A Quiet Genocide Page 4

  ‘Oh God!’ exclaimed Gerhard.

  ‘She is still in Munich,’ Michael repeated. ‘But she has lost faith. She does not believe anymore. We would rather kill Jozef with our own hands than allow her near him – and we would never hurt a hair on that boy’s head. As I said, he is too important.’

  ‘Where is Jozef’s father?’ said Gerhard, still unseated in his panic.

  ‘Safe. He is no longer with the mother.’

  ‘Who is he?’ asked Gerhard and as soon as the words fell from his lips he did not know if he meant Jozef or his biological father.

  ‘That is something you do not need to know. Catharina must also never know. She is… she is unstable. This you know.’

  Gerhard looked up and saw Catharina standing in the doorway.

  ‘Darling,’ said Gerhard. ‘We didn’t hear you come in.’

  Fear filled her husband’s eyes, which blinked out among the drab upholstery like beacons.

  ‘Catharina,’ said Michael, rising to his feet and kissing her on the cheek. ‘You look beautiful. I am afraid I have led your husband astray this evening. We have drunk rather too much. Now I must go. Gerhard – it has been wonderful. Remember what we talked about.’

  ‘Yes. Yes.’

  The second word sounded more like an apology.

  ‘What were you talking about?’ enquired Catharina after Michael had left. She had her wits about her and it was clear her husband did not fully have his.

  ‘What? Sorry, darling?’

  ‘What were you talking about?’ she repeated more accusingly.

  ‘Nothing,’ he said weakly.

  Chapter Seven

  Elena Engel allowed Jozef to gently stroke her leg during lunchtime. Her perfectly soft skin made the finest silk seem unhewn.

  She liked it, Jozef thought, sat happily in the warm sunshine on the school playing field. He was going out of his mind and was in heaven for the thrilling few heartbeats.

  ‘Would you like to meet up this weekend?’ she said, switching her gaze to Jozef’s kind face.

  ‘This weekend? Right. Yes, of course,’ Jozef stuttered, unsure of what he had done to deserve such a wild upturn in fortune in his previously non-existent love life. Polite boys did badly when it came to girls, Jozef had convinced himself. ‘What do you want to do?’ he asked.

  ‘Call round for me on Saturday after supper and we can go for a walk,’ she replied, confidently rising to her feet and breaking off Jozef’s touch.

  Jozef watched her transfixed as she left him alone on the worn grass baked yellow by the hot season. He collected himself but did not feel his feet touch the ground as he followed her to his first lesson of the afternoon, double German.

  ‘Guten Nachmittag ladies and gentlemen,’ said Herr Slupski.

  No reply.

  ‘Guten Nachmittag ladies and gentlemen,’ he repeated, louder this time.

  ‘Guten Nachmittag sir,’ the class repeated in unison.

  ‘Danke,’ said Herr Slupski, returning to a more jovial state. ‘Just checking you were all still breathing.’

  Collective giggles put everyone at ease.

  ‘In 1928, the Nazis received 2.6 per cent of the vote in the general election. Less than five years later in 1933, Adolf Hitler was chancellor and the most powerful man in Germany. How did he do it?’ Herr Slupski asked, rolling up his white sleeves tightly above his elbows.

  ‘Well,’ he continued, opening a large top window with a long pole commandeered from behind the blackboard. ‘I’m going to tell you.’ A soothing breeze from the field instantly cooled the space.

  Jozef caught sight of Elena Engel over his shoulder. She smiled at him. Sebastian did not miss their moment and was concerned.

  ‘In 1929 the Wall Street crash in the United States of America triggered the Great Depression. Germany was hardest hit of all the developed nations. Unemployment shot up; food became prohibitively expensive; people were miserable. Germany’s five major banks were all bankrupt by 1931. Twenty thousand businesses in Germany, businesses your parents owned and tirelessly ran, were also bankrupt. The German middle classes were badly hit.’

  Herr Slupski took a sip of water.

