Tremor of Intent (5 page)

Strangely, my own nightmares featured Roper more than myself,
perhaps because Roper had written those letters. I could see him very clearly as I read them – pale, fattish, bespectacled (with those steel-rimmed respirator-spectacles that made the wearer look like an idiot child), a shaggy straw nape under the eaves of the steel helmet. In my dreams he did my moaning for me, vomiting up such dream-objects as the flywheels of clocks, black-letter books, wriggling snakes, and he sobbed very idiomatic German, full of words like
Staunen
(astonishment) and
Sittlichkeit
(morality) and
Schicksal
(destiny). His own nightmares were of the forced evening walk (a lovely sunset, the birds' last song) through groves of corpses, along with burrowing into hedges of blue flesh and (this was fairly common with all of us) actual necrophagy or corpse-eating. And then dreaming Roper allowed himself to appear as a sort of British Christ, John Bull Jesus crucified on his own Union Jack. The crucifixion was either punishment or expiation or identification – he couldn't tell which. He'd done very little reading outside of physics and chemistry and very simple poetry.

But guilt was in his letters. These crimes had been committed by members of the human race, no different from himself. ‘We should never have let this happen,' he wrote. ‘We're all responsible.' I wrote back: ‘Don't be so bloody stupid. The Germans are responsible and only the Germans. Admittedly, a lot of them won't have that because a lot of them won't believe what's been done in their name. They'll have to be shown, all of them. You can start off with the German women.' That's what I'd been doing. In a way, with their deep belly-consciousness or whatever the hell it is, the German women were already lining up to be punished. They didn't think it was that, of course; they thought they were just on the chocolate-buying game like the women of any conquered country. But the deep processes of genetics were calling out for exogamy, fertilisation by foreign bodies, and the deeper moral processes were shrieking for punishment. Wait, though: aren't those aspects of the same thing? Isn't the angry punitive seed more potent than the good gentle stuff that
dribbles out in the pink-sheeted marriage-bed? Isn't miscegenation a means of destroying ethnic identity and thus getting rid of national guilt? For my part, I didn't then ask such questions of the stocky women of Bremen. I got stuck into them, not sparing the rod. At the same time, showing my teeth and manhood, I was dimly aware that their menfolk, dead or merely absent, had got the better of me by making me one of themselves – brutal, lustful, something from a Gothic bestiary. Ah, what a bloody Manichean mess life is.

Poor Roper found a woman in Elmshorn. Or rather she found him. She married him. She needed the leisure of marriage to enforce a lesson diametrically opposite to the one I'd been trying to teach. Though Roper and I were both in the British Zone of Germany we never met, and it wasn't till the marriage was a couple of years old and the lessons well under way – back in England, in fact, with both of us civilians – that I was able to indulge my not very-strong masochistic propensities (vicarious, anyway) and see the
Ehepaar
(these lovely German words!) in cosy domestic bliss.

I remember the occasion well, sir. Roper said shyly, ‘This is Brigitte,' having got the introductions arse-backwards. He realised it and then said, in confusion, ‘
Darf ich vorstellen
– What I mean is, this is my oldest friend. Denis Hillier, that is.'

Roper had been released from the army no earlier than anyone else, despite the scholarship that was awaiting him at Manchester University (not Oxford, after all) and his obvious potential usefulness in the great age of technological reconstruction that was, we were told, coming up. He was now in his third year. He and this Brigitte had had a twelve-month engagement, she waiting in Elmshorn with the ring on her finger, he getting his allowances and a flat sorted out in that grey city which, when you come to think
of it, has always had some of the quality of a pre-Hitler
Stadt
– rich musical Jews, chophouses, beeriness, bourgeois solidity. I understand that that picture has now, since the immigration of former subject peoples longing to be back with their colonial oppressors, been much modified. It is now, so I gather, much more like a temperate Singapore. Perhaps the German image only came out fully for me when I saw Brigitte, almost indecently blonde, opulently busted, as full of sex as an egg of meat, and a good deal younger than Roper (we were both now twenty-eight; she couldn't have been more than twenty). She'd contrived to stuff the Didsbury flat with cosy Teutonic rubbish – fretwork clocks, an elaborate weatherhouse, a set of beer-mugs embossed with leather-breeched huntsmen and their simpering dirndl-clad girlfriends. Lying on the sideboard was a viola, which Roper, perhaps never having met one in England, insisted on calling a
Bratsche
, her dead father's, and she could play it well, said proud Roper – nothing classical, just old German songs. There seemed to be only one thing of Roper's in the stuffy Brigitte-smelling living-room, and that was something hanging on the wall, framed in passe-partout. It was the Roper family-tree. ‘Well,' I said, going to look at it. ‘I never realised you were so – is
Rassenstolz
the word?'

