Good People (24 page)

Thomas returned home buzzing with ideas and plans. He immediately noticed that Clarissa's red-collared coat was gone, as well as her scent: her hair cream and perfumes, the fresh smell of the grass that clung to her when she returned from the university. She had gone to Westphalia that morning with a group of girls from the NSV to distribute goods in towns and villages. In preparation for the trip she had removed superfluous objects from the house—a coat, shoes, notebooks, textbooks—and she had also packed up his mother's wardrobe, Thomas's reluctant contribution to her organisation.

‘All well and good, but those clothes have sentimental value,' he complained when she piled everything into a large carton.

‘The greater the suspicion, the greater the contribution,' she chided, reminding him of the events of November. A glow of victory smoothed her face. ‘Besides, you were the one who taught me that an obsessive focus on “the good old days” is a disease of the German soul. A house isn't a memorial to the dead but a place where people live.' (Not ‘a person', he noted, but ‘people'.)

‘Did you tell Karlchen that you were going away? If you didn't,
he'll turn up here every morning,' he said in mock annoyance.

‘Don't worry, I told him,' Clarissa chuckled. ‘I warned him not to come near you. You scare him a little.'

In the last few weeks she had taken to sleeping in his mother's room, and did the housework for him in lieu of rent. Sometimes she returned late, a little drunk, in a thin summer dress, with a hairdo that changed every week, while he sat in the parlour, read a book or planned all sorts of ‘business ventures'—but actually he was waiting for the moment of her return when she would stand in front of him in all her glory, blushing and giggling, leaning against the wall, a high-heeled shoe in each hand. Then the room would swarm with invisible motion, and, though nothing had apparently changed in him, he would be filled with life, and his whole body would awaken. He would pretend to be interested in where she had been, and how she had enjoyed herself, wanting her to stay near him: in those moments he was permeated with pleasure and hope, and once again everything seemed possible. Sometimes she didn't come home, but would sleep at a girlfriend's house, in her parents' apartment or somewhere else. He never dared to ask where, and would fall asleep in the parlour or crawl into his room, the windows already pale with the dawn.

Thomas wasn't the only one who tracked Clarissa's nights: they also preoccupied Karlchen, her seven-year-old brother, who adored her. From the moment he learned that she was sleeping in the neighbour's apartment—Thomas never asked her whether her parents accepted the arrangement or whether it expressed a kind of minor rebellion against them—he would climb the two flights of stairs in the early morning and knock on the door. If his sister was there, she usually sent him home, but sometimes she let him lie in her bed, depending, she said, on the lesson she wanted to teach him, but Thomas suspected she decided on impulse. Sometimes the kid would turn up very early. Thomas would regard him with groggy eyes, and hear himself saying sweetly, ‘My dear little boy, I'm also looking for your sister.' He would warm some milk for him, and together they would wait for Clarissa.

‘Where do you work?' the boy asked. ‘Clarissa says you used to be a big man. She says that now you sit in the house and complain, and she's going to help you be a big man again.'

Thomas laughed. ‘Do you think a man can stop being big?'

The boy gave him an annoyed look, blew on the milk and didn't answer: just like Clarissa when something didn't please her.

Thomas wandered through the house before sitting down to concentrate on the opportunities that were now presenting themselves. He poured himself some cognac and took it to his workroom. Recently he had stopped smoking a pipe. It reminded him of the smoke-filled rooms at Milton, and anyway he had decided it was time to exercise regularly and discard harmful habits. He had applied to join a swimming and a rowing club. Meanwhile, he exercised twice a week at home.

A grey bird stood on the windowsill and picked at breadcrumbs that Clarissa had left there. A breeze ruffled the heavy curtain, which swung out and swallowed the bird up in its folds. Thomas sprang over to it. He imagined the bird plummeting to the street, but it had disappeared.

