Iron Gustav (56 page)

‘Very kind, Erich. But how much a German parliamentarian can speculate on the reduction of the mark has to be taken into account … All the same, this Bast case requires thought. If it's played up in the courts, as Herr Bast seems to wish out of professional vanity, then it would be grist to the mills of our beloved press. All the penal reformers and do-gooders in the world will blubber over the poor, blind man and bring discredit on the name of Hackendahl.'

‘Eva was quite a harmless sort of girl.'

‘According to Herr Bast she goaded him into all his crimes by her insatiable thirst for pleasure, her immoderate love of dissipation …' The lawyer surveyed the heaving, chaotic, drunken bar.

‘And there are other examples of hedonism in this family,' he said.

‘Oh, stop these insults!' cried Erich, furious.

‘You're right, Erich. What is certain, however, is that your sister admits all this. She did instigate him, she says. She did demand money from him. And she did shoot him for no reason whatsoever.'

‘She admits all that?' said Erich, dumbfounded. ‘Is she mad? That means—'

The
lawyer nodded. ‘Six to eight years' penal servitude.'

‘And has she turned out like that?' Erich could not imagine Eva as a confirmed criminal – Eva as vamp. ‘No, that can't be true.'

‘Of course it isn't. She's lying right and left. She's under his thumb – you understand?'

‘That's right,' said the father's favourite son. ‘She's the true daughter of old Hackendahl. You saw the old man yourself this evening. He shouted and beat any sense of free will out of us. He's the one to blame! I want to have nothing to do with the affair. I'm going to Brussels.'

‘I have to defend both him and your sister. And he wants the defence to blame everything on her.'

‘But that rests with you,' said Erich, annoyed. ‘If Eva's under his thumb she can hardly be held responsible.'

‘Quite,' said the lawyer, smiling. ‘And in that case Herr Eugen Bast would reveal everything he knows about your family and, above all, drag you into the proceedings.'

‘So that if we want to have peace, Eva has to suffer?'

‘Right, my son.'

‘Nothing like a bit of blackmail?'

‘You understand perfectly, Erich.'

‘Perhaps Herr Bast wishes me to pay your fee into the bargain?'

‘Herr Bast knows that we're friends and that you earn a good deal of money. As I said – an unmitigated scoundrel.' Smiling, the lawyer looked at Erich. Erich was silent, ill-tempered. He was reducing the carbon dioxide in his champagne with a straw, lit a cigarette and was silent.

‘Well?' asked the lawyer.

‘Oh, yes,' said Erich, starting. He didn't answer immediately but looked towards where the little naked girl was playing with a teddy bear. ‘She looks really very nice,' he said eventually, upset.

‘You're right,' said the lawyer. ‘It's one of those seldom instances when something looks better naked than clothed. And what do you think of our case?'

‘Oh, do just as you … you know, Herr Doctor.'

‘So I may say it by quoting the name of a famous novel –
Arme Kleine Eva – Poor Little Eve
.'

‘Everyone
must help themselves.'

‘Understood,' agreed the lawyer.

‘And since she herself wishes it …'

‘That's so, that's so.'

‘Six years' penal servitude – it might change her perhaps.'

‘Undoubtedly – for the worse.'

‘Why do you sneer?' said Erich furiously. ‘You've spoiled the whole evening for me. I was in a wonderful mood. What do I care about my sister and her Eugen? I want to get on. I don't want people here in Berlin nudging and winking behind my back. I don't want to be dragged into the gutter press. I'm not responsible for my sister!'

‘Of course you're not,' agreed the lawyer politely. ‘I seem to remember that old Jehovah once received a similar answer from Cain when he was looking for Abel.'

‘But I did not kill my sister!' cried Erich angrily. ‘Let her get ten years – twenty if she likes. It'll do her good and we'll be left in peace.'

‘All right, all right,' said the lawyer. ‘Now I'm much clearer about what I'm doing, and have got to know you much better, my dear Erich. In addition, I suggest,' he said as Erich was about to vent his anger again, ‘that we change bars. I know one very nearby where I sometimes go to study.'

‘Waiter! We want to pay, please.'

