The Human Pool (14 page)

I experienced what I can only describe as a gallows-lurch, followed by a sensation of falling, as if every foundation I had known had been kicked from under me. The banging on the door became the banging of my heart. I knew what I was accused of. Sol had his case all worked out.

‘It was a whole fucking operation,' Sol said. ‘They weren't the only ones.' He looked at me with hatred. ‘You and your friend Willi sold them all out. You let the poor bastards buy their way out for a fortune, then pocketed their money.'

It wasn't true, I protested. Even the sister was looking at me queerly. Absurdly, I wondered how we were going to get back to Zurich. The idea of us travelling in the same car was unthinkable. It crossed my mind again that Sol had been involved in Karl-Heinz's death. He had the motive, and he probably wanted me gone, too.

Jean-Pierre stared at the sister, the surviving witness to his family's fate, then slipped from the room. This caused an immediate hubbub outside, marked by a voice of ponderous authority.

Half a dozen nuns flapped around two uniformed policemen. The older one looked resentful and underpromoted, a slow-moving, ruddy-faced man with a large head. The other one was barely eighteen. The incident was typical of the Swiss: a minor infraction followed by a full recital of the rule book. The mother superior chipped in, the voice of righteousness. Jean-Pierre ignored her. The officials who had sent his family back to the Gestapo were probably not so different.

Jean-Pierre walked away without a word. The difference this time was that he could, however strong the tug of the past. The police called after him. They were so ponderous that even the mother superior's patience was tested. Jean-Pierre's disregard of their authority had unsettled them, and they conferred uneasily.

A sense of throwback cloaked everything: nothing had changed in sixty years, since Jean-Pierre had last been there. Which was when I realised what he intended. I had been so dumbfounded by Sol's accusation that I had failed to read Jean-Pierre. I asked the mother superior which way he would have gone. I had to ask twice. I told her to keep the policemen there, unless she wanted another death on her hands.

The stairs were steep. I was breathless well before the top. Sol, following, kept having to stop. I doubted my power to reverse destiny.

Jean-Pierre was sitting in the open window, the last of the evening sun behind him. It was hard to make his features out. He seemed calm as he surveyed the room which he had last seen as an eight year old. My arrival barely registered. He was talking to the dead as if they were there with him. If I could get close enough, I decided, he would let me lead him away.

Sun in a dusty room, no furniture, the feeling of a space that had been empty a long time, the distance between us only a few feet and narrowing. I grew confident. There was a serenity to him. He looked at me now with recognition. He appeared reconciled, with none of his earlier agitation.

The room fell into shadow. It was like throwing a switch. The space between us became insurmountable again; the trample of boots on the stairs, the mother superior having failed or refused to exercise her authority. Bad timing. The convent clock chimed the hour, its vibration shaking the room. Jean-Pierre looked at me with resignation and irony. In the echo of the last chime he whispered ‘Goodbye,' and leaned back like he was tilting a chair. His image seemed to remain in the window afterwards, and the air was full of the near-silent rush of falling matter, followed by the sound of his impact. Jean-Pierre died without a shout or a scream, his exit a silent accusation to the authorities who came stumbling into the room. The mother superior crossed herself, another anachronism in a day of too many.

PORRENTRUY

I FELT RATHER THAN SAW
Jean-Pierre's death. I had gone outside and turned too late, thinking at first that it was Hoover, falling under the weight of accusation.

The bureaucratic aftermath took hours. We were questioned at the convent, then at the police station. The police were boringly thorough. They seemed to regard us as accessories to an enormous inconvenience, and it was their job to inconvenience us in return.

Much time was spent on who was responsible for the body, given the absence of next-of-kin. Hoover suggested that the town should pay for the funeral as it had been indirectly responsible for Jean-Pierre's death. At that point we ran up against Swiss law. The police endorsed the position of their predecessors. The family had entered the country illegally in 1942, and what happened consequently was nothing to do with the citizens of Porrentruy.

