At least you’re captivatingly beautiful, dear young lady, stammered Wilhelm. Alice. I’m sure you’re going to tell me your real name.’
Helene tried to summon up a friendly smile. Over Wilhelm’s shoulder she saw the clock in the corridor. The white grandfather clock said nine-thirty. Helene said she was about to leave.
What, already? Wilhelm couldn’t believe it. The party’s only just begun. Surely you’re not going to leave now, on your own?
I must, said Helene with her friendly smile.
Because of the hostel. Erich ran his tongue over his teeth and clicked it suggestively. The effect was obscene. She lives in the sisters’ hostel.
A nun, the Virgin Mary. Wilhelm believed it at once.
Nonsense. Erich set him right. Not that kind of sister, you idiot. She’s a nursing sister.
A nursing sister. Wilhelm spoke respectfully as if there were no difference to speak of between a nun, the Virgin Mary and a nurse. I’ll walk you back.
Thank you, but please don’t bother. Helene stepped to one side and tried to get past this tall young man called Wilhelm. He went to the door with her, helped her into her coat and said goodnight.
Next day Wilhelm suddenly turned up at the hospital. Nurse, he said, you must help me.
Helene was in no mood for companionable laughter and meaningful glances; she wanted to get on with her work. The beds in Ward 20 still had to be made, and the patient in Ward 31 who couldn’t get to the lavatory without help had rung for her ten minutes ago.
Nurse Alice, I’m going to sit on this bench. You can call the watchman or the medical director if you like, but I’m going to wait here until you come off duty. I don’t suppose that will be so very long, will it?
Helene let him sit there and went about her work. She had to keep passing him for over two hours, and the girls in the nurses’ room kept on whispering. That charming gentleman in the corridor, he must be courting her. What a handsome man, how good-looking with his fair hair and blue eyes! One of the nurses stopped beside Wilhelm and struck up a conversation with him. Later, passing Helene, she said: Let me know if you don’t fancy him and I’ll take him.
Helene would have liked to say she could take whatever she liked, but she found it difficult to answer the nurses’ whispers. Her tongue was too heavy in her mouth. As she was washing an old man’s genitals and buttocks, going carefully with his bedsores and burst boils, all the little wounds oozing pus that she tended with ointment and powder, she couldn’t help thinking of Carl, and how he would never come and fetch her now. Never again. Helene’s throat hurt, it felt tight and she couldn’t swallow. With her fingers covered in powder and ointment, Helene couldn’t wipe her eyes.
Your hands are so soft, nurse, they do me good. I always ask after you and whether you’re on duty. You were born for this profession, did you know, Nurse Helene? The old man lying on his bed with his back to Helene — she would have thought he must cry out with pain when she touched his sore flesh — twisted round so that he could at least look her way. He put out his hand and pulled her sleeve. There, he said, pointing to the bedside table. Look in the drawer, Nurse Helene, there’s some money there, do take it.
Helene shook her head and thanked him, but said she didn’t want his money. Whenever anyone gave her a present she returned it. Just sometimes she found coins in her apron pocket that someone had dropped into it unnoticed. This old man had been in the ward for two weeks and his condition was deteriorating. He was disappointed that Helene didn’t want his money. Take it, he insisted, if you don’t take it someone else will steal it.
Let them. Helene put the lid on the powder box, spread the covers over him, and took the basin to throw away the water and clean both it and her hands. Another patient, behind her, was groaning, saying he couldn’t wait any longer. She went over to the man’s bed; he needed the bedpan and asked Helene to stay with him, because he couldn’t manage on his own. A man in the next bed was wailing with pain in a strained, hoarse voice, to attract Helene’s attention. Then he pulled himself together as well as he could.
Two hours later, when Helene had hung up her overall in the locker and put on her skirt, pullover and jacket, Wilhelm was still waiting patiently on the bench in the corridor.
Would she like to come and have coffee? Helene agreed, not that she wanted to, but it seemed the course of least resistance. Outside the door she tried to put up her umbrella, but it stuck. Laughing and ignoring the rain, not to mention her struggle with the umbrella, Wilhelm was telling her something about feedback on the People’s Wireless, a radio device to be unveiled and demonstrated to the public in a few months’ time at the Great German Wireless Exhibition. From amplifier to amplifier, said Wilhelm, spreading his arms wide to show her how many of these new technological developments there were, more than would fit between them. Helene liked his enthusiasm. They walked to the bank of the Spree Canal. You could create the necessary sensitivity by feedback to the high frequency stage, he said. Helene didn’t understand, but she stood there with him out of civility as he stopped in mid-sentence to show her, by gestures, how she must imagine the construction of the device.
Helene now knew that he was an engineer, but it wasn’t clear whether he was talking about inventions of his own or other people’s. She still didn’t understand what he was talking about, but she liked hearing him and watching as he mopped the rain from his brow with his handkerchief. After all, he said, he was sure she couldn’t imagine the extent of possible communication and the amount of information that could be transmitted. In the end everyone would be able to receive the same information at the same time, learning about events that otherwise they would have heard of only by going to some trouble or from reading the newspaper days later — and which newspaper anyway? There were far too many newspapers now. Wilhelm’s dismissive gesture was friendly but determined. There was something infectious about his pleasure and Helene had to smile. She had managed to open the umbrella. Would he like to come under it?
Of course, said Wilhelm, taking the umbrella from Helene’s hand so that she wouldn’t have to reach too high. Sweet girls, he knew, need sweet cakes, said Wilhelm, making straight for a little café. They had apple cake and coffee. Helene didn’t like either, but she didn’t want to be difficult or attract any unnecessary attention. Wilhelm said, and there was no missing the pride in his voice, that within weeks they’d be able to go into full production of wireless sets, so that enough of this new invention could be sold at the Wireless Exhibition. What did she think of naming it Salvation Wireless, asked Wilhelm, laughing. Just my little joke, he added, there are better names. Helene didn’t understand his joke, but she liked to hear him sound so pleased with himself.
She hid her weariness behind her smile. After her long day’s work at the hospital, exhaustion was now spreading through her as she sat eating cake and drinking coffee. She felt she was behaving properly to Wilhelm if she looked attentive, sometimes raising her eyebrows as if in surprise, and nodding now and then. The words transmitter and receiver took on a significance of their own as she listened to him. A newspaper boy came into the café. There were not many people here, but he took off his cap and cried his wares. The headlines of the evening papers were speculating on the identity of those behind the fire in the Reichstag building.
Over these last few weeks a mood of gloomy indignation had been abroad in the trams and underground trains. Wherever people met, their faces reddened by the cold, their coats sometimes not long enough because fabric taken from them had been needed to make a child a jacket, there was complaint, discontent and argument. They weren’t going to put up with this much longer, they said. No one could be expected to take this kind of thing lying down, not any more, they weren’t going to let the authorities do as they fancied with them. Men and women alike were upset.