By the time both of them stepped into the street it was snowing softly and close to freezing.

‘No, no car,' said the lawyer. ‘It's only a step away. The fresh air will do us good. We've both drunk too much.'

‘I can still walk all right,' contradicted Erich.

The lawyer made no reply and the two walked next to each other, each wrapped in his dark, alcohol-inspired thoughts. An overground train only occasionally glided over the iron arches of the Bülowstrasse. Otherwise everything was quiet. Barely a light burned faintly in the windows of grey, dead houses.

Suddenly Erich stopped, seized the lawyer by his lapel, and asked
him angrily: ‘Why do you provoke me like this? Why do you force me over and over again to expose myself? I sometimes think you were never my friend … You've done this to me – do you still remember my room in Lille … You encouraged me to continuous humiliation! Why? I ask. Why? Why did you keep on at me till I told you to your face that – out of pure selfishness – I wanted my sister punished as much as possible? You already knew that! Is that friendship, or are you my enemy?'

He spoke increasingly quietly but ever more excitedly, and continued to hold the lawyer by his lapel as if he wanted to close with him. Now the lawyer removed his threatening hands, adjusted his own coat and said, peacefully, ‘You really have drunk too much. Let's go on.'

Erich was furious and wanted to contradict him, but controlled himself, because the lawyer said, ‘We're nearly there. It's a really nice bar. I don't know if you know that kind of bar. As I said, I sometimes go to them, often in fact. I too have my little amusements …' He smiled faintly. ‘You've just reminded me of your room in Lille … Yes, I remember it all now. You were a fresh young lieutenant and wore silk shirts … God, what a long time ago that all was. Yes, it's a homosexual bar we're going to.'

‘I'm not going into a homosexual bar!' said Erich, almost shouting. ‘I'm not a homo.'

At first the lawyer made no answer. He was busy humming a song that was then all over Berlin – ‘We, thank God, are different from the others'. He hummed it proudly and triumphantly.

‘As far as you're concerned, my dear Erich,' he said, lowering his voice, ‘you're on the one hand a sort of project of mine, and on the other a kind of hope. As hope, you must admit that I've several times cared for you like a father – that you owe your pleasant and fancy-free life in the first place to my efforts.'

The lawyer continued softly and smoothly in this vein. A raging anger rose in Erich, but something held him back from giving way to it; he wanted first to hear if the lawyer really imagined that he, Erich – no, it was impossible!

Worried, the lawyer now said: ‘In your momentary irritation, you accused me of tempting you down this path, from which one might
infer that it does not please you. But, my dear Erich, I have to say that up till now you have found this path very pleasant. Yes, it's only a little while ago that you were making currency speculations in Brussels, which very much looked as though you wanted to continue on such a notorious path.'

That lawyer! thought Erich, bitterly. That damned shyster – he twists everything into a hangman's noose!

‘Well,' continued the lawyer, more quietly and concerned, ‘I'm not saying no! People will say to me that a way can be found of initiating you into modern affairs. For the mark is going to fall, and fall very deeply, but one day it will stop falling. Such a day could be a gloomy day for you, my dear Erich, without me.'

The lawyer remained standing, gasping for breath. Snow hindered his progress and his vision. He took his spectacles from his nose, dried them carefully and said, proceeding slowly: ‘But such a clever and egoistic man as you, Erich, will not doubt the fact that other people can also be egoistic. Me, for example. You'll have to pay your way; I've long expected you to admit that, and I don't doubt that you'll pay on the nail.'

‘I've already told you,' answered Erich Hackendahl with a surly look, ‘that I'll share the profits of this currency business with you … Otherwise …'

‘You're an ass, Erich!' said the lawyer quietly. ‘Even without you I earn more money than the comrades like. No, the bill … I've told you already where we're going …'

‘I'm not a homo,' Erich repeated stubbornly.

‘I've heard that it sometimes happens that one doesn't want to pay a bill,' said the lawyer, smiling. ‘Nevertheless one pays it – unwillingly. Unwillingly.'

He smiled again and looked at Erich attentively through his round spectacles, then: ‘I already said, you were a project. My project. When I made your acquaintance, if you remember, you had just levied a forced loan on your father and sister.'

