I knew Lydia Weber’s laugh long before I knew what she looked like, hearing it carry through our shared wall on Görmarsche Gasse. Bright. Bold. Breathless.
At seven, I pressed my cheek to the cool brick, learning her by heart through the wall.
By sixteen, we were sitting shoulder-to-shoulder in the basement annex of our municipal library. Two idealists hunting down smuggled translations and German romanticism the new school curriculum had banned. My mother’s hallway became our lending library. We shared Rilke’s poetry books with dog-eared pages where I’d penciled notes in the margins, my heart laid out in graphite.
We’d sit by the stone wall above the Ilm for hours, arguing whether art could outlast tyranny. I’d stay beside her, memorising the rhythm of her breathing between the sentences.
*************
Benedikt Schmidt joined our class that September. He sat two rows ahead of us in Herr Müller’s room. Word was he had no family, only an uncle who kept him working long hours in his carpentry shop. When the bell rang for break, Benedikt went alone to the stone steps with his dry rye bread.
Then one day, I ended up on those steps beside him, having forgotten my bread at home.
He didn’t look up. Just broke his loaf cleanly in half with his thumbs and slid a piece across the stone between us.
“Your house…Is it the red door on Görmarsche?” he asked suddenly.
“You know that lane?”
“I haul timber past the canal. Shortcut.”
“That’s my way home too.”
“Same way, then.”
He didn’t say anything else. But the next afternoon, a piece of bread was already waiting for me on the steps.
By October, I was taking the long way home past the canal most evenings. Benedikt never asked me to. I simply showed up and he handed me the other end of whatever he was carrying. We worked until our shoulders burned, leaning against the stacked pine afterwards in a comfortable silence.
When he started joining our walk home from the library, Lydia talked right around him while he trailed three paces behind with his hands shoved in his coat pockets.
“Does he ever use more than three words, Polly?” she whispered.
“He works at the timber yard. You don’t need adjectives for oak.”
She glanced back at Benedikt, half-amused. “Tell your carpenter he’s ruining our literary atmosphere.”
“Tell him yourself.”
Lydia rolled her eyes in response.
Within a week, Benedikt was walking beside us, making room for himself on the narrow path as if he’d always belonged there.
*************
By November, frost had turned the willow leaves black along the Ilm. Our walks home grew colder and quieter. Red flags showed up everywhere. At school, two boys in the front row began wearing stiff brown shirts under their wool coats, sitting in watchful silence through lectures.
“Müller spent half the class erasing the blackboard today,” Lydia said one evening. “While half the class stared out the window at the trucks lining up on Schillerstraße.”
Benedikt spoke without looking up. “They aren’t commercial trucks.”
Lydia stopped. “What are they carrying, Ben?”
He didn’t answer. Just snapped a dry twig between his fingers.
“Right,” she said softly. “Never mind.”
She didn’t ask again. We stopped talking about banners. Stopped talking about the trucks idling past the canal, or how fast the town was closing in around us. Instead, Lydia filled the silence with the lines of Goethe and Hölderlin, as if words were the only things worth holding.
By late November, the wind had started coming hard off the Ettersberg, driving needles of sleet along the canal. We were waiting out a sudden storm one day when the thud of heavy drums cut through the lane.
“In the arch. Now.” Ben caught my sleeve and Lydia’s wrist in one movement, pulling us into the doorway recess.
The Hitlerjugend marched past with their boots striking the wet cobblestones in unison. The crowd on the pavement surged to watch, pressing us deep into the stone arch.
Lydia’s fingers were stiff with cold as she fumbled with her scarf. I reached for her hands, but Benedikt’s were already there.
Holding her fingers between his palms, his thumbs pressed hard over her knuckles to force the blood back into them. When another surge from the crowd pressed in, Benedikt braced his arms against the wall beside her head, sheltering her completely between his shoulder and the wall.
In the deafening noise of the parade, Lydia’s hands remained bunched in the lapels of Benedikt’s coat while he bowed his head, his face close to hers, speaking words the drums swallowed whole.
All those pages filled with notes.
All those hours spent talking about art and survival.
Everything dissolved in a heartbeat.
I stood there, inches away from them in the dim corner, my hands clenched into fists.
The tread of boots faded down the block. Lydia lowered her hand, though she didn’t step out from beneath Benedikt’s arm. Her eyes blinked against the dim light, sweeping past the alley until they found me.
“Polly?” she whispered, pulling herself back from somewhere far away. “Is it clear?”
I looked out at the empty pavement.
“Clear,” I said, stepping out of the recess, leaving them together in the shadow of the arch, and walking up the lane alone to watch the corner.
Let them have this.
Everything around us was already burning.
Just let them have this.
———————————————-
Glossary:
This story is set in Weimar, Germany, in 1937.
Görmarsche Gasse: A narrow residential lane in Weimar, Germany.
Ilm (River Ilm): A river flowing through Thuringia and directly through the central parks and old town of Weimar.
Schillerstraße: One of Weimar’s primary avenues, named after the German playwright and philosopher Friedrich Schiller.
Ettersberg: A hill rising just north of Weimar. It is responsible for funneling cold winds into the Ilm valley during late autumn and winter.
Hitlerjugend (Hitler Youth): The official youth organization of the Nazi Party in Germany from 1926 to 1945.
(Thumbail Image from Unsplash)
