Unity (15 page)

Henry’s tale had an unexpected postscript. The following evening, he was sitting in the hotel bar, along with his wife Mathilda, Gerald and his wife Haroko, Geraldine, Sir Hallam, Dora and me, when a frail old man with a shock of ginger hair shuffled hesitantly towards us (‘If he has to dye it,’ Dora said to me later, ‘he might at least have offered a sop to Nature.’). He had the wide-eyed, plump-cheeked artlessness characteristic of certain monks – I except Fray Luis Antonio de Mijas.
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He stood straight in front of us, shifting his glance back and forth between Henry and Sir Hallam. The latter, adopting a tactical blindness,
continued
with his story – I forget what it was about, but you can be sure that Hattie or Johnny or Larry featured prominently. Mathilda, whose protective instincts had been honed by Henry’s recent outburst, challenged the intruder. He appeared reluctant to speak, as if expecting that either Henry – or, more improbably, Sir Hallam – would recognise him. When both looked blank, he resigned himself to explaining. His name was Per. He had been a dresser at the
Deutsches Theater
in the Thirties, when Henry was a member of the company. Moreover, he had met Sir Hallam on his visit to Berlin and was plainly hurt by his lack of recollection. ‘You must remember Rolf!’ he kept insisting: a demand which appeared even more unreasonable when it turned out that Rolf was a dog.

Henry, however, leapt up and clasped him in his arms (he later confessed that it was the past that he was embracing, since he had only the dimmest memory of the man). Sir Hallam, equally gracious but more restrained, stood and held out his hand. As Per took it, a collective shudder ran around the table, which Sir Hallam, to his credit, ignored. Per shyly apologised. He had lost three of his fingers in Sachsenhausen … ‘Enough of this doom and gloom!’ I hear you cry. ‘Take me to the
Oktoberfest
, where I can join all the middle-aged Germans in drowning my memories. Tell me about the trials of strength and the mock executions:
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anything to keep away from the camps.’ I’m sorry, but no can do. You have to know the truth and not only in your role as keeper of the conscience. Per’s fate has a particular significance for you.

We made space both for Per and his story, which he told with remarkably little fuss. He had been arrested by a policeman posing
as a hustler in the Tiergarten.
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He was sent without trial to the camp, where he was forced to sleep with his hands on top of the blanket to prevent his succumbing to the solitary vice to which all such ‘libidinal felons’ were prone. The temperature in the hut was several degrees below zero and he caught frost-bite but, even so, he didn’t dare to break the rule. He had seen the punishment meted out to a man found trying to warm his hands against his thighs. Four guards had dragged him from his bed and on to the
parade-ground
where they doused him with buckets of water. In the morning, he was discovered frozen stiff, covered in a sheet of ice as though he had been gift-wrapped in cellophane.

Per had been put to work in the quarries, carting rubble dug up by Jews who were harnessed to each other like horses. When it was learnt that he spoke three languages (his English was
demonstrably
perfect), he was transferred to the registry. It saved his life. It did not, however, save him from degradation, such as having to empty the swilling latrine buckets towards which, as a
homosexual
, he was supposed to feel an affinity. Nor did it save him from being brutally assaulted by the guards who, while publicly denouncing sodomy, were privately prepared to make exceptions. They were worthy students of the Berlin masters who had framed the law on race defilement to exclude rape.

As he spoke, I kept thinking of you: what I could have done to help; how little I would have been able to do.

Then, in 1943, Himmler issued a new directive. The German war machine needed men, even men with pink triangles. Anyone who agreed to be castrated would be released from the camps. Per volunteered and spent the rest of the War in a munitions factory outside Frankfurt. He spoke of it all so casually – as if he had merely had his gallstones removed – that it took me a while to
register the truth. The moment I did, Fliss’s mother’s diktat that ‘A eunuch is not a fit subject for the dinner table’ echoed through my head, and I yearned to scratch his story on her polite
conversational
veneer. But first, I had to hear its conclusion. At the end of the War, he returned to his mother. Not once, in the remaining twenty-five years of her life, did they exchange a single word about what had happened. ‘I felt ashamed for myself, that it was my sexuality that had led to my arrest and humiliated her before all her neighbours. I felt ashamed for her that she hadn’t raised a finger in protest but, rather, connived at a system that allowed such things to take place. And I felt ashamed for us both that we never found the courage to mention it. More had been taken away from me than the use of my hand.’

