All That I Am (21 page)

‘I see,’ she said. ‘You asked her to, to–’

‘I asked her nothing,’ I said.
It was you I asked!
I wanted to scream.
It was you
.

Like most things, that contained its own lie. If I had truly wanted Dora to stay with me I would not have frightened her away by talking about babies. I would have just talked about us. ‘Christiane is coming to be with me.’

Dora’s eyes welled with tears, which made her cross. ‘I didn’t think…’ she said, and stopped. She put her pullover over her head and yanked it down. Stood to do up the hook and eye of her skirt. ‘I’m going out.’ She retrieved her coat from under the pile of clothes on the floor. ‘For a walk.’

‘She does have to leave, actually,’ I said to her red back at the door. ‘Because of the role she refused. They wanted to see whether Toller’s girlfriend would work for them. It’s my fault.’

Dora turned around, her voice quiet. ‘Stop talking about yourself in the third person.’ I couldn’t tell whether her anger was directed at me or at herself. ‘It’s not funny any more. You want to believe in The Great Toller the public figure, so you need a little girlfriend who does too.’

It is true that I enjoyed feeling like the man Christiane thought I was. I didn’t know how long it would last, but if I could keep up the front for a young girl, maybe the black months would stay away.

‘Why is it so wrong to want to be…’ I wanted to say ‘better’ or ‘normal’, but couldn’t get it out.

‘The Great Toller?’ She threw her head back. ‘Because that’s not all you are.’

I followed her to the corridor as she started towards the stairs. Halfway down she turned around, chin up to me, her pale, pointed face floating in the darkness of the stairwell.

‘Does the little one know you need bars?’

I heard the front door slam.

I don’t know how much later it was that I heard steps. I went to the door. It was a woman coming up the stairs, carrying a string bag bulging with brown-paper packages. I watched the top of her head, blond and neatly parted on the side. A nothing. No one.

I went back inside. I couldn’t go near the bed. In the front room was a chair. I pulled it to the window and sat there, still and lost. For over an hour I could not move. I felt the punch of emptiness in my gut, a black hole inside that threatened to open up and swallow me down. Superstitions from my childhood returned: if the third person to come along the street was a woman, the world was in order; if Dora came back by my fifth cigarette, everything would be all right.

If Dora left me, there would be no one to catch me. It is only when your beloved leaves you that you realise the stake is gone, and where they were there is only cold air, with nothing to hold you up.

When she came through the gate the hole in me closed over, a very thin sheath. By way of humbling myself I didn’t bother pretending I’d done anything but sit waiting. Her nose was red, sore-looking. She stared at me, hunched and hopeless in the chair. She could see I’d been in freefall. Her eyes grew soft. Our love was like a carpenter’s spirit level, each of us holding an end up so hard, fighting to keep that trembling bubble in sight.

Dora had sat watching mad fellows, she told me, diving into the dark from a high springboard. The pond was blacker than the sky. She must have decided that she would weather this like we’d each weathered other relationships before, as symbols of our freedom.

‘We have work to do, don’t we?’ she said, taking off her gloves, one finger at a time.

Clara’s hand keeps moving across the paper for a few moments after I’ve finished speaking. It must be sore. She has flipped over a centimetre of pages on the steno pad, which are stacked now on the underside of the spiral binding.

‘Shall we take a break?’ I ask.

‘I’m fine,’ she says, but she has put her pencil down and is gently flexing her right hand open and shut.

‘Just a couple of minutes, I think.’ I get up from the chair, go to the window.

‘I’ll get these cases in order then,’ she says behind me. Clara is someone who cannot sit and do nothing, who will never be pulled down to nothing. I hear her start to rustle gently through my papers and clothes.

A life in two cases. Clara is taking my travel plans seriously, and I need her to. As for me, I am finding them harder to believe in. Although I have arranged to see Spender about a translation, and have agreed to public appearances in Oxford, London, Leeds and Manchester, I have to beat down the black part of me that sneers,
Who are you kidding?

I cannot escape it by boat.

The cherry blossom trees across the street are extravagant explosions, pink confetti burst from a can. I scan the park for them now, but it must be over. Their beauty seemed unwarranted, heartbreaking.