  ‘The Nazis’ message had not changed magically during all that time. Hitler still insisted Germany needed to be reborn and that Jews were to blame. But now, ladies and gentlemen, your parents were ready to listen. 37 per cent of Germans, more than one in three, voted for Hitler in the elections in July 1932, giving him the largest share of the vote.’

  ‘No one could tell if National Socialism was something good with bad side effects or something bad with good side effects. What people did not know was that the Nazis were very nearly bankrupt at this time as well. Hitler, Goering et al. could have been blown away in the wind, ladies and gentlemen. So what saved them from the brink? Humanity. In January 1933 politicians bowed to popular pressure and Hitler was offered the chancellorship as part of a coalition government. They foolishly thought that they could tame Hitler and control him better from within the Reichstag than outside it. They were wrong.’

  * * *

  Jozef lied and told his parents he was visiting Sebastian’s house that Saturday night. Sebastian was devastated. He couldn’t recall the last Saturday evening he had spent apart from his friend. Jozef had agonised all afternoon over what to wear. Those hours now turned out to be largely wasted when he opened his wardrobe. Everything felt unfashionable. Everything felt old.

  Elena Engel had had the same problem, although Jozef would never have believed it. She was effortlessly elegant in his love-struck eyes. She lived with her mother and stepfather above the family shop.

  It was dark and uninviting now and 7.30pm precisely.

  Jozef was a stickler for punctuality. He could not help it. He had given himself very nearly half an hour to complete the five-minute walk from his home to Elena’s and he had had to endure endless laps of the streets near where they lived to take him up to 7.30pm precisely. He felt he had relived the moment ten times over by the time he tentatively knocked on the Engels’ door. He heard someone bound loudly down stairs. Elena. She was wearing a red silk dressing gown, a gift from her mother last Christmas. She was not ready. She too had been ‘not ready’ for close to half an hour, waiting impatiently for Jozef to knock and ‘catch’ her getting dressed.

  ‘What has gotten into you this evening?’ her mother had complained.

  ‘Nothing,’ she had lied calmly.

  ‘Hi Jozef,’ she now said casually.

  Jozef, already drunk on excitement, almost blew his top when he saw Elena half-dressed before him. Her dressing gown was tied tightly at its top, but blew liberally open around her legs, which must have been the most stunning in Munich.

  ‘I’ll just be a minute,’ Elena said. On cue and as rehearsed all week in front of her bedroom mirror, she flicked out a bare leg before swishing back seductively upstairs to dress.

  Jozef couldn’t breathe.

  A few hours later she became the first girl he French kissed. It was a bit wet, if the truth be told, and almost like a race – who could open and close their mouth the fastest while waggling their tongue wildly around?

  Jozef was quite happy for Elena to win on that count. He was too busy getting to grips with her bottom at the time.

  Those few hours walking the streets of Munich, running and talking and grabbing and French kissing, were the happiest of Jozef’s life so far. He did not feel the cold; he did not feel the ground beneath his feet. He felt happy.

  One week and three dates later he was heartbroken. Elena had abandoned him for an older, more experienced boy. Humiliatingly, the whole school knew.

  ‘Dumped by Elena Engel after one week,’ goaded one greasy classmate.

  Jozef did not flinch. He was a veteran of hiding his true feelings. Still, something in Jozef changed that summer. He learnt to only trust himself. Who else could he rely upon? His mother? His father? Michael? Sebastian? His instincts told him perhaps the least likely of
those candidates – Michael.

  Chapter Eight

  Jozef wiped the steam from his inadequate mirror and saw his reflection staring blankly back. This won’t do, he complained bitterly in his head. Still, it was his mirror; it was his room; it was his new home. It was 1959 and Jozef felt different. His teenage years had been largely kind. He had remained athletically slim, he had escaped the worst scars acne could inflict and his boyish good looks were accompanying him happily into adulthood.

  He moved away from the corner of the cramped room in the undergraduate halls at Berlin university and sat on his bed and cried – really cried for the first time since he was very small. The initial tears escalated and finally graduated to heaving, breathless sobs which lifted his whole frame like some medieval torture. He was drowning. He could not breathe. Emotion seemed to be eating him alive from inside out. Breathe, he tried to tell himself.

