The Human Pool (34 page)

We could hear the other truck, its big diesel engines revving for a long time. From time to time a palpable ripple of fear went through our container. We were made to wait long enough for everyone to grow impatient for the journey to begin, whatever it might bring.

Our container was at last locked, and we left. We travelled in the dark, with no light inside. The road was poor. Disorientation soon made people vomit, and it became necessary to breathe through the mouth. Some started praying aloud, others began an intense keening. There was the dark, the motion of the container, and the babble of frightened voices, which gradually stopped. Then there was only the dark and the motion.

The explosion seemed to lift the truck right off the ground, a tremendous bang that filled the air with screams. I braced myself, thinking we were toppling over the edge of one of the ravines I had driven along with Hoover. But the truck settled, and there was a brief lull followed by the steady stitch of gunfire on metal. The panic in the container was contagious. We all knew we were about to die, a hundred minds united briefly in the same certainty. The only question was how.

We could hear the back door to the container being worked open, even over the yelling and the gunfire. The shrieking rose to a crescendo, then stopped quite suddenly as everyone realised that this was our deliverance.

The truck had been attacked by rebels. But the joy was short-lived. A new anxiety quickly took over that the security forces would counterattack before all the handcuffs could be broken.

Outside was still dark. The truck's cabin was burned out and twisted from the explosion. The dead driver was half hanging out and the rest of the guards were dead except for one standing with his arms in the air.

The prisoners had no hesitation in turning on the guard. Rebel soldiers stood by laughing as dozens of prisoners chucked rocks at the guard, who staggered around, stunned, arms out in front like he was playing blind man's bluff, his faltering steps those of a drunk until his balance went and he lurched over.

The death seemed as manufactured in its clumsy, graphic violence as a cartoon and I half-expected him to get up so they could all do it again. Instead he lay there, like an old bundle of rags, in a widening pool of his own blood, which, in the last of the night, stained the ground black. I watched dumbly, mindful of Karl-Heinz's belief that violence would revert to a Biblical cruelty.

Nobody seemed in any hurry now despite the earlier panic about a counterattack. The destroyed truck had become a symbol which everyone seemed reluctant to abandon, a sign of victory.

Eventually three military-type lorries came, low-sided and with metal skeleton frames for the canvas, which was missing.

Everyone crammed on, hanging on to the frame for support. We drove a mile or so in convoy and then separated. We travelled for several hours. I slept standing, held up by the squash of bodies. Whenever I woke, people were scanning the skies anxiously for the security forces' planes.

ZURICH

MOTHER RALLIED BRIEFLY
and seemed to recognise me.

I took Vaughan. He had said he wanted to meet her. I agreed. Hoover had explained to him how Mother had brought him to Switzerland in 1942. He looked at her a long time, then turned to me. ‘What could any of that have to do with me? Yet it's all still going on.'

Afterwards we were a long time in a café, sitting outside, at Vaughan's insistence, even though it was cold. He drank wine, as always.

At least he goes out now. At first he sat doing nothing all day, staring into space. I let him stay at Mother's. He will tell me nothing of his experiences. The doctor has ordered full rest. His spell as my guest looks to become an extended one. All he has asked is that I don't tell Dominic. So far I have not. But Dominic is in Basel, and is suspicious. In the case of Hoover, I was able to answer truthfully that I did not know.

Vaughan had called from Turkey, asking me to wire money which he would pay back. He returned looking like a man who had taken leave of himself and to whom too much had happened in too short a time. It rendered him more or less mute. He said he had nowhere else to go. For the best part of three days he slept, and when he wasn't sleeping he was in tears, a silent crying unlike any I have ever seen. I think it was utter exhaustion. He didn't talk or read or watch television or go for walks. He didn't want to see anyone. I came in the evening to cook him pasta or an omelette, which he put aside after a couple of mouthfuls.

He drank instead, red wine, at first only in the evening, until he was drunk enough to go to bed, then all day, borrowing money from me. He sat in cafés at first, he told me, then started taking bottles into parks, wearing an old coat of Adam's which I had lent him. However much he drank, he never got noisy or uncoordinated or made an exhibition of himself, just got quieter and sadder.

A man from the American Embassy has called on several occasions, the first time to say that Uncle Konny's place had been found evacuated. Hoover's whereabouts are unknown, as are Bob Ballard's. There has been no news of him since before everyone left. Still, it was in the nature of his job to have to move quickly.

I don't know if Dominic spoke to Bob Ballard. It was one of my conditions for helping him obtain the museums contract that he did. The other was that he send Vaughan home. Now Vaughan is back. Soon I will have to tell him to make other arrangements because he is becoming an embarrassment, stumbling around town. I know he is suffering the after-effects of trauma, and that he wishes to offend my bourgeois sensibilities, but my patience and generosity are not limitless, nor are my manners. And Dominic is persistent.

