All That I Am (39 page)

It was beyond bearing. I rose again. I could feel the room with me this time. ‘What kind of love is that?’ I shouted. I had nothing to lose–thrown out or sitting here, I’d be silenced either way. I held out my hands, my voice not quite under control. ‘Dora was in
high
spirits! She was doing her life’s work! She was uncovering the Hitlerite activities here!’

The coroner nodded at the guards again. I had seconds. I was pointing at Wolf now. ‘Why didn’t he call for help? Why didn’t he try to find them as I did? Because…’ I knew I would manage to say it now, so I slowed down for effect, ‘he knew they were already dead!’

I kept my eyes on Wolf as I felt them take me under the arms, one each, and pull me into the aisle. I turned my neck to look for Ruth. It will all depend on you now, I wanted her to know, it’s all up to you.

RUTH

A trolley with someone on it goes past in the corridor, but by the time I look up I see only the feet sticking out of the sheet.

I can’t remember how they took them out of the flat.

The next time I saw Toller was at the inquest. His feet lifted a little off the ground as they took him down the aisle, his head swivelled around to find me. I knew what he wanted.

And I would do it. I had practised what I was going to say for the Swiss investigator and I hadn’t had my chance to say it. I had held back with the police because I did not want them to get to the cupboard before I cleared it. On the Saturday I’d given all the documents that could implicate anyone here, or in Germany, to Otto Lehmann-Russbüldt. Now I could say everything. I did not care if they sent me back. I would tell this court, the press, the world, of Germany’s preparations for war. I would tell them about the death threats and the flat being ransacked. I would tell them Dora was killed because they wanted to silence her. I left my bag on the bench.

As I lowered my hand from taking the oath I saw only a sea of skin and hair and eyes. I could not put the features together. The room swayed a little, in a blur of unknown flesh.

‘Could you state your relationship to the deceased, please, Dr Wesemann?’

‘I was Dora’s cousin, sir. Our fathers are brothers. Mathilde I knew as an acquaintance. From Berlin.’

‘And you lived at 12 Great Ormond Street, Bloomsbury?’

‘Yes, sir. Though I had gone temporarily to France. I was just coming back when—’

‘We will come to that. Can you tell the court why you were in France, Dr Wesemann?’

‘I…’ I breathed again to start properly. ‘My husband, sir. He had gone and I–I needed a change. It was temporary.’

‘I see.’

‘My husband was working for them, for the German government, and he, I didn’t see it—’

The coroner’s voice was suddenly authoritative. ‘I feel I must make it clear at the outset, Dr Wesemann, that we cannot have politics introduced into this court.’

My blood ran cold. It was all about politics–the life, and the death.

‘Not matters concerning another sovereign power, and especially ones that may be
sub judice
between other nations at this moment. I would ask you therefore to confine your contribution to the matter at hand, that is to say, to the deaths of Dr Fabian and Mrs Wurm in the flat at Great Ormond Street.’ He paused briefly, examining me over his spectacles. ‘I would like to start, actually,’ he continued, ‘with the matter of the locked room. Were there locks on the internal doors when you and your husband took the flat?’

‘No, sir. We had them put on. We were broken into and–and nothing was taken. They were looking for documents we had from Germany, documents which proved Hitler’s plans for—’

‘Dr Wesemann,’ his tone was icy, ‘I say again: I will not have politics introduced into my court. And I do not need to warn you of the consequences for refugees in this country who continue to engage in the political agitations, whatever those may be, of their home country.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said automatically.

But he had picked the wrong threat for me. And then I glimpsed a face in the crowd that I could put together: Fenner! About halfway down the aisle, on the end. Fenner had told the newspapers this week that Dora was ‘the bravest person’ he had known. I had no other worth than to keep speaking here. There would be no other time. I cleared my throat.

‘It is that very fear, sir, of being sent back that motivated my husband to work for them, to turn over Berthold Jacob and to betray Dora as his outlet—’

The coroner banged a gavel on his desk and the room was shocked. His voice came out with a studied calm. ‘I have warned you, Dr Wesemann, that in this country we do not permit the courts to become fora for unsubstantiated political innuendo. I am asking you about the locked room. Specifically. And I would be grateful if you would confine your answer to this matter alone. Now, can you tell me, if you would, who else had a key, or keys, to the flat?’

