Authors: Anna Funder
All That I Am (19 page)
But instead I ask, ‘Do you dance?’
‘I love to dance.’
She is young and beautiful, and stuck here in this room. I do not wish her to fall in love with me. And the surest way to prevent that is to ask her to dance (who would touch such a shrunken Minotaur?). She places one hand on my shoulder, her grazed forehead near my cheek.
‘I warn you,’ I say, ‘you take both our lives in your hands.’
‘I’ll risk it,’ she smiles.
I hold her a little stiffly at first. But as we move to music we can no longer hear I lean into her and my hand settles, gently but proprietorially, in the hollow of her back. She lets herself be to me the warm body I want. She lets me have her back, in this room.
Spies in the bedroom, spies on the roof,
Spies in the bathroom, we’ve got proof.
Spies on the lawn where the shadows harden,
Spies behind the gooseberries in the kitchen garden,
Spies at the front door, spies at the back,
And hiding in the coat-stand underneath a mac.
Spies in the cupboard under the stairs,
Spies in the cellar, they’ve been there for years.
'Spy Song’ by W. H. Auden
,
from his translation of Ernst Toller’s
No More Peace!, 1935
In London Hans and I looked for rooms like itinerants, in this new world of labyrinthine terraces divided into single cells, landladies now mighty over us. At the first house, on Coram Street, Bloomsbury, a woman in a pale green housecoat showed us a room underground. It had a bed, a chair, and a dresser with a one-ring Primus stove on it. The only window was a thin oblong of grey light at pavement level.
While she talked of the rate (a pound a week, bath extra), the conditions (home by ten p.m., quiet from ten-thirty; cooked breakfast between seven and eight, kippers extra), I watched shoes and ankles on their way to work. Hans, in his faltering English, told her, ‘We are having only temporary visas, we will—’
‘As long as you’re not Irish,’ she cut him off, ‘I don’t mind.’
The second room we looked at was on Guilford Street. This woman was square-jawed and skinny, with red-chapped hands and an Irish lilt. When Hans raised the issue of our papers she shook her curls and laughed. ‘As long as you’re not English,’ she said, ‘dat’s all right wi’ me.’
I looked at her face–a lifetime of pasties, skin that sucked the light and reflected nothing back. We could have come from anywhere; we were just ‘foreign’.
In the end we took a small flat to ourselves at 12 Great Ormond Street, Bloomsbury. It was a few doors down from the children’s hospital and a block away from Coram’s Fields, where the foundling home had been. The caretaker had lived there with his wife, but they’d moved to the bigger, basement flat. To get to ours we entered the front door from the street, under a fanlight with an angel’s head looking over it. There was a grand staircase that spiralled back on itself, past the large flats on the first three floors. Then the proper staircase ended and a narrow, rickety set of wooden stairs led to our place under the roof.
The ceilings were so low Hans stooped involuntarily going through the doorway. From the entry space, there were two rooms to the right, each with paned windows facing the street. The glass in them was old and uneven; the Georgian terrace houses on the other side wobbled and shuddered as we walked. On the left off the entrance was a kitchen we could eat in, with a door on its far side onto a large bare concrete balcony, which was really the roof of the larger flat below. Tucked away next to the kitchen was a small third bedroom and a bathroom. Straight ahead in the entryway was another door. Hans opened it and pulled the light cord. It was a walk-in cupboard with shelves on three walls.
‘We’ll need to find ourselves a
teensy
refugee for this one,’ he said.
Because my father could send us money from Poland we were relatively well off compared to other exiles, who were prohibited from getting their money out of Germany. Which is to say we were not destitute, begging for money from the refugee-relief and Quaker organisations, like most. Though our flat was small, its great advantage was its three separate rooms. If we ate in the kitchen, there would be room for Bertie, and perhaps Dora. Unless she stayed with Toller–but we never knew quite what was happening there.
