Free After Midnight by Irmgard Keun Page B

see the way he was bathed in sweat at the end of the speech, and then the SSsurrounded him?” Well, that was what Aunt Adelheid said, and I saw it myself. Aunt Adelheid feels just the same in the City Theatre. I’ve been there with her a couple of times. She doesn’t think anything much of the actors in comedies. But we saw a play called Thomas Paine , where there was an actor down in a dungeon, wearing clanking chains and ranting away so that you were fairly deafened. “It goes right through you,” said Aunt Adelheid. And when the actor took his bow she said, “Look, he’s utterly exhausted, bathed in sweat, what a wonderful actor, we ought to see this play more often.” And then she even bought a photograph of the actor and hung it in her bedroom. The Führer’s hanging there too.
    So I had every right to assume that the most important point, to Aunt Adelheid, is for someone to sweat.
    Three days after that Saturday, there was a brisk, firm knock at my attic door at seven in the morning. At first I thought it was Aunt Adelheid on a spying trip to see if Franz was sleeping with me, but he’d gone an hour ago. I tried to go back to sleep instead of answering the door. Then there was more knocking—thump, thump, thump—and loud, harsh men’s voices.
    A couple of minutes later two deadly serious men were crawling about under my bed, looking under the mattress, into my suitcase, even looking in the chamber pot. “Secret police,” they had said abruptly when I opened the door, and after that they wouldn’t answer any of my questions.
    The men went on creating chaos down in Aunt Adelheid’s apartment. “Oh, the shame of it!” cried Aunt Adelheid. “And in my home—the shame of it! I’m a respectable widow, I’ve been in the movement for years …”
    “Yes, yes, we know,” one of the men told Aunt Adelheidgently, all kindness. “It’s nothing to do with you.”
    “If I’d known what I was taking into my home” cried Aunt Adelheid, looking at me as if I’d taken part in some dreadful jewel robbery.
    The whole thing seemed to me utterly unreal; I thought maybe I was still dreaming. I hadn’t even been allowed to get dressed to go downstairs with the men, they just let me fling my raincoat on. And the silly thing was that Franz wasn’t there, because he went out to buy vegetables at the market before office hours. Then the two men let Aunt Adelheid go upstairs to fetch me some clothes, while they stood guard over me. They’d searched and searched and found nothing, and they were looking even grimmer than before.
    Then they took me to police headquarters in a car, and I had to sit in the Gestapo room upstairs for hours on end.
    I didn’t know what I was supposed to be there for. People kept coming in and making statements. Natives of Cologne had tales to tell of other natives of Cologne who had dealings with the Red Front. An old, old woman came in and went on for hours about her lodger, who didn’t pay his rent and was a Communist. She said he’d torn down the swastika flag she draped over the balcony. Well, no, she didn’t actually see him do it, but the swastika flag had been torn down all right, and she’d given the man her best front room, with her late husband’s armchair and all, her late husband had been a policeman—“I brought a picture to show you, Commissioner, look, that’s him”—yes, well, she’d put his armchair in that room. “And the lodger hadn’t paid any rent for three months … and the swastika flag on the balcony was ever so nice, Commissioner, oh, you should just have seen it—my brother’s a witness too, he’s out there in the waiting room …” And in comes the brother with a friend,both of them even more ancient than the old lady, shrivelled old men with their hats in their hands, and humble eyes. The policeman’s old widow begins crying over the swastika flag and the unpaid rent. “She’s a bit soft in the head, see?” says the brother. “And what