The Passenger (21 page)

While Steffi cooked, the children continued to compete for Lorenz's attention. He found their antics and playful conversation strangely restorative, and memories of Paris began to fade. After supper, Pia and Jan were prepared for bed, and Lorenz was summoned to read them a story. Before turning the light off, he paused at the door. They were both looking back at him with wide, adoring eyes. Jan's hair was standing on end. The love that he felt for them was so visceral and deep-rooted, he could barely speak. ‘Goodnight,' he said, before flicking the switch. He had to compose himself before descending the stairs.

When he entered the kitchen Steffi asked, ‘Will you be staying for Christmas?'

‘No,' he replied. ‘I have to go back.'

‘They're so inflexible. As if a few extra days would make any difference!'

Lorenz ran his finger along the grain of the tabletop. ‘How is Elias?'

‘We got a letter from him only last week.'

‘Where is he?'

‘On his way to Leningrad.'

Lorenz nodded, expecting his sister to say more. Instead, she remained silent, pressing her lips together until they became pale. He decided that it would probably be wise to talk about something else. ‘I heard about the bombing: I was worried.'

‘Actually,' Steffi relaxed, ‘it wasn't that bad. There were a lot of planes but most of them got shot down, and there was very little damage—considering.'

They discussed the war in a roundabout, allusive manner, and when their talk dwindled Lorenz produced a bottle of
perfume that he had bought for Steffi on the Rue du Louvre. She unscrewed the top, dabbed a little on her wrist, and inhaled. ‘Thank you—divine. Did your friend help you to choose it?'

‘No,' Lorenz shook his head.

Steffi's eyes became slits. ‘Sigi?'

‘It didn't work out.'

‘Oh, I'm sorry. What happened?'

‘We just weren't right for each other.'

Steffi shrugged and replaced the bottle top. ‘I know someone who'd like to meet you. A school teacher: she's very nice.'

T
HE NEXT DAY
L
ORENZ WENT
for a long, solitary walk around the ice-fringed lake. He skipped stones like a boy and observed scudding clouds reflected on the water. Frozen leaves crunched beneath his boots in the forest. Entranced by the chilly stillness of the winter morning he was overcome by an eerie sense of remove, of having entered some magical, timeless domain. This fantasy was shattered by the sudden roar of a low-flying plane. Lorenz had already called out the first syllable of the word ‘alarm' before he recognized its redundancy. Looking up through a canopy of bare branches, he saw the underside of a Messerschmitt heavy fighter. Even after it had passed and the stillness was restored, his heart was still hammering.

The days were passing too quickly. He didn't want to return to the boat, he didn't want to plunge deep into darkness, to endure yet another eternity of explosions, breaches, and shrieking metal. And most of all, he didn't want to face the unknown. Eschewing the word ‘ghost' in favor of vague abstractions helped to mitigate fear. He was still clinging to the notion of himself as a rational man. But the dread that he felt at his core was like molten rock, exploiting weaknesses, finding ways to the surface through chinks and fissures. Lorenz picked up a piece of ice and held it until the cold became pain.

He had arranged to have lunch with an old friend, Leo Glockner, and when he arrived at the restaurant behind St. Hedwig's Cathedral, Glockner was already there, sitting at a table and reading a typed document. Glockner had been a thin, weak, myopic boy, always coughing, always feeling poorly, and attracting the attention of bullies. Lorenz had been obliged to rescue him on countless occasions. Poor Glockner had compensated for his physical deficiencies with hard work: he became fluent in five European languages, including Russian and Greek, studied law, and went on to teach jurisprudence at the university, where his skills were valued, and he was swiftly promoted to a very senior position. Glockner was also very well connected, which was surprising, because he was constitutionally shy and did not enjoy the receptions and dinners that he was frequently invited to attend. Looking at him, Lorenz didn't think that his friend had changed very much over the years. He was still thin, nondescript, and easily overlooked, the kind of awkward, unprepossessing, largely invisible man who might have made an excellent spy.

Their conversation was warm, jovial, and punctuated by reminiscences. When they had finished eating, and the coffees had been ordered, Lorenz said, ‘Can you do me a favor?'

‘Well,' Glockner replied, ‘that depends . . .'

‘I'd like you to find something out for me.'

‘Oh?'

‘I'd like you to find out about a professor who used to have a chair at the University of Oslo. He's dead now. Bjørnar Grimstad—an archaeologist. He may have been involved with the Norwegian resistance.'

‘What do you want to know, exactly?'

‘I want to know what he studied: I want to know if he was regarded as an authority on anything and I want to know what sort of a man he was.' Glockner looked over his glasses, sensing that Lorenz hadn't quite finished. ‘And . . .' Lorenz lowered his voice, ‘I want to know why the SS were interested him.'

‘Ah,' said Glockner. ‘I see. Perhaps it would be wise to give me some background—a little context?'

Lorenz had not intended to disclose the full story of his involvement with the Schutzstaffel's special operation, but already he could see that total candor was necessary. He hunched his shoulders and leaned forward. ‘We'd been sent up north to provide a weather report—idiotic use of a U-boat—and we were on our way south again when we received a triply encoded message from headquarters.' He continued, describing Sutherland and Grimstad's transfer, the shooting incident, and Dönitz's reluctance to discuss the matter, and ended with an account of his meeting with Friedrich in the Scheherazade Club.

‘Intriguing,' said Glockner. He removed his glasses and cleaned them with the edge of the tablecloth, ‘How very intriguing.'

