All That I Am (15 page)

In the flat she kept the lights off. She moved from the hall past the little bookshelf where they took off their shoes to the first of the three rooms facing the street. Her eyes adjusted to the dimness; she could make out the divan on the left against the wall, with the silk sari draped over it, the little square reading table in the middle of the room. The windows were unseeing panes of black. She crouched to below the level of the balcony and pulled the curtains across, moving sideways like a monkey. She hoped it was too dark to notice the fabric swaying from outside.

Her mouth was dry. In the kitchen she turned on a light. Scratched her forearms. Ashtrays sat unemptied and a rose in the neck of a bottle was turning to paper. She took a glass from the shelf. The tap sputtered, plumbing juddering in the wall.

Back into the hall, where the ceiling was high and the walls lined with bookshelves, all the way down. The books that were published could never be exterminated completely; somewhere a copy would survive, the fossil imprint on the world of that particular soul at that particular time. The floor creaked and groaned as she walked down. At the end was the grand corner room–windows on two sides to the street. So many times she had waited for him, working in this bed as he paced out his nights, that the creak-and-groan of the corridor when he came down to her had the same effect as the chink of his belt buckle undoing. She was unsentimental, practical, hedonistic about sex. Very beautiful play, she called it. Toller had been shocked.

But now the empty bed unmoored her heart. This heart with a life of its own. He closed his eyes when they made love.

The men were never the same, he said, after they came out of prison. Inside, some turned into girls, wearing ribbons and mincing; swapping sex for protection from rape, sex for cigarettes. They all masturbated like boys; some made vaginas out of bread rolls. There was a traffic in matchboxes of semen from the men to the women prisoners; pubic hair back. Talismans of longing, the body’s own need for another. The men’s dreams of women were whittled and honed to slick and practical things, and when they came out living women did not match them. She knew he felt this as a loss, another way that he could not, now, get back inside his life.

‘Why do you keep your eyes closed?’ she asked once, afterwards. She was so slight that, hunched, her vertebrae made a ladder of bone, from nape to tail.

‘You know why,’ he said.

‘You close your eyes to be in prison when we make love?’

Part of the thrill of Dora was that she trained her intellect, impartially, on everyone. Just sometimes, it could be you.

‘Not in prison,’ he said quietly.

‘Well,’ she leant back against the pillows, a cigarette between two fingers, ‘in a prison dream then.’

He sat up and placed his feet carefully on the floor. Walked to the study and pulled the door closed. Again and again she would push for truth and end up four seconds later in a room all alone. Correct, but alone.

He must have taken the kidskin case with him. She reached up and found two others–one leather and one cardboard–on top of the wardrobe. She carried them across the hall to the study at the rear of the apartment.

The narrow little room faced the yard, her own desk tucked behind the door. He would sit with his back to the window, the day-curtain always drawn against the headaches that sometimes came in the afternoons. Dora sat in shadow, stockinged feet on some books or the rung of her chair, while he dictated, or they discussed corrections. One mind feeding into the other until their concentration collapsed under its own intensity and they would go across the hallway to bed.

She looked at the study window. The pale linen hung from its curtain rings, as always. If they came for her, she could jump to the yard from here.

She worked quickly. The most important thing was the story of his life. A first draft was nearly finished, the manuscript in two cardboard boxes with spring fasteners on the shelf nearest her desk. She opened the top one: ‘I Was a German’ where she had typed it.

The snap fastening caught and bit her skin as it closed, leaving a thin smudge of red on the page. She sucked her finger. She put the boxes into one of the suitcases, then turned to the correspondence, taking down the alphabetically labelled binders and putting them on the carpet. She sprang them open. She could fit more paper into the cases if it was loose.

From where she sat she saw the diaries on the bottom shelf. He’d written a lot from them.
Look Through the Bars
, as well as the autobiography. She had not read them, but she knew when he was lost he would pick one up and open it, looking to find himself inside. Some were leather-bound, some paper. The smallest was a tiny, cracked calfskin thing that had buckled to the shape of his body in the trenches. They wouldn’t all fit in the cases. She’d have to come back with another case.