  Jozef’s parents had left him a few lifetimes earlier and now all he could see were four years reaching out before him forever. Four life sentences. What had he done? How stupid had he been? Jozef had arrived at the end of day one, week one, year one of a four-year degree in modern history at the University of Berlin. He had been so desperate to leave the home he had grown to hate in Munich behind. Now, all he wanted to do was board the first train back. Drunken giggles could be heard outside. Jozef’s fellow first years had wasted little time finding new companions, companions they were now escorting to the undergraduates’ union to get wildly intoxicated with and melt the ice of social discomfort they all currently felt. Jozef would rather have gone to the gas chamber.

  All he had was four grim walls – his home for the next academic year at least. There was a single bed, a large beaten wardrobe, which badly needed cleaning, and a simple sink headlined by a small mirror, which had its own light chain. You pulled it and highlighted in stunning detail every blemish and tiny imperfection on your face. It wasn’t having the desired effect on Jozef’s fragile confidence.

  Bang, bang, bang.

  Jozef jumped out of his skin. He froze, praying the noise would go quietly.

  ‘Hello? Hello?’ sounded an alien voice on the other side of Jozef’s thick wooden door.

  He flicked to autopilot and opened it without replying.

  ‘Hello dear fellow. My name is Mathias. I am living just across the hall. Would you like to come out for a few beverages this evening?’

  More drunken giggles from desperate hangers-on. Mathias was drunk and holding a half-empty bottle of red wine in one hand. He was wearing a black leather trenchcoat, not unlike a Nazi and he was flanked by two other boys. A fourth, with long hair, was collapsed worryingly on the floor behind them, drunk beyond measure and struggling to remain conscious.

  ‘Well dear fellow?’ said Mathias.

  ‘Oh, sorry,’ said Jozef.

  ‘Would you like to come and get very drunk not unlike a skunk?’ said Mathias.

  ‘Err… no,’ said Jozef.

  Mathias was stunned.

  ‘Err, no, sorry. I have a prior engagement with friends in town,’ Jozef continued, lying to protect his pride.

  ‘Suit yourself,’ Mathias sniffed, a little hurt. ‘Good night.’

  The three boys lurched arm in arm down the narrow corridor and were quickly followed by the boy bedraggled on the ground, hauling himself to his feet. He momentarily smiled at Jozef.

  Jozef returned the compliment and fleetingly felt he might have an ally. He closed the door to his room again and breathed deeply. The verbal exchange had at least temporarily wrenched him out of his depression. He would go for some air and a walk around campus. He could get his bearings and then go to bed and sleep. Tomorrow was another day. It couldn’t get any worse than the last two.

  The night before Jozef left home for university his mother and father had sat him down.

  ‘Jozef, you are adopted,’ his father had said flatly.

  His greying mother, Catharina, had sat there dutifully observing rank behind her husband.

  Jozef’s head had swayed like a boxer who had been hit.

  Catharina had ached to grab hold of her son, her baby, but Gerhard’s presence and temper prevented her. It was one more thing she never forgave him for.

  ‘You’re not my parents,’ Jozef had finally said, mimicking his father’s monotone.

  ‘We believe we are your parents,’ Gerhard had replied. ‘But now we believe the time is right that you know that, no, we are not your birth parents.’

  Eighteen years of things unsaid collapsed in seconds. How easily. The honesty in the room had been beyond disturbing. Who were these strangers sat opposite him, Jozef had suddenly thought. ‘Are my real parents alive?’ he had asked.

  Catharina’s heart ached at the word ‘real’.

  Gerhard had been expecting the question. ‘No,’ he had said firmly. ‘Your mother died in a bombing raid here in Munich during the war and your father was captured by the Russians in Stalingrad. He was sent to Siberia after the war and died in a prisoner-of-war camp in 1951.’

