All That I Am (31 page)

Although I knew then that there were real forces bearing down on us, this feeling has remained with me all my life, whether in the bustle of London or the beauty of Sydney, on water or land: that there is complex machinery at work, there are invisible roads in the sea, and there is a meaning to all this which I cannot, for the life of me, uncover.

But we were better off in London than in Germany. That last week of June 1934, home was a slaughterhouse. Most of the murders were made public. They trumpeted them about, so we didn’t even need to rely on party sources in Germany. The Nazis called it the Röhm Putsch, as if their actions had been in response to a coup attempt. We saw it for the meticulously planned massacre it was and called it the Night of the Long Knives.

On 30 June, before dawn, Hitler had flown from Berlin to Munich. He’d called a meeting with Ernst Röhm, at Röhm’s hotel by the lake at Bad Wiessee. Röhm may have thought the Leader was coming, finally, to offer him control of the army. He and the leaders of the SA were sleeping off hangovers. Hitler, his chauffeur and some armed SS men ran through the corridors of the Hanselbauer Hotel, bursting open doors, screaming at the groggy men to wake up, get dressed, get out. When some were found in bed together Hitler pretended outrage and ordered them to be shot immediately in the hotel’s grounds, though he had long known of Röhm’s penchant for young recruits. Others were bundled into cars, taken to Stadelheim Prison in Munich and shot there in the yard.

When Hitler got to Röhm’s door he had the guards open it without knocking. He told Röhm to put his clothes on. Röhm mumbled a sleepy
‘Heil
,
mein Führer,’
and went downstairs and found himself an armchair in the lobby. He ordered coffee from a waiter. Then they put him into a car for Stadelheim too.

But this was broader than Hitler’s annihilation of a too-powerful paramilitary. He and Göring had already drawn up a List of Unwanted Persons. When the killing in Munich was done, Hitler phoned Göring in Berlin and gave the order for SS cells in towns all over Germany to open their sealed lists of names, their slices of the master list of the unwanted. Then the local Nazis got to work.

General Kurt von Schleicher, the former Chancellor, they shot in the study of his villa, along with his wife, who tried to protect him. They shot the leader of Catholic Action, Erich Klausener, at his desk in the Transport Ministry because he’d spoken out against Nazi violence. They shot Father Bernhard Stempfle, a priest who had helped Hitler write
Mein Kampf
while he was in prison and knew too much about him. They shot Karl Ernst, a Berlin SA leader who may have been involved in the burning of the Reichstag and needed silencing. By nightfall on 1 July more than two hundred associates, acolytes and committed Nazis, as well as independents, conservatives, military men and political leaders, had been slaughtered. Over a thousand more were under arrest.

But Berlin, we heard, celebrated. Hitler declared the next day, 2 July, to be a flag-waving holiday. In a speech to the nation he declared himself above the law.

It is a mystery to me how people can believe they are being made safer when events clearly show that it is no safer to be a friend than an enemy, and that you might be switched from one column to the other on a whim.

Some saw it, though, for what it was: the consolidation of a killer’s state. And within that state one, at least, was turned.

They have added something to the drip. It is collapsing time. I see things I have imagined so many times that they are fact to me. And other things I have known without seeing.

The problem with life is that you can only live it blindly, in one direction. Memory has its own ideas; it snatches elements of story from whenever, tries to put them together. It comes back at you from all angles, with all that you later knew, and it gives you the news.

I knew him once. His hair is receding and his glasses have no rims. His suit is fine and on his little finger he wears a signet ring with the family crest. His new office is large; heavy curtains in red and gold frame the windows in the Berlin Ministry of the Interior. The rich carpet muffles his footfalls as he walks the room. Erwin Thomas is in too much pain to sit. Yesterday they killed his dear friend and mentor Kurt von Schleicher. The thought of Kurt and Ada slumped over the desk at their villa in Neubabelsberg with bullets in their brains makes his jaw clench and his fists curl till his nails bite the palms. It is partly anger, and partly to hold his resolve.

The phone rings.

‘Yes,’ he says. ‘It is drafted.’ He listens to the receiver for a moment. ‘It is a single article.’ He is looking at the paper on his desk. ‘No sir, I do not foresee any difficulties there. Sir. Heil Hitler.’