 

We drove away in silence, apart from Hoover saying to Sol, ‘I hope you're pleased with what you did.'

I wondered whether Jean-Pierre had lived his entire life in anticipation of its ending. The clarity of his death left everything else feeling approximate and muddled, like running blindfold. I didn't want to live with Hoover's guilt. I told him I would drop him off wherever he wanted and then I was going back to London.

He asked if I believed him. Sol strained for my answer. I told him he was maybe a better liar than the ones I was used to dealing with.

Hoover said, ‘I know my innocence. I'm less sure about Karl-Heinz's. Sol believes Karl-Heinz was in on Willi's scheme. Say Willi was transferring these people's assets into Switzerland, maybe Jaretski and the DSK currency-control mob were in on it, too. But that doesn't sound like Karl-Heinz to me. Karl-Heinz was a businessman, a negotiator, he worked the system. I would be very surprised if he was a con man. Money was easily available to men like him in the war, and on top of that he was a realist. It doesn't make sense to go to all that trouble—and risk—only to have them sent back.'

Sol confirmed that Jaretski had been taking a cut and turning a blind eye to the smuggling operation in exchange for his ten percent.

Hoover said, ‘What interests me is where Sol fits in all this. Sol knew Willi. Sol was obligated to him. So what did Sol do after Willi brought him to Switzerland?'

Sol was sweating hard in spite of the cool night. I could smell the funk coming off him.

I was aware of the empty seat. Hoover caught my eye in the mirror. ‘Going back there killed him,' he said. ‘The past reached out and took him. He had a ticket home.'

Sol finally spoke up, saying it was the last thing he had expected. They had talked a lot about a return to Porrentruy, he said. Jean-Pierre himself had referred to it as ‘an exorcism'.

Hoover asked Sol bluntly, ‘And where were you the day Willi stood under the chestnut tree and watched Jean-Pierre's family being taken away?'

The car was filled by Sol's embarrassed and almost intolerable silence. Then, in a halting voice, he told us instead about how he had worked for Willi Schmidt after his delivery to Switzerland. He had found himself increasingly beholden. Willi fixed his papers. Freedom went to Sol's head, and he started gambling heavily. Willi paid his losses. Sol became bound and trapped by his gratitude to Willi for liberating him. Willi, playing on Sol's obligation, burdened him with his own knowledge. He transferred his conscience onto Sol. In time Sol became the trusty (and trusted) Jew, the friendly face that welcomed the escapees, helping them settle in, sorting out financial matters that needed bringing up to date, prior to betrayal.

Hoover asked Sol how he had felt being party to that. Sol said that the situation was easier to live with than it sounded. One of the psychological points about any persecution was that it put the emphasis on survival, and that became the single rule of existence. ‘I learned to think of myself as a unit in the plus rather than the deficit column. No more, no less.'

He had made his own devil's pact in persuading Willi Schmidt to let some escaping Jews go free, on the grounds that it was good politics. Willi had agreed to a figure of thirty percent—based on Judas's thirty pieces of silver—so long as Sol decided who should live or die. It was the same tactic the Nazis had used, using Jews to police Jews. Diligent Sol had stuck to his word and kept to Willi's percentages. And now he faced his postexistential crisis, the guilt he felt at not feeling more guilt.

Hoover asked, ‘Did you send the book and the package I was supposed to think was a bomb?'

Sol nodded. Hoover asked him why. Sol said, ‘I wanted you to share the punishment.'

‘Not guilty,' said Hoover.

‘That's not what Willi said.'

‘That's bullshit,' said Hoover, but he sounded unsure.

‘Willi talked about you a lot,' said Sol.

‘You have the advantage there. He never mentioned you to me.'

