All That I Am (40 page)

When my father’s heart failed in the third year of my term, my mother offered to pay for a private police escort of six armed men so I could attend the funeral. Permission was denied.

I was released in October 1939. War had broken out. Some have found it strange–another piece of undeserved good luck, their veiled looks say–that I was released at all, and not simply sent to be gassed and burnt like all the rest. But unlike the rest I had the benefit of a sentence imposed by the law, and it required, at its end, that I be set free.

The Nazis duly stuck to the letter of it, but added a creative ultimatum. At the prison gate I was given twenty-four hours to leave the Reich: if found on German soil after that time, I would be sent to a concentration camp. I was a grouse, being set into flight before hunters. I thought back to when Hans and I had been given twenty-four hours to leave. This time they weighted the stakes in their favour by confiscating my passport.

I boarded a train to my mother’s villa in Königsdorf. When the ticket collector came I hid in the toilet, and when the military police did their sweep I stood on the outside platform behind the last carriage. My brother had left for Switzerland, so Cook had moved into the house to keep Mother company. When I came in Cook held my face in two hands, tears leaking silently. In the entrance hall a letter with my name on it sat on a silver salver, postmarked three years before.

‘I knew you would come to get it,’ Mother said. That small sentence carried the freight of a lifetime’s undeclared love.

I need to go home. They are waiting for me in my front room.

I hope I didn’t say that aloud.

I tell the nice nurse M
ARGARET
P
EARCE
I want to leave. She says she’ll see what she can do. When she comes back she tells me the doctor isn’t happy about it, but, as she reminded him–and her tone implies that these child doctors need corralling–‘We have a new policy of letting people go home, so long as palliative care can be arranged.’ It’s the first time anyone has said ‘palliative care’ to me.

Do I have anyone to care for me? she asks, jangling and smiling behind her half-glasses. This is clearly a step-by-step procedure. Nothing to worry about, all quite by the book.

Bev picks me up from the hospital. She opens the drawers next to the bed without asking, packs my things into my toilet bag. I submit to this invasion of privacy because at my age one needs mothering, again. And again, I think, as she clatters about and I look at the hospital triangle hanging above me where once hung a butcher’s rig, one must accept the mothering however it comes. My head is bandaged this time as well. I am reduced to an eye on the world, a single aperture.

I watch Bev work with a brusque kindness I know will turn into a story in her own honour later. Her spotted hands are covered in cheap gold rings. I wonder if she would eat her own fist to make me laugh.

In my kitchen Bev gives me instant noodles and puts my pills into a lurid fluorescent container she has bought specially, as she tells me. It has compartments for every day of the week, morning, noon and night. The pills sit in there in their colours and shapes ready to push me, in plastic-coated increments, into my future. She holds my hand in hers before she leaves. She says, ‘Dear. Dear.’ She is crying.

After the war I came to this sunstruck place. It is a glorious country, which aspires to no kind of glory. Its people aim for something both more basic and more difficult: decency. I couldn’t see it at first, but now it is all around me, quiet and fundamental. It is in the hydrotherapy angel and the smiling Melnikoff, in Trudy Stephenson my pupil and the scrap-haired woman holding the traffic at bay, in the nurses and the baby doctor. It is, I would hazard a guess, in Bev.

The letter on my mother’s salver was from Bertie. I have kept it with me through all that came afterwards. I must have read it a hundred times. It is five pages long. The last page, with his best wishes and blessing, hangs framed in my kitchen. I take it down now and place it on the bench next to the pills.

The Swiss government’s protest worked: the Nazis set Bert free after six months in custody. He went back to France, while Hans languished in a cell in Basel. Though Hans begged the German government to make the same kinds of protests on his behalf to get him back, the Nazis left him there to rot.

Bert wanted me to know that he too hadn’t seen what was coming. He wanted me to know how it happened. Bertie wrote that he’d met Hans at the restaurant in Basel. Hans was at a table with two others, a man he introduced as Mattern, and the forger. Bertie hadn’t been expecting anyone else, but Hans explained that both men worked together. Bert produced the photo he had brought for the passport, and the forger wrote down his date of birth, height and eye colour on a piece of paper. Without asking, the man wrote ‘Religion: Jewish’ in his notes.