In my parents’ villa the maid lived in a room off the kitchen, but Cook and the other staff lived in houses I’d never visited. In Berlin, Hans and I had had a girl, Rosalie, who came every day, but she lived with her parents and brothers in a two-room flat in Neukölln. We had all spent years talking about the working class, but as I looked around this little place with its low, plain ceilings and tiny rooms I realised that we hadn’t ever, really, known how they lived.
And though we had talked ourselves blue about workers’ rights, it would never have occurred to me to join their ranks in a practical sense. The second week at Great Ormond Street we hired Mrs Allworth, who charred for the elderly couple below us, to clean. Mrs Allworth lived in the East End. She was skinny, snub-nosed and energetic, prone to rashes that started on her neck and bloomed up behind her ears, sometimes across her jawline. I don’t think they were caused by embarrassment, just emotions she could not at that minute place and put away.
At the interview I looked into her pale-blue eyes and ignored the pink blooms, but they made me like her. It felt like honesty, to be able to see this life shifting below the surface. Mrs Allworth held her hands together in her lap and looked around her in wonder that this place had existed, tucked up here, all along. I saw it for a moment through her eyes: rickety rooms with mismatched donated furniture. A faded green couch we’d inherited from the caretaker and his wife, a crate with a cloth on it for a bedside table. The walk-in cupboard was stocked with stationery and typewriter ribbon instead of food. She made no comment, but I imagined she lived in better (no doubt neater) circumstances.
Mrs Allworth wore her wavy, faded-auburn hair bunched in a net, a pinny tied at her tailbone and her sleeves rolled up to her biceps. I grew to appreciate her through her language. She used ‘elbow grease’ and ‘went like the clappers’ about the flat; things ‘tickled her fancy’, and people ‘rabbited on’ or ‘made a palaver’. Her ‘old man’ or ‘himself’ worked on the docks and they had four sons, and all of them, the whole family, were to be killed in the Blitz. She came Tuesdays and Fridays.
The Reichstag fire and the persecution in its wake had sent fifty-five thousand Germans into exile–some two thousand writers and artists among them. Several hundred of us ended up in Britain. An exiled wit joked that we were the ‘Emigrandezza’: the educated political opponents of the regime. The mass of Jews came later. There was nothing grand about us, though. Everyone was dislocated and struggling–without our language, often without money, without readership and with no right to work.
Our English visas also stipulated ‘no political activities of any kind’. But our lives would only have meaning if we could continue to help the underground in Germany, and try to alert the rest of the world to Hitler’s plans for war. We were being offered exile on condition that we were silent about the reason we needed it. The silence chafed; it made us feel we were betraying those we had left behind. The British government was insisting on dealing with Hitler as a reasonable fellow, as if hoping he’d turn into one.
Even receiving mail from Germany could place us under suspicion, which might lead to our visas being revoked. But word leaked out, one way and another, of what was happening at home. With every carefully phrased letter or rumour, the threat of being sent back acquired new colour and terror.
The barbarians started with the revenge they had stored up the longest–against the revolutionaries of 1919. Toller’s adjutant, Felix Fechenbach, was ‘shot while attempting to escape’ at such close range the back of his chest was blown open. When Hitler’s men found Erich Mühsam, another of Toller’s co-revolutionaries, they branded a swastika on his skull and bashed him to a pulp. Then they made him dig his own grave, but pulled back from killing him at the last minute, giving him just a foretaste of hell. Hans’s editor, the renowned pacifist Carl von Ossietzky, had been taken prisoner and there was no news. There was nothing covert about what they were doing: they wanted everyone’s fear.
Every three months when we respectfully begged His Majesty the King of England to be allowed to stay, our minds flooded with the things we could not mention in our polite visa application letters, the true reasons we could not go home. It was like submitting to a medical test; you feel fine until the test itself conjures up the possibility, in minute and excruciating detail, of the illness being tested for. Suddenly the symptoms you’ve been ignoring, the twist of spleen and liver ache, the shooting pain in your upper breast, are proof of the diagnosis any fool but you would know is coming.