They sank back into their own thoughts. Hoover slept, or pretended to, and Sol stared at the road. I asked Sol about the book he had sent Hoover, and the obituary. He had wanted to prick Hoover's and Karl-Heinz's consciences, he said. He held them accountable. He was hoping to shame Karl-Heinz into endorsing Frau Schmidt's claim, so they could access Willi's account and share whatever was in it with the surviving relatives of Willi's victims. As for finding out Hoover's whereabouts, he had his son Abe to thank. Abe was a computer whiz: Hoover's CIA file had been cross-referenced from his original name, his credit card transactions had alerted them to his trip to Europe, and his travel agent's files had contained dates of travel, destination, and hotel.

‘Him turning up is a bonus', said Sol. ‘Now he can authenticate Frau Schmidt's claim and do a little to clear his conscience.'

He asked to be dropped at a taxi rank we passed in the outskirts of Zurich. We parted without a word.

It was too early to call anyone, so Hoover and I ended up killing time in an all-night workman's café. We had nothing to say. I checked the times of the flights to London from a pay phone, then waited for Hoover to make his call, and drove him up to an address in an expensive residential area. The house belonged to Betty Monroe, he said, and he would be staying there awhile. I helped him with his bags. Hoover stumbled from tiredness. A tall woman was waiting. Hoover introduced her as Beate von Heimendorf, Betty Monroe's daughter. We shook hands. She granted me an appraising stare. Hoover and I barely said goodbye. I didn't turn back as I walked away. I didn't expect to see him again.

ZURICH

MY LIFE HAS ALWAYS BEEN BOURGEOIS,
Swiss, and uneventful, circumspect in a word. My work is in art restoration, heading a distinguished team of professional restorers. My focus and attention go into the job. In the formal world in which I move, it is easy to keep people at a distance. Now I do less physical restoration than committee work, negotiating with museums and fitting their requirements to our busy schedule. I have come to regard restoration in a metaphysical, even spiritual, light.

I live ordered days and dress well, and tend to my sick mother as much as possible. I have learned not to think of myself as either unhappy or in hiding. I have led a life of minimum risk. Strange then, to my mind, to be drawn to Hoover, a man so much older than me, who I decided upon first seeing had been another of Mother's lovers.

His arrival also caused some anxiety as it reminded me that I had not been organising Mother's papers as promised. Such tardiness was uncharacteristic of me. Her files were messy and disorganised, and their jumble offended, yet I had done nothing to put them in order.

Hoover's return brings with it a double edge. He seems a broken man, and it is the least I can do to look after him, for Mother's sake, if nothing else. But I fear that my initial deception will return to haunt me. After his request at our first meeting for material on Willi Schmidt, politeness demanded I give him something to take away, so I passed on Mother's account of his recruitment. It made it easier for me to lie about the rest of her papers being missing.

ZURICH

I WORK IN BETTY MONROE'S
old study on the first floor of the house. If I stand at the window I can see the lake. Karl-Heinz's papers are spread all around like a snowfall on the old landscape of Betty's life. There are framed black-and-white photographs everywhere, including one of Betty Monroe and Dulles, taken in Dulles's garden in Herrengasse. Others, similar (always the same frame maker), show her in smart social evening groupings, surrounded by extra-attentive men, who look as though they might be famous, or at least highly regarded. The men appear aware only of Betty, while her gaze serves the camera, willing it to make her photogenic, which it always does. Betty was one of those fortunate women who was well nailed by time's shutter and appeared absolutely sure of the moment. Dulles, by contrast, looks shifty next to her. A portrait of two consciences—one as clear as a bell, the other muddied—yet in person Dulles gave no sign of a troubled interior.

I spend days making lists. Every meeting I can remember with Willi, Dulles, and Karl-Heinz, and Betty, too, although we met less than half a dozen times, and only twice in this house. I am aware of these lists serving two purposes. They act as a reminder and a distraction, a form of surface order only. Being in the house, right in Betty's room, I feel as if I am haunting a place where I don't belong. I feel like an interloper. I suspect there are traces of Betty's past still in this house which would throw light on my own life.

