All That I Am (17 page)

They were coming, room by room.

‘Not here! Sir!’

‘All clear!’

To Benesch’s apartment then, up the back stairs–a risk, but what choice was there? She shoved away some papers to steady her feet and then she saw the white rock. Yes! She hefted it in her right palm and ripped the thin curtain aside–

Christ, Toller!

Bars. Black iron bars, a hand-width apart.

There was no sound.

They must be outside the door.

They are long, the moments trapped in a room, waiting for the end.

A knock. ‘Frau Fabian. Wieland, Ministry of the Interior. I am asking you to open this door.’

Fear can open up silence and make it hum. Revealing, finally, the sound of the universe shifting quietly, making ready to accommodate you.

No answer from the room. The three of them stood outside, the boy holding her shoes and the offsider with his gun in both hands, trained on the floor. The orders were to take her alive.

‘Frau Fabian,’ Wieland said into the door, ‘you have nowhere to go.’ He nodded to the marksman. ‘Stand back!’ he commanded.

A voice from the room. ‘Don’t shoot!’

When they opened the door, what did they see? A tiny woman, a beaked bird with a glossy black head–was she twenty? Or thirty? Stockinged feet hanging below the desk and a white rock smooth in the cleft of her lap. Trying to strike a match on a box with fingers bitten to the quick.

The man trained the gun on her. The boy held her shoes.

‘We have orders to arrest you,’ Wieland said. ‘On suspicion of treasonous activity against the Reich.’

‘I work for Mr Toller.’ The voice was husky, low. ‘I am doing nothing wrong here.’ Black eyes through the smoke.

‘It’s the law, ma’am.’

‘A new law?’

‘No, ma’am.’

‘New Reich then?’ She smiled at him.

‘Yes, ma’am.’

She blew out the match. They had no humour, these people.

He nodded at the others to get her.

She put up a palm. ‘It’s all right, gentlemen.’

The boy held out her shoes by the laces. The scraps of leather and sole were suddenly intimate things, moulded by her body, open and loose-tongued and revealing. The boy gawped as if he had never in his life watched a woman slip her foot into a shoe. She jumped down from the desk.

On the way to the car an Alsatian, his face in a cage, kept to her side. She scratched his ears in consolation, or comfort. ‘Inside everyone the ice hounds bark,’ she said.

On my crutches in the street people look away from me, a legacy of their mothers hissing ‘Don’t stare!’ when passing puppet-spastics, the violently birthmarked, dirty flashers or dwarves. Or they give me sympathetic smiles, encouraging me in these, they assume, my precious last steps. I could scream at them: ‘You have no idea! How–lucky–I–am!’ Something in me wants to say ‘blessed’ but I stop myself. I am not a pitiful old woman hanging on to her mind while her body shuts down. I am a woman on her way to eat cake.

The shops in Bondi Road show the transformation of this place. The older ones have been transplanted straight from Riga or Stettin or Karlovy Vary, but the greengrocer now calls itself a ‘Fruitologist’ and the butcher is organic. The Hungarian bakery still has the best
Gugelhupf
.

I have loved
Gugelhupf
since I was a child, its heaviness and vanilla scent, the swirls of dark poppy seeds in the thick white cake. I order, then manoeuvre myself onto a stool at the front counter and lean my crutches against the window. When the cake comes it is more friable than usual. I lift the fork carefully from plate to mouth, a distance which has increased with age and is now full of treacherous possibility. The cake drops off just before it reaches my lips. I hope no one is looking.
It is the pity of passers
-
by I don’t like
.

‘Dr Becker?’ A voice at my ear. ‘Dr Becker?’ At my age everyone thinks you are deaf, or slow. Already half departed.

I turn as much as I can on the stool and the face looms in to me–I see molars, and smell perfume like an advance guard of verbena.

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Hello there.’ It is a middle-aged woman with rectangular tortoiseshell glasses and streaky-blond bobbed hair. She could be anyone. Every now and again one of these creatures accosts me, sweetly, gratefully.

‘Trudy Stephenson,’ she says. ‘Trudy Winmore I was at school.’

