A Ladder to the Sky(10)
We talked of other things then. Of our schools and our classmates, of the subjects that interested us and the ones that didn’t. And – because all conversations then turned to this subject eventually – we spoke of the Führer and our weekly meetings of the Hitlerjugend. We were members of different corps and shared an enjoyment of field exercises while agreeing that doctrinal classes bored us to the point of paralysis. We had both attended the Nuremberg Youth Rallies since graduating from the Deutsches Jungvolk and found the atmosphere oppressive with the extraordinary numbers gathered there and the terrifying noise of unenlightened patriotism.
‘I saw him once,’ Oskar told me, leaning forward a little and lowering his voice. ‘A year ago, perhaps a little less. I was coming out of the Hauptbahnhof when a convoy of cars appeared along Lüneburgerstra?e and everyone stopped and stared. His car, a black Grosser Mercedes, drove past me, and he turned his head just as I looked in his direction and our eyes met. I clicked my heels together and saluted him and despised myself for it afterwards.’
I sat back in disbelief when he said these words. Had I heard him correctly? Had he told me that he despised himself for saluting the Führer?
‘I think perhaps I have shocked you,’ he said, and there was anxiety in his tone now. Fear. This was not an opinion that people voiced out loud, even if they felt it, and especially not to a new acquaintance whose trustworthiness had yet to be established.
‘A little,’ I said. ‘You don’t believe in him, then?’
‘He frightens me,’ said Oskar, and I understood this because he frightened me too. But then of course my younger brother and I were Jewish, or a quarter Jewish anyway, and the purges against the Jews had already begun. By now it had been more than three years since Jews had been stripped of their citizenship entirely and I knew of at least two couples whose engagements had been cancelled after the law had come into place banning Jews from marrying non-Jewish Germans. Only four months earlier, the city had descended into chaos after a boy my own age, a Jew, had shot a Nazi diplomat in the German embassy in Paris. Days later the SS had run riot through the city, destroying Jewish shops and synagogues, desecrating graveyards and arresting tens of thousands for deportation to the camps. Running home that night, desperate to escape the violence, I witnessed an elderly man being beaten to death by an officer some forty years his junior, another emerging from a jewellery store with blood pouring down his face after the glass in his shop window had been shattered and, near my home, I saw a girl being raped by an SS Sturmbannführer in a sidestreet while his colleague pinned her father to the wall and forced him to watch. I had not been a victim of any of this for I did not share any of the typical physical characteristics of the Jew, nor were we an observant family so we did not live with other Jews or attend synagogue. But the fact remained: I, and my brother, were Mischlings.
‘They say that he will restore Germany’s power,’ I remarked carefully.
‘And he may succeed,’ said Oskar. ‘He has charisma, it’s true, and his oratorical skills incite the crowds. The people are behind him for now. He has infected them with his hatred. He demands absolute loyalty, and when anyone dares to criticize him, they lose their position. I think he will lead a great army, but what will be the result?’
‘A thousand-year Reich,’ I said. ‘At least that is what he says.’
‘And is that what you want?’
‘All I want is to live in peace,’ I told him. ‘I want to read books and perhaps one day write some of my own. The future of the Fatherland is not something that concerns me.’
He smiled and reached a hand across the table, placing his atop mine in what was certainly intended as a fraternal gesture but sent sparks of electricity through me nevertheless. No boy had ever touched me like that before. ‘I want the same,’ he said. ‘Only with my paintings.’
‘Do you think I might find inspiration in Paris too?’ I asked.
‘For your novel? Of course! Great writers have lived there. Hugo, Hemingway, Fitzgerald. Many classics of literature have been written in the city. It encourages creativity, or so I’ve heard.’
An image came into my mind of the two of us sharing a flat on the top floor of some decrepit old building near Notre-Dame, he painting in his studio, me writing in my study, the two of us coming together as one in our shared bedroom at night. The idea was almost too glorious to imagine. Before I could embarrass myself by suggesting it, however, he stood up and excused himself to use the bathroom and while he was gone I looked across at his sketchbook, telling myself to leave it alone, not to intrude on his privacy, but I could not resist and pulled it towards me, opening it at the first page. It was brand new, containing only one drawing so far, and as I stared at it my heart sank in my chest as waves of disappointment poured over me. The sketch was of a young girl with long black hair, very beautiful, turned to a left profile but with her back to the artist as she sat on an ottoman. Her right hand was touching her cheek and she was naked. A hint of her breast was given towards the left of the picture and there was something in her eye that suggested desire. I wondered whether she was a creature from his imagination or a girl who had posed shamelessly for him and, if the latter, did that mean that she was his lover? Closing the sketchbook, I returned it to his side of the table, placing the charcoal pencil on top of it, and when he returned a moment later he told me I had a sad expression on my face and the only way to conquer that was for the two of us to stay there and drink until our money ran out, a suggestion I agreed to immediately.