A Ladder to the Sky(8)
‘And did he make it?’
‘No,’ I said, shaking my head. ‘He died shortly before the war began.’
‘How did he die?’
‘He was shot.’
Maurice nodded, and I stopped at a bench, sitting down and closing my eyes as I tilted my head back, allowing the late-morning sunshine to warm my skin. I felt him sit down next to me and the slight connection between his leg and my own. A passer-by might have taken us for father and son, a misunderstanding which had in fact taken place a few nights earlier when we’d checked into our rooms at the hotel, adjacent once again at my insistence, and it had upset me more than I’d expected, although Maurice had simply laughed.
‘You remind me of him,’ I said finally. ‘Of Oskar, I mean. You have similar features. Round, cheerful faces, bright blue eyes and that untameable dark hair that falls over your forehead.’
‘Tell me about him,’ he said. ‘Was he a good friend of yours?’
I hesitated. This was a part of my life that I’d locked away for many decades, never confiding the story in a single person. And yet sitting there that day on a bench in Caffarella Park, this twenty-two-year-old boy made me long to reveal my secrets in the most self-destructive way imaginable. I wanted to confide in him, to tell him my story.
Oskar and I, I told him, had met in early 1939, shortly after my seventeenth birthday, in the Nachmittag Café near the Volkspark am Weinbergsweg in Berlin. Like Maurice, Oskar, who was a few months younger than me, was a waiter, working for his parents in this small restaurant they had run for many years in the north of the city. It was not my usual custom to wander into such places alone but on the day in question it had begun to rain while I was on my way home and I took shelter inside, choosing a seat by the window and ordering a cup of coffee with a slice of Stollen. I noticed a book sitting on the window ledge, an adventure story that I had read and enjoyed several times. This volume, however, was considerably thicker than the one I had at home, more than three times its length in fact, and so I picked it up and turned to the title page, only to discover that it was a deceit, for the book’s jacket had been removed and another, a less controversial one, pasted in its place.
Before I could consider why someone might have done such a bizarre thing, a boy came running out from the kitchen area with an exaggerated sense of urgency and I looked up when he stopped before my table, one hand pushing the hair back from his forehead as he stared at me in dismay. I was aware of the anxious expression on his face but, more than this, I experienced a stirring at the pit of my stomach unlike any I had felt before. Of course, I had known for some years that I was homosexual and, at seventeen, was no stranger to physical attraction. For a time, I had tried to force myself to be attracted to girls but it was no good and I had little interest in pursuing so fruitless a goal. My homosexuality, I knew, was something that I could never change but also something that I could never indulge. Himmler, after all, had given a speech only a year earlier in which he had denounced the personal for the public and I had listened to his words on our wireless, uncertain why such a curse had been placed upon my head. He declared that the homosexual had to be got rid of – ‘Just as we pull out weeds, throw them on a heap and burn them’ – and there were rumours that known homosexuals were being sent to concentration camps or shot. Naturally, such ideas terrified me. And so my plan had been to feign a disinterest in all sexual matters, to become a eunuch around my friends, betraying no hint of desire and never indulging in or even pretending to understand crude jokes. Should it prove necessary, I imagined that I might one day take a wife and perform as husbands do but promised myself that this would only be a last resort for self-preservation.
‘My book,’ said the boy, reaching a hand out towards me. ‘I was searching for it.’
‘You changed the jacket,’ I replied. ‘Might I ask why?’
He bit his lip nervously and glanced around the room. Despite the inclement weather, the tables near mine were quite empty.
‘Give it to me, please,’ he said, lowering his voice. I nodded and handed it across. ‘You won’t tell anyone what you saw, will you?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s none of my business and, anyway, I’ve read that book myself. At home, in my bedroom. With the curtains closed. Aren’t you frightened of reading it in public?’
‘Of course, that’s why I made it look like something else. When I realized I’d left it out here, I thought I was going to faint. If the wrong person had found it, I might have been in trouble.’
The book was Buddenbrooks, by Thomas Mann, and I was aware, as was Oskar, that its author had fled Germany for Switzerland some six years earlier and that his books had subsequently been banned when he had been declared an enemy of the Reich. From his home in Zürich he had written at length about his contempt for the Führer and the Nazi Party and although the majority of his articles had been suppressed, some had appeared in underground papers and his views had been disseminated among a largely apathetic populace.
‘Join me if you like,’ I said, indicating the seat opposite me. ‘I’d be interested to know what you thought of it.’
‘I can’t,’ he said, glancing back towards the counter, where an older man I took to be his father was watching us warily. ‘My shift doesn’t finish for a couple of hours yet. I haven’t seen you in here before, have I?’