All That I Am (16 page)

Dora said I could be more intimate with thousands than I could be with one.

I move to the small desk by the window and write Christiane a note. It is in part an apology, which I know she’ll shoo away with one hand. So I make it mostly of thanks, and genuine–truly–good wishes for her future. I tell her she will be a star. I seal the envelope and resume my chair.

Clara brings across the letters for my signature.

‘Oh, and another thing,’ she says, slipping the cover over the typewriter, ‘I had Mr Kaufman on the phone yesterday. He says MGM will pay your passage, first class. He said it was the least the studio could do.’

I shake my head a little. ‘That’s nice.’

‘Yes, it is,’ she says.

‘I mean of you. To think of asking him.’ She shrugs off my compliment. ‘You should go and see Christiane’s doctor friend. He treats refugees for free. On East 61
^st
Street.’

‘I’m
fine
,’ she says, at the door. ‘Try sleeping, will you?’

Once Clara is gone, I pick up the note again. I could just walk right out there into the night lights, get a cab across Central Park South and deliver it to her in person. I might surprise her.

I look towards the bathroom. The door is shut. I can leave it; there’s a lavatory in the lobby. I collect my Burberry trenchcoat from the closet and put it over my arm. I can’t remember the last time I wore it.

My room is five storeys up but I take the stairs. When I get down there, the lobby is a vast acreage of swirly-patterned carpet and potted palms between me and the revolving door to the street. Capped busboys criss-cross with trolleys and people are moving all about, from the door to reception, reception to the lifts, or up the little stairs to the bar. I have a few seconds before my stillness is noticed.

My shirt is sticking to my skin and my mouth is dry. My heart pounds. I want, I really want, to get through that door and into the glittering night. But am not sure my legs will do my bidding. I turn and make it, just, into the men’s.

In the mirror an ashen-faced man stares back at me, grey hair spiralling off his forehead. My mother is dead now, but I try to find, here, some remnant of what she loved.

The taps are the same as in my bathroom upstairs, ‘H’ and ‘C’ in enamel buttons on them. If I leave the building the wings will make their escape and their blackness will foul this city. Or is it the other way? The wings are a function of me: if I walk out of here will they come with me and contaminate it then? Either way it will be my fault. I have to stop them.

RUTH

Bev is in the doorway, armed with a spraygun and a fluorescent yellow microfibre cloth. It’s a stand-off.

‘I might go for a walk then,’ I say. ‘To the library.’

‘By yourself? But I was going to get you some lunch, after.’ Everything Bev says contains an inbuilt reproach.

‘I’ll get something at the shops.’

‘Suit yourself.’ She runs her eyes over me, as if I am doing this purely to thwart her and my comeuppance is nigh, nigh, nigh. ‘I’d change my top if I were you,’ she says, picking up the biscuits and my cup in her pink rubber hands and turning on her heel.

When she’s gone I pull out my cardigan. There’s a hand-sized coffee stain under my breasts. I am long past shame; it is the pity of passers-by I don’t like. I try to get out of the chair but my arms seem weaker than usual. I can’t get up enough momentum to–push–off.

Bev reappears with my crutches and handbag and a fresh cardigan.

‘Well, then,’ she says from her height. ‘Not a lot goin on here.’ But she helps me up, and off with the old and on with the new, and as I put the crutches under my arms–the metal jangle of them rings like freedom’s bells to me–I bow my head to her and she hangs the handbag over my neck.

When I’m at the gate she can’t help herself and darts out to open it.

‘You’ll be right, will you?’ she asks. She reaches up and straightens my wig. Her face is a picture of mock tragedy over what I recognise, with a stab of surprise, as genuine concern.

‘I think so,’ I say. ‘Thanks.’

And then I am free on this glorious day, down the street with its pavement cracked open by the roots of the Port Jackson figs that will not be contained. And the sun close enough to kindle sparkles of response from the bitumen, way down here.

The morning after we hid Toller’s cases, trucks woke me before it was light, rumbling over the cobbles of our street, then brakes screaming into the corner. Next to me the bed was untouched. I moved to the window and saw an open vehicle full of uniformed men. It had happened before that Hans, carried away with the night, had not come home. I went to the kitchen and put the coffee on. I could never eat first thing. I heard more trucks.