London was harder for Hans than for me. I had reasonable English from school, but his was rudimentary. He found reading the newspaper difficult, and he found the fact that his name did not appear in it worse. Hans brought the same honed eye to the British that he had trained on the Germans, but here he had no outlet to tell what he saw. Slowly, he lost his sense of public self, and with it his private one evaporated. For him London was a place where the wind blew litter around red postboxes and the parks were under lock and key. Businessmen in suits and bowler hats dressed to disguise the human underneath, signs of individuality restricted to the pattern or colour of their ties. The houses too were identical, in blank-faced rows with black cast-iron railings, distinguished only by the colours of their doors.
In fact neither of us could get used to the minutiae of differentiation, we couldn’t take it seriously. We mistook people’s exaggerated politeness and lavish praise for friendliness, when it was meant to keep us at a distance. The manners, Hans quipped, fenced off unassailable and pristine areas, like the parks.
During the daytime, while I busied myself working with the Jewish Refugees Committee and the Quakers and taking pictures, he walked alone to the reading room at the British Museum. He would write himself into a novel.
Those first weeks, I found it a shock not to be recognised for what I had always been seen to be–a German, a bourgeois, a Jew. As socialists we had argued for an international brotherhood of man in which class and race were irrelevant, but I had never stopped to think what that might actually feel like. Here, by the magic of exile, whole categories of my identity were obliterated.
Very soon, though, it became clear that I’d been granted a glorious liberty. It was the liberty of a licensed observer, a tourist–of someone from whom nothing could be expected. As winter turned to spring I spent long, absorbed hours taking photographs around the city–children in bright knitted hats at London Zoo; swift-fingered cardsharps on Oxford Street, all winking, incomprehensible charm; calm-faced women nursing their bags on the top decks of buses. Hans, who was shy speaking to the English, spoke of them as they fitted his preconceptions: a nation of shopkeepers, tea drinkers, lawn clippers. But I came to see them differently. What had seemed a conformist reticence revealed itself, after a time, to be an inbred, ineffable sense of fair play. They didn’t need as many external rules as we did because they had internalised the standards of decency.
Which, in an unspoken way, they tried to teach us. A rich and kind Jewess, Mrs Eleanora Franklin, held an open house for refugees every Sunday at her residence at Porchester Terrace in Paddington. Mrs Franklin’s earlobes hung heavy with gems and she carried an apparently legless white animal in a bag made of carpet. On the way in to tea she asked whether we would like to wash our hands. Neither Hans nor I had touched the dog, whose head, with its mesmerising underbite, nodded at her elbow.
‘No, thank you,’ I said.
‘My hands are clean, thank you,’ Hans said politely.
Mrs Franklin leaned in to him, enunciating clearly. ‘I meant, dear, would you like to use the lavatory?’
He shook his head in silence.
The meal was announced as the clock chimed. It was afternoon tea, not a repast we were familiar with. The table was fully laid; there were sandwiches made of white bread on tiered stands, with fillings of cucumber, smoked salmon, egg and mayonnaise, prawn. Other stands held cakes–tiny chocolate squares in ruffled paper, berry tartlets, and pink-and-white coconut fingers. Bowls of jam glistened darkly at each end of the table, next to ones of clotted cream. The maid appeared with platters of warm scones and put them down. We didn’t know what order to serve ourselves in. We watched others closely and followed suit: it seemed you could have cake before a sandwich or an asparagus roll, but only one thing on the plate at any time. Our hostess stood and poured tea from a height. There was no lemon for it, but milk instead. A serving girl came round with a tray bearing coupes of champagne.
Hans sat next to me, waiting and watching, in quiet conversation with a middle-aged Quaker with pomaded hair. During a lull I heard the man say, ‘That’s how you sit, is it, in Germany?’
I looked quickly at Hans. He was sitting perfectly upright, his hands in his lap. Hans said nothing, inclined his head politely. The man stretched out his arms, garnering the attention of the room before placing his wrists ceremonially on the edge of the table. ‘In this country,’ he said, as if to be kind, ‘we sit like so.’