This is a question I wanted. ‘I had keys. Dora and Mathilde of course. And Professor Wolf.’

There were cries of outrage in the room. The associate banged his own gavel.

‘Thank you, Dr Wesemann,’ the coroner said when the noise subsided. ‘You may stand down now.’

But I had not finished. I held on to the edge of the stand. ‘But Your Honour, we had death threats before this happened! Letters and phone calls—’

‘Now, Dr Wesemann.’ His tone was curt, as to a misbehaving child. ‘Thank you.’

The orderlies or watchmen or whatever they were moved towards me. I stood down before they could complete my humiliation.

Wolf was recalled. He flatly denied having keys to the flat.

It was 1.15 p.m. when the coroner summed up: two lives were worth precisely an hour and forty minutes of his time. He told the jury that Dora’s shorthand note–‘if she wrote the note, and if it was correctly translated’–indicated that she had committed suicide because of ‘unrequited love’. The fact that the door to the room was locked from the inside–a room on the top level of the building, inaccessible by any other means–was one that the jury needed to take into account in their deliberations. He said the situation in the case of Mathilde was ‘far less clear’, because it was unlikely a woman of her age and character would be dominated by her younger flatmate. It was possible, though, that Mathilde was suffering ‘the imbalance of mind known as depression’, to which many refugees were vulnerable in this country. He said that Dr Fabian may have administered the poison to Mrs Wurm before drinking it herself, though ‘of course this is a matter of fact for you to decide’.

The decision took twenty minutes. The foreman came back in and we rose.

‘We find that in both cases,’ the man read, ‘the deceased committed suicide whilst of unsound mind, by means of self-administered narcotic poisoning.’

The room was still. Then there were noises, but no uproar. The people were infected by the terror of what had happened to Dora and Mathilde, a terror magnified by what had just taken place in this room: there was no earthly authority to turn to, no one who would believe them and keep them safe.

The coroner left through a side door, the jury through one on the opposite wall. I remained seated as the room emptied. The world was closing over her. She wouldn’t leave a trace.

TOLLER

I stood outside the court smoking, walking up and down like a schoolboy on detention. I watched as they all spilled out onto the steps. The mood was worse than at a funeral, fear being more awful than sadness. Ruth didn’t come out.

I went in. The room was empty. Had they taken her away? And then I noticed the curve of a back, just visible in the front row. Bent over and rocking. When I reached her I saw that her mouth was open in a silent cry. She registered me.

‘I tried…’

I helped her up. The funeral was in one hour, at three o’clock. We had to catch the underground, then a bus out to the Jewish cemetery at East Ham.

They were plain wooden boxes, each covered in dark cloth. I’d say there were a dozen of us all told, gathered up the front of the synagogue. The service was short. Ruth sat sunk into a pew, sobbing. When I hoisted one corner of Dora’s coffin onto my shoulder it was horribly light. The rabbi led the way. The sky was low, rain falling on my face. Two fresh pits had been dug next to one another at the back of the cemetery.

‘Thou shalt not be afraid of the terror by night nor of the arrow that flies by day,’ the rabbi intoned. Ruth swayed beneath an umbrella but held herself upright. ‘He shall cover thee with His feathers and under His wings shalt thou take refuge.’

Fenner, Lord Marley and I took up shovels as they lowered the coffins. It is the turning away, the walking off to tea, that is the hardest part.

Outside the iron gates journalists had gathered, from
News Chronicle
,
Daily Express
,
News of the World
and
Jewish Daily Post
. I mounted the running-board of the hearse. Someone held an umbrella over me and I began.

‘We have buried here today a brave woman,’ I said. ‘She died fighting for us all–for the people of Germany who suffer under the tyrant, and for the peoples of Europe against whom he is determined to go to war.’ I was speaking over a huddle of black umbrellas. ‘I, personally, owe Dora a huge debt of gratitude…’

The umbrellas parted. Between their black-boned segments, something bent and white was pushing. I kept talking.

