Carl sang her a sweet birthday ditty in German and gave her a hug, then pulled back the curtains and opened the window. The birds would do the rest of the singing, he said. The weather was warm, perfect for a birthday celebration. Friends would be arriving later that evening, as many as twenty. They would all be bringing some food. Drink, too.
Carl left for work later than usual. The previous evening they had stayed up late, going over and over what the Gestapo might and might not know. Emma was sick with worry about her father, while Carl was becoming increasingly nervous on her account. He tried not to show it, but he was besieged by a constant, light form of panic. They had a file on her, they were watching her. Which meant that he too was being watched, as well as Trott. They had fallen asleep holding hands, worn out from all their speculations.
Emma saw him to the garden gate, and watched as he walked down the road, their rural byroad on the outskirts of the violence. His train would take him to the unimaginable amphitheatre of crime: a free performance, all day long. She would not focus on that, it was too overwhelming. The events were beyond her. She inhaled the fragrance of the June gardens all around, and tried to follow Carl in her mind once he was out of sight, boarding the train, leaving Dahlem towards the city centre. She wanted to hang on to his physical presence, the body in which she had nestled herself. But that was a dream, wishful thinking. There he was, walking away from her, without her, thinking ahead to what might await him at his office. He might spare a thought for her now and then, recalling how she had returned his embrace. And had sighed about getting old: “Twenty-nine, Carl, I’m twenty-nine now, don’t you think I’m old?” He had said it was the world that was old, not her.
She had a busy day ahead: tidy up the house, unpack those bags that had been blocking the hall for the past two days, go to the few shops that still had anything left to sell, lay the table for twenty people. As if nothing was the matter, as if it was the most normal thing in the world to celebrate one’s birthday. Come what may. Well, twenty people were coming. Their friends from Dahlem, a few from Zehlendorf, a few from the city centre, and even somebody from Potsdam, who would be staying the night – they might all end up staying the night, if there was an air-raid warning. She had seen the devastation from the car window on the way to Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse. Entire streets lay in ruins. After a while she had lost her bearings, in spite of being quite familiar with the city. She had lived there as a student for close on four years, from August 1931 till 12 June, 1933, the day of her finals, after which she had left immediately. A few weeks before that she had been in the Opernplatz together with some friends, watching transfixed as books were being burned. The S.A. men were in a frenzy, leaping and shouting as they set upon the piles of books and hurled them onto the bonfire. It had felt like a rehearsal for mass murder. Where they burn books, they will end in burning human beings: the lesson of Heinrich Heine, whose work had gone up in smoke with all the rest that evening. Her studies at the university had not posed any problems. “If you want to study history in the making, go to Berlin,” she had been told in Holland. A sound piece of advice. The windows of the lecture halls on Unter den Linden rattled to the noise of demonstrations and parades and police charges and countercharges going on outside. She needed only to glance out of the window to see history unfold. If the professors were to be believed, you could hear the groundwork being laid for a thousand-year empire.
The ride in the car, she had relived it dozens of times. Not a long ride, half an hour at the most, but enough for night after night without sleep. The two Gestapo men, no more than boys really, had sat one in the front and one in the back with her. They paid no attention to her, asked no questions. They looked as if they had just stepped out of a shop selling Gestapo uniforms: shiny coats, shiny shoes, shiny pistols. But the car was old and battered, and reeked of stale cigarette smoke. The driver clearly enjoyed taking corners at speed. Emma kept having to reach out for support, and several times her hand had brushed against the arm of the boy beside her. The roads of Dahlem were excellent for tearing round corners. Falkenried, then left, In der Halde, turn right, Am Hirschsprung, right again up the Dohnenstieg. Had they taken the Dohnenstieg for a particular reason? Did they know Himmler lived there? A spot of racing past the boss’s house? They knew the way by heart; one more short cut and they came to the Lenzeallee. Full speed ahead to their robbers’ den.