They drank fairly solidly for an hour and a half. Then the forger said that ‘for the money part’ he would prefer them to come to his flat in Riehen. Bert said he looked at Hans, who nodded calmly: it must have been part of the plan. Downstairs a car was waiting. ‘What self-respecting forger doesn’t have a car with a chauffeur?’ Bertie wrote.

Bert and Hans got in the back of the car, Mattern and the forger sat in the front next to the driver. Bert didn’t know where the district of Riehen was. They passed a train station on the edge of town, then drove into the night where there was nothing. The car was going fast. He looked at Hans, who shrugged his shoulders as if to say, Who knows how these things are done? There was enough alcohol in Bert’s system to be second-guessing his first responses, telling himself to calm down.

Until they got to a guard’s hut with the Swiss flag hanging from it. The border! Instead of slowing as the sentry stepped out, the car accelerated. The man had to leap clear to save himself. Bertie cried out then, and Hans too. Mattern and the forger snapped around to rest the stubby snouts of Mausers on the back of their seat.

‘Gestapo swine!’ Hans shouted. Mattern pistol-whipped him, hard, across the face. When the car reached the German boomgate, it was already raised.

At Weil am Rhein they sped down Adolf-Hitler-Strasse to the police station, pulling up around the back. Men were coming out of the building, shouting. Hans was hunched on his side, one hand holding the door handle. Bert was cowering too, but in all the movement and noise he felt oddly calm. After all, he wrote, some kind of end is not unexpected, not unimagined: so this was it. And Hans was with him.

Then, without speaking, Hans turned away and opened the door. In seconds he was a white shirt disappearing into the dark. ‘He didn’t say a single thing to me.’

Mattern took his time aiming and shooting a single bullet. ‘Shot while attempting to escape,’ someone said. There were snickers. The choreography of the scene gave them away. ‘I wasn’t even angry at first,’ Bert wrote. ‘It was more an emptiness, as if my soul had been removed.’

Bert asked to see Hans’s body; of course they refused to produce it. The interrogation in the provincial police station lasted till after midnight. Then they put him, under guard, on a train for Berlin.

Bertie said that Dora had died trying to save him. He said we were tied together like climbers on a mountain and if they picked one off the rest would fall. And about Hans he wrote, ‘I was fooled to the end, so how could you not be?’

But Bert had not known all that I knew. I have kept his letter hung up in my kitchen to remind me at what price my survival has come.

Bertie added a postscript about Wolfram Wolf. The British, he said, though availing themselves of Wolf’s story so as to avoid any conflict with Berlin, didn’t believe it themselves. Shortly after the inquest they expelled him from the country. Wolf wasn’t politically active in any way, but they knew he was the cover guy for the Nazi action. A cover they themselves had made use of.

My mother had two identical dresses made for me from the blue-and-white curtains in the vestibule at home. She stayed there until, after their invasion, the Germans requisitioned the villa as their headquarters for our region. Then she fled east, my poor, proud mother. I heard that she suicided under a train in Warsaw, before it took off for the camps.

From Königsdorf I managed to get a train to Genoa, where the docks were filled with Germans and Poles, Romanians and Estonians–every spectrum of humanity fleeing the coming cataclysm. At the ticket window I paid for passage in steerage to Shanghai, the only port that would accept refugees without passports. People slept about the docks. Children dozed on bags or wriggled in their mother’s arms; men sat on the ground playing cards for matches. I had three days to wait.

The morning of my departure I was washing my alternate dress in a tub on a ramp near the water when I saw him. There were still boats that accommodated first-class passengers. Well-dressed people with decent luggage and papers boarded in a leisurely, ceremonial way, with the staff lined up in greeting and a bugler, bugling. In full view of us human detritus. I dropped the dress.

Hans–it was him, surely–was in a pale suit with a gold cravat at his neck. I started slowly, then broke into a run. People skittered out of my way. I tripped on a coiled rope or a bag or a person. When I reached the ship the ticket collector moved his body to block the gangway.

‘Biglietto, Signora?’

‘Where…?’ was all I could think to say, trying to look behind him. ‘
Dove
—?’