‘Did you at least have the chance to discuss it with friends?’ I asked, in a question designed more to assert a semblance of normality than to elicit a response. ‘No’ was the simple answer. His friends had all been sent to the camps. There was no
new-found
country waiting for them. One of the few who survived (at this, he raised his mutilated hand, although whether as a figure or a metaphor I couldn’t say) had been liberated from Buchenwald. He was informed by the commanding officer that, under
American
law, he had committed a crime and one that was uniquely heinous. Since he had served only five years of his eight-year sentence, he was to be kept in jail. Per corresponded with him until his death from typhus eighteen months later. ‘At least he had the comfort of knowing that he died to protect our saviours.’

It was only now, he added with a wry smile, that people were beginning to show an interest in his ordeal: the researchers and historians who saw him less as a person than as a chapter in a best-selling book.

His visit had an unexpected consequence when Wolfram heard about it, the way that Wolfram hears about everything, and offered him a part in the film. He is to play an elderly Jew whose flat is
requisitioned and earmarked by Hitler for Unity (in reality, it belonged to a young married couple). Showing a callousness remarkable even for her, Unity sized up the rooms, measuring curtains and trying out colour schemes, while the owners looked on. Although he has a mere half-dozen lines, for Per it is the fulfilment of a lifelong ambition. He describes himself as the Grandma Moses of the acting world.

Meanwhile, please don’t laugh – although you deserve the chance to; we all do after what we’ve been through – but I’m having an affair … though it’s hardly so formal: a romance … though I don’t feel romantic: sleeping with … but then she’s such a light sleeper that, when we’ve done the business, she likes me to leave: a fling … I’ll try anything to avoid having to finish the sentence and reveal her name. It’s Dora. Yes, I know: Dora of the ‘let’s just say I’m at an age when anyone asking the time is likely to be making a perfectly innocent request’. But haven’t you heard about the attractions of the older woman? And it’s not just a
question
of experience. Her body is really, well, young. If you put her head in a bag – no, that sounds dreadful: she has the most
beautiful
face. Not that I need to tell you. It’s only a couple of months since you saw her on stage. But she looks equally good on the pillow. Everything about her is so soft and powdery. And, whatever anyone may say, she is a natural blonde. There’s something
enormously
refreshing about making love to a woman you’re not in love with. It has to do with a lightness: an emphasis on pleasure: an acceptance of boundaries. Everything is so deliciously of the moment. There’s no history because there’s no future – or should that be the other way round?

Felicity is flattering herself if she expects me to sit at home and pine. There are plenty more fish in the sea/pebbles on the beach etc etc. But promise me you won’t put my liaison (that’s the most accurate word) with Dora down to some sort of tit for tat. I’m not the one who plays games with people. Dora is a wonderful person.
I may not be in love with her but I am tremendously fond of her. She gives so much and asks for so little in return. ‘Use me,’ she said. ‘Use me in any way you wish.’ And, without going into details, she has shown me ways that you wouldn’t think possible. Suffice to say that I shall never regard
armpit
as an insult again. Sex is such fun! And I mean to have a lot of it. But flesh on flesh sex. Nothing involving drugs, or guns, or defecation. Did you know that in the American state of Arkansas laughing
in
flagrante
used to be a crime? Dora told me that at the same moment as she was inciting me to be a multiple offender.

By the way, many thanks for elucidating the papal reference. My only comment on husband number two is that he can’t have known what he was missing. Oh, I’m so glad that I’ve told you everything. As always, even by proxy, you’ve done me a power of good.

Your grateful pal,

Luke.

