Their first afternoon on their own together had been a picnic in the Tiergarten during the May Day celebration and parade. The day had been unseasonably warm, full of people enjoying the sunshine, kicking balls about and playing games, drinking and laughing. He could see them now, past the duck pond, more and more people joining the line along the parade route, shuffling about as they tried to find the best spot to take up their positions. Fathers carrying sons or daughters on their shoulders, wives and mothers with woolen blankets, children with paper windmills and footballs, bunting swinging from the trees and lampposts. And all the flags, hundreds of flags; everybody holding one. They had found a quiet spot beneath a couple of trees and laid out a picnic blanket along with the food they’d picked up from Hertie’s department store on Dönhoffplatz. He had surprised her with a bottle of wine, pulling a couple of glasses from his pockets. She had looked so pretty in her summer dress with the sun dappled on her skin through the leaves. The light fluttered like butterfly wings across her face.
He pulled the starting control out to its fullest extent and turned it, then switched on the ignition and operated the starter. The car choked and spluttered, the whole vehicle juddering under him with the effort and then puttering out. He tried the starter again and the engine coughed and died. He sat for a moment, waiting. He didn’t want to flood it.
He remembered the conversations. Even back then there had been the vague talk of war. Eva had a brother, Bernhard, who worked in the new Air Ministry building on Wilhelmstraße. He said the rumors were all unfounded. There weren’t any plans to expand Germany beyond what it had already reclaimed in the Rhineland and Austria, and those had both been rightly theirs. Eva said she didn’t believe a word of it. What does silly old Bernhard know anyway? He’s just a pen pusher.
They were late joining the throng of people lining the parade route through the park. Although they ran along the line with their picnic hamper and flags, they had caught only the briefest sight of the official cars through the mass of excitable bodies. The noise—claxons, cheers, and music—had been almost deafening. And as the crowds dispersed again, he thought for a moment that he had lost her, among all the hundreds of faces.
They took a walk around the park in search of ice cream and stopped on what he now considered to be “their bridge,” asking a passing couple to take a photograph of them. It was an act that he would soon learn Eva would insist upon, on every afternoon stroll they took there, on every future picnic and parade, as if this bridge was a reminder of that first delicate and quivering flush of romance, and each photograph taken in their usual spot and pose—half-turned towards each other with an elbow on the rail—fastened them just a little tighter together.
In the garage he tried to start the car again, but the engine wouldn’t take and the air filled with fumes. He cranked down the window and sat, thinking. Then he tapped on the fuel gauge. Empty, of course. Not even the English would be stupid enough to abandon a car full of petrol.
If there is a war, Eva had said, I mean another one, what will we do?
The comment had come quite out of nowhere.
Do? What do you mean?
Well, we’ll all get dragged into it somehow, I suppose. I can’t just play in an orchestra. What good will that do? I’ll have to turn my hand to something useful, something good.
Her mother, she had said, thought getting married and having children was useful.
And then she had stopped herself and laughed, thinking maybe that talk of marriage and children on their first turn together around the park was perhaps a little presumptuous.
But he hadn’t minded at all. And, in time, that had been their plan, he thought as he sat in the Crossley, staring at the empty petrol gauge. After the war.
In the study
He pulled the starting control out to its fullest extent and turned it, then switched on the ignition and operated the starter. The car choked and spluttered, the whole vehicle juddering under him with the effort and then puttering out. He tried the starter again and the engine coughed and died. He sat for a moment, waiting. He didn’t want to flood it.
He remembered the conversations. Even back then there had been the vague talk of war. Eva had a brother, Bernhard, who worked in the new Air Ministry building on Wilhelmstraße. He said the rumors were all unfounded. There weren’t any plans to expand Germany beyond what it had already reclaimed in the Rhineland and Austria, and those had both been rightly theirs. Eva said she didn’t believe a word of it. What does silly old Bernhard know anyway? He’s just a pen pusher.
They were late joining the throng of people lining the parade route through the park. Although they ran along the line with their picnic hamper and flags, they had caught only the briefest sight of the official cars through the mass of excitable bodies. The noise—claxons, cheers, and music—had been almost deafening. And as the crowds dispersed again, he thought for a moment that he had lost her, among all the hundreds of faces.
They took a walk around the park in search of ice cream and stopped on what he now considered to be “their bridge,” asking a passing couple to take a photograph of them. It was an act that he would soon learn Eva would insist upon, on every afternoon stroll they took there, on every future picnic and parade, as if this bridge was a reminder of that first delicate and quivering flush of romance, and each photograph taken in their usual spot and pose—half-turned towards each other with an elbow on the rail—fastened them just a little tighter together.
In the garage he tried to start the car again, but the engine wouldn’t take and the air filled with fumes. He cranked down the window and sat, thinking. Then he tapped on the fuel gauge. Empty, of course. Not even the English would be stupid enough to abandon a car full of petrol.
If there is a war, Eva had said, I mean another one, what will we do?
The comment had come quite out of nowhere.
Do? What do you mean?
Well, we’ll all get dragged into it somehow, I suppose. I can’t just play in an orchestra. What good will that do? I’ll have to turn my hand to something useful, something good.
Her mother, she had said, thought getting married and having children was useful.
And then she had stopped herself and laughed, thinking maybe that talk of marriage and children on their first turn together around the park was perhaps a little presumptuous.
But he hadn’t minded at all. And, in time, that had been their plan, he thought as he sat in the Crossley, staring at the empty petrol gauge. After the war.
In the study
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