‘Not race,' said Brigitte, whose eye on me had been, since my entry, a somewhat cold one. ‘Family-proud.' For that matter, I hadn't taken to her at all.

‘Brigitte's family goes back a long way,' said Roper. ‘The Nazis did some people a sort of service in a manner of speaking, digging out their genealogical tables. Looking for Jewish blood, you know.' I said, still looking at past Ropers: ‘No Jewish blood here, anyway. A bit of French and Irish, some evident Lancashire.' (Marchand, O'Shaugh-nessy, Bamber.) ‘A long-lived family.' (1785–1862; 1830–1912; 1920 – This last was our Roper, Edwin.)

‘Good healthy blood,' smirked Roper.

‘And in my family no Jewish,' said Brigitte aggressively.

‘Of course not,' I said, grinning. And then, ‘This Roper died pretty young, didn't he?' There was a Tudor Roper called Edward-1530–1558. ‘Still, the expectation wasn't all that long in those days.'

‘He was executed,' said this Roper. ‘He died for his beliefs. It was my grandfather who dug up all this, you know. A hobby for his retirement. See, there he is – John Edwin Roper. Died at eighty-three.'

‘One of the first Elizabethan martyrs,' I said. ‘So you have a martyr in the family.'

‘He was a fool,' pronounced Roper, sneering. ‘He could have shut up about it.'

‘Like the Germans who saw it through,' I suggested.

‘My father died,' said Brigitte. Then she marched out to the kitchen.

While she was clattering the supper things I had to congratulate Roper and say what a handsome, intelligent, pleasant girl she seemed to me to be. Roper said eagerly: ‘Oh, there's no doubt about the intelligence' (as though there might be some doubt about the other qualities). ‘She speaks remarkably good English, doesn't she? She's had a rough time, you know, what with the war. And her father was a very early casualty. In Poland it was, '39. But she's not a bit reproachful. Towards me, I mean, or towards the British generally.'

‘The British were never in Poland.'

‘Oh, well, you know what I mean, the Allies. It was all one war, wasn't it? All the Allies were responsible, really.'

‘Look,' I said, giving him the hard eye, ‘I don't get all this. You mean that your wife, as a representative of the German nation, very kindly forgives us for Hitler and the Nazis and the bloody awful things they did? Including the war they started?'

‘He didn't start it, did he?' said Roper brightly. ‘It was we who declared war on him.'

‘Yes, to stop him taking the whole bloody world over. Damn it, man, you seem to have forgotten what you did six years' fighting for.'

‘Oh, I didn't actually fight, did I?' said literalist Roper. ‘I was there to help save lives.'

‘Allied lives,' I said. ‘That was a kind of fighting.'

‘It was worth it, whatever it was,' said Roper. ‘It led me to her. It led me straight to Brigitte.' And he looked for a moment as though he were listening to Beethoven.

I didn't like this one little bit, but I didn't dare say anything for the moment because Brigitte herself came in with the supper, or with the first instalments of it. It looked as though it was going to be a big cold help-yourself spread. She brought serially to the table smoked salmon (the salty canned kind), cold chicken, a big jellied ham (coffin-shaped from its tin), dishes of gherkins, pumpernickel, butter – a whole slab, not a rationed wisp – and four kinds of cheese. Roper opened bottled beer and made as to pour some for me into a stein. ‘A glass, please,' I said. ‘I much prefer a glass.'

‘From a stein,' said Brigitte, ‘it smacks better.'