 

Mother's house has become almost like the old days, with people coming and going. The man from the American Embassy has turned up to talk to Vaughan, and an Englishman, who says he is from his embassy. The Englishman is handsome. I was at Mother's house, ostensibly working on a paper, when he called round. My real reason for being there was to keep an eye on things. I suspect Vaughan will soon start stealing to pay for his drink. Today he stuck his tongue out at me. It is quite black. Whether he did it to show me or because he was being rude, I cannot say. Such behaviour seems entirely in keeping with his present state of mind.

That night we talked more than usual. Vaughan said he had been ‘debriefed by a couple of desks'. They had been incredulous and sceptical about what he had told them, though too professional to show it.

What Vaughan went on to tell me made no sense—such things don't go on today—and perfect sense. I understand the principle of vested interest. I am aware that my, and my country's, security is at the expense of others' freedom. The equation I find hard to accept, but will, if pushed. I did not expect to find myself being so thoroughly stripped of any illusions.

One reason for Willi Schmidt's change of identity at the end of the war was, Vaughan said, because he had swindled Jews by organising false escape routes. Konrad Viessmann's first job had been to provide a safe haven for Nazi doctors involved in the extermination programme, and the clinic used had been the foundation of his later empire.

I wish to talk of my own confusion but cannot. I am not ready to accept Konrad Viessmann as my biological father, and certainly not Willi Schmidt. I rejected Vaughan's link of a collection of jazz records as tenuous.

Vaughan wanted Carswell, he said, and he wanted me to get Carswell for him. I shook my head. It was unthinkable.

Vaughan wouldn't let me rest. He worked his story backwards, starting with the rivers. The enormous dam project would give Turkey control over the flow of Iraq and Syria's two main rivers. The project also allowed the Turks to move the problematic Kurdish population around at will. The Syrians were retaliating by harbouring Kurdish rebels, Vaughan said. ‘The links go back to Bern and Zurich and further, and back to 1942, and maybe even before.'

Turkey's Kurds were not a humanitarian issue for European governments, he said, because those governments needed Turkey to act as a stabilising force in the Middle East. ‘Most of this comes out as isolated news stories. They never show you how the shadings go all the way from white to black, as a matter of course. When there is some scandal they make out it's an aberration, a one-off. They isolate. They personalise. And if we are going to get personal, Carswell and Viessmann are both way in the black as far as shadings go.'

I argued back. His stubbornness gave me a glimpse of what he had managed to survive. He had told me little of what had happened except to say that he had no real proof, other than what he had seen, and his own speculation to put two and two together. He was sure people were being killed, certain there was a secret medical programme.

I said if he could prove what he was saying, I would help him in any way he wanted, though I did not reasonably see what I was supposed to do. My upbringing demanded you protect those closest to you, whatever they might have done. Circles are there to remain closed. My previous attempt to break it, with Hoover, ended in humiliation.

I don't particularly like Vaughan, but we understand each other. He knows I am, essentially, without a voice. Vaughan laughed a weary laugh, and said, ‘Even now your mother's dumb, look at the hold she has.' He said that what I took for love and obedience was fear.

I was forced to accept his description of Dominic as a cruel man. Tyranny in the bedroom is a good enough indication of a man's personality. Yet perhaps I still wanted him as a friend because I was intrinsically scared of him, too. It gave me a certain power to maintain civilised relations with Dominic, and as a result our collusion runs deep.

After I had agreed to help Vaughan he told me what Dominic had done to Mr Ballard. I don't know why he had held back, perhaps because he thought I would have resisted believing him. If only he knew! My instruction to Dominic had been ‘to take care of Mr Ballard', and only now do the full and terrible implications of that phrase strike me.

Does Vaughan want to ‘take care of Dominic'? He is not saying, and I am not asking. My help is conditional upon not knowing what he intends to do. I pray this will help excuse my own role in Mr Ballard's gruesome end. As for Dominic, he would never fail to act on his desires. Once I saw him slap a woman in such a way that left me in no doubt of his murderous instincts. That woman was me, seen in the full-length mirror in front of which we were standing at the time. Afterwards he had cried—crocodile tears, no doubt—and apologised, which was probably more than he did to Mr Ballard.

 

Mother was a keen gardener; Dulles was not. Mother used to tend his garden for him—she describes doing so in her diary. Part of the slope had been turned over to a vegetable allotment. Mother had arranged a regular gardener for Dulles, but when she was there, she liked to do some herself. The bank was sunny and included a vine which produced sweet grapes. Her diary describes how her times alone in that secluded garden were among her happiest. She writes: ‘The garden is wasted on Allen, who appreciates it only for its secret entrance. He fails to see the beauty and magic of it, especially in spring, when it starts to conceal itself again after the winter. The summer view from Allen's bedroom window is of an impenetrable canopy of green.'