Her bookshelves testify to a well-read woman. Signed copies of Jung, even one by Freud, and personally inscribed dedications from Rosamond Lehmann, Max Frisch, and Elizabeth Bowen, as well as an early Nabokov that Beate didn't know about, which adds credence to their tennis partnership. I draw solace from the presence of these books, from their order and their finished state, compared with my own messy work-in-progress which refuses to obey the rules of narrative organisation. There is a copy of Fitzgerald's
The Crack-Up
(first edition, uninscribed). I am aware of its relevance, know, too, that I have undergone an acute if short-lived breakdown in the aftermath of the events at Porrentruy. They have thrown me back into the past—a past I have no wish to confront—as surely as they pitched Jean-Pierre to his death. As he fell, part of me thought that it should have been me, and more than once I have found myself ambushed by the idea of ending it, too. Fitzgerald's lists were a symptom of his crack-up, and so are mine, no doubt. Part of my depression relates to negligence of my current illness, whatever that is. Advanced hypochondria becomes another form of paranoia.

In the furrow of my depression I am aware of how I lagged behind men like Willi and Karl-Heinz, whose ruthless aspiration I could never match, however hard I tried. Karl-Heinz with his shirts taken from Gatsby's wardrobe, Willi the more oblique with his calibrated manners and American sense of timing, born of his love of jazz.

Equations in death. Gatsby dead in his pool after being shot; Karl-Heinz's death by shooting, a gangster's death for the gangster he really was, and Willi's death by water—symbolic or real?
We shall see,
I write, knowing that I have no wish to see. I wish to think of Willi only as belonging to a dark past.

I must be aware, too, of misreading my mental symptoms, just as, when Fitzgerald thought he was recuperating, he cracked. I cautiously admit that I have started to feel better. I feel more cheerful in this house than I did in Naomi's, where I was also a houseguest rooting around in the past—a dry run, I suspect, for the real thing. Looking forward to Beate's evening arrival gives me energy for the struggle. Days feel as though they are starting to knit. At the risk of sounding corny, Beate's feminine presence gives me reason to live. By that I mean both her general womanhood and what is specific to her. I draw reassurance from her simplest gestures. Her evident self-control has, with years of practise, translated into an effortless poise. A different kind of ambush: the heart-stopping beauty of the everyday, the pleasure of watching someone perform mundane tasks well, her insistence on opening the wine and her grimace as she pulls the cork, followed by a small smile of pleasure as it comes free. There is a frisson between us. I nurse that feeling during the day when I plunge back into the icy waters of the past. I use this crass metaphor deliberately. The effort of will that it takes to go back reminds me every time of the churning river that swept Willi away. As for Beate, if one subscribes to Fitzgerald's theory that life has a variable offensive—and it is difficult not to—then I read into my pleasure in her an ebbing of my grief for Mary, just as everything else falls apart.

Beate's coming each evening affords me a lifeline out of the past, she the light towards which I move. At worst I feel literally as though I might drown. I tell Beate some of this. I sense compassion beneath her formal reserve, a passion also, inherited from her mother, but controlled.

She willingly and cheerfully cooks my supper and stays chatting long into the night. I often tell her I am surprised that she has nothing better to do, meaning that she should not feel obliged to me. Sometimes the remark produces a fleeting sadness, as though this were true and she has shut herself away too long. Other times it seems as though she is waiting for me to ask her to stay, not yet with me but in this house where she appears so ill at ease. Most evenings I light a fire to ward off the summer chill, with memories of Dulles doing the same, on hands and knees, carefully arranging the kindling. Beate and I eat in Betty's study and stay there afterwards, as if leaving the room would break some kind of spell.

Outside, the soft greens of June and one rainy day after another keep me indoors, hard at work on my writing. The weather front is similar to the one that famously kept Byron and the Shelleys confined during that summer of Frankenstein. Given such a prompt, I am bound to ask: What monster might I be creating?

 

I am bound, too, to examine Willi as I knew him then. I find myself snapping at his heels for signs of what I know now, and still I want to give him the benefit of the doubt. Frau Schmidt's act was a deception, so why not Sol's, and to what extent could an eight-year-old boy be taken for a reliable witness? I test Willi in my memory, a kaleidoscope of images revisited for signs of the hairline crack of betrayal, and find none. I had always believed that Budapest and the terrible events of 1944 were what turned him. Now, if Sol's version is true, he was deep into his seam of corruption two years earlier. Was I?

