If at least I’d been able to fight Paul . . . that would have been different.
A smile lit up his face. At the same moment, his aunt opened the door and looked straight into his eyes. Perhaps she read betrayal and murder in them; perhaps she was simply afraid of Jürgen’s presence. But whatever the reason, she reacted by trying to slam the door shut.
Jürgen was quick. He managed to get his left hand there just in time. The doorjamb hit his knuckles hard and he stifled a cry of pain, but he had succeeded. However hard Ilse pushed, her fragile body was powerless against Jürgen’s brutal strength. He leaned his great weight against the door, and both his aunt and the chain protecting her were dispatched onto the floor.
“If you scream I’ll kill you, old woman,” said Jürgen, his voice low and serious as he closed the door behind him.
“Have some respect: I’m younger than your mother,” said Ilse from the floor.
Jürgen didn’t reply. His knuckles were bleeding: the blow had been harder than it had seemed. He set the newspaper and cudgel on the ground and approached the neatly made bed. He tore off a piece of the sheet and was tying it around his hand when Ilse, believing him to be distracted, opened the door. Just as she was about to make a run for it, Jürgen yanked hard at her dress, pulling her back down.
“Nice try. So, now can we talk?”
“You haven’t come here to talk.”
“That’s true.”
Grabbing her by the hair, he forced her to stand up again and look him in the eye.
“So, Auntie, where are the papers?”
“How typical of the baron, sending you to do what he doesn’t dare do himself,” snorted Ilse. “Do you know what it is he’s sent you to get?”
“You people and your secrets. No, my father hasn’t told me anything, he’s just asked me to get your papers. Luckily my mother gave me more detail. She said I have to find a letter of yours that’s full of lies, and another from your husband.”
“I have no intention of giving you anything.”
“You don’t seem to understand what I’m prepared to do, Auntie.”
He took off his overcoat and put it down on a chair. Then he drew out a red-handled hunting knife. The sharp edge gave off a silvery gleam in the light from the oil lamp, which was reflected in his aunt’s trembling eyes.
“You wouldn’t dare.”
“Oh, I think you’ll find I would.”
For all his bravado, the situation was more difficult than Jürgen had imagined. It wasn’t like a tavern brawl, where he would allow his instinct and adrenaline to take over, and his body became a savage, brutal machine.
When he took the woman’s right arm and held it down on the bedside table, he felt barely any emotion. But then a sadness bit into him like the sharp teeth of a saw, scraping the pit of his stomach and showing as little mercy as he himself showed when he put the knife to his aunt’s fingers and removed her index finger in two messy cuts.
Ilse screamed in pain, but Jürgen was ready and covered her mouth with his hand. He wondered where the excitement was that violence usually brought, which was what had first attracted him to the SA.
Could it be the lack of challenge? Because this scared old crow was no challenge at all.
The screams stifled under Jürgen’s palm had dissolved into inaudible sobbing. He fixed his gaze on the woman’s tearful eyes, trying to take the same pleasure from this situation that he’d felt knocking out the teeth of the young Communist a few weeks earlier. But no. He gave a resigned sigh.
“Now will you cooperate? This isn’t much fun for either of us.”
Ilse nodded hard.
“I’m glad to hear it. Give me what I’ve asked you for,” he said, releasing her.
She moved away from Jürgen and, with hesitant steps, walked toward the wardrobe. The mutilated hand that she held against her chest left a growing stain on her cream-colored dress. She searched among her clothes with her other hand till she found a small white envelope.
“This is my letter,” she said, holding it out to Jürgen.
The young man took the envelope, the surface of which bore a bloody smudge. His cousin’s name was written on the other side. He tore open one end of the envelope and removed five sheets filled with tight, round handwriting.
Jürgen glanced over the first lines but then was drawn in by what he read. Halfway through the text his eye bulged and his breathing became agitated. He threw Ilse a suspicious look, unable to believe what he was seeing.
“It’s a lie! A filthy lie!” he cried, stepping toward his aunt and holding the knife to her throat.
“It isn’t, Jürgen. I’m sorry you had to find out like this,” she said.
“You’re sorry? You feel sorry for me, do you? I’ve just cut off your finger, you old hag! What’s to stop me slitting your throat, eh? Tell me it’s a lie,” hissed Jürgen in a cold whisper that made Ilse’s hair stand on end.
“I’ve been a victim of this particular truth for many years. It’s part of what has made you into the monster you are.”
“Does he know?”
This last question was too much for Ilse. She staggered, dizzy with the emotion and loss of blood, and Jürgen had to catch her.
“Don’t you dare faint now, useless old woman!”
There was a washbasin close by. Jürgen threw his aunt onto the bed and tipped some water over her face.
“Enough,” she said weakly.
“Answer me. Does Paul know?”
“No.”
Jürgen allowed her a few moments to recover. A tide of conflicting feelings passed through his head as he reread the letter, this time to the end.
When he finished, he folded the pages up carefully and put them in a pocket. Now he understood why his father had been so insistent about wanting these papers, and why his mother had asked him to bring them to her first.