The door flew open and Hans threw his shoes down hard, one then the other in the hall. He leaned on the doorjamb to the kitchen.

‘They’re raiding homes!’ he panted. He ran his hand through his hair. ‘I came as soon as I heard.’ I caught his air of vodka and cigarettes.

I stared. ‘I’ve been here,’ I said. ‘I’m fine.’

‘Look at this!’ He passed me the
Völkische Beobachter
. The headline was huge: ‘Communist Terror Plot: Reichstag Burns!’

‘But it’s not … but they didn’t—’

‘Of course not,’ he said. ‘There was no plan to do that.’

I read aloud the Leader’s words: ‘“The German people have been soft too long. Every Communist official must be shot. All friends of the Communists must be locked up. And that goes for the Social Democrats and the Reichsbanner as well!”’ I looked up at Hans, who was lighting a cigarette. I read on:‘“You are now witnessing the dawn of a great epoch in German history. This fire is the beginning.”’

Brakes squealed, right outside this time. We moved to the window. Four of them jumped off the truck. There was nothing to do. Nothing to be done.

Hans opened the door before they knocked. There they were: a plainclothes man and two SA boys in brown with automatic pistols. Plain Clothes nodded at one of the boys, who moved straight past us into the flat. My coffee was burning.

‘Gentlemen,’ Hans said, standing straighter than sober. I stood behind, pulled my dressing gown closed.

‘Herr Wesemann?’ The man was tall as Hans. ‘Frau Wesemann?’

‘Yes,’ Hans said.

‘You have twenty-four hours, sir. You must be outside the borders of the Reich within twenty-four hours. Or your citizenship will be revoked.’

‘I have done nothing illegal,’ Hans said. ‘I am a decorated veteran. And I am not a member of the Communist Party.’

‘Sir.’ The man pulled a folded piece of paper from his inside breast pocket and made a show of checking it. ‘The order is for Johannes Alois Wesemann and Ruth Wesemann, née Becker. Sir.’

‘Whose order?

‘Reichsminister Göring’s. Sir.’

The boy came back with my red flag from the closet. He handed it to his boss, and the three of them looked at us in silence. Then the little one behind broke it.

‘Count yourself lucky,’ he piped.

‘Lucky?’ Hans said.

‘You get a warning.’ The boy smiled a smile of pure power, the sudden enjoyment any mortal might have at being on the right side of the line.

By the time they got to us that morning, these boys and their fellows had already killed fifty-one people, and arrested more than four thousand. At first they worked from the membership list they’d stolen from the Communist Party headquarters, but then new orders came which were much broader–to capture or kill anyone who had spoken out against them. If they found you in a bar or café or some other public place they took you into custody; if you were at home you could be shot there, ‘attempting to escape’. Some they didn’t bother taking or shooting. When they found eight Communists hiding in a cellar in Mitte they simply boarded it up. People walking to work heard their calls from the vent at pavement level but no one dared help. It took two weeks for all cries to stop.

Before noon on the 28
^th
of February Hitler presented to Cabinet his Reichstag Fire Decree, ‘for the Protection of the People and the State’, to counter the ‘act of terror’. It permitted arrests without warrant, house searches, postal searches; it closed the newspapers and banned political meetings. In essence, just as Bertie had predicted, it prevented campaigning by any other parties before the election. By the end of that day, thousands of anti-Hitler activists were being held in ‘protective custody’ in makeshift SA barracks–empty factories, a water tower in Prenzlauer Berg, even a disused brewery. Soon there was not enough room. That was when they set about building the concentration camps.

On the night of the fire, the authorities found a dishevelled Dutch ex-Communist labourer called Marinus van der Lubbe and arrested him. He confessed to the arson, insisting he had acted alone. But Göring’s people used the chance to arrest others who were nowhere near the scene–a Communist MP called Torgler and three Bulgarian Communists who were visiting Berlin. We scoffed at the idea that van der Lubbe had done this by himself. He was twenty-four years old, half blind and feeble-minded.

I don’t know why they warned us that morning. Perhaps we were protected by Hans’s notoriety–they couldn’t be seen to be killing well-known journalists, or not at first. Or maybe they were playing with us. We soon heard that lists with names and photographs of people they wanted to catch had been distributed to the railways and all border crossings. Perhaps they would get us in flight. We booked the 18:04 to Paris.