8 München 40,

Giselastrasse 23,

West Germany

29th Oct 1977

Dear Michael,

I don’t suppose that you’ve been poring over reports of our hostage crisis. No doubt ‘Small kidnap in Cologne’ ranks pretty high on the Skip to the Arts Page scale. Even so, you must have read that at long last it has ended. Schleyer, not the finest
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for Western democracy, was found dead in France. The passengers were freed from the hijacked Boeing. Baader and his cohorts have committed suicide. And life here is slowly returning to normal. The overwhelming feeling, even on the Left, is one of relief, especially that the plane was stormed without any further casualties. Did you know that eleven of the eighty-six passengers were beauty queens? Imagine: one day, they’re parading in swimwear and evening-dress, professing their hopes and
ambitions
; the next, they’re sweltering on the tarmac at Mogadishu at the mercy of a madman. In common with half the male
population
of Germany, I was ready to volunteer for the rescue operation myself! Soldiers apart, the hero of the hour is Chancellor Schmidt, who has seen his softly-softly approach vindicated. Had it failed, there were plenty of people eager to offer hard-line alternatives. What I find so incomprehensible is that if I (and I’m sure you) can see that violence is counter-productive, why can’t the terrorists? Are they so in love with their own legend? Carole Medhurst
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claims that it’s a calculated strategy: to force the State to become increasingly repressive and so inspire people to rise up against it. Well, it certainly hasn’t worked that way in the past. This is
Germany, home of the Reichstag Burning, and yet the Red Army Faction perpetrates arson attacks on department stores. In every sense, it’s playing with fire.

At least we should be able to concentrate on our work with no further interruptions. Dora swears that she has never known a film like it. As a rule, sets are a world unto themselves. It’s what happens off them that becomes ‘unreal’. This one has been quite the opposite. At every corner, SS guards and Nazi officials can be found in furious debate about the merits of their spiritual
successors
. What with the reshooting around Wolfram and the technical cock-up over the Diana/Mosley wedding, we are now two weeks behind schedule. We need to devote all our energies to the matter at hand.

Someone who won’t be able to profit from this peace dividend is Sir Hallam who, after suffering a stroke, has had to be flown back to England. It’s such a humiliating fate, and particularly for one who prided himself on his vitality. I can still hear him lamenting ‘old age that creeps up on you in carpet slippers only to lash out with its stick’, and yet doing so in a voice supremely confident of warding off the blows. Last week, he collapsed under their weight. What happened is open to dispute but, as a guest in the adjoining suite, I can speak with more authority than most. I was spending the evening with Dora. She had just rung down for a bottle of champagne – not to drink: at least, not primarily. She likes me to dip my prick in it before we make love. At first, I resisted (I’ve hardly ever drunk the stuff, let alone anything else), but she told me not to be so boring (do you detect a pattern? I’ll give you a hint: it’s in the first syllable). She declared that it was the perfect combination of her two favourite tastes. Such pleasures, however, had to be deferred, since the expected knock wasn’t room service, but rather Dieter, in a muck sweat and dressed in a Nazi uniform, frantically beckoning us next door.

There, in a heap on the bedroom floor, his clothing rumpled, his skin puckered and clammy, was Sir Hallam. And yet the felled actor still glowed with the lustre of a lifetime’s roles. His last appearance on stage was as John of Gaunt, a man who both extolled and exemplified England’s virtues. Much the same could be said of Sir Hallam, who played so many kings: who played before so many kings, and was now lying in a pool of his own urine. An hour or so later, once the ambulance had arrived and Dora had accompanied him to hospital (I wonder if her veto on my going sprang more from the wish to spare me pain or a mistrust of German authority), I spoke to Dieter and pieced together what had occurred. As the entire unit knows, he has been having problems with Streicher. Who can blame him? It can’t be easy playing a man whom even Himmler deemed to be excessively anti-Semitic, a man who horsewhipped his enemies and forced elderly Jews to eat grass. Sir Hallam had offered to coach him (hence the uniform), but the violence of the part overwhelmed him and induced a stroke (Does that make me in some way responsible? Was it my lines that delivered the
coup de grace
?). At first, Dieter assumed that he must have fainted. He loosened his shirt and slapped his face (a little severely, I’d have said, to judge by its colour). Then, when that had no effect, he tore off his shirt and massaged his heart.