 

Mother died, at five o'clock this morning. She was gone by the time I arrived. I felt nothing. No release, relief, or regret. I could not bring myself to kiss or touch her goodbye. The sceptical side of me thought that I had not heard the last of Mother. Actually, I felt rather giddy and lightheaded.

I called Dominic to tell him. My ex-husband was always sincere at condolences. He wanted me to know he was there for me should I need him. I was tempted to ask exactly how he had taken care of Mr Ballard. I was eager still to share Dominic's secrets. He asked if I needed anything. Not yet, I said, but I might do soon. The call was a test of nerve. It would have been easier to tell him everything.

Mother had been very Swiss in the arrangement of her death, organising for her letter to be delivered from the lawyer by courier on the morning of her demise.

It arrived at about eleven, as Vaughan was opening his first bottle of wine. I went to her room to read it. It was blunt and formal, and dated from the onset of her illness.

ZURICH

My Dear Beate,

I shall be dead when you read this. Perhaps you will think good riddance. My illness will have been a trial for you, all the more because we have never been close in spite of the pretence.

I have no regrets except with regard to you. I know it will come as a great shock to you to learn that your father was not your real father, and that your Uncle Konrad was. I should have told you, and the reason I did not was because the man you believed to be your father was the better person, and more appropriate father. I never told him, either, and he never gave me any reason to suspect that he knew the truth. But truth, I have learned, is not an absolute commodity. I believed that subscribing to the lie would create a better truth than the truth itself. Besides, your father—I shall continue to call him that as that's what he became—had always wanted children, particularly a daughter, where Konrad had no paternal inclinations. I am telling you now, after much deliberating with my conscience—that somewhat atrophied item—because I feel that you have been held back by the half-truths and shadows that have surrounded your life.

I was never proud of my relationship with Konrad, which is not the same as saying I regret it. It caused me to do many wrong things. I told myself these were done in the name of some higher cause, which justified the tough moral decision. For a woman to be part of the world of men, she has to be as ruthless. I was enthralled by their power and wanted it for myself and not by proxy.

Your father was a victim of that power, and I dare say you were, too. Perhaps most of all I enjoyed my selfishness at your expense because you and your father represented the kind of world everyone wanted for me, as a woman. One of obedience, fidelity, and insufferable boredom.

Happiness was not a condition of my life. I did wonderful things and competed on the best of terms, and, though it sounds old-fashioned now, I served my country. In spite of having enjoyed many lovers, I lacked companionship. Happiness was brief and often solitary. I remember one such moment very clearly. I was alone in Dulles's garden one golden autumn afternoon, feeding a bonfire, watching its smoke disappear into a cloudless sky. On the train back to Zurich, I smelled of burned leaves and, still happy, had to change into clean clothes before dinner.

I carried terrible secrets throughout my life. I have hesitated long and often, trying to decide whether you should share this legacy. In the end, I have decided that as my daughter you should. You have always thought of yourself as closer to your father when, in fact, you are more like me. You are tougher than you think, despite your deference to me and the men in your life.

One last thing I would ask you to do, related to the above. I leave the choice of how it is done to you.

There is a final set of papers. They are not discreet. Allen made me burn all the originals of any extracurricular documents and correspondence before he left Switzerland in 1945, and he made sure he was there to watch me do it. But Allen was naive in a way only clever and deceitful men can be. He also remained ignorant of matters secretarial. He did not realise I had kept carbons of everything. This last set of papers details things even Allen did not know about.

My dear Beate, it is up to you whether you read them or not. What I ask is that you, as part of me, retrieve them and destroy them. I hope through doing this you will become free to move on, and that in the rest of your life you will achieve a happiness and fulfilment which—through my own fault, probably—eluded me.

There is a joke in all this, over the whereabouts of the papers. In Allen Dulles's garden is a vaulted cellar for storing wine with a secret hiding place, a false brick concealing a lead-lined box. Allen had it put there, and we were the only ones to know about it. After he had left Switzerland, I returned and hid the papers there, and I am sure they are there still. The cellar is halfway up the slope, to the right of Allen's apartment as you face it.

My wish is that you burn the papers in Allen's garden. If that is not possible, then do it at the house where the gardener burns the leaves. As for getting into the garden, Stefan the lawyer has the key. Allen gave me one all those years ago, and I kept it. It worked when I last tried it, not so long ago.

You shan't be disturbed. Nobody used the garden much and, if you are challenged, I am sure you will use that imperious manner to good effect.

I know I should think of a proper way of ending this letter, but I suspect that protestations of love would be rejected. Instead I shall think of you standing by the bonfire, hoping that you will remember my own brief happiness doing the same, and believe me when I write that I was and remain your loving errant Mother.