‘It’s bronze and the plinth is marble,’ he said sulkily, but his wife had already taken Tauber’s money.
‘For you, my dear,’ Tauber said, making a flourishing gesture and handing it over to Frieda. ‘I’m sure Herr Karlsruhen will admit that it is not quite as beautiful as its model but it’s a fine piece of work nonetheless and I am proud to make you a present of it.’
Frieda suspected that Karlsruhen would admit no such thing, but the sculptor merely continued to scowl and said nothing.
A New Job
‘THAT WAS
The boisterous crowd of young men and women, their elegant evening dress in disarray, shouted for more as the sweating combo retired to the little band room at the rear of the stage behind a shimmering beaded curtain.
Wolfgang had begun working for Kurt the very day after they first met, when, true to his word, Kurt had bought the club in which Wolfgang was working.
‘Say hello to your new boss, Mr Trumpet!’ the exuberant teenager had shouted, having waylaid Wolfgang in the alleyway at the back of the venue as Wolfgang was chaining up his bicycle. ‘I told you I’d buy this joint. So welcome to the Joplin Club, the hottest hell-hole in town.’
Katharina was there too, standing in the shadows of the little stage doorway, trying to keep her coat from touching the filthy, urine-soaked walls, the tiniest smile creeping across her usual mask of bored indifference.
Wolfgang smiled also.
But nervously.
In the early hours of that very morning he’d been wiping this woman’s lipstick from his mouth and lying to Frieda that he could not recall if she was pretty or not. He had in fact recalled very well how pretty she was, and had continued to recall it any number of times that day as he mangled nappies and created amusing faces out of apples and cheese for his children.
But what could he do? Jazz musicians couldn’t turn down work because there were pretty girls attached. They’d never work at all.
‘Congratulations, Kurt,’ he said, ‘looks like I’m your new band fixer then.’
‘You betcha, Daddy!’ Kurt replied. ‘We’ll make this joint jump!’
And from the moment the three of them walked together down into the darkened cellar, breathing in the stench of the previous night’s booze and tobacco and following the morning’s toilet bleach, they did exactly that. They made the joint jump.
It was, without doubt, the best job Wolfgang had ever had.
And not just because Kurt was a ridiculously generous employer who paid at least twice what Wolfgang could have got elsewhere. The main cause for Wolfgang to celebrate was that Kurt was a genuine fan. He loved his jazz in a way that only the young love their music. Like a first love.
‘Just make sure it’s out there, Daddy,’ he said. ‘Blow it hot hot hot!’
Wolfgang could scarcely believe his luck.
‘All the other assholes I’ve worked for don’t give a damn about the music,’ he told Frieda on the morning after his first night at the Joplin. ‘Those cloth-eared pricks only play jazz because it brings in the gangsters and the flappers; they’d play nursery rhymes or bloody Wagner if they thought it would pay. Even the ones who pretend to understand the music would be happy if we played
‘That’s nice,’ Frieda observed dryly between sips of coffee and bites of black bread. She was working away at some statistical papers and did not look up. ‘I dealt with three cases of rickets yesterday.’
‘Oh?’ said Wolfgang rather surprised. ‘That can’t have been much fun.’
‘It was heartbreaking actually. Lack of nutrients, pure and simple. They don’t need a doctor, they need a meal. The city Oberburgermeister says that a quarter of all school kids in Berlin are under normal height and weight due to malnutrition. Imagine that. In the twentieth century.’
Wolfgang was of course somewhat deflated at Frieda’s reaction to what he’d imagined was wonderful news.
‘What’s rickets and malnutrition got to do with my new job?’ he asked.
‘Nothing really. Except that with the city slowly starving to death it’s nice that one big kid got his own club to play with, that’s all.’
‘And you’re saying that it’s Kurt’s fault the country’s completely fucked, are you?’
‘Don’t swear. The boys might be awake. They’re picking things up you know.’ Frieda continued to tick and cross boxes on the forms she was working on.
‘Well, there speaks the great radical! Swearing is the language of the proletariat, isn’t it? I thought you were supposed to be all for the working bloody class?’
‘I want a fairer world, not a coarser one, Wolf.’
‘You sound like your mother.’
‘And that’s a criticism, is it?’
‘You decide.’
‘Wolf, I’m just asking you to watch your language a bit. Edeltraud told me that a couple of days ago in the Volkspark an old gentleman patted Otto on the head and Ottster told him to fuck off.’
‘Good for him. You don’t mess around with a man’s hair, that’s well known. They’d kill you for it in the south side of Chicago.’
‘Edeltraud thought it was funny, which is of course half the problem.’
Wolfgang lit up another Lucky, his fourth of the morning, but with the money he would now be earning he could afford to smoke as many as he liked.
‘Look, I don’t want to talk about Edeltraud, or old gits in the park. I want to know why you seem to feel that my new job’s got something to do with you treating kids for rickets.’
‘Come on, Wolf,’ Frieda said, putting away her papers and taking her cup and plate to the sink where she managed to crush a cockroach with a serving spoon. ‘You know very well that all these people getting rich quick is making a terrible situation worse. If your Kurt can afford to buy his own nightclub he must have got the money from somewhere.’
‘What? From starving children?’
‘Indirectly.’
‘He got it from
Frieda sat down again and tried to smile.
‘Look, I’m sorry, Wolf. I’m being unfair, I know that. It’s just very hard at work. I never thought my first job as a doctor would be watching children die. You know TB’s up 300 per cent on pre-war levels?’
‘No, I didn’t know, as it happens. I haven’t had time to study the city’s medical statistics. I’ve been busy working all night making sure my own kids don’t starve.
