Night Skies

 Part One – Kristallnacht (November 9-10, 1938)

Hansi König made the paintings on Kristallnacht, but before he began he waited until Tünde, his wife, had gone to bed. Greta was in the small cradle on the floor between them. Chamomiles, cornflowers and forget-me-nots ran Fauvist riot over the unvarnished wood. Tünde rocked the cradle with her foot. The baby had been crying all day and her arms and shoulders ached. Her nerves were frayed like cheap ribbon. Hansi turned the radio dial away from the official two minute silence for the Nazi officer murdered by a Jew at the German embassy in Paris.

“Shhh! Greta’s just fallen asleep. I’m going to take her to bed,” Tünde whispered. “Won’t you come too Hansi? You look exhausted. Why don’t you take a little Veronal and sleep?”

He shook his head. It was pointless to insist. He said the sleeping pills trampled his imagination. He preferred insomnia, from which he had been suffering since 1933.

He was only 34 years old, but his temples were white and his cheeks were lined. He was tall and powerfully built. He sat perched on the edge of the armchair like a great flightless bird who longs for the sky. He didn’t know how to sit back comfortably into the upholstered city chairs. He didn’t like the feeling of the fabric against his skin, nor the way the soft cushions grasped his body. He missed the hard-backed wooden chairs and benches of his childhood in Bavaria. He flicked off the radio and stood up with sudden purpose, as if he were about to go somewhere, and then, he stopped still in the middle of the room. His grey eyes were hooded and bewildered. His arms hung long and limp by his sides. The fifth finger of both his hands were bent out at unnatural angles. They looked like drunken soldiers unable to stand at attention. He scanned the small, orderly room until he found the pencil. It was on the coffee table beside Tünde’s crossword. He went and picked it up, rolled it between his fingers and sniffed the lead. Then he went over to the window and stood behind the closed curtains. He closed his eyes and saw before him the night sky as he wished it to be: pristine, vast, numinous. He parted the curtains and looked up. He opened his eyes. It was cloudy again. From deep within his throat came a long, low growl of frustration. “Night clouds! What nonsense!” he muttered to himself as he turned on his heel. “You can’t draw night clouds! They look like dirty ash! Like old boiled potatoes! Like radio static!” He needed to move but he didn’t want to wake his girls, so he sat on the lounge room floor, pulled off his boots and tip-toed to his studio. It was a small room with poor light and poor ventilation. There was a single window with a frosted glass pane. It gave onto a narrow, blackened airshaft where washing lines criss-crossed between the apartments like finely spun spider silk.

He began painting in the spare room a year ago when he’d been removed from his teaching post and could no longer afford to rent a studio. At first he could still get commissions. There were many unfinished portraits, and still others that had been arranged months before that. But in July 1937, when the Committee for the Assessment of Inferior Works of Art decided to hang two of his paintings in the Degenerate Art Exhibition, people got nervous. Hansi König had been publicly humiliated. Then Tünde lost her job at the Leo Handlsmann Gallery when it was forced to close down. The two had met there in 1935, shortly after Tünde had arrived from Budapest. After the gallery was shut, Hansi could no longer publicly sell his paintings. He had to look for other work. He found he could make a little money painting signs and billboards, but businesses were closing daily, failing, or else changing hands, usually not by choice. So he got by painting houses. 

He had not only been forbidden to exhibit and sell his art, but forbidden to even make art. He was no longer able to buy paint or brushes or canvas. But still it was difficult for Hansi to believe that the Nazis really cared what some penniless artist painted in the privacy of his home.

“You must be careful Hansi,” his best friend Max Muller warned him, “just the smell of turpentine is enough to get you arrested and you know what turpentine’s like, it leaves a stink worse than sauerkraut. Even wet brushes in a glass are dangerous.”

But Hansi didn’t believe Max. Max was afraid of cuckoo clocks and shadows. He still lived with his mother and painted silk lilies in Meissen vases for war widows. But Max was a loyal friend. He bought supplies for Hansi, and Hansi continued to paint at night, while Berlin, and his girls slept.

After the Degenerate Exhibition Hansi took to going deep into the Tiergarten at night. “I can breathe again!” he would say, as he loosened the scarf from around his neck and took long, strong strides across the darkened green. In his rucksack he would carry a thermos of coffee and a telescope. He wanted to study the stars so that he could paint the unpeopled, borderless heavens. The park was mostly peaceful – just the occasional prostitute looking for business - and Hansi was free to study the night skies. In early January 1938, just after Tünde realised she was pregnant, Hansi was out one night in the park. The moon and the stars were effortlessly beautiful. Thought, motion and desire were one. The silence was so complete that later Hansi would say that the policeman must have tip-toed across the green in his socks. The policeman did not know who Hansi was, but he thought that the telescope was suspicious, as was the secret code in which he was scribbling.

At Gestapo headquarters they knew who Hansi König was. They immediately searched his apartment. They found his wet black paintings hanging in the hall closet behind the coats. They seized them. Evidence of sedition. They broke his easels and his brushes, they tipped his paint out onto the studio floor. They locked him up. They interrogated him. One of the interrogators was so enraged by Hansi’s stubborn silences that he broke two of his fingers, snapped them, one after the other, like dry chicken bones. Hansi’s Night Skies were taken to the Reich Chamber of Culture to be inspected. The following year in Lucerne they would be auctioned off by the Nazis for hard currency.  

