pictures from a Christmas butter-biscuit box. A fairytale place. One of the last medieval bridges in Europe that still had the colourful houses and shops built right on its stone. Paris and London had lost theirs hundreds of years ago. Erfurt maintained. We know our history. It is still here. England does not know us to bomb. Their bridge fell down, as the song would have it. Because they did not care enough for history.
I was born on this bridge. The vaults and steps above the Breitstrom waters were my hiding places as a boy or where I crouched concealed from the wrath of my father’s open hand.
I thought we were poor to live here, our house so small and ancient, but no, despite the small leaning buildings looking into each other’s lives we were privileged. I would be happy to inherit it, as my father had from his father, if only to sell it and buy a proper home for Etta and our children. My son would not live in a box of a room with straw-packed walls and no window. Our front door would not open onto stairs to take him to a floor above a camera shop.
My father opened the door, his once blond hair now yellow and grey but still thick with vitality, like the whole of him.
‘Ernst! Etta!’ He hugged Etta and scolded me. ‘Why did you not let us know you were coming? What boy does this?’ Neither of us had a telephone. I suppose he wanted me to shout from our window. ‘We have nothing in.’ This my fault, and not true. When my parents died there would be two small plots for them and a mausoleum for their food. They were of the great war. When there were real shortages not just rationed ones. The habit of hoarding jars and cans, pickling everything, not given up. Just in case. I was born the year my father came back from the war. I stacked tins like other children stacked blocks.
The creaking stairs, my mother’s voice howling from the kitchen.
‘Etta! Ernst! Why you not let us know! My hair, Willi! My hair!’ She clutched at her head. It was in exactly the same clipped bun it had been since my youth.
I took off my hat and Etta’s coat as my mother fussed and my father reminded me that I had not joined the church football club for yet another year.
‘I am hoping I won’t have time for football soon enough.’
My mother clasped her face. ‘Oh Willi! She is pregnant! She is pregnant!’
Etta waved her down. ‘No, no, Frau Beck! The news is all for Ernst.’
‘Let them sit, Mila,’ my father pulling out glasses and Madeira. ‘What is it, Ernst? You have not signed for the army?’
The glasses to the white paper tablecloth with the cherries decoration. The same tablecloth as when I lived here. My crayon marks still on it.
‘No, Papa. Better. I have a job.’
He took our coats. ‘A draughtsman? A real job. You hear this, Mama?’
Her hands had not left her face. ‘Oh, Ernst! My boy!’ And then the hands were on my face. ‘My clever boy! When did this happen? How?’
My father poured wine. The Madeira meant it was Mama’s pickled pot roast for dinner. I cannot drink more than one glass of the sickly stuff but I would wait to see if a beer would come. Sunday after all.
‘So, you can start paying me back at last!’
‘Willi!’ My mother dropped my face. ‘Let the boy sit. Give them some wine. Let him talk.’
The wine in the thin glasses was already in our hands, Etta’s knees against mine on the small sofa, the same seat where I once put my little cars to bed before myself.
‘Topf and Sons were hiring. A junior position but—’
‘Of course. Why not?’ My father lifted his hands as if bargaining for a rug in a bazaar. ‘That is how men start. A year or two and you will have your own department.’ He slapped my knee.
My mother sat and tightened her shawl. ‘Topf, you say? My, my. Such a fine company.’
Father saluted his glass.
‘The oldest firm. The proudest. The world will open to you now. What are you working at, Ernst? Or is it secret?’ Eyed me in a way I had not seen before.
‘Why would it be secret?’
He shrugged.
‘Maybe they have some war works or such.’
I drank my syrupy wine.
‘They have contracts with the prisons. And for military parts.’
Etta touched my hand. Patted it.
‘Ernst is, unfortunately, only working on new oven designs for the camps.’ Not looking at me. At my mother. I took my hand away. ‘Unfortunately,’ she had said.
My mother’s shawl tighter.
‘The camps?’ Her voice as a whisper. ‘Buchenwald?’
‘All of them,’ I said, let Etta’s disparaging of me pass. She had suggested this visit. I thought because of pride in her husband. Maybe she had hoped a different reaction from my parents about the camp. ‘I am to work on new patents.’
‘New?’ My father nodded sagely over his glass. ‘You see, Mama? They give him new projects to work on.’ And then straight to it. ‘How much does it pay? Salary? Not week?’
‘Forty marks a week. No trial. I have already started. May I smoke, Mama?’
She stood. ‘I must get to my roast.’ I took that as yes and brought out my tobacco, and father’s pipe came from the drawer by his chair.
Etta stood.
‘Let me help you, Mila.’ And the men were alone.
An age for my father to suck his pipe into life. The sound of my childhood.
‘Ernst.’ He shook out his match into the glazed ashtray I made him at school. ‘Tell me about the ovens?’
I exhaled with him.
‘Topf created crem—’ Etta’s ear turned. ‘Created ovens for use in chapel, in ceremony. They invented the petrol oven and the gas fuelled. They export all over the world. But the prisons use coke for cost. As such I understand they need repairs. Often.’
‘Why so?’
I watched the cloud of him reach to the yellow-stained ceiling.
‘Overuse. Brick ovens. Typhus is in the prisons. Coke ovens and brick are not able to cope with the demand.’
‘So why use coke?’
‘Cost. Petrol is too expensive. Too crucial to waste on ovens. The SS are all about cost I gather.’
He leant forward.
‘The SS?’
‘You know they run the camps?’
‘I did not think they bought the ovens?’
I drew long on my cigarette. ‘Nor did I. I have learnt that much already.’
‘That is what you must do. Learn every day. Ask everything. Show that it is more than just a job. And then when they are looking for the next top man they will look for the one who shows the most interest in the company. He drummed his words out on the arm of his chair. ‘That is the way.’
‘I am doing something on that tomorrow. I am going to Buchenwald with my department head to inspect for a new oven.’ I looked to Etta not smiling at me from the kitchen.
He put his pipe on his knee.
‘You are going inside the camp?’
My mother’s voice. ‘Who is? Who is going to the camp?’
‘Ernst is, Mama,’ my father called over his shoulder. ‘Ernst is going to Buchenwald. Tomorrow.’
She came into the room, drying her hands. Always drying her hands.