‘It was Dora Fabian who smuggled out of Germany, at risk of her life, my manuscripts…’ My mouth kept moving but Ruth had all my attention. ‘And I tell you today, categorically, that there can be no connection between this alleged note to Professor Wolf and her death…’

Ruth had taken off her jacket and dropped her bag; her white shirt was stuck to her torso and her red skirt stained dark with streaks of water. She walked to the cemetery gates. When she reached them I watched her face into the sheeting rain, turning each way down the street. She could not know the area, which direction to take. She walked halfway across the street, stopping at the white lines in the middle. Took off her shoes. The rain was pelting now, the sky had broken its moorings. She started running. Cars had their lights on, honked at the racing woman to get off the road. Curtains in houses parted to see: a picture of lopsided grief, a bull in the ring trying to outrun its pain.

RUTH

The funeral does not bear remembering.

Afterwards Toller cruised the streets in a cab with my handbag and shoes. When he found me, he took me back to Great Ormond Street. We sat on the edge of her bed together; there was nowhere else to be. I hadn’t touched it. The pillows still had their hollows in them. We stared out the window, me soaked and him holding my bag. Grief was making of us a club of two.

‘You’ll be all right?’ he asked, after a time.

He was asking this of himself, as much as of me. Whatever strength he’d found to address the journalists had deserted him. He started to weep. Then he turned and put a hand to the pillow where her head had been, and moved as if to place his cheek in the indentation. Something in me snapped.

‘You should go home. To Christiane.’

I sank into her bed where she had been. I planned it there.

I don’t remember telling anyone what I was going to do, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t let it slip. I was heedless, desperate.

Three weeks after the funeral I went to visit my parents in Poland. When she saw me my mother said, ‘You are not in your right mind.’ She assumed it was grief. I had no faith that my mind had been right before at all.

My plan was to go back into the Reich, up to Berlin. I would retrieve Toller’s other suitcase from the garden shed on Bornholmer Strasse. No one else knew where it was, apart from Uncle Erwin, and he would never risk sending it directly to Toller. It seemed to be the one part of Dora’s work I might be competent to finish. While I was doing it I could maintain my connection to her, to our common project. And if they got me, I deserved it.

I took with me
The Other Germany
leaflets we’d printed. One hundred and fifty of them, on tissue paper pressed flat against my stomach, crossways under my navel. I borrowed the Polish passport of a school friend who resembled me and got the tram to the station.

They were waiting for me there. Two Gestapo agents, and a woman to do the body search. She asked me to undress and took the leaflets. I suppose they’d been watching me. They put me on the same train to Berlin I had a ticket for, keeping guard outside the compartment door. That arrest has provided me with the one heroic act I have retold my whole life, and in which I cannot, of course, believe. Having failed to do it myself, I was now getting Them to do the punishing for me.

In a cellar at Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse they splayed me like a starfish on the wall and shot around me clockwise, the bullets spitting plaster between my legs and hands and onto my hair. They wore earmuffs, as for target practice. The interrogator wanted information about our party meetings in London; he wanted to know Dora’s source for the documents from Göring’s office. After the last shot he said, ‘The next one goes into you.’ When I turned my head to look at him he saw that I did not care, so he would not give me the satisfaction.

My father hired the best Nazi lawyer he could find. The judges–twelve of them, no less–were all in Nazi uniforms, but when Father came into the courtroom, an old Jew with a war injury and his medals jangling on his chest, they stood to honour him. At that early stage, they still loved the war more than they hated the Jews. The prosecution wanted to put me away for twelve years. If that had happened I would have been killed in the camps like all the others. But money will buy you many things. I only got five.

I spent most of them in solitary. Alone in my cell I was required to make 144 fake chrysanthemums every day, scraping a metal implement over wax paper to curl each petal. My fists cramped in pain. Such idiotic work, making decorations for the salons of the Berlin bourgeoisie, that if the other prisoners didn’t have political ideas when they came in I thought they’d develop them quick enough. My own thoughts turned mostly in a small personal circle, around all I did not see, and all I did not say. They turned around Hans and Bertie and Dora and me.