They wanted to use me. They think I’m an idiot. No one is going to have this letter but me . . . and I’ll use it at just the right moment. Yes, that’s it. When they least expect it . . .
But there was something else he needed. He walked slowly toward the bed and leaned over the mattress.
“I want Hans’s letter.”
“I haven’t got it. I swear to God. Your father’s always been looking for it, but I don’t have it. I’m not even sure that it exists,” Ilse stammered, clinging to her mutilated hand.
“I don’t believe you,” lied Jürgen. Ilse didn’t seem capable of hiding anything at that moment, but all the same he wanted to see what reaction his disbelief would provoke. Again he held the knife to her face.
Ilse tried to push his hand away but, with her strength almost gone, it was like a child pushing at a ton of granite.
“Leave me alone. For God’s sake, haven’t you done enough to me?”
Jürgen glanced around. Moving away from the bed, he seized the oil lamp from the nearby table and threw it against the wardrobe. The glass shattered, spilling burning kerosene everywhere.
He returned to the bed and, looking Ilse right in the eye, placed the tip of the knife against her belly. He inhaled.
Then he buried the blade up to the hilt.
“I have now.”
39
After the argument with Alys, Paul was in a foul mood. He chose to ignore the cold and walked home, a decision that would become the biggest regret of his life.
It took Paul almost an hour to walk the seven kilometers that separated the beer hall from the boardinghouse. He barely paid any attention to his surroundings, his head lost in his recollections of the conversation with Alys, imagining things he could have said that would have changed the outcome. One moment he wished he’d been conciliatory, the next he wished he’d replied in a way that wounded her, so that she would know how he felt. Lost in the interminable spiral of love, he didn’t notice what was happening till he was just a few steps from the gate.
Then he smelled the smoke and saw people running. A fire engine was parked in fr
ont of the building.
Paul looked up. There was a fire on the third floor.
“Oh, Holy God—Mama!”
On the other side of the road a crowd was forming, a mixture of curious bystanders and people from the boardinghouse. Paul ran toward them, searching for familiar faces and shouting Ilse’s name. Finally he found the landlady, who was sitting on the curb, her face smeared with soot that was furrowed with tears. Paul shook her.
“My mother! Where is she?”
The landlady started to cry again, unable to look him in the eye.
“No one’s escaped from the third floor. Oh, if my father, may he rest in peace, could see what’s become of his building!”
“And the firemen?”
“They’ve not gone in yet, but there’s nothing they can do. The fire’s blocked the stairways.”
“And from the other roof ? The one at number twenty-two?”
“Perhaps,” said the landlady, wringing her calloused hands in distress. “You can jump from there . . .”
Paul didn’t hear the end of her sentence because he was already running toward the neighbors’ door. An unfriendly policeman was there, questioning one of the boardinghouse tenants. He frowned when he saw Paul charging toward him.
“And where do you think you’re going? We’re clearing—Hey!”
Paul shoved the policeman aside, knocking him to the ground.
The building had five floors, one more than the boardinghouse. Each was a private dwelling, though they must all have been empty at the time. Paul groped his way up the stairs, as the building’s electricity had clearly been cut off.
On the top floor he had to stop because he couldn’t find the way onto the roof. Then he understood that he’d have to reach up to a trapdoor in the middle of the ceiling. He jumped, trying to grip the handle, but he was still short by a couple of feet. Desperately he looked around for something that might help him, but there was nothing he could use.
I have no choice but to force the door of one of the apartments.
He threw himself against the nearest door, ramming it with his shoulder, but he achieved nothing except a sharp pain running down his arm. So he started kicking at the level of the lock and succeeded in opening the door after half a dozen blows. He grabbed the first thing he could find in the dark entrance hall, which turned out to be a chair. Standing on that, he was able to reach the trapdoor and lower the wooden ladder that led to the flat roof.
Outside, the air was unbreathable. The wind was blowing the smoke in his direction, and Paul had to cover his mouth with his handkerchief. He almost fell down the space between the two buildings, a gap of a little more than a meter. He could barely see the neighboring roof.
Where the hell do I jump?
He took his keys from his pocket and threw them ahead of him. There was a sound Paul identified as the impact with stone or wood, and he jumped in that direction.
For a brief moment he felt his body floating in the smoke. Then he fell onto his hands and knees, scraping his palms. At last he’d reached the boardinghouse.
Hang on, Mama. I’m here now.
He had to walk with his hands stretched out in front of him until he had cleared the smoky area, which was at the front of the building, closest to the street. Even through his shoes he could feel the roof’s intense heat. Toward the back there was an awning, a legless rocking chair, and the thing Paul was searching for desperately.
Access to the next floor down!
He ran toward the door, afraid that it would be locked. His strength was beginning to fail, and his legs felt heavy.
Please, God, don’t let the fire have reached her room. Please. Mama, tell me you were smart enough to turn on the tap and to stuff something wet into the cracks around the door.
The door to the stairs was open. There was smoke in the stairwell, but it was bearable. Paul rushed down as fast as he could, but on the penultimate step he tripped over something. He quickly stood back up and knew he’d only have to make it to the end of the corridor and turn right, and then he’d be at the entrance to his mother’s room.
