All That I Am (3 page)

Um Gottes willen!
How would I be aware? Sitting here in Bondi? And what ‘previous correspondence’? Then again, it might have slipped my mind.

The enclosed documents, belonging to Mr Ernst Toller, were found in a safe in the basement. The material consists of a first edition of Mr Toller’s autobiography,
I Was a German
, together with sheets of typed amendments to it. A handwritten note with the words ‘For Ruth Wesemann’ was found on top of them. The German Restitutions Authority has confirmed that you were formerly known as Ruth Wesemann.

Should you so decide, the Butler Library of our university would be honoured to house this material for future generations. We already hold first editions of all of Toller’s plays, and his correspondence from his time in the United States. We have taken the liberty of making copies for safekeeping.

If I or any member of the university faculty can be of assistance to you, we would welcome the opportunity.

Yours sincerely,

Mary E. Cunniliffe

Brooke Russell Astor Director for Special Collections

Toller!

His book is brittle as old skin, or a pile of leaves. The spine is broken, sprung loose from the cloth cover because of the sheets of paper thrust between its pages. Something from him to me: it can only be about her.

I reach to put it for a moment on the coffee table but my hands are shaking and some of the papers fall out onto the glass, then slip off to the floor. Inside me a sharpness–my hand moves to check the patch over my heart.

In his presence, and hers, I am returned to my core self. All my wry defences, my hard-won caustic shell, are as nothing. I was once so open to the world it hurts. The room blurs.

When I pick the book up again, it falls open at the first, typed insertion:

I call to mind a woman, to whose courageous act I owe the saving of these manuscripts. When in January, 1933, the Dictator of Braunau was given power against the German People, Dora Fabian, whose life has ended sorrowfully in exile, went to my flat and brought away to safety two trunk-loads of manuscripts. The police got to know of what she had done and sent her to prison. She said that the papers had been destroyed. After she was released from prison she fled from Germany, and, shortly before her death, she got the papers out of Germany with the assistance of a disillusioned Nazi.

Ernst Toller

New York, May 1939

Toller was always a master of compression.

I pull a rug over my knees. I’d like to crawl back inside the night, perhaps to dream of her. But one can control dreams less than anything in life, which is to say, not at all.

TOLLER

I am so settled here I might never leave this room. The Mayflower Hotel, Central Park West, is quite a good hotel–not the best, by any means. Still, if I am honest, better than I can afford. But honesty is so hard. If I look too closely at the truth I might be unhinged by regret and lose hope in the world.

Then again, I may be well and truly unhinged already. Last week on the subway, a man hanging absent-mindedly onto the leather hand-strap stared at me a little long. Without thinking I flashed him what Dora called my ‘famous person’s smile’. The poor fellow turned away as if ignoring a tic.

I fled Europe for the land of the free, but I didn’t quite count on invisibility. In Berlin or Paris, in London or Moscow or Dubrovnik, I couldn’t take two steps without wading into autograph hunters. Once in a tender moment, Dora said it was good for me to know my work was appreciated. But I had been famous a long time; I was on first-name terms with the phantom-Toller the press had made. Though I needed applause like oxygen, I never believed the love and plaudits were for the real me, who, because of my black times, I kept well hidden.

Clara has gone to get coffee. We are in a hiatus; the hotel knows I can’t pay the bill but is not throwing me out. Out of gratitude, we don’t push the limits by using room service.

I love Central Park. There’s a man out there now on a soapbox gesturing to passers-by, trying to attract and keep them like papers in the wind. I know that feeling: eyes screaming that the world belongs to you and you can reveal it all, if people will only stop, and listen. It is this prospect, of something freshly imagined, some new possibility of belief, that America holds out to all comers.

The book is in my lap. What
chutzpah
, to write my life story at forty! Or a bad omen. Perhaps, having written it down, I now feel the life is done. Dora would have made me snap out of it. There are some people just the thought of whom makes us behave better.

It is six years ago now, that we worked on this book. In Berlin, in my narrow little study on Wilmersdorfer Strasse. Dora’s desk was behind the door, practically obscured if anyone opened it. She would sit there in the shadow, stockinged feet resting on two dictionaries stacked on the floor. My desk was bigger, under the window. She took down my words, pulling me up and putting me to rights if I veered off course. Dora thought I left the bitterest and most basic emotions out of the book, in favour of, as she put it, ‘all that derring-do’. I didn’t want to write about what went on inside me.

