LITMIR.BIZ

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regiment when your mother told me of your stomach ulcer.’

      ‘Well, your influence didn’t last long, Herr Bürgermeister. I didn’t get a discharge. I was placed temporarily on the reserve. My papers came this morning. I rejoin the 15th Panzer-grenadier Division in Sicily next week. They are awaiting the invasion. I shall never come back.’ That little bastard Holländer was smirking gleefully.

      ‘You would do well not to come back, Niels. Give your mother a hero for a son, you at least owe her that.’

      ‘More than I owe her money to pay the rent and keep her from starving?’

      ‘I would rather starve than have a son like you. You are an enemy of the State, a thief and a liar.’

      Niels stood waiting for the Burgomaster’s wrath to diminish.

      ‘Get out,’ he said after a long silence. Niels was pleased to get away so lightly.

      ‘And …’ said the Burgomaster. Niels turned. ‘You will pay the three thousand marks to the Winter Help Fund and show me the receipt. I shall not withdraw my invitation for dinner tonight, but I shall not be unhappy if you fail to turn up.’

      ‘Yes, Herr Bürgermeister,’ said Niels, trying to look sad. That was wonderful. He had far better things to do tonight: the dance, and providing the terror flyers stayed away perhaps a visit to the fourth floor of the Annex. There was a tall Viennese nurse whom he rather fancied. She would be tastier than the Burgomaster’s roast duckling.

      Niels had been responsible for the eighteen invitations to the Burgomaster’s dinner at Frenzel’s. He had done the job carefully, remembering all sorts of obscure cousins and business colleagues. In fact, only one invitation had gone astray; the one to Frau H. Pippert, widow of a building contractor, had been typed with the wrong street-name and the postman had guessed, wrongly, that it was intended for Fräulein G. Pippert, a teacher at the Volkschule.

      Gerda Pippert knew from the moment she opened the envelope that the invitation was not intended for her. On the other hand she also knew, unlike the Burgomaster, that Hanna Pippert – Johanna really, of course, but no one called her that – had died over six months ago. Hadn’t she received more than a dozen wrongly addressed letters of condolence from brick merchants, timber firms and manufacturers of stoves and boilers. And hadn’t she forwarded them to the brother-in-law of the dead woman at some address in Krakow. Gerda Pippert deserved the invitation. In the circumstances surely no one would begrudge her honorary membership of the Burgomaster’s family for one festive evening. It was over three years since she had eaten a meal at a fine restaurant and as for being recognized, if they didn’t even know that old Hanna was dead, what chance was there that they would remember her face. Anyway, old ladies looked alike. She could put some new lace on her black dress. One of her ex-students – now an artillery officer – had sent her an antique lace tablecloth from Brussels. She had never risked a teapot on it, but as a collar for the black dress it would be most chic. She decided to gatecrash the dinner, or, as she rationalized it to herself, attend as a friend of the family.

      She had written a brief acceptance, carefully smudging the initial. She looked at herself in the full-length mirror of the wardrobe. It made the dress look quite new. Her white hair was drawn tightly back and fastened with a black ribbon. She would wear just a touch of face powder – it was a special event, after all – and leave her spectacles off. Then she remembered the old lorgnette. It was in the bottom of her sewing box, a splendid device with an ivory handle and gold rims to the glasses. She could no longer see very well through the lenses but held up to her face it looked most distinguished. What’s more, it would give her something to do with her hands. In the sewing box there was an old ivory cigarette holder too. She put it in her handbag. Tonight after the coffee and speeches and cognac she would try a cigarette again. If only her handbag were a little more elegant and the handle weren’t so worn, but if she held it low against her skirt it didn’t notice so much. She paraded up and down the bed-sitting-room practising wellborn gestures. The dress looked fine. Tonight Gerda Pippert, fifty-six-year-old spinster and schoolteacher, was to dine with the Burgomaster! It was the most exciting prospect she could remember since her holiday in Heidelberg in 1938.

      Gerd Böll may have been the town wag but he was no fool. Sometimes he regretted that he had left the university, for the young people there had a sense of humour more nearly tuned to his than had the people of Altgarten. In spite of disapproving eyes Gerd continued to act the fool for he knew that it was his particular strength that he could endure the supercilious remarks of his neighbours without wishing them ill.

      Of all the people of Altgarten, Gerd’s best friends were among the TENO engineers who manned the camp on the Krefeld road. Many times Gerd had taken his van and gone with them into the Ruhr after a big RAF attack. He had seen the TENOs digging for hours into burning wreckage and finding only shrivelled corpses. He’d seen them lifting steel beams in their bare hands and he’d noticed that some of the most pugnacious and disreputable roughnecks among them could be the most gentle with the injured. None of them were young, for the young had all been screened off to provide TENO battalions for bridge-building and demolition with front-line fighting units. Each man had a technical skill and their easy discipline reflected this, for theirs was a job where a few minutes could mean a cellarful of people saved from flames or drowning. They were a strange breed of men, new to Gerd Böll. They took a drink when others would need a night’s sleep, they settled for a cigarette instead of a meal and swore when lesser men would have wept.

      In addition, Gerd liked their equipment: the tractors, lorries and mobile cranes, the pumps and generators, and the winches that could topple an office block.

      It was five-forty, almost time for Gerd to report his movements to the Burgomaster’s Control Room. This evening of all evenings it was scarcely necessary, for he would be at Frenzel’s with the Burgomaster. For a birthday gift he had bought a small humidor, inlaid with ivory and mother of pearl. One of the Russian POWs had made it for him. He wondered if the Burgomaster would disapprove if he knew its origin. Perhaps he would recognize the style of work, for the madonnas they sold from door to door had the same design on the skirts as the humidor had round its lid.

      Dark suit? Well, Gerd didn’t have a dark suit. Apart from this green suit he didn’t have one at all. And this one had long since ceased to fit him. He unfastened the jacket buttons and breathed out with a long sigh of relief. Well, he’d leave it open. It would never notice when he was sitting down. He sat down now at his antique desk and cleared aside the accounts and unanswered correspondence. From this window he had the ugliest view of Altgarten. The cramped slum tenements crowded together between brewery siding and gasworks as did the people inside them.

      In the cobbled street a group of children, some of them in Hitler Youth uniform, were kicking a ball around. Gerd watched them with interest but eventually the moment he had been putting off arrived. He pulled a piece of paper towards him and sadly began a letter to his cousin August.

Rheinprovinz, Altgarten
June 31st, 1943	Bahnhofstrasse 33

      My dear kind August,

      Perhaps you will despise me when you have finished reading this letter and yet, try as I have, I can find no alternative to writing it. This afternoon when I met you with Anna-Luisa and you both looked so radiantly happy it seemed clearly my duty (and my joy) to keep silent. Now I once again think otherwise. Think of me and my predicament as I write this letter. As unhappy as you may be, spare a moment to remember that I too am as sad.

      The test of friendship is the extent to which a man will expose the friendship to total destruction by doing something he believes is in the best interest of his comrade. The girl is beautiful and to be sure has been a loyal employee and a fine guardian of little Hansl. But a young girl like Anna-Luisa has a life different from us, different too from any style of life we can remember. Like any beautiful girl living alone in a town filled with young men, the temptations put to her are unreasonable, but it would be dishonest of me, and foolish of you, to pretend that she has not succumbed to those temptations

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