At this time, in the early months of 1939, there was a general assumption that war was coming. No matter what the British said or did, it seemed clear that the Führer wanted armed conflict, knowing that only a full-scale international engagement could establish Germany as the world’s leading power. For young men of my age, this was a frightening thought. We had seen the effect the last war had had on our fathers – those of us who still had fathers, that is – and did not relish the idea of our lives following a similar pattern. And so perhaps it is not so strange that the first thought I had upon laying eyes on Oskar in the Böttcher was that war must be avoided at all costs lest someone as beautiful as him fall to the indiscriminate brutality of the battlefield.
‘Oskar,’ I said, sitting down, and as I did so he closed his notebook and placed the charcoal pencil on top of it.
‘My friend!’ he replied, smiling at me, and I swallowed nervously. I had never before known someone whose sheer physicality could hypnotize me to this extent. We ordered two beers and clinked our glasses together. He told me that he hated working in the café because his father was a brute but his plan was to save enough money so that he could travel and see the world. ‘I’d like to be an artist,’ he said. ‘And Paris is the place for that. Have you ever been?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I’ve never left Berlin.’
‘I’d like to see London too,’ he added. ‘And Rome. I read a book about the catacombs once and they’ve fascinated me ever since.’
Neither of us mentioned the possibility of war. There were two types of youth in Germany then: those who could barely wait for it to begin and those who pretended that it was not coming at all, as if by ignoring the fact we could smother the bellicose infant in the crib.
‘You were drawing when I came in,’ I said, nodding towards his sketchbook. ‘Will you let me see your work?’
He shook his head and smiled, his cheeks flushing a little. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Anyway, that wasn’t drawing, it was just doodling. You know this word, yes? Something to pass the time. I have some canvases at home and that’s where my real work is. I paint with oils, mostly. At the moment, however, I can’t seem to find the proper inspiration. I paint landscapes, bowls of fruit and portraits of great buildings simply because I can and I’m able to sell them at the street markets. But what I really want is to paint something that no one else has ever painted before. Either that or paint something familiar in an unfamiliar way and allow the viewer to consider it from an unexpected angle. Does that make sense, Erich? I hear myself speak and worry that I might sound ridiculous to you.’
‘Not at all,’ I said, drawn to the idea of Oskar as a great painter. ‘I would like to be an artist too someday.’
‘You paint?’ he asked.
‘No, I can barely draw a straight line,’ I replied with a laugh. ‘But I write a little. Stories, that’s all. Perhaps one day a novel. Like you, I have not yet found my subject but I hope it will appear one day.’
‘Would you let me read one of your stories?’
‘Only if you show me one of your paintings.’
We talked of other things then. Of our schools and our classmates, of the subjects that interested us and the ones that didn’t. And – because all conversations then turned to this subject eventually – we spoke of the Führer and our weekly meetings of the Hitlerjugend. We were members of different corps and shared an enjoyment of field exercises while agreeing that doctrinal classes bored us to the point of paralysis. We had both attended the Nuremberg Youth Rallies since graduating from the Deutsches Jungvolk and found the atmosphere oppressive with the extraordinary numbers gathered there and the terrifying noise of unenlightened patriotism.
‘I saw him once,’ Oskar told me, leaning forward a little and lowering his voice. ‘A year ago, perhaps a little less. I was coming out of the Hauptbahnhof when a convoy of cars appeared along Lüneburgerstraße and everyone stopped and stared. His car, a black Grosser Mercedes, drove past me, and he turned his head just as I looked in his direction and our eyes met. I clicked my heels together and saluted him and despised myself for it afterwards.’
I sat back in disbelief when he said these words. Had I heard him correctly? Had he told me that he despised himself for saluting the Führer?
‘I think perhaps I have shocked you,’ he said, and there was anxiety in his tone now. Fear. This was not an opinion that people voiced out loud, even if they felt it, and especially not to a new acquaintance whose trustworthiness had yet to be established.
‘A little,’ I said. ‘You don’t believe in him, then?’
‘He frightens me,’ said Oskar, and I understood this because he frightened me too. But then of course my younger brother and I were Jewish, or a quarter Jewish anyway, and the purges against the Jews had already begun. By now it had been more than three years since Jews had been stripped of their citizenship entirely and I knew of at least two couples whose engagements had been cancelled after the law had come into place banning Jews from marrying non-Jewish Germans. Only four months earlier, the city had descended into chaos after a boy my own age, a Jew, had shot a Nazi diplomat in the German embassy in Paris. Days later the SS had run riot through the city, destroying Jewish shops and synagogues, desecrating graveyards and arresting tens of thousands for deportation to the camps. Running home that night, desperate to escape the violence, I witnessed an elderly man being beaten to death by an officer some forty years his junior, another emerging from a jewellery store with blood pouring down his face after the glass in his shop window had been shattered and, near my home, I saw a girl being raped by an SS Sturmbannführer in a sidestreet while his colleague pinned her father to the wall and forced him to watch. I had not been a victim of any of this for I did not share any of the typical physical characteristics of the Jew, nor were we an observant family so we did not live with other Jews or attend synagogue. But the fact remained: I, and my brother, were Mischlings.
‘They say that he will restore Germany’s power,’ I remarked carefully.
‘And he may succeed,’ said Oskar. ‘He has charisma, it’s true, and his oratorical skills incite the crowds. The people are behind him for now. He has infected them with his hatred. He demands absolute loyalty, and when anyone dares to criticize him, they lose their position. I think he will lead a great army, but what will be the result?’
‘A thousand-year Reich,’ I said. ‘At least that is what he says.’
‘And is that what you want?’
‘All I want is to live in peace,’ I told him. ‘I want to read books and perhaps one day write some of my own. The future of the Fatherland is not something that concerns me.’
He smiled and reached a hand across the table, placing his atop mine in what was certainly intended as a fraternal gesture but sent sparks of electricity through me nevertheless. No boy had ever touched me like that before. ‘I want the same,’ he said. ‘Only with my paintings.’
‘Do you think I might find inspiration in Paris too?’ I asked.
‘For your novel? Of course! Great writers have lived there. Hugo, Hemingway, Fitzgerald. Many classics of literature have been written in the city. It encourages creativity, or so I’ve heard.’
An image came into my mind of the two of us sharing a flat on the top floor of some decrepit old building near Notre-Dame, he painting in his studio, me writing in my study, the two of us coming together as one in our shared bedroom at night. The idea was almost too glorious to imagine. Before I could embarrass myself by suggesting it, however, he stood up and excused himself to use the bathroom and while he was gone I looked across at his sketchbook, telling myself to leave it alone, not to intrude on his privacy, but I could not resist and pulled it towards me, opening it at the first page. It was brand new, containing only one drawing so far, and as I stared at it my heart sank in my chest as waves of disappointment poured over me. The sketch was of a young girl with long black hair, very beautiful, turned to a left profile but with her back to the artist as she sat on an ottoman. Her right hand was touching her cheek and she was naked. A hint of her breast was given towards the left of the picture and there was something in her eye that suggested desire. I wondered whether she was a creature from his imagination or a girl who had posed shamelessly for him and, if the latter, did that mean that she was his lover? Closing the sketchbook, I returned it to his side of the table, placing the charcoal pencil on top of it, and when he returned a moment later he told me I had a sad expression on my face and the only way to conquer that was for the two of us to stay there and drink until our money ran out, a suggestion I agreed to immediately.