‘Oh yes. Trudy.’ I have no idea. ‘Of course. How are you?’ I look closer at the face–kind, deep-set eyes, and a small gap between her front teeth–trying to summon the girl underneath. People say babies look alike, or the very old, all grey and sexless and sunken-skinned. But for me it is the middle-aged women of the eastern suburbs who are so hard to distinguish. They are all neatly, crisply put together, stout-bodied under striped shirts with their collars up, the hair streaked and smoothed to the exact same substance. I taught at the ladies’ college for twenty years. So many, many girls. But as I squint longer at this one the years peel off her till she is an earnest, pudgy, sweet-faced girl in my matriculation German class.

‘Do you remember?’ she is saying.

‘Yes,’ I say, ‘I do.’ They like to be remembered.

She chuckles. ‘And do you remember my father?’

Oh God. ‘I’m afraid…’ I start.

‘You taught us Goethe’s love poetry,’ she smiles. Is that a blush?

‘“
O Mädchen, Mädchen wie lieb’ ich dich!
”’ I start. O girl, girl how I love you…

‘“
Wie blickt dein Auge!/Wie liebst du mich!
”’ The look in your eye!/How you love me! She takes it up like a long-cherished thing, a mantra she has muttered throughout her life at particular times, never telling anyone about it. ‘“
Wie ich dich liebe/Mit warmen Blut
.”’ How I love you/It heats my blood. She laughs and her eyes are suddenly full of tears. ‘We’d never heard anything like it! We didn’t think you were allowed to speak those things.’

‘
Ach
,’ I say. ‘Australia in the ’50s.’
Those things
–like love, like desire, the most precious–were to remain subterranean for your whole little life. It was as if these Anglos thought the feelings were tainted by the involvement of the bodies needed to express them. I never got used to it.

‘My father,’ this Trudy starts. And then I do remember. It is all still inside of me. Her father wrote a letter to Miss Blount, the headmistress: ‘Who is this fellow Goethe anyway? It would be better for the girls to learn something useful instead of this filth.’

‘I remember now!’ I say. I am so pleased. ‘“This filth” he called it, didn’t he?’

‘I’m afraid so.’ Trudy purses her lips mock-ruefully, then smiles again. The tears are gone. ‘But we loved it.’ She touches my forearm. ‘We loved you for it.’

‘Thank you, dear.’

She leaves, square-bottomed and tidy as a tug, a box of cakes dangling in a stork’s triangle from the plastic bag on her arm.

The girls knew I had been in one of Hitler’s prisons for my political activities. I told them about the five-year sentence, three of it in solitary so that I, as a ‘political’, wouldn’t infect the others–abortionists, prostitutes, thieves, poor souls–with ideas of social justice. But at their age the girls were more interested in love, of course. They imagined, because I had been married and unmarried, that I had a scandalous degree of experience. They believed I taught them Goethe’s poetry of desire as if I could vouch for it. None of us–teacher or taught–realised how an imagined romantic life can sustain you as a possibility, a hope, and remain just that. Like parallel train tracks, it runs alongside, but will never meet, the life you are living.

The Gestapo had nowhere left to take her. Every possible cell was full. And in any case, they wanted Dora to be alone, to soften her up. So she was put in an ordinary cellar in the old police building–a dirt floor and the vestiges of a pile of coal in the corner. Two buckets in another corner, one with water, one empty. There was no light and the cellar was unheated. She spent her time pacing in the dark to keep warm. She had one army blanket and she shared it with lice.

The arrests were taking place so quickly that there were no arrangements for feeding the prisoners; dear Mathilde Wurm heard that they had her and immediately took in baskets of rolls, wurst, bananas, underwear and cigarettes.

They kept Dora for five days before the interview, which was as long as the law allowed. As the guard undid the padlock she said, ‘You would be my Orpheus, come to rescue me?’ He stared blankly at her. She apologised. In the light of the yard she saw that her clothes were covered in dirt and her hands were rimmed in black. As they walked to the administrative building the boy motioned to her forehead. ‘You might want to…’ He gestured a rub.

‘Thanks,’ she smiled back, ‘but it’s not my filth.’

The bare electric bulb in the interview room hung from a brown cloth-covered cord. Dora blinked after the dimness of the cellar. The interrogating officer was not an ordinary policeman, but one of the newer, black-uniformed ones. His face was shiny, small eyes stuck in deep, like raisins. He asked her what she had to say in her defence.

‘So far as I know,’ she said, ‘I am not on trial here.’

‘You have been apprehended on the grounds of lèse-majesté and suspicion of high treason.’

‘On account of what?’

