr Gruber.

‘
I hear they’re burning books by Jack London and H.G. Wells,’ she said uneasily.

‘
And Thomas Mann,’ added Jonas, glancing toward the door. Another roar from the platz drifted in and the chants seemed to come in waves.

Instinctively she moved closer to Jonas. Gruber leaned toward them. 'It seems wolves and Martians have unsettled Doctor Goebbels. Now pay attention you two. Ignore those pyromaniacs and their goons over at the platz.'

Eva noted the script was shaking slightly in the director’s hands. The noise outside swelled momentarily. Gruber glanced up toward the door, then turned to the couple, clearing his throat quietly. 'They are in love, yes, your characters?'

Eva and Jonas exchanged a glance. Jonas' eyes twinkled and Eva dimpled back. They nodded. With a gesture, Gruber had Eva sitting on the edge of the bed and moved Jonas upstage, then stepped back. Satisfied with their positioning, he continued, 'Now think, what would they be doing? It's the morning. This scene, Jonas, is like Romeo and Juliet, Act 3, Scene 3. The lovers are about to part after their first night together; the sowing of the first doubts, of love and loss. He's leaving her chamber as they talk. What action could he be doing?' Gruber was inspired, moving around in his out-sized suit. He looks wonderfully crumpled, thought Eva.

'Getting dressed,' grinned Jonas, tipping a wink to her.

'Excellent. Yes! Getting dressed.'

Eva blushed deeply. Gruber noted it swept down to her collar bone. Gruber clapped his hands. 'Now again!'

They were preparing a short two-hander that Jonas had written and performed with Eva at Warsaw’s summer theatre. As a result they both had been invited to Berlin to perform for the student body studying Polish drama, notably the works of Leon Schiller. Herr Gruber, a disciple of Brecht, wanted to add a more nihilistic slant to the work. They were discussing the piece further when the door to the rehearsal room was kicked in.

Two SA troopers in their late-teens stood red-faced, sweating drunk, with batons in their hands.

Gruber strode forward, demanding the reason for the intrusion. He was beaten repeatedly then stamped on. He fell to the ground. Eva screamed. Jonas placed himself in front of her as the two SA troopers strutted in. They ignored Jonas’ shouts of protest as they were drawn to the beautiful young girl. No more than seventeen, her auburn hair sat shoulder-length, framing a heart-shaped face and grey Nordic eyes.

‘
Well, well, well what do we have here?’ the taller of the two troopers said, ogling Eva. The smaller one with porcine eyes snatched away her script.

‘
A play is it?’ he slurred, looking back at Gruber’s body. Gruber lay still with blood now pooling around him. The trooper tried to read the print. When he couldn’t, he proceeded to tear the script slowly and deliberately.

‘
Looks like degenerate Jewish literature,’ he sneered.

‘
Wir sind nicht jüdisch,’ countered Jonas slowly.

‘
Any nudity?’ rasped the other one, his eyes never leaving Eva.

Eva drew closer to Jonas. Her mind was frozen in terror. The two Brownshirts moved in and out of the minimal overhead lighting. The smell of smoke, sweat and Scotch whisky assailed her. One of them unsheathed a knife from his jack boot and sidled toward her, grinning.

‘
Yep, nudity alright.’

Jonas lunged at him. ‘Run!’ he shouted at Eva.

She bolted for the door as the three men struggled. The smaller one grabbed her by her hair, pulling a clump of it out. Leaping over Gruber's prone body, her forward momentum drove her into the corridor. Her neck was wet and she was bleeding. Pressing the palm of her hand against the wound, she sprinted for the courtyard.

Jonas floored the first attacker with a punch to the jaw. The smaller one ducked under the follow through and slashed him across the arm with his knife. The blade cut deep into the muscles of Jonas’ forearm. With his free hand he smacked the man down onto the floor, the knife clattering away from them. Bleeding heavily, Jonas bolted for the door.

He paused deliberately to lure the men away from Eva, hoping their bloodlust was sated and they would ignore her. Their stumbling footfalls and whooping cat-calls told him they were behind him. Pausing for another beat, he watched Eva running for the courtyard. He spied a stairwell to the upper corridors and bounded up the steps two at a time, his wound leaving a spotted trail.

Eva sprinted toward the university’s square. In it stood two furniture removal vans with their engines idling, the back doors open. A line of SA and Nazi sympathisers were loading hundreds of books onto them. They were surrounded by angry students and lecturers pushing, shoving and throwing punches. The SA in turn retaliated with batons and kicks. More SA arrived in trucks. The campus was fast becoming a battlefield.

A disturbance overhead made Eva look up. She screamed.

Jonas was pitched over the third floor balcony onto the cobbles below by the two troopers, where he was set upon by more SA, throwing books aside and sprinting over to him. They started stamping, kicking and swinging their batons onto his unprotected head.

Eva tried to run to him. Ellen Eidelstein, a girl Eva and Jonas had been rooming with, ran toward her from the student protest around the van.

Eva was shrieking and struggling to get to Jonas. Ellen pulled her away, removing her scarf and putting it over Eva’s head in case her attackers could see her below. The two men on the balcony were scanning the square, their faces contorted in a drunken rage. Ellen dragged Eva into the mass of protesting students who started running after the vans toward the inferno. The two women ran past it into the unforgiving night filled with the songs of German might and the fluttering ashes of literature.