Photos! She returned to the bedroom with her own bag and grabbed the one from the bedside table of his mother and sister smiling in front of the house in Samotschin. Scraps of paper underneath it fell to the floor. They were covered with writing at all different angles, scrawls he’d done without bothering to turn the light on. She gathered them up too, then opened the dresser for the other photos, loose in the drawer: Toller in uniform in 1914; with the actress Tilla Durieux in Munich before the revolution; at the Berlin premiere of
Hoppla, We’re Alive!
There were newspaper clippings, reviews. At the bottom of the drawer her fingers hit something hard–a coin? A medal? No, the tag from his puppy: ‘Toby’. She put it in too.

Her body reacted first. The skull contracting and a bird in her chest, trying to get out.

The telephone. Just the telephone.

But everyone knew he wasn’t here. Was it the neighbour Benesch, warning her? Or was it them?

She moved to the doorway and looked at the thing on his desk, ringing and ringing, black in its cradle. Fourteen rings. It stopped. She waited till her pulse faded.

Dora slung her bag with the photos in it over her shoulder, strapped the cases and tried to lift them. Paper is a trick of physics, words heavy as gold. She turned back to the phone.

‘Don’t come in,’ she told me. ‘Wait in the cab outside. And bring all your keys.’

Hans was still out so I dressed and went alone. It was raining. The cab idled outside Toller’s building, its headlights making twin yellow streaks on the road. Dora carried the cases down one at a time, holding them sideways in front of her.

‘Bornholmer Strasse allotments,’ Dora told the driver.

When we got to the gardens the driver kept the motor running. We took a case each and struggled out of the cab.

‘Night gardening, comrades?’ He smiled, cutting the engine. ‘Let me help.’ He looked kind, in his cap. He looked like one of us.

But Dora said, ‘We can manage. Thanks.’

‘At least let me wait for you.’

We sent him away. A high, inaudible whistle of alarm had sounded. We didn’t trust anyone.

We waited for his tail-lights to disappear, then started along the path through the garden plots near the train line. We made our way without a torch, the cases slapping against our legs and mud sucking our shoes. We could distinguish the little fences dividing each allotment. These had once been places of leisure–people grilling meat in summer, workers sitting on garden furniture with their shirts off, gap-toothed children larking on board-and-rope swings. But since the stock-market crash most people grew food here.

Hans and I had never used our plot, either for leisure or necessity: it came with the apartment. We went through the gate to the shed. Dora lit match after match while I worked the rusted padlock.

‘This is just for now,’ she said. ‘Till I can get them out of the country.’

The lock twisted and sprang open. ‘You can keep these.’ I handed her the keys. ‘I don’t need them.’ I tilted my head to look at her, her hair plastered to her cheeks, eyelashes wet. ‘When are you going?’

‘I’m not going anywhere, Ruthie. I have things to do here.’

‘But Bert said—’

‘I’ll go underground. Don’t worry. I’ll have someone else get these out.’

‘Who?’

‘I don’t know yet.’

‘Where will you stay, then?’

She pushed the door open for me with one arm, gestured inside grandly like a valet. ‘Ta-da.’

‘You’re joking.’ The shed was dark and smelt like wet concrete.

‘Not very funny, is it?’ She smiled.

‘No.’

Inside, Hans and I had stacked things we didn’t want in the apartment–boxes of papers, a horrible Biedermeyer sofa we’d been given as a wedding present. We hid the two cases behind the sofa and covered them with some coarse grey removalist’s blankets.

Then we made her a bed out of a couple more. I left her with two packets of matches.

They wouldn’t be coming after me; I could go home. The underground trains had stopped running. I walked with my face to the rain as if some small suffering of mine might mitigate someone else’s–the old crazy bargain with the universe.

As I rounded the corner to our apartment I smelt smoke. Hans still wasn’t home. From the living-room window there was no fire to be seen, so I went to bed. Whatever it was, it would be dealt with by morning.

TOLLER

I have been walking the room while we work through the letters: apart from Mrs Roosevelt, I have to respond to Grosz, Spender and the IRS. The light is fading gently over the park, turning everything into its silhouette. I hear the click as Clara turns on the lamp by her chair over at the little typewriter table. When I sit down and face her I see she has one bloodshot eye and a nasty graze high on her forehead.

‘What happened?’ I cry. Good Christ, does it really take a physical injury for me to pay attention to someone?

