Tomorrow Berlin Read Free Page B

and he towards line 12, to his mother’s three-room apartment on the rue de la Convention. Again without kissing, they each went their separate ways, towards that dull life in which they were no longer together.
    Armand was hungry. He wanted to buy some sweets from the vending machine on the platform of line 12. He accidentally pressed the wrong button and some madeleines came out. Armand didn’t want to admit defeat. He took out another coin; he got the right button. While he was doing this, the train went by. He’d catch the next one; he wanted sweets.
    He leaned against one of those high seats designed to stop tramps sleeping on them. He was eating his sweets and waiting for the next train. Emma appeared on the platform right in front of him looking flustered. Without giving him time to take this in, she kissed him. A first kiss that tasted of jellies.

III
    Franz has the same name as his father. Franz Riepler. Exactly the same. This is not a very good omen. The father died young, newly wed, in a hunting accident. A stray bullet. One minute he was standing there, the next he was down. The child his wife was carrying still unborn. Guts ruptured, aware he was dying, on his knees on a carpet of brown leaves in the beautiful Bavarian forest. Our son will live, but you won’t be there to see him, but they’ll give him your name so that he knows you would have treasured him, if the bullet had struck elsewhere.
    The mother is sad. She brings Franz up as all she has left. See how like his father he is. His smile, the look in his eye. He’s not called Franz Riepler for nothing. He has the same way of frowning.
    That’s how little Franz grew up, like a photograph that keeps changing, the piece of photographic paper his mother treasured; sadly, the living image of what fate had snatched from her.
    He and his mother left Bavaria, since there was nothing for them to do there, since there was no more father working at the sawmill. Mother and child, on their own, making a life for themselves. Dinah, the mother, found a job as a chambermaidin the home of an industrialist in Lübeck. Franz, the child, went too. He was four. A long journey, then arriving on a cold, grey day in the big middle-class house of the Kienzel family, manufacturers of wine-bottle corks.
    It was quite something, the big house built of brick, the park that extended as far as the eye could see, a pond, outbuildings. This would be a good place for Franz to grow up. They were an influential family, a fine family. The children ran around in the garden. Soon, Franz would join in their play, pulling Katherine’s hair, fighting with Georg like they were brothers, since they were growing up together. The mother performed thankless tasks, humiliating chores, the sort where you wipe away other people’s filth. Ironing Sir’s shirts, brushing Madam’s wigs, scrubbing Sir’s shit off the toilet, throwing away Madam’s tampons. Rebuffing the caretaker’s advances, doing the shopping. Anyhow, Franz grew up with them, he learned their manners, he pulled little Katherine’s hair, he fought with Georg, like they were brothers.
     
    Soon Franz turned fifteen. He fell in love with Katherine. She had such soft skin, such long hair.
    They had to hide it: brother and sister can’t fall in love; nor can you love the maid’s son.
    It was bliss. At night Franz would get into Katherine’s bed. They made love simply, as two young people do. They felt they were experiencing something unique, something that other people could never know. The touching belief of young lovers, cut off from the rest of the world since they live for what others – so they think – could never feel.
    Franz would go to Katherine at midnight. He’d sleep in her bed, and at around 5 a.m., before the household awoke, he’d creep back upstairs alone to wait for morning.
    During the day, he stayed in his room, so as not to see Katherine, to avoid his feelings for her bursting out in front of everyone and