Authors: Anna Funder
All That I Am (42 page)
I used to make my wife pack a length of rope in my suitcases. Oh God oh God–fetid bird-stink, the bluesteel flash of beak. That beast will have me, it will not leave here until it gets what it wants. There is a hook on the back of the bathroom door. If it will hold.
I get up to write a note for Ruth. If she lives she is the first audience for my efforts, the one who also loved yet failed her. She should have this before any publisher. The one thing she always had, that kind, lopsided listener, was the ability to imagine herself into another’s skin. I think it distracted her, really. Clara will find her.
My hand trembles over the paper. There is no neat cover note for passing this life–Dora’s life–from one person to another. I find I am out of words. So I just write ‘For Ruth Wesemann’ and put the note on top of Clara’s steno pad, which lies on the book. The parts she has already typed Clara has inserted into it. I go to the window and untie the cord. A puppy downstairs has wound its lead around a parking meter; two young Negro women in pastel hats, one green, one violet, walk under the fringed entrance canopy and emerge, as expected, on the other side. The cord runs coolly through my fingers, will slip nicely. I will not fail this time.
In the bathroom there is nothing, just a flickering light. There is no time for thinking; for once no point coming up with words to recreate this later: there is no later! The idea is a relief to me. This, too, is a practical matter. I tie a slipknot firmly around the hook on the door, and make another, wider one for my head. My poor hands shake their protest but I get the cord over me, turn my back to the door.
I feel the exact same feeling–hesitation and blind purpose– as before jumping into a cold pool. The fall off the block.
Nothing more—
When Bev is gone I get out of bed and make my way down the hall to the front room. My balance is slightly out and I trail my fingertips along the wall. I flick the switch in the room. But the darkness has come inside! The ceiling is black–it is moulting and velvety. Bev must have left a window open; the bogong moths have come in on their migration and lined the place. The room shimmers with brief, misdirected life.
I am a vessel of memory in a world of forgetting
.
I sit under the canopy of moths. It is deep dark outside. Everything out there, every squat, sun-bleached house and frangipani tree, the domed synagogue and brick school, the rag-tag shops, the cliffs with the ocean behind them, has vanished. The world has shrunk to a small area of light from the streetlamp. Lines of rain slash through its bright cone. The bogongs are welcome here.
I pick up Ernst. It occurs to me only now: he must have thought of me in his last hours in that hotel.
Toller was always kind to me, but it was clear he inhabited a different sphere. I was neither beautiful nor important enough to occupy a place in his world. But he did not send me this life of his with Dora put back in because I am her cousin. He has sent it because we had her in common. We were the two for whom she was the sun. We moved in her orbit and the force of her kept us going.
His book opens in my hands to this: ‘Most people have no imagination. If they could imagine the sufferings of others, they would not make them suffer so.’
This is what we all believed. It is what he believed, I suppose, till he could no longer.
Imagining the life of another is an act of compassion as holy as any. We drafted the leaflets, cyclostyled the truth. We told the stories on butter paper, in cigar canisters, smuggled them back into Germany. We risked our lives to help our fellows–there and in London–imagine. They did not imagine it. But Toller, great as he was, is not right. It is not that people lack an imagination. It is that they stop themselves using it. Because once you have imagined such suffering, how can you still do nothing?
Now, at a distance of seventy years, it is safe to imagine, because no one can be called on to act. No one held to account. The costume party will not be interrupted. Of course, for me, the failure runs deeper. I failed to imagine the need inside Hans, and I failed to see his turning.
And here I am, in a week when a manuscript was delivered, I swam, I went for cake and fell, they patched me up and sent me home. But in truth I have been with them all along. I can imagine what it is like to be another till I float in and out of them, till the imagining sets like memory. How else can we know anyone, love anyone, but by imagining ourselves inside their skin?
I see the room as clearly as my own. As clearly as when I found it.
They were armed when they entered, bulges at their hips, but not uniformed. Five of them, with hats on. Slipping quietly into the building using the keys copied from the set Wolfram Wolf handed over. Their people had been watching the flat, waiting until the Swiss investigator was gone and the two women were alone. They had to wait a week. It was Sunday evening.