‘It’s nothing,’ she says, though I see she has singed the hair at her forehead as well. ‘We were trying to reheat the dinner on the Primus and it blew up.’

‘Did you go to the doctor?’

‘No, no. Really, it’s not serious.’

Of course, they don’t have the money for a doctor. ‘I’m sorry, have I…?’ I feel a queasiness in my stomach. ‘Have I forgotten to pay you? These things, sometimes I just don’t think—’

‘
No
–stop!’ She has her hands up, laughing. The stoicism of women has astounded me all my life. ‘MGM is paying me, remember?’

My head is nodding for yes, but I still feel it in the pit of my stomach. A shadow rustles at the edge of my vision. If I turn my head quickly to confront it, it slips out of sight like a floater in my eye. Clara turns back and starts typing.

I once forgot to give my wife, a girl in a foreign land, any money to live on.

When I think of Christiane I feel the blackness coming; my nostrils fill with a stink which is not human but is not sulphur. It is burnt flesh, as in the trenches. I look to the bathroom and this time I catch the last dirty feathers scraping back under the door, dropping filth in their wake. They barely fit behind there.

Six weeks ago, Christiane left me for a doctor on East 61
^st
Street, also a refugee. I do not blame her one iota.

Christiane Grautoff was fifteen years old when I first laid eyes on her, the child star of the German stage. For two years I courted her virtually without touching her, the thing between us remaining pristine and unreal, like a perfect future. She was a slender, energetic, blond-mopped person with slanted green eyes, unphilosophical and self-reliant. She came, as they say, from a good family, which is to say nothing about goodness, but only about money. The money was from her mother’s side. She was a self-absorbed minor novelist. Her father was an art historian with one of the coldest hearts I have ever encountered. When Christiane was eight they packed her off to a children’s home for four years of brutality–partly because she was ‘wild’, mostly because they were busy. She might have thanked them in the end: the home made her an acute observer, as are all the best actors. She learnt the working-class
Berlinerisch
within days, and she learnt to entertain the tough kids, and the overseers. But her father’s cruelty also meant that her standards of decent treatment from a man were way too low to protect her from me.

‘I am poison to you!’ I told her at the beginning, even as I courted her.
‘Caveat emptor!’

Christiane is the only woman I ever lived with. She saw the worst of it, in London, when I stayed in a dark room for months. My contempt for myself at these times contaminated my feeling for her; it killed the love and replaced it with itself.

A girl from Christiane’s background was not expected to cook, but in London she tried, apologising for every meal she boiled or burnt or drowned in butter as I waltzed out the door to a restaurant. Nor could she darn. My socks lay about our Hampstead room like demands. When we were invited to a grand country house, she knew the servants would unpack our bags and check our things for missing buttons or caught threads, then mend them before putting them away. Christiane packed four pairs of my disintegrating socks for a weekend trip, and imagined I’d be pleased at the result. When I saw them all perfectly darned I did not speak to her for three days.

Once, I took her to get a permanent wave. (Did I want her to look older? Shame.) My silken-haired girl sat trusting in the chair while I chatted with the hairdresser, who left the stinking, burning solution on too long. Christiane came out looking, as she said, like a poodle. But she decided to comfort me. ‘Not to worry,’ she said, ‘berets are all the fashion this winter.’

It didn’t stop when we got to America. Her talent was obvious to everyone; a big studio offered her a contract that would have made her a star. I forbade her to take it. I also forbade her to tell anyone I had done so. Then she said she wanted a baby, and I forbade that too. I despise myself.

It is not their fault, the spouses who come after, that we do not love them as we loved before. Christiane loved me no matter what I did to her. Because of this, I felt her love like a provocation. (Look at that! Can it be true that I continue to blame her, even now?) She excused all my private cruelties with the idea that I was a great man. I was fighting to save humanity–what matter that I left her alone in London for a three-month book tour in Russia, forgetting, simply forgetting, to give her any money? She was eighteen years old, a refugee and not allowed to work. What matter that when I got back I scolded her for failing to tell me she needed funds, for working illegally so she could eat, and for then starving herself to buy me a short-wave radio I had wanted for my birthday–childish! I said. Irresponsible! Too thin!