Our worst fight happened when I was writing about my–how should I say?–my collapse, after I was discharged from the front. When Dora wanted to interrupt me she used to put the steno pad down in her lap. When she had something serious to say, she’d swivel around to the desk, place pad and pencil down carefully there, and turn to me empty-handed. This was an empty-handed time.

She clasped her palms together between her thighs. ‘I think…’ she said, and stopped. She ran both hands through her dark, bobbed hair, which fell straight back into her face. She started again. ‘You’ve just written here so powerfully about the horrors of the trenches. And trying to save your men.’ Her voice, airy and deep, got deeper. ‘We need to see what that courage cost you.’

My heart beat slower. ‘Read it back?’

She took the pad from the desk and read: ‘“I fell ill. Heart and stomach both broke down, and I was sent back to a hospital in Strasbourg. In a quiet Franciscan monastery kind and silent monks looked after me. After many weeks I was discharged–unfit for further service.” And that’s it.’ She held out one blunt-bitten hand. ‘That’s all.’

I crossed my arms. ‘I had thirteen months on the Western Front,’ I said. ‘And all of six weeks in the sanatorium. It was a black time. There’s nothing to say about it.’

She rubbed her hands over her face. ‘Let’s leave it for now, then.’ She turned back to the desk.

If I could see her now, even just to fight with me, to swivel her bony back away from me, I would give it all.

‘So.’ Clara’s voice breaks the air. She places two cardboard cups down on the table in front of me, smiling as if to signal a new, better beginning to whatever is going on in this room. ‘Guess what’s so special about this?’

It takes me a moment to register her question. ‘The magic of putting liquid into paper?’ I have loved this kind of discovery since I got here, the sheer, left-field, practical ingeniousness of America.

‘No.’ She shakes her head. ‘These cups are
endless
.’ She uses the English word. ‘Infinite cups! We can go back and they will refill them, forever.’

I must seem unconvinced, or not quite adequately enthralled.

‘Or maybe not.’ She shrugs and laughs a little, sits down. ‘I’ll have to find out how that works.’

Clara flicks through her steno pad, happier now after her contact with the outside world, her discovery of the bottomless cup. Clara is not even my secretary, but Sidney Kaufman’s, from MGM’s New York office. Sid felt sorry for me after my scripts went nowhere (not enough ‘happy ends’, said Hollywood), so he’s lent her to me.

She finds her place.

But I am frozen. Caricatures I can do. Types in a play–the Widow, the Veteran, the Industrialist–but not someone so huge to me. What if my only talent is for reduction?

‘To understand her,’ I say, ‘you have to understand what she was trying to do. Dora was … a verb.’

Clara smiles.

‘It all came out of the war. Our pacifist party, the Independents. And, I am sorry to say, Hitler and this war he is now making.’

I look through the book in my lap to find the passage about my breakdown. It is extraordinary to me now, the deceit of words, how in saying everything one can reveal nothing at all. I will start by doing as Dora said.

‘Ready?’

‘Yep.’ Clara picks up her pencil.

‘Okay. The heading is “Sanatorium”.’ And then I continue, at dictation pace.

It is practically a boy who stands to sing. Blond down on his cheeks, and some thicker, unruly hairs on his chin. Seeing him in this state of transformation–neither boy nor man–feels an act of intimacy that should not be allowed. Outside of here he would have started to shave. With a movement of his shoulders he pulls his wrists into his cassock, as if they’re too tender to be seen. But he cannot stop his hands from gesturing with the notes, which move out from him to fill the room and soar inside us.

There was a boy his age at Bois-le-Prêtre, sitting in the ditch with tears and snot running down his face. His uniform didn’t fit and he failed to salute me.

‘What is it, Private?’

‘My friend,’ he blubbered. Behind him lay a boy in the grass, also sixteen or seventeen. His eyes were still open. The back of his skull and left ear were blown off. The flies had started to come for the meat.

‘What are you doing here alone?’ I asked the boy. I knew the cruelty of my question: until the shelling twenty minutes ago he was not alone. Now he was trying not to leave his friend. He was trying not to be left.

