All That I Am (28 page)

I cringed. She always went too far.

Hans bit. His voice lowered. ‘What? You think I’m not a target?’ He was ready at any minute to be insulted for not doing enough against Them, and then to blame her for his inability to do so–for not sharing the more important information from Germany.

‘No,’ Dora said, turning back around to face him. She spoke in a controlled tone, as if to a child having a tantrum. ‘I just mean I think you live under a lucky star, Hansi, and it won’t happen to you.’

His eyes turned to slits. ‘And you’re such a hero?’

‘Relax. It won’t happen to
any
of us,’ Dora said. She made an open gesture with her hands. ‘Look. There’s not much we can do about it in any event. If we think about ourselves, the fear will win. We need to think about the work.’

‘What work?’ Hans shouted, going into the hall.

Dora raised her shoulders at me as if to say, What did I say?

I examined the lino, a small, cross-hatched pattern in green on white.

The flat was silent. Then a scuffling noise, a shuffling in the hall. Hans was in the cupboard, ripping papers off the shelves. Dora must have forgotten to lock it up. He was turning and turning like a man in a snow dome. Stacks toppled and fell, manila folders disgorged their contents. Blue carbons floated lightly down.

Dora darted towards him, ‘Don’t! Don’t you dare—’ She stopped before making contact; something had gone off inside him. He twisted and turned till the shelves were empty and the floor had disappeared.

Dora switched to me. ‘You watch him,’ she ordered. ‘I have to clear out the courtroom this morning. I’ll deal with this,’ she gestured at the mess, ‘later.’ She collected her cups of coffee from the kitchen and went back into her room.

Hans walked past me without speaking and closed the door to our room. I went in anyway.

He was sitting on the bed with his head in his hands, adrift.

‘She does it to me every time.’ His voice was quieter now, but angry to the point of tears.

‘She was trying to reassure you,’ I said, though I knew that wasn’t all of it.

He ignored me. ‘She can’t help twisting the knife,’ he said.

Hans spent a long time in the bathroom. Dora and Toller left without eating.

I washed after him. As I came out of the bathroom he was sitting in the cupboard in his dressing gown sorting through the piles of papers, though he could not possibly have known how Dora had filed them. He stood up. ‘I’m s-sorry,’ he said, hands fluttering hopelessly at his sides. Some papers, folded, poked out of his dressing-gown pocket.

‘Leave them,’ I said. ‘I’ll do it.’ He moved to pass me. I pointed to his pocket. ‘Those too.’

He looked down, as if surprised. ‘I was just trying to find a spot for them,’ he said, removing them carefully and placing them back on the floor. But I could see one, folded, still in there.

‘That too.’ I pointed.

He put his hand over his pocket. ‘It’s mine.’

We looked at each other. Tears welled hot in my eyes. ‘Show me.’

‘No.’

How did I get here, policing my own husband? ‘If you don’t,’ I said, ‘I’ll have to tell her.’ I hated myself.

‘It’s mine.’ His face contorted. I had the sudden, sick feeling that he was speaking the truth. I put my head in my hands. I heard him take the paper out. He offered it to me, his eyes streaming.

It was a page ripped from his notebook, dog-eared and worn as if he’d had it in his wallet, fingered it like a talisman. It was covered with writing. But when I looked closer I saw it was the same four words, again and again, line after line.
All will be well. All will be well. All will be well. All will be well…

‘I’m so sorry,’ I said. He had nowhere to go but our room.

When Hans came out I noticed he’d dressed more carefully even than usual, perhaps by way of making himself feel better. He had a handkerchief in the breast pocket of his better suit; his hair was parted perfectly. Fixing things from the outside in. He left saying he was going to ‘walk it off’, then go to the library in the afternoon. He wouldn’t be meeting me for lunch.

I was used to him dressing carefully. We’d talked about the whiff of desperation given off by our friends on the edge of poverty–the too-hearty thanks as a refugee pumped the hand of a potential editor or benefactor, eyes glimmering with hope for just one translation, one article commissioned. Men betrayed themselves with scuffed cuffs and shiny knees, shoes gaping at the toes and a collar turned to hide the fraying: telltale signs you were doing it hand-to-mouth. We were not poor, but Hans felt that for others to have confidence in him he had to prevent his need from showing at all costs. ‘Look the part,’ he used to say to himself. ‘I must look the part.’

