A Man Lies Dreaming (11 page)

He raised his head and found himself staring directly into the adoring eyes of Unity Mitford.

‘Valkyrie?’ he said. He had always used her middle name.

‘Don’t you recognise me?’ she said, laughing.

Wolf winced. He found he could not draw away from her, his eyes kept searching that sweet, smooth face, the full red lips, the mischievous eyes. She had not changed. Her delicate perfume tickled his nostrils. ‘You haven’t aged a day,’ he said.

‘Always so gallant,’ she said, laughing. ‘Did my sister not say I would be here? I’ve been looking for you
everywhere
.’

Wolf took her hand in his. ‘It is very good to see you again, Valkyrie,’ he said.

‘And you, too. So, so much.’ She slipped her arm through his. In her other hand she was holding champagne. ‘Oh, Wolf!’ She looked up at him with those adorable, adoring eyes, a sad look just like the one Wolf remembered, so fondly, from his German Shepherd, Blonda. Leaving his dog behind had been one of the hardest things he’d ever done. ‘Oh, Wolf, where did we go wrong?’

‘You were too beautiful,’ Wolf said, ‘and I was a penniless prospect. A cat may look at a king.’

‘But you hate cats!’

He grinned, a wolf’s grin, and didn’t speak again.

‘Come,’ she said. ‘Let’s get some air.’

‘I should get back.’

‘Not yet you don’t.’ She led him and he followed. Down the stairs and out to the garden in the back. It was a beautiful night. The rich never live in winter; only the poor.

Music was playing, Glenn Miller’s big band tunes, and couples were dancing in the garden. Tall torches set into the ground cast shadows from their flickering flames, like snakes shedding their skin. Unity took Wolf’s hand in hers. ‘Do you still think of me?’

‘Always.’

‘You lie.’

‘In every great lie there must be a kernel of truth,’ Wolf said.

‘Always the cynic.’ She sighed and leaned against him. ‘Do you remember?’ she said.

Wolf said he did.

There are all kinds of truths and most of them are uncomfortable.

1933: the last of the Nuremberg Rallies.

Wolf, bitter in defeat. But not yet defeated.

It was an unofficial war and it had raged over the Roaring Twenties and early thirties, across Germany and in particular Berlin. Brownshirts and communists, SA men and KPD comrades fighting for control. That poor dumb fuck Horst Wessel was an SA-Sturmführer when a communist assassin shot him in the kisser. People were predicting civil war, though there was nothing civil about it. Germany was a powder keg, as the saying goes. Wolf was the match. Then came the elections and the communists, the KPD, came to power, shocking everyone but especially Wolf.

1933 and he still thought he could win. The commies were still consolidating their unexpected authority. It was time for a last, desperate push.

The Reichstag burned.

And Wolf marched in Nuremberg. Not in victory but in defeat, but he marched all the same. It was then that Valkyrie and her sister Diana came to see him. He had been taken with Valkyrie. She was only nineteen. In a way, she reminded him of Geli.

He was keeping Eva at the time. She was a pretty, uncomplicated little creature. At twenty-one years old she was two years older than Valkyrie but less mature. He had first met her at the photographer’s where she worked as a model and assistant. She had been seventeen, then.

He often wondered what had happened to Eva, after the Fall. Did she die in the camps? Or did she, a simple creature not much given to politics, get by? Did she find herself a handsome young commissar to marry and did she bear him children? Wolf supposed he could have tried to find out, but he never did.

Valkyrie came into his life when his life was all but over. She was a precious thing, and she doted on him. Those puppy eyes, just like Blonda’s. He took her to balls and rallies while Eva was left behind in the apartment he had bought her. Valkyrie looked good on Wolf’s arm.

It was the last ever of the Nuremberg rallies. He remembered the flags waving in the wind, the people standing down below looking up at him with heavy, veiled eyes. Remembered the heat, the sweat, the feel of the woollen suit against his skin, chafing. The smell of defeat was the smell of a homeless soldier back from the war, the smell of gangrene and sour alcohol.

‘Do you remember?’

