Hannah & Emil Read Free

medals that rattled on the enamel plate, this globe with its fading colours.
    She returned the globe to the plate and picked up the key, wondered that this object could find her, could follow her across the world. The traffic was growing heavier at the window, the light was changing, a man called out on the street, the day was coming to life. She replaced the key on the tin plate with a little click. She gathered the medals and the compass and the globe into her open hands and the light, rising at the window, fell on them. For a moment they seemed to give off a light of their own, and a heat.
    Then the light passed on and the objects in her hand were old, worn things again, relics. Any life in them was a life she imagined.

Emil
    DUISBURG, 1902
    In the summer, it did not matter that Emil was shoeless. The soles of his feet were as tough and dirty as leather. His friend Thomas left his own shoes at home in a paper bag stuffed behind the toilet in the outhouse, and so there was no difference between them.
    Down along the Rhine, at the edge of the fields, dozens of men were building a huge factory. Ships docked at the pier and swearing workers unloaded bundles of timber planks and steel beams and crates of bolts, tools and machinery, while a crane swung pallets of bricks from the ship onto the bank. The boys were close to the world of how things worked, of metal and machines, and Emil watched carefully. He and Thomas ran around the crane operator as he peered up at the rope on the winch and then at the teetering bricks, wiping his forehead with the back of his hand and then shifting the crank gently, wheeling in the load. They jumped and ran in circles, shouting encouragement, but all the time Emil followed the progress of the bricks, pieces of wire, moulds, pipes, planks of wood to see what would happen to them, to see what their purpose in the world might be.
    One day they watched unbelieving as an entire load of bricks was upended into the river. It happened slowly enough to observe properly, to remember afterwards: the pallet dipped a little to the left and the crane operator overcorrected it. The bricks went in, sliding unstoppably, hundreds pouring into the water in a second. The boys hooted and slapped each other, pointed at the operator, a man named Dieter. The foreman came striding down the track from the office-cabin above the steep bank and stood in front of him. He cuffed Dieter around the ear and shouted. Dieter’s body crunched forward and he held his head in his hands. Blood was filling one of them, leaking from between his fingers. The boys ran home.
    The next day there was a different man working the crane, one with a head like a bulldog’s. The boys stood on the towpath at a distance, taking in the impressive size of Dieter’s replacement. Emil approached the man, who was loading machinery parts onto a cart to pull up to the factory. ‘Come back!’ Thomas called from behind. But Emil’s curiosity forced him on.
    â€˜Excuse me, sir.’ The man did not stop loading. Sweat darkened his vest. ‘When is Dieter coming back? Is he working inside the factory now?’ The man stopped at last, snarled, a wordless grunt from his throat. Emil froze, and then felt Thomas pulling at his shirt. He woke to himself and they ran back along the path, gasping and laughing.
    As the building grew, the ragged rows of bricks blocking out more and more sky, they found that there was always some corner of the building site left unattended. They lugged armfuls of sharp-edged bricks stacked up to their chins to a hidden spot behind a hummock and built a den with walls high enough for them to stand inside the structure unseen. They peered over the bricks, watching the builders beyond the little rise of land, small from here, balancing like circus performers as they hurried across steel beams and up and down great ladders, the hods of bricks at their shoulders like no weight at all.
    Every day was warm; the