After an hour of skirting side streets and avoiding crowds, they made it back to Ellen's modest student digs under the cover of night. Sleep wouldn’t come. Eva rocked in the bed as Ellen hugged her and tried to soothe her. Eva sat up rigid and stared, the light through the window framing her in stark light; her eye sockets pitch black like a skull.

Next morning, after the mob had dispersed, Ellen went back to the university to try to collect Eva’s belongings. Mindful of her own striking Semitic looks, she bundled herself into bulky clothes and covered her lush black hair with a plain brown scarf.

In the dressing room behind the rehearsal space, Ellen found only detritus. The stage’s scenery was smashed to matchwood and strewn across the room as if struck by a hurricane.

Gruber’s body was missing, but a thick trail of blood disappeared into the corridor. She found Eva’s suitcase. It smelled of urine. Her underclothes were scattered and her make-up bag had been emptied. Ellen picked around and uncovered in a corner Eva’s passport and identity papers, miraculously preserved amid the ashes of a fire. The faint whiff of Scotch came off the remains. Whoever had lit it had left in a hurry, perhaps disturbed.

Ellen started to weep silently. The once beautiful city of Berlin was now at the mercy of the mob. Pulling herself together, she made her way through the corridors, out into the shadows of the cloisters and slipped out onto the main street.

‘
We have to find Jonas, Eva. We have to try to find out if he's alive or dead,’ she had whispered over and over, trying to drown out the whispered cries from Eva’s lips that evening.

After an immense effort, Ellen and Eva, swaddled and holding each other like two old ladies, began the painful search for Jonas. For Eva the journey was a series of indelible images - trams, hospital walls, morgues, unsympathetic staff and hostile police. Her beauty, even in grief, received unwelcome attention from the police and SA patrols that were gathering in strength nearly every day on the street. Every morgue they visited smelled like a butcher’s shop.

She remembered Ellen shouting at a nurse who told her to her face she wouldn’t talk to a Jew.

Eventually they found Jonas in the morgue of the Charite Horsaal. They walked with an attendant amid gurneys with sheets draped over them. Spotting them, the attendant had put down his mop and offered to help. Eva watched him, hunched and old. He was sympathetic and listened to their enquiry with deep-brown concerned eyes. She described Jonas. When the attendant asked for some identifying feature, her mind froze momentarily. Then she spotted a hand sticking out from under a sheet with a ring she recognised. The ring, with an agate stone fashioned to an oval, was a gift for his twentieth birthday from her. She had bought it for him in the market square in the shadow of St Mary’s Basilica in Krakow. A bloodied stump at the middle phalanx of his middle finger indicated his finger had been cut in an attempt to remove it. The morgue attendant pulled the sheet back. The face and body of her dead lover brought a hideous scream from Eva as she tried with her hands to block the bloodied, crushed visage. None of his features remained intact. The face was swollen, flattened and purple. The once-lush flaxen hair was matted brown with blood. The beautiful mouth that she had kissed a thousand times was torn, split and discoloured. Ellen held her close as Eva’s body, racked with spasms, screamed out his name, her voice echoing out into the corridor.

Ellen left, telling Eva to remain there as she went to find a local undertaker.

Eva took the mutilated hand with the agate ring and held it. She summoned every prayer she knew, believing somehow that he was still alive. Despite her beseeching to Almighty God, Jonas' chest wouldn’t rise. She hunted in her pockets and found a used handkerchief. She gently wiped the congealed blood from his shattered visage, her tears falling onto his face. They mixed with the blood and dirt, and clean smears of grey coloured skin appeared as she wiped him tenderly.

By chance Ellen had found an undertaker in the hospital foyer, a kindly man named Bergen. Rohm’s thugs had had a busy night; Bergen was collecting the remains of two men beaten to death on the street by the SA. Bergen and Ellen returned to the morgue to find Eva keening gently into Jonas' ear as she cleaned him tenderly.

Eva accompanied Jonas' remains back to Krakow to his family after telegraphing them the dreadful news. She pawned her diamond engagement ring as a down-payment for the coffin, storage and transport of Jonas' body. She met his parents at the border station with Bergen. The coffin was removed from the hearse and placed on board. The family greeted her coldly, believing that Eva was somehow responsible for Jonas' fate.

'This pretty and flirty girl took my son to Berlin and brought this horror upon us,’ cried his mother, Zoya, at the sight of the coffin.

Eva bade farewell to Ellen at the station, promising to stay in touch, neither one really believing it through their tears.

The journey by train was fraught. Eva tried to comfort Zoya who scowled at her beneath the black shawl. The family whispered among themselves, throwing glances in her direction, offering no comfort. Jonas’ father, Christian Zamoyski, who had connections in the government, had contacted the German embassy to lodge an official protest. His enquiries, along with the Polish Embassy’s demand for an explanation, were ignored.

Two days later, Jonas was buried in the family plot, his parents, four brothers and three sisters weeping under the gently falling rain. Eva’s parents were buried here in this cemetery too, killed in a car crash a year earlier. She was once told that no two Polish gravestones are ever alike and, looking across the graveyard, Eva couldn't see a single matching silhouette. She stood by their graveside amid six uneven lines of private proud headstones, back from Jonas’ grave. Her Grandmother Agnieszka stood with her, weeping silently. Her Grandfather Henk stood with the grieving family.

The next day, Eva was summoned to Jonas’ family home, a comfortable middle-class dwelling that to Eva had been always filled with laughter. As she stepped over the threshold she felt the pall that had descended throughout the house.

Christian Zamoyski seemed to almost look through her as he held his arm out before her. ‘Good afternoon, Eva. Please step into my study,’