Hans had confided occasionally–at night in bed, or if he joined me for lunch at the tearoom–his dreams for the future. I realised from their intricacy that these scenarios had been sculpted and treasured a long time; they were like reels he could play in his head at will, to lift his spirits. When all this was over he would edit his own colour magazine, a
Time
for a new Germany. He would be a player, wield influence over a fresh dawn in Berlin; politicians and celebrities would court his good opinion. We would have a villa by the Grunewald, five uniformed staff and a car. We would have holidays on yachts. We would see the Pyramids. I didn’t long for a villa, staff, or a yacht, but I said nothing. I could see he needed a picture of the future, and I wouldn’t take it away from him.

Over time, though, his daydreams became worn and diminished in efficacy. The more outrages the Nazis perpetrated, and the longer no foreign country protested, the more it seemed to Hans that history would rob him of his rightful life. A gap opened up between his dreams and the days at Great Ormond Street larger than he had ever had to bridge before. It was larger than the gap between the vicarage at Nienburg and our life in Berlin, between returned soldier and renowned journalist, between stutterer and sweet-talker, Aryan and Jew. It was a gap that, if he slipped into a dream one afternoon, threatened by evening to make this life seem paltry to him, turn to dust in his mouth. I knew from the way the door slammed, the satchel was thrown, that to come back up here was to come back to an existence he felt unworthy of him.

But that day after the counter-trial, something changed. Hans came home early, just before lunch. I was still there, doing my best with the filing. He burst in the door.

‘I’ve got it!’ he said. His shirt was damp, his face shiny and his hair mussed. ‘I can go to see Bertie–that’s the one thing I can do.’ He was walking around and around the tiny hall outside the cupboard where I sat, not looking at me. His speech was rapid-fire, the plans already made. When I caught them I saw his eyes were livelier than they’d been in a long time–tiny flames of hope blown back into them. He would stop work on the novel immediately, he said. Bertie was even less protected than Lessing had been, and Hans thought he should go to Strasbourg to keep him company and cheer him up.

‘And then maybe I can place articles from his
Independent Press Service
here, and send him back the money.’ If that went well, he said, he might be able to make a go of helping more émigrés by placing their work in British publications. ‘What do you think?’ he asked finally. ‘If I can’t write my own pieces, I can at least be a middleman.’

It didn’t make a lot of sense to me, but I understood that Hans wanted to be out of the flat. I suspected he might want to get some information of his own from Bertie, so as to stop relying on Dora to pass him material. And I understood that by my lack of faith I had let him down. That’s as far as my thinking went.
Gezwungene Liebe tut Gott weh
. No one can force anyone to love them.

He was gone within a week.

The day of my twenty-eighth birthday, Hans was still in France. Mrs Allworth came with a basket covered in a check cloth. Something was moving underneath it.

‘For you,’ she said.

I pulled back the tea towel to find a small ball of black-and-white fur. The kitten was still blue-eyed, a tiny perfect life. I burst into tears.

‘Dear, dear,’ Mrs Allworth said, ‘I just thought—’

‘No. It’s lovely,’ I said. I was not used to ordinary kindnesses any more; to beauty in a basket.

I called him Nepo, for John of Nepomuk, who refused to divulge a queen’s secrets. He grew into a quirky, friendly lap-cat and I told him everything.

‘I’ll tell you everything,’ I say to the nurse.

‘That’s good,’ she says. This one I haven’t seen before; she must just do the nights. She’s dark-skinned, a night angel with a gemstone in her nose. ‘That’s very good, Ruth.’

TOLLER

The photograph in the paper shows the SS
St Louis
lit up at night like a Christmas tree in Havana harbour, by searchlights from police boats and lamps dangling from its decks to stop people jumping. I also read my own letter, demanding that ‘this nation founded by those fleeing persecution accept now these refugees fleeing from a barbarism that seeks to make war against us all’.

Same old story. What did Auden say? He could no longer believe in our better nature. The blue-eyed rabbi in our village at Samotschin used to talk to me as though I were a grown person, even when I was just a boy. We must believe in God, he told me, because if we don’t we will have to believe in man, and then we will only be disappointed.