‘I prefer a glass,' I smiled. So Roper got me a glass with the name and coat-of-arms of a lager firm gilded on it. ‘Well,' I said, doing the conventional yum-yum hand-rubbing before falling to, ‘this looks a bit of all right. You're doing very nicely for yourselves,
nicht wahr
?' At that time British rations were smaller than they'd been even at the worst point of the war. We now had all the irksome appurtenances of war without any of its glamour. Roper said: ‘It's from Brigitte's Uncle Otto. In America. He sends a food parcel every month.'

‘God bless Uncle Otto,' I said, and, after this grace, I piled smoked salmon on to thickly buttered black bread.

‘And you,' said Brigitte, with a governess directness, ‘what is it that you do?' The tones of one who sees a slack lounging youth who has evaded call-up.

‘I'm on a course,' I said. ‘Slavonic languages and other things. I say no more.'

‘It's for a department of the Foreign Office,' smiled Roper, looking, with his red round face and short-cropped hair and severely functional spectacles, as German as his wife. It was suddenly like being inside a German primer: Lesson III –
Abendessen
. After food Roper would probably light up a meerschaum.

‘Is it for the Secret Police?' asked Brigitte, tucking in and already lightly dewed with fierce eater's sweat. ‘My husband is soon to be a Doktor.' I didn't see the connection.

Roper explained that only in Germany was a doctorate the first degree. And then: ‘We don't have secret police in England, at least I don't think so.'

‘We don't,' I said. ‘Take it from me.'

‘My husband,' said Brigitte, ‘studies the sciences.'

‘Your husband,' I said, ‘will be a very important man.' Roper was eating too hard to blush with pleasure. ‘Science is going to be very important. The new and terrible weapons that science is capable of making are a great priority in the peaceful work of reconstruction. Rockets, not butter.'

‘There is much butter on the table,' said Brigitte, stone-facedly chewing. And then: ‘What you say I do not understand.'

‘There's an Iron Curtain,' I told her. ‘We're not too sure of Russia's intentions. To keep the peace we must watch out for war. We've learned a great deal since 1938.'

‘Before you should have learned,' said Brigitte, now on the cheese course. ‘Before England should this have known.' Roper kindly unscrambled that for her. ‘It was Russia,' said Brigitte, ‘that was the fiend.'

‘Enemy?'

‘
Ja
,
ja
,
Feind
. Enemy.' She tore at a piece of pumpernickel as though it were a transubstantiation of Stalin. ‘This Germany did know. This England did know not.'

‘And that's why Germany persecuted the Jews?'

‘International
Bolschevismus
,' said Brigitte with satisfaction. Then Roper started, eloquently, going on at length. Brigitte, his teacher, listened, nodded approval, cued him sometimes, rarely corrected. Roper said: ‘We, that is to say the British, must admit we have nearly everything to blame ourselves for. We were blind to it all. Germany was trying to save Europe, no more. Mussolini had tried once, but with no help from those who should have helped. We had no conception of the power and ambition of the Soviet Union. We're learning now, but very late. Three men knew it well, but they were all reviled. Now only one of them is living. I refer,' he said, to enlighten my ignorance, ‘to General Franco in Spain.'

‘I know all about General bloody Franco,' I said coarsely. ‘I did a year in Gibraltar, remember. Given the chance, he would have whipped through and taken the Rock. You're talking a lot of balls,' I added.

‘It is you who talk the balls,' said Brigitte. She picked up words quickly, that girl. ‘To my husband please listen.'

Roper talked on, growing more shiny as he talked. There was one thing, I thought in my innocence: here was a man who, when he got down to research, as he would very shortly, would be quite above suspicion – a man who would be susceptible to no blandishments of the one true fiend. What I didn't like was this business of England's guilt and need to expiate great wrong done to bloody Deutschland. I took as much as I could stand and then broke in with: ‘Ah God, man, how can you justify all the atrocities, all the suppression of free thought and speech, the great men sent into exile when not clubbed to death – Thomas Mann, Freud –'

‘Only the smutty writers,' said Brigitte, meaning
schmutzig
.

‘If you're going to wage war,' said Roper, ‘it's got to be total war. War means fighting an enemy, and the enemy isn't necessarily somewhere out there. He can be at home, you know, and he's at his most insidious then. But,' he conceded, ‘do you think that anybody
really enjoyed having to send great brains into exile? They wouldn't be argued with, many of them. Impossible, a lot of them, to convince. And time was very short.'