He resumes pacing. His secretary knocks and comes in to remind him of a lunch appointment. He tells her to cancel.

‘Your ulcer?’ she asks.

‘That will do.’ She is a fine girl.

He picks up the phone again and puts it down. On his desk lies the law he has drafted, at Göring’s personal request, to justify the killings this week. Though it is but a single article, it is enough to undo all his faith and training. He reads it once more, still standing.

3 July 1934

Law Regarding Measures of State Self-Defence

The measures taken to put down the seditious and treasonous attacks of 30 June and 1 and 2 July 1934 are hereby declared lawful as ones of state self-defence.

Thomas knows there is no such thing as state self-defence. There is only political murder. But he did what he was told. Again.

He sits and takes fresh letterhead from the desk drawer. He is a man in command of language, argument. He is one of the best educated, he is the epitome of culture and loyalty. Look where that has got him. He picks up a fountain pen. Puts it down. Taps a cigarette on his silver case and lights it.

And then it comes to him: the one thing she will recognise. He starts to write. The note is very short. He seals it in an envelope which he does not address, slides it inside his breast pocket. He collects his coat and hat from the stand near the door, shoots his cuffs without thinking and walks into the July heat of Wilhelmstrasse, in the direction of the Foreign Office.

The flat at Great Ormond Street had come to seem like a place besieged, by phone calls and mail and eyes under hat brims in the street. We tried not to think about it too much; we would have gone mad if we had.

I found myself more and more often at the docks. The boats came in and went out to all the untouched places of the world: to Monrovia and Singapore and Fremantle. Through Mr Allworth I became friendly with a manager, Mr Brent, who let me go wherever I wanted, as long as I looked out for myself. I was making a series of prints about the work in the dry dock, starting with the
Muscatine
, a huge, anvil-bellied ship, magnificent as a building. It rested on wooden blocks, each the size of an automobile. At the front its anchor chain spewed down, hundreds of metres long, and lay coiled on the ground as if it were the intestine of a majestic beast. Men in overalls and caps checked the links, pecking over them like tiny, cleansing birds.

One morning a worker came to tell me that a lady was waiting for me in the site office. When I got there Dora stood up, pale as if she’d been punched.

‘Is there somewhere we can go?’ she asked. I took her to my favourite teashop nearby.

A letter had come this morning, after I’d left the flat. She passed it to me across the table. It wasn’t in a plain envelope, like the others. This one had the crest of the Reich Foreign Office on it.

‘Open it,’ she said. Inside was another envelope, with ‘Ministry of the Interior’ embossed on the left-hand side.

‘The—’

‘Just read it,’ she snapped.

The note was very short, handwritten, unsigned.
It is finished, this being a fig leaf over power. Please call First Secretary Jaeger at Whitehall
7230.

Fear was like static in my brain. I knew the expression ‘fig leaf over power’ from my childhood but I couldn’t make sense of the note.

Dora slid her forearms across the table and took the letter back. She folded it and slipped it into her bag between other documents. I waited for her to speak. When she did, her voice had the clipped, businesslike tone it got when she was afraid.

‘Is this what Helmut got? An invitation to call the German embassy?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘He had his papers cancelled by the Home Office here–it was all done through the English. After that he had to report to the German embassy, because they said he’d be illegally on British soil.’

‘Right. Right.’ Dora breathed in. Chewed her cheek under her hand. She looked around. People were eating soup, or sandwiches cut in perfect triangles, drinking tea with their meal.

‘It might be a trap,’ I said. The idea of something happening to Dora was a worse terror than something happening to me. My mind raced. What could they possibly want with an exiled opposition journalist other than to do something harmful? They were singling her out. Unless it had to do with her mother back in Berlin–oh God, what could they be doing to Else? We knew other refugees whose family members had been taken hostage and put into camps in order to force home those who’d left.

‘Yes,’ she said. She started to pick and tear at the ragged skin around her thumbnail with her index finger, then put it to her teeth. She put her hand down crossly.