‘I won't listen to any more of this rubbish,' Erich almost shouted. ‘I've paid it all back.'

‘Yes, and with my money. As I say. You were on the edge, but a fire – which was then going out in me – seemed to burn in you, a
self-belief, a belief in others, in goodness, or in whatever it was, and I loved you because of that fire.'

‘So I was supposed to join the Social Democratic Party, was I?' Erich mocked angrily. ‘You no longer believed in the party, but just exploited it, and I was supposed to be the dummy, was I?'

‘I gave you every opportunity,' continued the lawyer relentlessly, ‘to go over to, let's say, the light. But you insisted inexorably on the dark.'

‘You forced me!'

‘No, Erich. Who slunk from the trenches to the High Command?'

‘And who in Lille taught me to do a bit of malingering?'

‘Right! When I saw that no fire burned in you, but only a tendency to laziness, dirty business and dirty pleasure, I wanted to see how far you would go – if there was at least some part of you which was worth something, a little fragment unknown to you … a little hope.'

‘Farewell, Herr Doctor!' said Erich, but the lawyer did not stir.

‘I clawed my way up in the party,' said the lawyer reflectively, ignoring Erich. ‘I went through the difficult years, when it was a crime to be a Social Democrat. We were heavily persecuted then, but that didn't put us off. Back then I still believed in the good in mankind, in a better future, in progress, in the slow progress of human society.'

‘You've got a bit fat to be that much of an enthusiast,' mocked Erich maliciously.

‘Oh, Erich, what an idiot you are! For the cunning chap you are, you really are too stupid. I've just been telling you about my getting fat, about losing my illusions so that I now only believe that mankind is bad. You were my last project, my last spark of belief. But unfortunately, my dear Erich, you've been a complete failure from the very first moment.'

The lawyer sighed. ‘If a debtor,' he went on to say almost professionally, ‘cannot pay cash, we go for his material assets, as we jurists say,' and was silent.

Erich looked at him, gloomily silent, his teeth biting into his lower lip. They were standing in front of a café, a rather dark café. It was the end of their journey. The lawyer went no further.

‘You
must admit,' the lawyer once again started to persuade the silent Erich, ‘that I've spared you for a long time – from my importunities, I mean. There was always the remote possibility that there was something, let's say, decent about you. It was a very remote possibility. But since this evening … You must understand, Erich. What difference can it make to you? You can do me a favour for a change.'

Erich looked tensely at the lawyer's imploring, bloated face. Then he said with venom: ‘Your cheeks are wobbling, Herr Doctor! Are you really so upset? Do you really think I would do that?'

The lawyer didn't seem to have heard anything, and said simply, ‘I'll take your sister off your hands and that oaf Bast, and you'll be left in peace for a long time. I'll make you into a rich man, Erich. It's really only a trifle. Come on, Erich.'

And he clung onto him and wanted to pull him towards the café, desperately stroking his hand. ‘Erich, please … Just once! I've waited so long …'

‘Leave me alone,' shouted Erich, freeing himself. ‘Don't touch me. You want me to abuse myself in that way too!' He looked at him, full of hate. ‘I'll never do it, never.'

But that meant nothing to the other. He only saw his booty, the booty which wanted to escape from him and for which he had waited so long. ‘Erich!' he shouted, and reached for his hand, gripped it and held it tight, no matter that Erich pulled away as hard as he could. Then the lawyer bent down and wanted to press his lips on Erich's hand. Erich could already feel them.

For a moment he hesitated. Then he overcame his inhibitions and hit the lawyer hard on his lowered head. The latter hesitated, tried to stop himself, but then fell backwards onto the cobblestones in the snow with a pathetic groan.

Why don't I go, thought Erich, and stared at the prostrate body. I shouldn't have done that – I'm drunk. He can do me a frightful lot of harm … Now it's too late … I'd better go.

And yet he stood there, staring at the figure on the ground.

The lawyer stirred, half sat up and looked around.

‘Oh, Erich?' he asked. ‘Did I fall? Give me a hand will you?'

Mechanically Erich stretched out an arm and helped him up.