He looked at the sheet in front of him. She knew he would have been studying it well in advance.

‘On account of membership of the Independent Social Democratic Party and its successor the Socialist Workers Party. And of your editorship of this…’ He pushed an edition of a pacifist journal across the table. She stared at her name, next to Walter’s, on the masthead. ‘Not to mention,’ the man continued, ‘certain writings such as,’ he put his finger on another page in front of him, ‘“the ecstasies of women for the Leader are a sign not of loyalty, but of need. This need will not be satisfied by him, nor the husbands he promises, nor any man.”’

He looked at her a long moment, then back at his paper. ‘Such utterances are designed to bring the authorities into disrepute and slander the Leader. Membership of the Socialist Workers Party is now an offence—’

‘As of?’ Her voice might have sounded genuinely curious if you didn’t know her.

‘Tuesday.’ He lowered his eyes to the file.

‘Not before then, then?’

He looked up. ‘You have continued your membership. You have committed the proscribed act.’ The man adjusted the leather belt over his shoulder and around his waist. ‘Where are the materials you took from Herr Toller’s apartment?’ The preliminaries were over.

‘I burnt them.’ Dora was suddenly afraid, in her filth under the too-bright light, that it didn’t matter what she said, and it didn’t matter that she’d left the party. The point had been passed where the law could protect her. This argument was a farce, the cat playing with the mouse for the pleasure of smelling its fear.

‘I want to speak to your superior,’ she said. It was a risk, but she had nothing to lose.

‘He’s not here.’ The man held her gaze.

‘I am sure he is.’ She smiled a little. ‘And I wish to speak with him.’

‘I would say, Dr Fabian, that you are not in a position to be making demands.’

She was taken back to the cellar.

The next day they brought her up again.

‘What’s this for?’ she asked the guard. She wondered whether it was to give themselves a new start on a further five days of detention.

‘The Director is coming.’

When he walked into the room she felt relief, although she doubted he had come to help. She looked at the familiar pointed moustaches, the perfect bow tie, the pinkie ring.

‘Dr Fabian,’ he said. So, there would be no familiarity in front of the warder. She would not compromise him. She was here to get out.

‘Dr Thomas.’

‘You have been told the charges against you.’ He put his manila folder on the table and sat. ‘I am not sure what help I can be to you now.’

‘I am entitled to a lawyer. And,’ she took a breath, ‘as far as I know, you cannot keep me on remand after five days.’ She held his gaze. ‘It has been a week.’

Uncle Erwin looked down and squared the papers in front of him. ‘Your father would have been proud of you.’ Then he started to shake his head, as if, regrettably, the whole situation were out of his hands. ‘But the law has been changed.’

‘The opposition parties may have been made illegal,’ Dora shot back, ‘but criminal procedure?’

Thomas glanced at the warder. ‘Not yet,’ he said. ‘But it will be done. The charges are serious. You are here for having, among other things, destroyed evidence wanted in legal proceedings.’

‘What proceedings?’

‘Proceedings against Mr Toller.’

So now they were criminalising whomever they pleased, impounding all their possessions. She couldn’t argue the substance of it. She would have to argue, with Uncle Erwin, a technicality.

‘You are obliged…’ She too glanced at the warder and eased her tone. ‘I believe the law requires me to be released after five days to await trial. Or there would be no rule of law here.’

Thomas held his lips together and breathed hard through his nose. ‘The first sign of respect for the law I see in you,’ he said, standing up. He started to walk to the door. ‘“A fig leaf over power”, as I recall.’

Dora said nothing.

Thomas motioned to the warder. In the doorway he turned his shoulder almost imperceptibly to halt her exit. Spoke down into her left ear. ‘A loophole,’ he muttered. ‘Soon fixed. We will call them the Fabian amendments. In your honour.’

They let her out to await a trial.

She did not go back to her own flat to pack, but to ours, checking that there was no guard outside. When she got in she saw why. They had smashed all our furniture already–dinted the chrome chairs, slashed the mattress in the bedroom; horsehair and feathers everywhere. They’d had fun with the glass (they loved glass, didn’t they? Glass, and lists, and fire), destroying the top of a drinks trolley, shattering picture frames and the mirror of the bathroom cabinet. Someone had drawn a lewd cartoon of Hans on the kitchen benchtop and placed the mojito stick upright as a penis.