Free Second Violin by John Lawton

reading the author’s work in the original German – he had turned to philosophy. As a young man in
his twenties he would while away long winter nights with Schopenhauer or Spinoza, subjects on which he could converse with no one.
    In November 1933, about ten months after the accession to power of Adolf Hitler, Old Hummel had died, leaving young Hummel alone in the world, in full possession of a tailor’s shop that
thrived or not as the tide of tailoring ebbed or flowed, and the skills to run it. Social skills he had few, and, as Bemmelmann had remarked on his departure, young Hummel had been watched over by
his neighbours, his father’s contemporaries – each one baffled by the gangling, big-eared youth.
    His father’s last words had been, ‘Joe, whatever will become of us?’ Hummel had taken this to be more a reference to the fate of Jews in general than to the tiny tribe of
Hummel.
    So it was that each November, on the morning of the 10th, Hummel would go at first light to the Jewish cemetery on the far side of the Prater and sit at his father’s grave. It was a ritual
that began the night before. Hummel would take his father’s best suit from the wardrobe, his father’s best brown shoes and his father’s best grey herringbone woollen overcoat. The
only item that fitted remotely well were the shoes – the suit and the overcoat were far too big, and he looked, at thirty-one, as he had at eighteen, a boy masquerading as a man – a
scrawny youth in the baggy clothes of a long-dead father. Dressed in mourning.
    He sat that evening, and into the small hours, cocooned in his father’s overcoat, gently rocking in his father’s rocking chair, re-reading Descartes, weighing up for the fourth or
fifth time that everything is mathematics and struggling to understand how Descartes could reach this conclusion and remain a deist. He had not read a newspaper of any kind for a week or more
– he was no more aware that Ernst vom Rath had just died than he was aware that Ernst vom Rath had ever lived. Had he been aware he might not have ventured out when, a few hours before dawn,
listening to the creaking silence of night, he had heard the biggest bang of his life. It rattled the windows, it shook dust down from the ceiling. A poltergeist had walked into the room and it
appeared to have come from the direction of Leopoldstrasse.
    He slipped out of the door. The street was deserted, the curfew observed. But from the same direction came the sound of smaller explosions, and a red glare above the rooftops. He walked to the
end of the street. He’d been ready to break the curfew to sneak across the park to the cemetery, what would a peek into Leopoldstrasse matter? At the sound of running feet, he pressed his
back against the wall, and, invisible in the darkness of the alley, watched as three men of his own age, one in his nightshirt, ran past pursued by half a dozen Brownshirts.
    He looked down Leopoldstrasse. Several buildings were on fire. He walked on – no more running, no more shouting, jeering Brownshirts. A small crowd had gathered. He approached their backs,
almost certain of what he would see. They’d been torching synagogues for weeks now. He rather thought this was the first time they’d blown one up with dynamite. And in so doing they had
wrecked the houses to either side.
    He found himself standing behind an old couple in dressing gowns and carpet slippers. They wept, the man no less loudly than the woman. The air seemed full of confetti, dancing in the heat and
dust like autumn leaves caught in a breeze. Hummel held out one hand and a fragment settled – it reminded him of a game he had used to play with his father at just this time of year in the
park. His father would walk several paces behind him. The young Hummel would spot a crisp, brown autumn leaf swirling to earth and run ahead to catch it, cup it in his hands. His father would say,
‘Well done, Josef’ – that had been his