‘But tread lightly, Leo.' Lorenz walked his fingers around his coffee cup. ‘Friedrich was almost certainly telling the truth. His orders came from very high up.'

‘I always do.'

‘Even so . . .'

‘And what do I get in return?'

Lorenz studied his friend's badly ironed shirt and crumpled tie. ‘Steffi is setting me up with a pretty school teacher—I'm meeting her tonight. I'll ask her if she's got a friend, someone who likes opera and reading foreign poetry. Will that do?'

It was sad how little it took to make Leo happy.

T
HAT EVENING, THERE WERE TWO
dinner guests: Monika, the school teacher, and an elderly doctor called Hebbel. Monika was young, attractive, and respectful. She wore her blond hair in traditional alpine braids, and there was something about her appearance that suggested fresh-faced innocence, wholesome
country living. Hebbel, a widower, was Elias's mentor and a longstanding friend of the family.

When they had finished eating, Lorenz was encouraged by Hebbel to step outside in order to sample one of his ‘strong' cigars. The doctor claimed that the smoke that they produced was so pungent it would almost certainly irritate the delicate mucous membranes of the female nose. It was, as Lorenz suspected, a somewhat transparent pretext for a man-to-man discussion about submarine warfare. The doctor was particularly interested in the routine deprivations of everyday life on a U-boat: the moldy food, the damp and stink—the cramped space and poor sanitation. He shook his head sympathetically and said, ‘The nation owes you a great debt.' A limousine festooned with pennants rolled down the road and a face appeared in the black rear window. The vehicle slowed for a few seconds before accelerating into the night.

‘A curious thing happened on our last patrol,' said Lorenz, affecting an attitude of casual disregard. ‘We were transporting a British prisoner who unfortunately died before we could get him back to base for questioning. Shortly after, one of my mechanics had an accident—he banged his head on a diesel engine—and from that moment onward he kept on babbling about having seen the dead man.'

‘The brain is a remarkable organ,' the doctor responded. ‘But uniquely vulnerable. The slightest concussion is sometimes all that it takes to disrupt its functioning.'

‘Indeed. It's just . . . I was wondering . . .' Lorenz rotated his cigar in the air, producing a floating white hoop that gradually dissipated. ‘Are hallucinations always connected with insanity?'

‘Your mechanic suffered a brain injury. He didn't go mad, as such.'

‘He was acting as though he was mad.'

‘Yes, because of a lesion in his brain.'

‘Don't
all
hallucinations come from the brain?'

‘They do . . .'

‘Then what's the difference?'

‘You raise a very interesting point, my friend. Doctors have been arguing over such philosophical distinctions for a hundred years or more. I suppose, medically speaking, all hallucinations must be the result of some kind of lesion, but some lesions—such as those that are likely to result from banging one's head against a diesel engine—are more readily determined than others. Are you worried about this crewman?'

Lorenz ignored the question. ‘Then you would say that hallucinations—if not always associated with insanity—are always associated with a . . . brain problem.'

‘Well,' said Hebbel, his face showing the first portents of that singular form of irritation professionals are prone to exhibit when subjected to persistent questioning by laypersons. ‘It's not quite as simple as that. There are some who have proposed other possibilities, other accounts that do not assume structural damage.' The doctor sucked on his cigar and when he exhaled, his features vanished momentarily behind a vaporous haze. ‘I used to know a psychiatrist called Simmel. He founded the Tegel Palace Sanatorium not far from here. It was a very fine institution in its day.' Hebbel seemed to be engaged in the effortful process of forming a mental picture of those persons and places he was remembering. ‘Simmel was a disciple of Freud, and on those occasions when Freud came to Berlin, he usually came as Simmel's guest. I attended one of Freud's talks.' Hebbel's eyes became more focused. ‘You know of Freud?'

‘I've heard of him, of course.'

‘His work has since been vilified for being un-German.' Again, Hebbel paused to draw on his cigar. ‘I had many fascinating conversations with Simmel and the members of his circle. Some of his associates suggested that hallucinations have special meaning, and, like dreams, merit interpretation. Indeed, they spoke of hallucinations as if they were escaped dreams . . .'

‘Escaped from where?'

‘The unconscious: that part of the mind that is not accessible to introspection. Deeper and wider than any ocean you have explored, my dear fellow, infinitely deep. It is a concept that has become associated with Jewish psychiatry, but actually our own German philosophers have been discussing the hidden depths of the mind since the eighteenth century.'

‘I'm sorry, Herr Doctor, my question . . .'

‘Which was . . . ?'

‘Are hallucinations always a symptom of insanity?'

‘In most cases, yes, but in others—perhaps—hallucinations might represent some kind of communication from the unconscious.'

‘I don't understand: communication? What kind of communication?'

‘That rather depends on the circumstance. But if a person were, let us say, in some kind of danger, then the hallucination might be construed as a warning.' The doctor dropped his cigar stub and crushed it beneath his heel. ‘Come now, shall we go inside? It's cold and I am of the opinion that Fräulein Monika is eager to become better acquainted with you.' Hebbel smiled. ‘You shouldn't be standing out here discussing philosophical aspects of psychiatry with an old man like me when there's a pretty girl like Fräulein Monika anxiously awaiting your company. That
would
be madness!' The doctor laughed at his own joke, and resting a solicitous hand on his companion's back exerted just enough pressure to encourage movement. Lorenz tossed his cigar stub aside and said, ‘In which case I had better prove my sanity before you call an ambulance.' Opening the front door he bowed and gestured. ‘After you, Herr Doctor.'