Two months later the KPD thugs came and arrested him. The organisation had been broken, mass arrests were made, and Wolf was sent to the camps. Some of the others fled: Hess, the coward, took a private plane across Europe and into Britain. Göring joined the communists. Julius Streicher was killed in a shoot-out in Nuremberg. Even Wolf didn’t mourn his passing. The man was a menace, a rapist and a drunk, but he had been effective. Streicher’s newspaper,
Der Stürmer
, was shut down.

National Socialism was dead.

‘I remember,’ Wolf said. His teeth were clenched. All around them ghostly couples danced in the light of the burning torches. Valkyrie was close against him, her warmth like a promise, her perfume an invitation. Her lips by his ear. ‘Remember when we were alone. I could do those things for you again, that you like.’

He pushed her away, but not roughly, more with a sense of loss and regret. And tried not to think of the monstrous woman, that Ilse Koch as she had called herself, and her torture chamber under that now-abandoned club on Leather Lane.

‘I am no longer that man.’

‘Oh, Wolf.’ There was so much sadness in her voice it made him ill. ‘People don’t change. You are still who you were! A leader, a visionary. You are what poor deluded Oswald could never be.’

‘You’re young,’ he said. ‘And I am not. And time comes upon all of us, like a thief in the night.’

‘Oh, how I hate the Jews who did this to you!’

‘
You were always steadfast in your hatred of them, Valkyrie
.’

‘No one says my name like you do.’

One memorable night in Nuremberg, he and the two Mitford sisters … but no. He would not think of that.

‘Diana still worships you as I do,’ Valkyrie said.

Wolf smiled. ‘No one does it like you do,’ he said.

‘Come with me. Back to my flat.’

There was such naked need in her voice. Wolf shook his head. The past had a habit of catching up with you. ‘I had better go,’ he said. ‘I think Oswald would have preferred me to use the servants’ exit.’

‘The man is a buffoon.’

‘He
is
your brother-in-law.’

Valkyrie shrugged. ‘Let Diana warm his bed for him,’ she said.

‘He might be the next prime minister.’

‘Is that what this is?’ Valkyrie said. ‘Is it about
power
, Wolf?’

‘It is
always
about power,’ Wolf said.

‘Do you think I love you less for having lost your power?’

An ugly word:
love
.

Perhaps sensing she had made a mistake Valkyrie, too, withdrew. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—’

‘Did you not?’ Wolf said, darkly.

‘Please, Wolf.’ As if she couldn’t but move closer to him, a moth to his banished flame. Whispering in his ear, ‘I will fuck you the way you like it.’

He pushed her away, roughly this time. ‘Whore,’ he said.

‘I will be your whore, if you’d only let me!’

People were looking at them now. ‘Lower your voice,’ Wolf said, and his own voice was distant and cold.

The woman was close to tears, he saw. Wolf touched his fingers to the brim of his hat. ‘
Auf wiedersehen
, Valkyrie.’

‘Wolf, no!’

But already he was going, walking away, and the English people parted before him, as though they could sense the lethal mood he was in. Unity didn’t follow. She remained standing there, alone, with people staring and then looking away and murmuring amongst themselves. ‘Damn you, Wolf!’ she shouted. ‘And damn you too, you nosy bastards—’ pointing a finger at the assembled guests, who studiously avoided eye contact.

‘Come on, pet.’ It was that young broker, Fleming.

‘Oh, Ian,’ Unity said. She let him lead her away. She leaned her head on his shoulder. ‘It’s all so very
beastly
,’ she said, miserably.

Wolf’s Diary, 3rd November 1939 –
contd.

That stupid bitch Valkyrie had made a miserable ending to a miserable day and I suspected it was not yet over. I did not like women trying to assert an authority over me. The Mitford girl was too unpredictable, too
independent
. I liked my women the way I liked my dogs, obedient and devoted, like Catholics suddenly confronted with their maker.

I did not make a good Catholic. My father hated the clerics and I had hated both the clerics and my father. My mother was devout, and I remembered as a boy going to church and waiting on my knees, as God in the form of a priest stuck his flesh and dribbled his blood in my mouth. My mother had so much love to give, to her Lord and to me. Even to my father. And I remember, too, as a young boy, hearing the sounds coming from their bedroom, at night, my father’s grunting, my mother’s soft sobs and sighs. Perhaps it was as early as that that my dislike of my father began, with the sounds of his nightly assault.