‘How long will you be gone?’ Clara asks.

I am already gone. I turn around. Clara has removed everything from the cases, so as to audit my plans and fit out my future. She is counting shirts and dividing time to come by their number. Her blouse snaffles the light into its deep, magenta folds.

‘I’m not sure. Perhaps indefinitely. For the time being.’

She gives me a small nod as if I have made perfect sense, then turns back to her task. ‘We’ll pack as much as we can, then.’

Even pared down, my life might be hard to carry out of here in two cases. I feel a sudden and terrible pity for this girl who has to deal with me, now.

‘I’m a hard case, wouldn’t you say?’

She winces and shakes her head at my weak pun.

‘Sorry.’ I hang my head in mock shame. ‘No, truly, I wouldn’t worry too much about the packing.’

She looks up sharply.

‘Well, I mean they might hold some of my papers in the safe downstairs,’ I offer. ‘While I’m gone.’ I move to her and make as if to touch her arm, but don’t. ‘How about you finish that later?’ I ease myself back in the chair. ‘I’m ready to go on.’

I had a lot of work to do in London, and Dora and I set about doing it in the weeks before Christiane arrived. My first plan was to finish the autobiography, but events in Germany forced me to speak out about them instead.

On the 1
^st
of April 1933 Goebbels warned Germans of three things that represented the ‘Jewish spirit’ which, he said, was undermining the nation: the magazine
Die Weltbühne
(they had imprisoned its editor, Carl von Ossietzky, already), the philosopher Theodor Lessing (now safely in Czechoslovakia) and me. ‘Two million German soldiers,’ the little hysteric screamed over the radio, ‘rise from the graves of Flanders and Holland and condemn the Jew Toller for having written: “the ideal of heroism is the stupidest ideal of all”.’

The German chapter of PEN promptly expelled me. And then my books were burned, by eager university students and their craven professors, in towns and cities all over Germany. They made a bonfire party of it, with music from SS and SA marching bands, sausage stands, and ritual incantations as they threw the books into the fire: ‘Against decadence and moral corruption, for discipline and decency in family and state, I consign to the flames the works of Heinrich Mann, Lion Feuchtwanger, Erich Kästner, Ernst Toller…’

When I got to London, H. G. Wells, who was outraged by what the Nazis were doing, made a point of inviting me to the PEN conference in Dubrovnik as part of the English delegation. I would be the only non-Nazi German there. I felt the weight of it on my shoulders.

While Dora and I drafted I walked the room, or the garden if the day was bright, and she sat over her writing pad, flipping the pages around their coil of wire. People often have to be alone to think or to write, but being with Dora wasn’t like being with another person. We rarely made eye contact. I orbited her chair, eyed without seeing how her hair was cut soft into her nape, the gloss of it. To be with Dora was to be relieved of the burden of my self. This is the trick to creative work: it requires a slip-state of being, not unlike love. A state in which you are both most yourself and most alive and yet least sure of your own boundaries, and therefore open to everything and everyone outside of you. The two of us threw ideas and words around until we had carved a new way forward for the world–clearer and surer and nobler than had ever been done before. Then, elated, we went to bed, whatever the time of day.

The German government had silenced writers in Germany, and now it was trying to silence those of us who’d managed to get abroad. The Nazis were putting pressure on the British government to prevent us addressing public events. They threatened reprisals against publishers in Britain who published our work. It wasn’t just about depriving us of a living, it was the first step to silence.

‘What about that?’ I moved into Dora’s line of vision. ‘“This is the first step to silence.”’

She chewed the side of her cheek. ‘Sententious,’ she said, looking up at me. ‘And in your case, unlikely.’

‘All right, all right.’ Sometimes you just need the tone, the voice of the thing, and then it will come. ‘What if I start by telling them that the SS came to my flat the night the Reichstag burnt and that I was not there? That when they got to von Ossietzky’s and Mühsam’s and Renn’s and all the others’, those men were there, and now they’re in concentration camps. What about “The freedom I have retained by pure chance obligates me to speak for those who no longer can”?’

She nodded, took it down. She said nothing about the fact that it was she who had been in my flat and she who was arrested in my stead–I knew she wouldn’t want me to write that.