  Jozef’s head had swum again. First, he had learned he was adopted and the two people he had shared the vast majority of his young life with had been revealed to be relative imposters. Now, he had learned his true mother and father were dead. At that point he had started to really worry about university. He had been so excited about going for so long that the emotion had almost exhausted itself. But his nerves were unsettling him now deeply.

  He stood outside in the dark. Drunken cries and music from the undergraduates’ union rumbled in the distance like artillery on the Western Front. It felt like it was coming from another world. He breathed in the October air and stretched his legs around surroundings still alien to him. University campus was cocooned close but away from the hustle of real life and central Berlin.

  The intimidating size of its buildings leaned over him, suffocating him again. He tried to catch his breath, forming ghosts out of fog in front of his face. He walked quickly to escape the sensation and lost track of time. He could see an expensive car filing past a few hundred yards below. Jozef did not want to venture further. At least he felt a perverse sense of safety here.

  He was displaced physically for the first time in his life as well as displaced emotionally. He did not know where home was – or where it had ever been. He thought buried and long locked away in his memory was the image of his true parents, who had created him and tended to him gently as a newborn. It felt strange knowing that what he wanted to know above everything was buried within him.

  Drunken cries were edging closer. Jozef saw a group of stragglers merrily swaying up the hill from the direction of the city and the outside world – three of them, arm in arm like sailors on leave. They were singing, but Jozef couldn’t make out what. He quickly crossed the road to avoid any possible confrontation. The scars from the day the man had beaten him for throwing a snowball at his window had faded, forgotten on his skin, but psychologically they resurfaced in panics like this. Jozef broke out in a sweat before the party marched happily, harmlessly past. They hadn’t even noticed him.

  Jozef’s confidence had taken a pounding in the last two years. His friendship with Sebastian was not the same. They had effectively been divorced and had only just got back together. Sebastian had met a girl, who had never liked Jozef. She viewed him as competition and had cruelly eliminated him from her new sweetheart’s life. Jozef didn’t care for her, but he cared deeply for Sebastian, who had betrayed that emotion he felt.

  The girl had dropped Sebastian abruptly at the start of the summer. Jozef, still desperate to get back with his friend, scarcely dare believe it, but Sebastian hadn’t taken the hint. It was not over in his naïve eyes until a few weeks later when, distraught, Sebastian had raced out of a pub in town. Jozef had been with him and known then.

  Jozef, who all the girls at school had been sweet on, ironically remained a virgin. His week-long romance with Elena Engel was all he really had to show for his good looks and as a result
he was still innocent when it came to the opposite sex. Sebastian had had intercourse during his one relationship like it had been going out of style, which pained Jozef. He felt left behind by the one peer he thought he could trust. Then Sebastian had gone to university in Frankfurt to study science.

  The first week of university in Berlin was a dizzying round of fairs and enrolments. Which clubs to join; which societies; who to associate with? Jozef could not decide. He just wanted classes to begin and some structure to his day – and he wanted something to take his mind off this debilitating homesickness, which made him cry most evenings and which undermined what little confidence he had. That first week crawled by like a month. Jozef did not befriend anyone, never really talked. If he did, he almost immediately disliked people, who were overly confident and aggressively arrogant. He was beginning to wonder if everyone at university was like that.

  Jozef had feared this. He had billed this great adventure as ‘the first in his family to go to university’. His father, Gerhard, was a skilled working-class man and now Jozef was going to enter the professions and lower middle-classes or climb even higher. But that sounded like nonsense now. He did not know his true circumstances. Maybe he was the family dreamer – the one who foolishly tried to become a professional footballer, the one who underachieved. Jozef knew that he perhaps could have achieved more so far in his life, but he had done his best. So many things now clouded his past.

  Chapter Nine

  For the first time since arriving in Berlin, Jozef had a spring in his step. It was Monday morning, the first day of class. Thank Christ, he thought before apologising to the heavens with a smile for blaspheming. Week one was behind him and like a bad dream. The sun was shining despite a bite in the air and the sky was blue and clean like his mood. He could see the sun rising and warming the bottom corner of the world from his window – he was no longer a prisoner looking out his grey cell. Life wasn’t so bad after all, he thought.