9
Paul Reiner was shivering in the light May rain. His mother had stopped dragging him, and now walked by his side through Schwabing, the Bohemian district at the heart of Munich, where thieves and poets sat side by side with painters and whores in the taverns until the early hours. Few of the taverns were open now, however, and they didn’t go into any that were, as they didn’t have a pfennig.
“Let’s take shelter in this doorway,” said Paul.
“The night watchman will throw us out; it’s happened three times already.”
“You can’t go on like this, Mama. You’ll catch pneumonia.”
They squeezed into the narrow doorway of a building that had seen better days. At least an overhang protected them from the rain that drenched the deserted pavements and uneven flagstones. The weak light of the streetlamps cast strange reflections on the wet surfaces; it was unlike anything Paul had ever seen.
He was afraid and pressed even closer to his mother.
“You’re still wearing your father’s wristwatch, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” said Paul, alarmed.
She had asked him this question three times in the past hour. His mother was drained and empty, as though slapping her son and hauling him through the alleys far from the Schroeders’ mansion had used up a reserve of energy even she hadn’t known she possessed, and which was now lost forever. Her eyes were sunken and her hands trembled.
“Tomorrow we’ll pawn it and everything will be all right.”
The wristwatch was nothing special; it wasn’t even made of gold. Paul wondered if it would pay for any more than one night in a boardinghouse and a hot dinner, if they were lucky.
“That’s a great plan,” he forced himself to say.
“We need a place to stay, and then I’ll ask for my old job back at the gunpowder factory.”
“But, Mother… the gunpowder factory doesn’t exist anymore. They demolished it when the war ended.”
And you were the one who told me that, thought Paul, now extremely concerned.
“The sun will soon be up,” said his mother.
Paul didn’t reply. He craned his neck, alert to the rhythmic steps of the night watchman’s boots. Paul wished he would stay away long enough to allow him to shut his eyes for a moment.
I’m so tired… And I don’t understand any of what’s happened tonight. She’s behaving so strangely… Perhaps now she’ll tell me the truth.
“Mama, what do you know about what happened to Papa?”
For a few moments Ilse seemed to awake from her lethargy. A spark of light burned deep in her eyes, like the last embers of a bonfire. She held Paul’s chin and stroked his face gently.
“Paul, please. Forget it; forget everything you’ve heard tonight. Your father was a good man who died tragically in a shipwreck. Promise me that you’ll cling to that-that you won’t go looking for a truth that doesn’t exist-because I couldn’t bear to lose you. You’re all I have left. My boy Paul.”
The first glimmers of dawn cast long shadows on the Munich streets, carrying away the rain.
“Promise me,” she insisted, her voice fading.
Paul hesitated before answering.
“I promise.”
10
“Whooooah!”
The coal merchant’s cart screeched to a halt on the Rheinstrasse. The two horses stamped restlessly, their eyes covered by blinkers and their hindquarters blackened by sweat and soot. The coal merchant jumped to the ground and distractedly ran his hand along the side of the cart, which bore his name, Klaus Graf, even though only the first two letters were still legible.
“Clean this, Hulbert! I like my customers to know who is bringing them their raw material,” he said almost amiably.
The man in the driver’s seat removed his hat, pulled out a rag still bearing distant memories of the original color of the cloth, and set about working on the wood, whistling. This was his only way of expressing himself, as he was a mute. The melody was gentle and swift: he, too, seemed happy.
It was the perfect moment.
Paul had been following them all morning, ever since they came out of the stables Graf kept in Lehel. He’d also observed them the previous day and understood that the best time to ask for a job would be just before one in the afternoon, after the coal man’s midday rest. Both he and the mute had polished off large sandwiches and a couple of liters of beer. Left behind was the bad-tempered drowsiness of early morning, when the dew accumulated on the cart as they waited for the coal store to open. Gone, too, was the irritable tiredness at the end of the day, when they’d drink their final beer in silence, the dust constricting their throats.
If I can’t do it, God help us, thought Paul desperately.***
Paul and his mother had spent two days trying to find work and had eaten nothing whatsoever in that time. Pawning the watch had given them enough money for two nights in a boardinghouse and a breakfast of bread and beer. His mother had persevered looking for work, but they’d soon learned that a job was a pipe dream in those days. Women had been thrown out of the positions they’d occupied during the war when the men returned from the front. Not because the employers wanted this, naturally.
“Damn this government and its directives,” a baker had said to them when they’d asked him for the impossible. “They’ve been forcing us to hire war veterans when women do the work just as well and charge much less.”
“Did women really do the work as well as men?” Paul asked him insolently. He was in a bad mood. His stomach was growling and the smell of bread baking in the ovens was making matters worse.
“Better sometimes. I had one woman who could work the dough better than anybody.”
“So, why’d you pay them less?”
“Well, it’s obvious,” said the baker, shrugging his shoulders. “They’re women.”
If there was any logic to this, Paul couldn’t understand it, even though his mother and the employees in the workroom nodded in agreement.
“You’ll understand when you’re older,” one said as Paul and his mother left. Then they all burst out laughing.
Paul’s luck hadn’t been better. The first thing he was always asked, before the potential employer found out if he knew how to do anything, was whether he was a war veteran. He had suffered many disappointments in the space of a few hours, so he decided to confront the problem as rationally as he could. Trusting to fortune, he decided to follow the coal man, to study him and approach him in the best way possible. He and his mother had managed to stay in the boardinghouse for a third night after promising to pay the following day, and because the landlady felt sorry for them. She even gave them a dish of thick soup with bits of potato floating in it, and a piece of black bread.
So there was Paul, crossing the Rheinstrasse. A bustling and happy place filled with peddlers, newspaper sellers, and knife grinders, who hawked their boxes of matches, the latest news, or the benefits of well-sharpened knives. The smell of the bakeries mixed with the dung of horses, which were much more common in Schwabing than cars.
Paul took advantage of the moment when the coal man’s assistant left to fetch the doorman of the building they were going to supply, to get him to open the door to the cellar. Meanwhile, the coal man prepared the enormous birch-wood baskets in which they transported their wares.
Maybe if he’s alone he’ll be friendlier. People react to strangers differently in front of their juniors, Paul