‘I… I…’

‘Get back to camp.’

The boy got up and started to move down the unsealed road, between two rows of thin poplars.

‘Private!’

‘Sir?’ He turned around.

‘You forgot to take his boots.’

He gave me a look of hatred so pure I knew he could keep fighting.

Such brutality we had taken inside of us.

In the sanatorium we sit at a long table, the monks in brown robes at the head of it, soldiers down the end. We patients wear remnants of uniforms–the greatcoats are especially prized–or a mishmash of civilian clothes if relatives have managed to send some. The only sound is the leather of the novitiates’ sandals slapping the stone as they bring in the meal. All is calm, apart from the Christ hanging at the end of the room, naked and dying. He looks familiar–like a relative? So far as I can tell, he and I are the only Jews here. A row of high windows lets in light that striates the room, illuminating the air in all its minute, flying particles.

I have not spoken for seven and a half weeks. In the military hospital at Verdun they put electrodes on my tongue to spark it, as though the failure were mechanical. When I cried out they determined there was nothing wrong with my body, so they sent me here, where time, shunted only by slow bells, stretches out to heal.

The silence was a relief.

Lipp nods as he sits down next to me, tucking a napkin into his collar and spreading it out wide over his chest. He is a medical doctor in fancy clothes, but also a socialist–he insists on living in a stone cell just like everyone else here. Lipp is chatty, assiduous in his care of us. Nothing shocks him. During the day, I watch him move among the men as though doing the rounds of a normal hospital, speaking quietly, pulling on his goatee. He addresses me without waiting for an answer, as if to be mute were an entirely appropriate reaction to this world.

In the summer of 1914 everyone had wanted war, me included. We were told there had been French attacks already, that the Russians were massing on our border. The Kaiser called on us all to defend the nation, whatever our politics or religion. He said, ‘I know no parties, only Germans…’ And then he said, ‘My dear Jews…’ My dear Jews! We were bowled over by our personal invitation to war. War seemed holy and heroic, just as they had taught us at school–something to give our lives meaning and make us pure.

What could we have done, ever, to need such purification as that?

Dr Lipp bows his head and closes his eyes, then crosses himself and addresses his attention to his bowl, where barley and pieces of carrot float in a pale broth. Unusually for a socialist, he is also a fervent Catholic. He is convinced all things are part of a plan, even if we mortals cannot know it.

Some of the veterans have horrendous wounds, mended as best as possible at field hospitals before the men came here to be tended for other, unseen damage. Four are missing legs, or parts of them. Each is entitled to two prosthetic legs from the War Ministry in Berlin, but they have not come. The fellow opposite us has lost both arms, one from the shoulder, the other from the elbow. His prostheses have arrived. They are made of metal and attach around his chest on the side where there is no arm, and to the remnants of the other arm by leather straps with metal buckles, the same as on a school satchel. He must need help to put them on in the mornings. As he sat down, I noticed his fly buttons were left open–is this an oversight, or a necessity? In a world without arms, dignity is hard to maintain. Can he handle his prick with the hook?

His neighbour reaches across for the man’s spoon and without asking starts to feed him. Before, when I passed returned men on the streets of Munich or Berlin, the legless wheeling themselves along on boards, their cloth-bound hands pushing the ground, or sitting on their stumps on grey army-issue blankets selling matches, or the hundreds and hundreds of ‘storkmen’ on crutches, I thought them adept. I permitted myself the fantasy that, because of the cripple’s skill with the board or crutch or cane, he had come to terms with his situation. Here, we fall off crutches and out of chairs, soiling ourselves and weeping with rage. This, too, is a transition stage that should be hidden. And it is being hidden, here.

It’s a good broth today–chicken. The monks raise their own, and are not required to send them in for the war effort, just the bones afterwards for stock-meal, like everyone else. Theo on my left used to be an apprentice waiter at Aschinger’s restaurant in Berlin. His nose and top jaw have been knocked out by a grenade; he wears a dark cloth patch that covers the centre of his face. Beneath it is a reddish hole his breath goes in and out of. The patch has no practical value; he wears it to spare others the sight of him. His eyes are pale blue above it, and hard to look at too.