‘I refuse,’ I went on, ‘to recognise the right to rule of the present rulers in Germany, for they do not represent the noble sentiments and aspirations of the German people.’

When I got up to speak in Dubrovnik there were catcalls and booing from the German, Austrian, Swiss and Dutch delegations, all of whom walked out. But there was cheering too, and when I finished a standing ovation. On the street people in cafés stood to applaud me. My words were reported around the world. I was pleased; I thought some idea of the Other Germany might survive the madness.

I have used the speech we wrote for PEN that day, or versions of it, more than two hundred times in the past six years. But I have to say that the reverence and attention I craved to save me from the solitude of writing was not good for me either. The more causes I supported, the more I wondered what would be left of me to give to the page. I remember Dora once risking a joke about it. ‘What must have happened to you,’ she asked, ‘to need approval on such a global scale?’

At the Hampstead house the mail came morning, mid-and late-afternoon. Dora sorted it, opening all correspondence except that from Christiane, which she’d place apart on my desk, partly out of respect and partly reproach. One day, after my return from Dubrovnik, I came in from my morning walk and caught her moving away from the desk crumpling a letter in her hand.

‘Bad news?’ I asked.

She nodded, realising there was no way of hiding it from me. She flattened it out. ‘DIE JEWISH TRAITOR SCUM,’ it read. The letter was in German, typed.

I took the envelope from her other hand. It was addressed to me, dated the day before.

‘It’s a local postmark,’ she said. ‘They must be watching the house.’

‘Who?’

‘I’d say it’s the local fascist group trying to feel important,’ Dora said. ‘They’re hotheads, but probably harmless. They meet at the German Club here. People say they inform Scotland Yard about refugees’ activities, hoping to get them expelled that way, but that could just be fear talking.’ She touched my forearm. ‘It won’t happen to you,’ she said. ‘You’re The Great Toller and the British love you.’ She said this gently and she meant it as a comfort, that my fame might protect me. But an irony had crept into her tone lately.

‘What about you?’ I said.

‘What about me?’

I smiled stupidly. ‘Is “scum” singular or plural?’

‘Well, it’s addressed to you.’ She cocked her head to one side. ‘But if you’re asking me to share your lovely life, I’ll think about it.’

The truth was, I had already been receiving hate mail, and I knew I was being followed on the streets.

The day before Christiane was due to arrive, Dora was still staying at the flat. I wasn’t sure when she was leaving and I couldn’t ask. I came back from my walk early and found her in the bathroom, pulling a hypodermic out of her arm.

‘Pain?’

She looked at me and her eyes were brown and huge and pinned and I knew the nothingness had hit her in the gut.

‘A little,’ she said.

In the afternoon she was gone.

Clara gets up to draw the curtains.

‘Please. Leave them. I like to watch the lights at night.’

She reties the green-and-gold curtain rope and turns, putting her things together to leave. Clara does not comment now on how I have loved, but I can tell she does not judge me. I can tell it by the way she thinks to stack the half-packed cases on the floor so that I can use the bed, and by the way, calm and firm, in which she says, ‘See you tomorrow, then.’ This is a job we are doing together; it is important, and it will be done. I have always been saved by practical people.

RUTH

I pay for my cake and walk from Bondi Junction down through the wildness of the ravine at Trumper Park, its vines and frog noises and overhanging darkness. In summers past I used to beat a stick to warn the snakes off the path, though my crutch does just as well now. I find the worn sandstone steps and go down them sideways, like a spider with four legs. I come out at New South Head Road and get the bus five stops to Rose Bay.

This is the most perfect bay on earth. Pleasure boats bob lightly, tied to buoys. Behind them the seaplane shuttle touches down, pulling a delicate furrow of foam through the water. Further out, the harbour is covered in spinnaker craft, all white sails and pale blue, blown into the same shape and direction, like hope.
Like hope?
My loose, loose mind.

I stand on the promenade, looking out. Across the bay a sleek ferry slides silently into its dock. The world is muted, without those aids in my ears. A bare-chested young man jogs towards me, a tattoo like a spider crawling out of his trunks; could it be a sign of some kind–Celtic? Runic? Come hither, or beware? God knows I was always the last person on earth to tell the difference.