Later we heard our friends’ stories. Some had disguised themselves as mental patients or
Fasching
revellers in order to slip across borders, or they’d simply skied off-piste into France. They arrived with no papers, no clothes. Hans and I disguised ourselves too, I suppose, as casual holiday-makers, packing only one large case, and a briefcase each–more would look suspiciously like flight. I took two changes of clothes and filled the rest of the space with my camera and lenses, books and photographs. I couldn’t fit the albums, so I chose quickly, ripping pictures out of their corners: our wedding at the Majestic Hotel in Breslau, my parents and Oskar in the garden at Königsdorf, Dora and me as children at the Kleinmachnow fair, Hans asleep on our first night, the sheets rumpled light-and-dark like landscape.

Hans packed his typewriter, his folio and his evening clothes. He came in as I was closing the case. ‘Room for this?’ He held out his hand. It was the porcelain pâté pot from the TicTacToe. ‘For cufflinks,’ he said. He must have souvenired it. The knob on its lid was a chubby pink pig lying on his back, laughing regardless.

‘You’re unbelievable,’ I said.

No one on the platform spoke to one another, and no one started conversations in our compartment. When I heard the ticket collector coming down the train corridor, my heart banged in my throat. As he opened the glass door I sat very still. While the others reached quickly into purses and bags for tickets, Hans slid his hand casually into his jacket pocket and pulled out a napkin. Then, corner by corner, he unwrapped it to reveal a single, perfect, hard-boiled egg.

‘Mahlzeit
,’ the conductor said. Bavarian for
Guten Appetit
. A round fellow with bushy sideburns, for whom Berlin was, hopefully, a faraway place with faraway problems.

‘Thank you,’ Hans said.

I didn’t trust my voice to come out properly. I passed over our tickets. The conductor punched them, then dropped his puncher back into the pocket of his leather apron.

‘You change at Frankfurt for Paris,’ he said, as if it were the most ordinary thing. ‘Platform two.’ He left.

‘An egg!’ I hissed. ‘When did you do that?’

‘While you were packing.’ Hans smiled, pleased with his magic trick. He had always been good under fire. The others in the compartment chuckled, and started chatting–it turned out every one of us was fleeing. Hans reached into his pocket again and pulled out an egg for me, then a twist of paper with salt in it.

Once over the French border we allowed ourselves the dining car. From Paris we went to Calais, where we got a boat to Dover. Then one more train and we were in London.

Hans and I must have been safely over the border when Dora went back with a duffle bag for the diaries.

It was three o’clock in the afternoon. She snibbed both locks behind her inside the apartment and placed the keys on the little bookshelf. Slipped off her shoes.

The bedroom held no power over her today. The desk was as he’d left it, messy with current business–the white rock from the beach at Rügen sitting on letters to be answered, an open matchbox with a muscled sailor on the lid, undrunk coffee blooming aqua and white in a red china cup. She took the cup to the kitchen, washed out the mould. It made a sound as she placed it on the draining board. Too loud. She froze. A man’s cough outside the front door. A knock.

She wasn’t here. The kitchen was the first room on the right off the entrance hall. Whoever it was stood listening three metres from her. She did not breathe.

Dora slid out to the hall, edging along the floor so the boards would not creak. She was an animal, or a child–unprotected, elemental. If she could reach the study, she could get out the window to the yard.

Perhaps it was just a delivery? She’d laugh at herself later.

‘Open the door please.’ A man’s voice. The neighbour again? She was halfway down the hallway.

‘Frau Fabian! We know you are there, Frau Fabian.’

Them. She flew into the study, slid her desk across the door. She heard thumping, then a gunshot, shocking and unmistakable. The sickening groan of the wood splintering. A flash of her–bizarrely–felt responsible for the damage.

And then a shout. They were inside.
Shot while attempting to escape
. It would be the irony of her life if she proved with her death their truthfulness. How is it that in terror there is time to think this?

She kneed up onto Toller’s desk to reach the window. Fist first, then head. From the yard she would get through to Sächsische Strasse–no, they’d have someone there. To the cellar–but the keys were back in the hall.