But though I loved them, women always betrayed me. First and worst, Geli, of course. How dare she escape me, and using my own gun as the key to her freedom! But she was only the first of them.

I met Eva when I came to visit Herr Hoffmann’s studio in Munich. It was a place I frequented regularly. The first time I saw her she was climbing a ladder in the shop and I saw her pretty ankles and the rising hemline of her dress and I was smitten, I will admit that I was smitten. She was a model of Aryan womanhood and at seventeen she glowed with good health, her eyes were innocent and clear and yet unspoiled. Whenever I came in to see Hoffmann I would take her hand and kiss it with decorum and call her my lovely siren from Hoffmann’s. I would make her blush. She knew me as Herr Wolf, which was the nom de guerre I was using at the time. No doubt she thought of me as that politician what was in prison. Her language was plain. There was no guile about her. Later I would take her on holiday to Berchtesgaden where she would sun herself in the clear air, as naked as the day she was born. She was Eve before the fall. We would go rowing on the lake together. Such a simple, delightful creature she was.

In Munich I would take her out to the opera or to my favourite restaurant, the Osteria Bavaria. I would buy her presents – the first thing I ever gave her was a yellow orchid. It was the first flower a man had ever given her. I had given the whore everything! And yet she, too, tried to escape me.

I had found her diary, the pages of which I had not destroyed but kept, as proof of her guilt. She was a silly girl! All she could speak of was of my taking her away from the shop, of perhaps giving her a little house of her own. At first she was jolly but as the days went by her distress grew. One Sunday, for instance, I had promised to see her. She had phoned the Osteria, left a message with Werlin to say she was waiting to hear from me. I was not there, of course. I had gone to Feldafing, and when Hoffmann invited me to coffee and dinner I told him where to stuff it. The silly girl waited for me all through the night. The Hoffmanns had even given her a ticket for the Venetian Night that evening, but she didn’t go.

Her diary became increasingly confused. I am utterly miserable, she wrote, the little slut, as if she could know true misery!
I
had been on the Front. Eva threatened to buy more sleeping powders.

He only needs me for certain purposes, she wrote.

Later I invited her to dinner at the Four Seasons. At the end of it, I gave her an envelope with some money.

A few days later the stupid whore Frau Hoffmann told Eva I had found a replacement for her, called Valkyrie.

On 28th May she took thirty-five sleeping pills and tried to kill herself but she failed.

The stupid whore! She could not even kill herself successfully.

The whole thing was a pathetic ploy, a cry for my attention. Well, I suppose she did get it, after all. I have always had a soft spot for a plump bit of dumpling and no mistake.

*    *    *

In another time and place Shomer lies dreaming and tries to forget.

In memory there’s no escape.

He remembers them fleetingly, in jumbled fragments. Avrom’s dark curls gleaming in candlelight, Bina’s laughter as he made faces at her and she snorted like a certain treife animal; their smell when they were babies, in those sleepless days when he sat by his typewriter morning and night churning out tales of Yiddishe gangsters and chaste girls with a wild heart hidden within, of bloodied murders and anti-Semite conspiracies and of detectives who walked the cold streets in search of a justice they knew to be an illusion – in those early days when the babies cried and Fanya feeding and the shouts of merchants outside silenced by snow, and a fire burning, and his fingers on the warm hard keys, and the smell of milk, of babies, everywhere in the house, and in everything he touched, and in his clothes – those were the happiest days of his life, he realised, and you only learn that too late, when they are vanished like smoke.

Those are the moments he wishes to burn like the pages of a manuscript. To see them consumed by flame so he would never have to see them or remember them or how they were, their smell eradicated for ever. He resents Fanya when she appears to him, unexpectedly, in unguarded moments; he resents her for leaving him. He wants her gone from his mind the way she had left this world, so abruptly: one moment they were together a family, and the next the man severed them with his horsewhip, they to go one way and he the other. They to the ovens, he to the work units. And he didn’t know, they didn’t know, Fanya held Avrom and Bina’s hands and looked back at him as they parted, and her lips tried to form a smile. ‘You will see each other again, they are only going to the showers, to be washed,’ a soldier said, a voice lacking in emotion, and an old man masticating toothless gums said mournfully, ‘Auschwitz, Auschwitz, what is this Auschwitz?’