Chronology is not my strong point. Besides, with age, linear progression becomes somewhat elastic, and its recollection prone to fancy. What's more, I kept no diary and worked to short-term deadlines, which encouraged an edited sense of memory. In our line of work one preferred to forget.

 

Dulles's garden was in full summer bloom that velvet evening when we first met. I remember that detail but little of the meeting that followed, apart from us standing on the terrace, Dulles's pipe smoke repelling the midges, which then gathered around me. Sol attributed my Red Cross appointment to deep scheming, when what I recall was Dulles nudging me in its direction, apparently without ulterior motive, saying that it was useful work and full-time. My impression was that I was being given the brush-off. Jaretski's arrest had compromised me for Willi's runs. Betty Monroe appeared to have dropped me. With Dulles I sensed that I was tainted by Karl-Heinz's insistence that I deliver his message personally. Whatever I had been doing since arriving in Switzerland I thought of in terms of failure. So when the Red Cross approached me, I persuaded myself it was coincidence. This was, I see now, part of a necessary process: in the controlled biography of the double life, it was the shadow that got forgotten. I packed my bag and left for Geneva. Willi said that he hoped I appreciated scenery because there wasn't anything else.

 

Geneva in wartime, empty and dreary as a succession of Sundays. The slow rhythm of diligence. There was plenty of work, but the town was always Sunday-dull, and the Swiss, fearful of German invasion, were more than usually well behaved. Willi Schmidt avoided Geneva where there was little carousing to be had.

The Swiss made up for lack of wartime involvement by forming committees. The Red Cross administration was well intended but cautious, and much given to in-fighting. Co-ordinating committees were created for committees that would not otherwise talk to each other, and behind their founding lay a history of exhausting meetings. I was appointed liaison officer, which involved driving bureaucrats between the Central Prisoner-of-War Agency, the International Committee of the Red Cross, and a new committee intended to improve relations between the Red Cross and the League of Nations. This new committee was responsible for organising relief to occupied countries, particularly civilians.

One flurry of activity had me requisitioned (in writing) to yet another co-ordinating committee responsible for 60,000 pairs of spectacles collected by the Swiss Women's Civilian Service—which was very precise about the amount—to be forwarded to prisoners-of-war who were complaining of worsening eyesight as a result of a poor diet. In warehouses I saw the results of these charity drives: dozens of table tennis tables, rooms full of musical instruments—banjos and flutes, mostly—and a stack of Polish Bibles. Three years later their equivalent was stockpiled in the vaults of the Frankfurt Reichsbank. Both left me wondering at the point of human activity.

Nothing was black and white. Nothing separated out the way they said it did later. I used to watch in wonder whenever my wife, Mary, separated the white from the yolk of an egg. It reminded me of men like Karl-Heinz, Dulles, and Willi, who seemed to be able to do the same with real events.

I suspect that the job I was doing was not dissimilar to what went on in large office departments all over Germany with the confiscation and redistribution of Jewish assets, which would have amounted to equally routine office and committee work, with everything ratified in triplicate. Paperwork in Geneva, and the carbons required, was a business in itself, sometimes the only one, it seemed. Whole sections were needed to organise its clerical production, distribution, and filing. The Swiss were minute mad. An abiding memory, the sound of multiple typewriters at work, room upon room of female secretaries.

 

I remember a considerable lapse of time between meeting Dulles and moving to Geneva for the Red Cross, yet it must have happened faster, because by the time Jean-Pierre's family was taken away, I was travelling between Geneva and Zurich, and can date that by Willi's birthday party, which was two days after the feast of the Assumption, the day of Jean-Pierre's deportation. On that memorable night of 17 August 1942 Willi showed no signs of being anything other than a man out for a good time, kissing all the girls.