The action had been discussed in Berlin and London. It would have been simplest to shoot them of course, as they had Lessing and Rudi. There was no need to kidnap Dora because they had her source already. She just needed silencing. But a shooting in Bloomsbury would have upset the English, and the English were upset enough. Also, she had contacts in high places. So shooting was ruled out, and they would need five men, two on each woman and one to give the order.
They’d approached Wolf in a bakery, when he was buying his morning rolls. He’d looked at them as if at the sudden incarnation of all his fears. They escorted him to a seat in Russell Square to discuss a proposition. It was hardly much to ask, they said: lend them some keys, write a letter, barely anything at all. Wolf stammered something about it not being possible; at the inevitable inquest his relationship with Dora would become known and his wife would find out. Then they mentioned his daughter, in Denmark, how convenient it was for her that she could walk to school. They spoke of other relatives in Germany who were still free; they terrified him with what might, in certain as yet undefined circumstances, happen to them. When he worried about having to imitate her handwriting they knew they had him. They were in a position, they said, to ensure that Scotland Yard would hand the note over to the German embassy for translation and graphology. It would be ‘taken care of’. Wolf came up with the idea of using shorthand himself, as an extra protection.
He wrote the suicide note on Sunday morning, typed his own address on the envelope. He dropped it through the letterbox around the corner from 12 Great Ormond Street, then walked swiftly past the children’s hospital with his collar up and hat pulled low, lest one of the women come out, slowing only once he got to the corner.
They knew from their previous visits to the flat how much Veronal was likely to be in the bathroom cabinet, but they hadn’t been in there while the Swiss was staying so they brought their own just in case, along with a bolt-cutter. It was evening. They let themselves in with the keys; the door was not chained. They found Dora in her pyjamas, Mathilde still dressed. The flat smelled of coffee. There was no discussion, no fanfare about it. This was a plan devised and approved at the highest level, rehearsed, and now to be implemented. They kept their gloves on.
They gagged each woman and tied her to a chair in the kitchen. Dora counted while they emptied three sachets into each cup. So this was how she would go. Tailor-made.
The boss man used this time to visit the famed hall cupboard he’d read about in the reports. When he came back into the kitchen he nodded at one of the men standing next to Mathilde, who placed the muzzle of his gun cold against her temple. He addressed Dora. They would shoot Mathilde if she did not drink. And quietly. Understand?
Mathilde moved her eyes, her head, almost imperceptibly, to indicate no. Dora should not drink. It was nonsensical to think that Mathilde would be let go after this. When they took Dora’s gag off for her to drink she screamed. A glove slammed over her mouth and nose; the gag was retied, tighter. So they would make her watch instead.
They removed Mathilde’s gag. She kept her eyes firmly on Dora: the two of them were still there, together. Mathilde opened her mouth when they told her to. Dora knew the taste, bitter, granular. It took Mathilde three swallows. They put the gag back on. There was no fear in her eyes. She was still Mathilde, for the time it would take. Dora’s eyes filled.
‘Look what you’ve done now,’ the boss man said.
Where do they get these calm killers from? He nodded at the one standing to Dora’s left, who yanked her head back by the hair and pinched her nose together. The other untied the gag and her jaw fell open. They poured the bitter stuff into her. Drops spilled onto her pyjamas.
They kept them tied to the chairs. The women watched each other, their eyes all they had. All the life in the world in them. An eternity of looking condensed here, into not being alone in this. Mathilde lost consciousness first. After fifteen minutes her head sank to her chest. Dora still held her in her gaze. Would not look at them. Would not give them the pleasure of the eyes of their prey in the intimate moments of death.
When Dora’s head fell they moved them to the bedroom. Pulled the covers back and put the bodies, still breathing, on the bed. They took off Mathilde’s shoes, placed them neatly against the wall. Turned them to face one another in a last embrace, entwined the fingers of Dora’s left hand and Mathilde’s right in a mock scene of sorrow. Then they pulled the covers back over them. How else, for God’s sake, could the covers have been so firmly up to their necks? No two people ever lie so neatly, die so neatly, covers firmly tucked up.