‘Venezuela,’ he said.
‘Biglietto?’

The man knew I wouldn’t have one; I was undernourished and had no luggage, my dress was wet and my wrists grazed red. I craned to see. Now turned away, Hans was pressing his right hand into a fur coat worn by a woman with dark hair up in a chignon. They vanished into the crowd on the lower deck.

I have seen him numerous times since then, in the way you might glimpse someone you once loved, or someone who died, in the shape of the back of a head on the ferry, or a distant, lax-legged walk. It brings the same sick lurch in the stomach, though it is not from love. I feel thrown away. Other times he has shown his face in my dreams. Then I feel fury. Sometimes something worse: wanting. Wanting his good opinion, wanting him. I wake disgusted that I have not been able to shake the power over me I ceded to him at eighteen, and get myself back, complete.

In Shanghai we foreigners lived under Japanese occupation. Because Germany was an ally the Japanese didn’t intern us, but we were crammed into a closed area, under curfew. I shared a partitioned room with a female tram driver from Berlin and I nearly starved. I fell pregnant to a self-taught Polish philosopher in exile. The doctor said if I could barely feed myself, there was no hope for carrying a child. I paid him for the abortion with a large tin of Nescafé, worth more than money on the black market. All my hair fell out. When it grew again it was still dark but thin, leaving white gaps of scalp when I pulled it back. The sorrow I felt from the abortion has gotten worse, not better, with time.

The news didn’t come to me until 1944. Fenner sent his letter care of the Shanghai Baptist College, where I was teaching by then. I took it to the park at lunchtime and sat on an ironwork seat around a tree. It was hot. Somewhere the toothless old man played his two-stringed erhu. Birds hung in cages in the trees, where people had brought them out to taste the air. In the part of the city where I lived there were no birds, they had all been eaten.

The Nazis never made the connection between Uncle Erwin and Dora. They never could account for how information about their secret air force got from Göring’s desk into the British parliament, and into the papers. They satisfied themselves with the thought that Bertie had somehow, through his arcane sources, given the facts to Dora.

After she was killed, Fenner kept in contact with Bertie, who was living in Paris. When the Germans invaded France Bertie was interned, but Fenner’s Independent Labour Party helped him escape to neutral Portugal. They installed him in a flat above a pet shop on Lisbon’s Rua Ouro while they tried to procure him an American visa. There was no guard, Fenner wrote, but the party was looking out for him. Their people warned him not to go for walks on the street, in fact not to leave the flat. They arranged for a woman to deliver food. It must have seemed to Bertie, though, so unlikely that he’d be followed here, from the internment camp at Le Vernet, over the Pyrenees to the backstreets of Lisbon. All he wanted was the newspaper. He could see the kiosk from his window. It would take five minutes.

The limousine had three men in it. Bertie was nabbed off the street and driven to Berlin, put in a cell on Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse. There, over months that turned into years, the other prisoners watched him get thinner and sicker. But he remained their unfailing source of hope because he never wavered: he was utterly convinced of an Allied victory. ‘Hold your head high,’ he told one of them, ‘don’t let the pigs see how beat you are.’

At the start of 1942 Bert had to have his teeth removed. Fenner believed the Germans were keeping him alive thinking he might have some exchange value for the Allies. In February, after a beating, he was taken to the prison hospital to die. He weighed thirty-two kilograms. The cause of death was recorded as tuberculosis.

Fenner wrote that he was saddened and very sorry. ‘I have failed you all,’ he said.

That was it then. Dora was gone, and Toller had been dragged under too, just before the war. Now Bertie.

Somewhere, though, Hans was at large in a land of mojito sticks and quietly available boys, probably still in the pay of the Germans. I did not want to share survival with him.

By 1947 I had enough money for passage to Australia. In Sydney I worked in a trouser factory in a suburb where trees would not grow, where the weather forecasters always had it a degree or two hotter.

Sometimes I would give Dora another life, one with a different ending. The human brain cannot encompass total absence. Like infinity, it is simply not something that the organ runs to. The space someone leaves must be filled, so we dream forever of those who are no longer here. Our minds make them live again. They try, God bless them, to account for the gap which the brain itself cannot fathom.