When she comes in she’s wearing the same clothes, though I know it’s a new day. Her face is lightly powdered; the red scrape on her forehead has faded. She is very pale. She puts my ticket down on the table.

‘They’re saying at the shipping office there have been suicides on the boat,’ she says, just holding it in. ‘I can’t get a telegram to Paul, they won’t let them have any contact with relatives, so we can’t know—’

I get up and take her elbow, guide her to the other comfortable chair. ‘Have you seen today’s
New York Times
?’

‘No.’

‘There’s a new plan. To let them land at the Isle of Pines. Maybe to make a Jewish colony there.’ I can see relief and hope tumbling in her, then a backwash of despair. ‘It’s hard that he is so close.’ She nods. ‘But,’ I touch her shoulder, ‘it might just turn out okay.’

‘Okay,’ she echoes. She turns automatically to her bag for her pad and pencil.

‘Mail today?’

‘Oh. I forgot. I’ll go now.’

When she returns–still no news from my sister–we resume.

After the British sent back that typesetter to the concentration camp, panic spread among the London refugees. Rumours flew that there were informers in our ranks. Dora said some misguided souls thought that informing for the British might help you get a visa, and that informing for the Germans might protect you from Them. In her view there was nothing much you could do about it; you just had to keep your information close.

Hans Wesemann came to see me not long after the counter-trial. He was full of flattery and winning self-deprecation. We talked about his visit to me in prison–more than ten years ago by then. He joked, saying I’d been a ‘captive audience’, then he apologised, quite sincerely, for having asked me to betray my fellow revolutionaries. He said that he was, unfortunately, the kind of person who thinks of saving himself–
‘Sauve qui peut
,’ he said with a wry smile–and who forgets that others have broader priorities.

As he talked I looked at his fine face, so ridiculously handsome you could get lost in it. As if he were what the eugenicists would have our species look like, the rest of us just dummy runs.

Wesemann had come offering to place manuscripts of mine with British publishers, for a small percentage fee. When I explained that I had direct dealings with my publishers already, he intimated that I needed, perhaps, ‘fresh material’ and offered a trip with him to see Berthold Jacob in Strasbourg. He said that with Jacob’s information and my profile I could write something ‘perfectly devastating’ about Germany for the widest possible public here. ‘More effect than
anyone
else,’ he cooed. I said I’d think about it.

Dora rolled her eyes when I told her. ‘He’s desperate, poor man,’ she said. ‘Looking for another coup-by-association with you. It’s not his fault, in a way,’ she added. ‘This is no place for a satirist. Our circumstances are beyond mockery.’

When he wrote to me about it a week later, I declined.

After my speech at the counter-trial was reported around the world, my publisher decided to expedite the publication of some of my essays.

Dora helped me correct the English proofs. We worked in separate rooms because I couldn’t stand to hear her pencil moving over the paper. Her corrections were usually good cuts–she made my thoughts clearer and the expression of myself less egotistical. But like a squeamish patient, I didn’t want to hear the incisions. Once, she came in holding a double page. Eraser crumbs clung across her chest, and her feet were masked things in their stockings.

‘I’m just wondering whether this is what you mean here.’ She glanced at me before starting to read. ‘“There comes to man sometimes a sickness, psychic or spiritual, which robs him of all will and purpose and sets him aimlessly adrift in a longing for death, a longing which lures him irresistibly to destruction, to a mad plunge into chaos.”’ She looked up, her face neutral.

‘Well?’ I asked. It is much easier to write something than to speak about it.

‘Well, this,’ she turned back to the sheet, ‘is what comes next—’

‘I know what comes next.’

She read it out anyway. ‘“The old Europe suffered from this dreadful sickness, and with the war she hurled herself into the abyss of suicide.”’

I said nothing. I made her say it.

‘I’m not sure…’ Her eyes flicked to the window, then back to me. She breathed in. ‘I’m not sure it makes sense to give a continent your psychology.’

I was ready. ‘It’s not my psychology.’

‘Well.’ She had a way of speaking to me as if it were understood between us that every word I had written was worthwhile; it might just need to be disentangled. This is the gift of a great editor. She spoke gently, as if only figuring it all out for herself right now, showing me she was not far ahead–in fact, I may have led her there. ‘The war,’ she said calmly, ‘was not caused by Germany drifting aimlessly and longing for death, but acting purposefully and longing for power and colonies.’