They placed Dora’s key on the shelf next to the bedroom door, locked it with their own behind them. Straightened the kitchen chairs. A tabby cat watched from the corner near the stove, its white tail-tip twitching. They locked the front door behind them, pocketed their gloves. If the neighbours saw anything, it was nothing they hadn’t seen before: five Germans coming down from a meeting in the attic flat.
Toller is still open in my hands. I close the book.
It is time for me to sleep. My tongue is dry as a lizard’s. I think I’ll just stay here.
When Bev comes at nine Ruth is still in her chair in the front room. A few moths cling to the ceiling, but most lie motionless on the floor, a thick, dusty-black carpet. Bev doesn’t speak to her but leans in and touches her hand–then her own flies to her mouth. As she calms herself, an old book and some yellowed papers slide off Ruth’s lap and make a mess on the floor. She’ll clean that up later. Slowly, Bev leans in again. She picks up the hand, holds it in both of hers.
Afterwards she walks down the hall to the kitchen and boils the kettle for a cup of coffee. Sniffs at the milk in the fridge, because Ruth always leaves it there too long.
Perched on a stool Bev surveys the cheap trinkets and keepsakes and practical things in the room. She realises she hasn’t just sat here since she applied for the job, three years ago. That day the old woman had gestured with her still-magnificent hands at the mess and creeping dust around her and said, ‘As you can see, I can’t do this alone.’
‘I can see that all right,’ Bev had said.
On the windowsill above the sink a velvet-leaved violet survives by catching steam. A small porcelain pig lying on its back is very happy with himself, looking down on his curly tail and anatomically detailed–over-detailed, she thinks now–penis. Bet that’s not Australian. On the table is a faded photograph of two girls at a fair, and on the fridge an appointment card for Professor Melnikoff. Below it there’s a magnet the same as the one on Bev’s fridge, with a Crime Stoppers number to call if she sees anyone she doesn’t like the look of, like that Portuguese woman. These objects made sense only to Ruth; Ruth held them together in a constellation of story: the violet, the pig, the photo, the card and the magnet. Now they are junk.
Bev tips the half-cup of black fluid down the sink. She pulls the phone from its cradle in the wall, dials the necessary number and starts to clean.
My most profound debt is to my friend Ruth Blatt (1906–2001), whose humour and humility I admired almost as much as her courage. I am also grateful to Charmian Brinson, Richard Dove and John Spalek for discussions with me. The plot of this novel, the relationships between the characters and their interior lives are all invented. But many of the events depicted actually happened. For material on these and others, I am indebted to
I Was a German: The Autobiography of Ernst Toller
, William Morrow, New York, 1934; and Toller’s
Look Through the Bars: Letters from Prison, Poems, and a New Version of ‘The Swallow Book’
, translated by R. Ellis Roberts, Farrar & Rinehart, New York, 1937;
The Strange Case of Dora Fabian and Mathilde Wurm: A Study of German Political Exiles in London During the 1930s
by Charmian Brinson, Peter Lang, Bern, 1996;
He Was a German: A Biography of Ernst Toller
by Richard Dove, Libris, London, 1990;
Die Göttin und ihr Sozialist: Christiane Grautoff–ihr Leben mit Ernst Toller
, edited by Werner Fuld and Albert Ostermaeier, Weidle Verlag, Bonn, 1996;
Der Fall Jacob-Wesemann (1935/1936): Ein Beitrag sur Geschichte der Schweiz in der Zwischenkriegszeit
by J. N. Willi, Peter Lang, Bern/Frankfurt a.M., 1972; and
Nazi Refugee Turned Gestapo Spy: The Life of Hans Wesemann
,
1895–1971
by James J. Barnes and Patience P. Barnes, Greenwood Publishing Group, 2001.
On a personal note, I am indebted to the Rockefeller Foundation, the Australia Council and the University of Technology, Sydney. The book has benefited hugely from the close and kind attention of its editors, Venetia Butterfield of Penguin UK, Terry Karten of HarperCollins USA and Ben Ball of Penguin Australia. My agent, Sarah Chalfant, has been the most wonderful source of strength for many years. My children, Imogen, Polly and Max, have been more patient, and more inspiring, than they yet know. My greatest thanks go to my husband, Craig Allchin, whose wisdom and insight sustain the life and the work.