‘You might not come out,’ I continued despite myself, my voice high with the effort not to cause a scene. ‘They might send you—’

She reached for my hands. ‘Shhh. I’m not going in there. We can agree on it, second it and minute it.’ She forced a smile. Her fear seemed to have transferred itself onto me; being the comforter made her stronger again. I blew my nose. She let go of me and started spinning the sugar bowl around between her hands. ‘It’s just that…’ She looked over my shoulder. The waitress had appeared. We ordered ham sandwiches and tea and the girl cleared the table.

‘It’s just that what?’ I asked as the waitress left.

‘I know who the letter is from,’ Dora said. She put the sugar bowl back.

‘Who?’

She didn’t answer me, but spoke as if to herself. ‘Which is not to say it isn’t still a trap.’ She wouldn’t be drawn further.

Dora didn’t burn the letter, but she didn’t respond to it either.

Two weeks later another one came, in the same two envelopes. This time it was an offer to meet in a public place of her choice.

She called the embassy number and said she’d come in.

I went with her. The embassy was in St James’s, a grand corner building on Carlton House Terrace. Inside, long corridors led off an atrium. Dora and I sat on a carved wooden bench. I had come because she wanted me to, because we both thought–completely irrationally–that if they were going to make her disappear it might be harder with two of us.

The assistant who came to get Dora wore an enamel swastika brooch on her lapel. The woman ignored me.

‘Shall I wait here then?’ I asked her.

‘If you like,’ the woman said to the space above my head.

‘How long will they be?’

‘Impossible to say.’

I started to choke, to battle for air. Dora leaned into my ear as she stood up. ‘Don’t let them see it,’ she whispered.

Waiting makes your mind roll forward, uncontrolling all the waking dreams. I tried to focus on small things: the lion’s paw leg of the bench opposite, the zigzag pattern of the floor tiles, the heavy frosted lights hanging from chains at intervals along the ceiling. I watched the doors in the corridor open and shut, releasing sometimes the bleat of a phone, sometimes a person. Secretaries in neat suits and stockings walked past me, their hair coiffed and mouths painted, interchangeable assistants. They looked capable of reducing anything to an administrative decision, a memo in sub-numbered paragraphs. I felt dishevelled, scrappy, undeserving of a place in this lacquered, decided world, even though I’d taken some care this morning: my one skirt suit, spare underwear in my bag. I couldn’t have told you if I’d dressed and packed for detention or to ward it off.

After a time I ceased to think. I counted doors. I blurred my eyes in and out of focus.
She will come back to me
. Part hope and part anxiety, this dumb lay prayer would keep her safe.
She will come back to me
.

One of the doors further down the corridor opened. It was a man. Disappointed, I kept watching so as to take my mind with him, step by lanky step away from here. He passed a secretary, who nodded at him familiarly. He was walking towards the other end of the corridor where there was a window, and as his knees bent a diamond of light formed and unformed between them. A clench in my stomach: I knew that walk. I knew from its long-legged laxness it was Hans.

I believe I would have let him go.

In front of him another door opened. Dora came out.

They stood at twenty paces from one another, a moment of recognition. And then I was up, running to them. Hans turned to watch me come, the third wheel spinning.

‘What are you doing here?’ Dora was asking as I reached them.

‘Dora,’ he said, calmly. He was in his good suit. ‘Fancy seeing you here.’ He turned to me. ‘Ruthie.’ He kissed me ceremonially on the cheek then drew a fine paisley-print handkerchief from his pocket. He dabbed his forehead. ‘I am here,’ he said in a low voice, ‘to try to help Bertie. With a passport.’ He smiled, a little sheepishly, I thought. ‘Wasn’t going to tell you till it worked.’ Then he tilted his chin at Dora. ‘Though I might ask you the same question.’ The smile was still there, but his eyes were steady, unflickering.

It was the only time I ever saw her pause for an answer, look unconvinced of herself. She cleared her throat.

‘Same,’ she said. ‘Me too.’

After we got home Hans went out to the shops for beer and chips. Dora couldn’t stop smiling, couldn’t sit down. She told me she now had a source from very high up–a legal adviser to Göring, no less. It was a chink in the great machine; it was
unbelievable
. She couldn’t tell me who it was, of course, that would endanger him. And me as well, if They thought I knew.