LITMIR.BIZ

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wiped dust from a shelf and moved around the room. Perhaps his ulcer was playing up, thought Ryessman.

      ‘If you will excuse me, Herr Bürgermeister,’ he said. ‘You have an appointment with your tailor and I have a meeting too.’

      ‘I was forgetting the time,’ said the Burgomaster. He nodded to Niels and left the room. Outside in the corridor there were five people. At first the dark clothes of the older people suggested that they had come to register a death. Probably, thought Ryessman, they have these same clothes for weddings, births and deaths. It was the young couple who showed that this was a wedding. There was no doubt about them. They were so clearly in love that they were oblivious of everyone and everything around them. The young man was dressed in a dark well-cut suit with a small spotted bow tie. He was a handsome boy with big eyes and a strong jaw. There were not so many young men like that still in civilian clothes, thought Ryessman. The girl was pretty. She did not have the wide pelvis, heavy bones and strong arms that were common to the local girls. She was petite with jet-black hair cut short and a heart-shaped face that was pale and doll-like. The parents shuffled uneasily as Ryessman walked down the corridor. Here in the country older people had never lost their fear of authority, thought Ryessman, and that perhaps was a good thing. Young people were less respectful and as he passed he heard someone whisper and the young man looked up and stared him straight in the face.

      Perhaps if the Burgomaster had been busy that afternoon he would have never pursued the matter or come across it in the first place. But the afternoon was quiet and sunny as he sat at his desk idly turning over the carbons of letters passing between departments in the Rathaus.

      Dear Sir,

      The Burgomaster thanks you for your letter of the twelfth of May and confirms that MEYER, Hans-Willy, of Rheinprovinz Altgarten Florastrasse 36 is now officially down-classified to Jew of two-thirds Jewish blood.

      Your department will ensure that his employer is informed and that any privileges that he had due to his former status as a Jew of one-third Jewish blood should now be withdrawn.

      A. NIELS

       for the Burgomaster

      Niels had initialled the carbon as was his usual practice. Acting on impulse the Burgomaster phoned through to police records and asked them for their file on this man Hans-Willy Meyer.

      ‘You have it already,’ said the police constable.

      ‘You are sure?’

      ‘I am certain, Herr Bürgermeister. Herr Niels came down for it personally. He said you had asked for it.’

      ‘Thank you.’

      ‘Is everything in order?’

      ‘Yes,’ said the Burgomaster. He knew the man with whom he had spoken, an elderly constable who had been put in charge of records after being badly injured in a fight with two drunks at the beginning of the war. He was a man of experience and would have made no mistake. The Burgomaster picked up the phone but replaced it and walked along to Niels’ office instead. The wedding party were still waiting in the corridor.

      Niels was not in his office and although at first Ryessman was about to dismiss the matter from his mind he had second thoughts and went through the cabinet to find Meyer’s police file. It was not there. There were in fact none of the grey-covered police files anywhere in the cabinet. It was then that he remembered that Niels had been carrying a grey file when he had come into the office and found Ryessman behind his desk. Yes, there it was, stuffed into a cabinet of purchase agreements so carelessly that its cover was bent double.

      The Burgomaster read through the file of documents. Meyer was a twenty-one-year-old Jewish farmworker. He was not permitted to serve in the Wehrmacht. His file was a very ordinary one that could have been that of any of Altgarten’s two dozen Jews. Ryessman had hoped that his data card with its identity photo and fingerprints would have been there, but it was not. Perhaps police records filed them separately.

      Meyer had been down-graded because his grandfather, a butcher from Lübeck hitherto listed as an Aryan, had now been classified as purely Jewish. This made Meyer’s father two-thirds Jewish like his mother, and, as everyone knew, the offspring of two such Jews was a two-thirds-Jewish son, not a one-third-Jewish son. What puzzled Ryessman was where the information had come from. Usually in cases of this sort one found in the file a short unpleasant note from a neighbour or fellow worker. Typed sometimes, or written in block capitals to conceal the writer’s identity. Often they contained obscenities, sometimes they ended with Nazi slogans instead of a signature. This file had no such note. The grandfather had been dead since before the Party came into power and these documents had originated with the Lübeck police records office. It seemed unlikely that they would have made a mistake but then perhaps in 1933, the first year of Hitler’s power, they had been overworked, for that was when all these Jewish files began. Before that the police had dealt only with criminals.

      It was time to go for his fitting. He replaced the file as he had found it, even bending it as before. As he left his office he saw the wedding party again. They were no longer tense and the bridegroom held his wife’s hand protectively. Herr Holländer, the registrar, brandished a huge bunch of keys and used them to unlock the cupboard on the landing. He reached for one of the hundreds of black-bound volumes that lined its shelves. The ceremony was not yet complete and Holländer looked the groom in the eye warningly. They were hushed and solemn as Holländer handed the official edition of Mein Kampf to the bride as was mandatory in all Reich weddings. The Burgomaster nodded approvingly at them as he passed.

      The sun now shone from a clear blue sky and Ryessman enjoyed the walk up Dorfstrasse past the ruined windmill on the corner. As he crossed Vogelstrasse he could smell the sweet, freshly cut timber in the carpentry shops where as a young child he had lingered on his way to school. He tried to forget the business of Meyer but he could not. Even as the tailor – old Herr Voss himself – supervised the fitting of his fine Party uniform he remembered it again. What sort of spiteful motive was behind the reclassification? Not that Ryessman had much sympathy for Jews; it was simply a matter of procedure. If there was a reclassification, then the file should show the evidence for it. If the reclassification had been upwards instead of downwards then Ryessman would have suspected corruption. It did happen, it was useless to deny it. There were such large sums of money involved. Some of them would offer a fortune rather than go into a concentration camp. It wasn’t fair that these Jews put that sort of temptation to loyal policemen and Party workers, but what could you expect from such people?

      ‘Raise your arm,’ said Herr Voss. ‘Too tight?’

      ‘Exactly right.’

      ‘Bend forward and straighten up.’

      The Burgomaster did so and Herr Voss fussed around the back of his collar, slashing at the soft brown cloth with his chalk. It was a smart uniform; he wished it had been ready this morning when the family had had its group photo taken. How fine his mother had looked even at eighty-six, and the children in their best suits had been transfixed and silent in case the photo should show them as having moved. For their parents had promised them dire punishments if this photograph for grandfather’s birthday was less than perfect.

      ‘Sit down. Clothes must look as well on a man seated as upon him standing.’ Again he applied the sharp edge of the chalk. It was an honour to be fitted by Voss himself. Voss was among the wealthiest men in the town. In 1930 in an upstairs room in this very building he had first tried his hand at making a uniform. It was for an old and valued customer who had just joined the SA. One of his fellow officers had admired it and by 1933 Voss uniforms had become famous for miles around. One wealthy SS officer came from Berlin and had previously been a customer of the famous Stechbarth, Göring’s tailor. It made Voss very proud. Some people said things against them, but the Nazis had done wonders for the uniform business, whatever other faults they might have. There were so many part-time organizations that many Germans had two or three uniforms. Voss’ greatest complaint against the Nazis was the way they had deprived him of his skilled Jewish staff. It was all very well, these arrogant young men complaining about stitching and the cut of the breeches. They didn’t seem to understand that there were secrets to tailoring

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