It took months for Hansi’s fingers to heal. By then Tünde was very pregnant and could no longer continue with the typing work she’d found after Leo’s gallery had been closed down. They could not afford any more trouble, so Hansi stayed in at nights. He drew with the pencils that Tünde bought for him one at a time from the newsagent, but only when they were no bigger than the stub of a cigarette. The pencils were cheap, the kind used by waitresses and storekeepers. He called them the Degenerate Pencils. They were rough and splintery, their leads broke easily. “Their colour is worse than dirty dishwater!” he would rage. No amount of build-up or smudging could produce depth. He dreamt of his old Lyra pencils, of their thick creamy leads, “so dark, so metallic, so expressive.” For paper he used an unlined message pad they kept by the radio in the lounge, as if by separating pencil and paper, their subversive alliance could remain hidden. Some nights when the sky was clear and so was his mind, he would stand by the windows memorising all that he saw: the street lights, the shadows, the rooftops, the trees, the stars, and the moon, which continued to entrance him in its every incarnation. On those nights his imagination was as undiminished as ever, and the belief that art and nature could heal the world came to him once more. On other nights, when he could not master his emotions, his thoughts would run riot like weeds in an abandoned field.

On Kristallnacht, after midnight, when the first rocks shattered glass, the baby woke screaming. Tünde ran out of the bedroom with Greta in her arms. She sent Hansi to look out the windows and find out what was going on. When he came back he said, “The madness has begun.” Tünde would not go back to the bedroom because the windows were too close to the street, so Hansi brought them some warm clothes and fashioned a bed for them under the table in the kitchen which faced the tiny air shaft. But they couldn’t sleep. Tünde paced with Greta. The baby would not hear of being put down, nor would she feed. She howled so fiercely that sometimes even the terror on the streets was drowned out. When Tünde’s arms ached so that she was afraid she’d drop the baby, when the sounds of shattering glass finally seemed to come from further away, then Greta slept, tightly coiled against her mother’s body. Tünde got Hansi to bring her some cotton wool and the bottle of Veronal. Then she stuffed Greta’s ears and her own, took a double dose, and crawled under the kitchen table with the baby. She pulled the blankets tightly around them. She prayed for fatigue to overwhelm fear, for the tablets to take affect, for the brief oblivion of sleep.

Hansi left Tünde and Greta in the kitchen and went back to his studio. The sounds of destruction seemed to be coming from every direction. He felt so restless, so helpless and powerless. He paced like a caged animal. In his head words cracked like rifle fire and thunder. He had to get them out! He grabbed the pencil and paper and fell to his knees. He started to write. Over and over again he wrote those words, as lists and then as sentences, forwards and backwards, scrambled and jumbled and then BOOM! He ran to the lounge room windows. A nearby synagogue had been set on fire. The crowd roared with joy, roared as if from a single throat. Hansi watched the flames, momentarily entranced by their beauty. Then he went back to his studio and got out his scalpel.

From every wall of their rented apartment hung mawkish still lifes and moribund landscapes. They had been there when the Königs moved in. Hansi had taken them down, and for a time their ordinary little flat had been alive with his Utopian Gardens: with giant teal-petaled flowers and ecstatic wingless air-borne creatures. After the Degenerate Exhibition, Tünde had put the still lifes and landscapes back up. She’d taken Hansi’s paintings over to Leo Handlsmann in the hope that he might still be able to sell them. Now Hansi ripped the hated pictures from the walls and piled them up in his studio. One by one he cut them out of their flimsy frames, flipped them over and laid them across his studio floor. From the bottom of the wooden crate he used as a table in his studio, he took out his bread-and-butter brushes and a tin of black house paint. He prised open the paint tin, took a deep, ragged breath and dipped the brush in. Then suddenly he stopped, paintbrush poised mid-air and tip-toed next door to the kitchen, dripping paint across the hall carpet as he went. He held his breath and opened the door. The stove was on and it was warm in there. Tünde and Greta were asleep under the table. As he watched them sleeping, his breath slowed and his mind cleared. He smiled at his girls and went back to his studio. The words that he had been struggling to understand, to fit coherently one beside the other, now came out fully formed and beautiful as a newborn baby. He whispered them to the night, swaying as he said them. He whispered them until he could no longer hear the shattering glass, until all the world was just four words: beneath fear liberty awaits. Then he knelt down and painted them, on one canvas, and then on another. The letters tumbled chaotically off his brush in their race to the canvas. Each one came to him from their very own cosmos. The rounded vowels arrived with elongated, cross-hatched wings; the ts and the l with twitching probing antennae, the fwith a foot that hung all the way down the canvas like a great swinging vine. The feel of the brush in his hand was so joyous, the smell of the paint so sweet that he laughed.   

It was almost five. Hansi put his ear to the kitchen door. All was quiet within. He pressed two kisses onto the door and then he slipped out into the dark morning. Across his shoulders was a small canvas sack filled with nails and a hammer. Under his arm he carried the roll of canvases. Outside the air was thick with the grey choking stink of ash. It was bitter cold, but Hansi, coatless and hatless, did not feel its sting. He stopped at the corner and looked side-to-side, listening for the sounds of exploding glass. Then he nodded, stepped out onto the road and walked into the jaws of Gehenna. ◊

Night Skies, part one, was first published in Evening Street Review #20, Spring 2019

https://eveningstreetpress.com/?s=Nicole+Waldner

Night Skies, part two, will be published in Evening Street Review #21.