He tried to move forward, but it was impossible. The smoke was a dirty orange color, there was no air, and the heat of the fire was so intense that he couldn’t take another step.
“Mama!” he said, wanting to cry out, but the only thing that came from his mouth was a dry, painful croak.
The patterned wallpaper began to burn beside him, and Paul realized he would soon be surrounded by the fire if he didn’t get out quickly. He doubled back as the flames lit up the stairwell. Paul could now see what he’d tripped over, what those dark stains were on the rug.
There on the floor, lying by the bottom step, was his mother. And she was hurt.
“Mama! No!”
He crouched down beside her, searching for a pulse. Ilse seemed to respond.
“Paul,” she whispered.
“You’ve got to hang on, Mama! I’ll get you out of here!”
The young man lifted her small body and ran up the stairs. Stepping outside, he moved as far from the staircase as he could, but the smoke had spread everywhere.
Paul stopped. He couldn’t get through the curtain of smoke with his mother in that state, still less jump blindly between two buildings with her in his arms. Nor could they stay where they were. Whole sections of the roof had now fallen in, and sharp red spears were licking at the gaps. The roof would collapse in a matter of minutes.
“You’ve got to hang on, Mama. I’ll get you out of here. I’ll take you to the hospital and you’ll soon get better. I swear. So you’ve got to hang on.”
“The ground . . .” said Ilse, coughing slightly. “Put me down.”
Paul knelt and rested her legs on the ground. It was the first time he’d been able to see the state his mother was in. Her dress covered in blood. The finger hacked off her right hand.
“Who did this to you?” he said with a grimace.
The woman could barely speak. Her face was pale, and her lips trembled. She’d dragged herself out of the bedroom in order to escape the flames, leaving a red streak behind her. The injury, which had forced her to crawl on all fours, had paradoxically kept her alive longer, as in that position her lungs had taken in less smoke. But by now Ilse Reiner barely had a breath of life left in her.
“Who, Mama?” Paul repeated. “Was it Jürgen?”
Ilse opened her eyes. They were red and swollen.
“No . . .”
“Who, then? Did you recognize them?”
Ilse raised a trembling hand to her son’s face, stroking it gently. The tips of her fingers were cold. Overwhelmed by pain, Paul knew that this would be the last time his mother touched him, and he was afraid.
“It wasn’t . . .”
“Who?”
“It wasn’t Jürgen.”
“Tell me, Mama. Tell me who. I’ll kill them.”
“You shouldn’t . . .”
Another attack of coughing cut her short. Ilse’s arms fell limply to her sides.
“You shouldn’t hurt Jürgen, Paul.”
“Why, Mama?”
His mother was fighting for every breath now, but she was fighting on the inside too. Paul could see the struggle in her eyes. She had to make a huge effort to get air into her lungs. But even more of an effort to force these three last words from her heart.
“He’s your brother.”
40
Brother.
Sitting on the curb, close to where the landlady had sat an hour earlier, Paul tried to digest that word. In less than thirty minutes his life had been turned upside-down twice—first with the death of his mother, and then with the revelation she’d made with her final breath.
When Ilse died, Paul had embraced her and was tempted to allow himself to die too. To stay where he was until the flames consumed the ground beneath him.
That’s life. Running across a roof that’s condemned to collapse, thought Paul, drowning in a pain that was as bitter, dark, and thick
as oil.
Was it fear that had kept him on the roof in the moments after his mother’s death? Perhaps he had been afraid of facing the world alone. Perhaps if her last words had been “I love you so much,” Paul would have let himself die. But Ilse’s words had given a completely different meaning to the questions that had tormented Paul all his life.
Was it hatred, the thirst for vengeance, or the need to know, that had finally made him act? Perhaps a mixture of all three. What is beyond doubt is that Paul gave his mother a final kiss on the forehead, then sprinted to the opposite end of the roof.
He nearly fell over the edge but managed to stop himself in time. The children next door sometimes played on the building, and Paul wondered how they got back across. He deduced that they probably left a plank of wood lying around somewhere. Paul had no time to look for it amid the smoke, so he took off his overcoat and jacket, reducing his weight for the jump. If he missed, or if the opposite bit of roof collapsed under his weight, he would drop five floors. Without thinking too much, he had taken a running jump, blindly confident that he would make it.
Now that he was back at ground level, Paul tried to assemble the puzzle in which Jürgen—my brother!—had become the most complex piece of all. Could Jürgen really be Ilse’s son? Paul didn’t think it possible, as only eight months separated their birth dates. Physically it was possible, but Paul was more inclined to believe that Jürgen was Hans and Brunhilda’s son. Eduard, with his darker, rounder complexion, had looked nothing like Jürgen, nor were they alike in temperament. However, Jürgen did resemble Paul. They both had blue eyes and pronounced cheekbones, though Jürgen’s hair was darker.
How could my father have slept with Brunhilda? And why did my mother hide it from me all this time? I always knew she wanted to protect me, but why not tell me this? And how am I supposed to find out the truth without approaching the Schroeders?
The landlady interrupted Paul’s thoughts. She was still sobbing.