He turned around and inspected the dark workroom, striped with small enclaves of light. The candle flame trembled in the evening breeze. Clarissa's decision to turn the little room where his mother had kept souvenirs and old things into a workroom had been a good one. But Clarissa's absence now struck him with awareness that he would spend his last days here in total solitude. He was overwhelmed with the certainty of death; it trampled over every other thought, destroying the trace elements of memory, as if all of his consciousness were silent. Death was terrifying, but even more terrifying were ‘the colonnade years', as his mother called them, which were already part of its domain. In truth, from childhood he had felt that in some aspect of his soul there was no pulse of life, that something inside him, which was steadily eroding, was already given over to death, and there was nothing left for him to do but look upon it, seized with dread and resignation.

With an effort of will he brought his thoughts back to the meeting with Weller. He had two choices: he could write a report and ask an exorbitant price for it, but he would be paid once only, and the document would do the rounds of the departments; if he didn't include the conventional opinions about the Poles, he might be accused of deviation from party principles, of fondness for Slavs or Asiatics. Or he could write a report that did no more than repeat the familiar invective; the people in the Foreign Office would decide he was an idiot and reject him. Could he blend the two approaches? The result would be muddy and useless.

He had to admit that the model prepared in the Warsaw branch of Milton was comprehensive. All he had to do now was rearrange it. It included a chapter about the commercial practices of the Polish Jews, which he could now refresh, calling it, let's say, ‘An Outline of the Character of the Polish Jew'. The challenge was to use the existing material to squeeze his way into the Foreign Office—preferably to a position of influence.

This was a golden opportunity, the first job offer in months that suited his abilities (if you forgot about the offer to serve as personal adviser to that tiresome woman, Scholtz-Klink, of the Nazi Women's League), and he needed to avoid any false steps. But to prepare a document for people without understanding their aspirations or power struggles was like cursing people in the street while wearing a blindfold: maybe someone would fall in love with your blunt style, but it was more likely you would get slugged.

At last he decided to prepare a short paper that would outline the general principles of the Polish model and to attach a proposal to hire him as a consultant. Only then would he deliver the whole document. ‘The matter will be settled to our satisfaction,' he said, letting the brandy linger in his throat, luxuriating in its warmth. ‘It's a classic case of everyone winning.'

…

The document that he presented, ‘A Multi-Disciplinary Model: The Ideal Type of the Polish People', contained twelve chapters, and was approved by senior officials in the Foreign Office. It was read at once and hastily circulated among the various agencies of the Reich. In just a week, on the eve of the invasion of Poland, urgent calls were received from the SS and from the Treasury, the Interior, Justice and Propaganda ministries; from Hermann Göring's office; from a man Thomas admired, Dr Todt, who was now supervising most of the technical projects of the Reich; and from officers of the Wehrmacht and from research institutes that dealt with Eastern European affairs. All of them wanted to meet Thomas, praised the report, raised objections, but mainly offered ideas regarding their future roles in Poland. Dozens of questions were showered on him, on myriad matters, like the extent of the Pole's opposition to accepting the local rule of the
Volksdeutsche
, the best way of neutralising the intelligentsia, the treatment of Polish businesses and the views of the Catholic priests.

The chapter that compared the attitude of the Poles to the Reich with their attitude to the Soviet Union, which Thomas regarded as the most brilliant, did indeed arouse great interest. An idea was going round that harmful Polish elements, especially within the intelligentsia, should be encouraged to move into the zone that the Soviets would conquer. Thomas thought this was crazy and he gave it short shrift: the hatred of the Pole for the Russian would sabotage any initiative to encourage emigration. The only practical possibilities were ‘the hastening of emigration by severe measures', or expulsion.

The Foreign Office decided to hold a conference focusing on the model, and to invite representatives of the various agencies that would operate in Poland. Ernst von Weizsäcker, the State Secretary at the Foreign Office, announced that he would chair the conference, an event that of course would be kept secret, and all the participants would be forbidden to speak about it to anyone except their superiors. Weller was full of cheer when he told Thomas that von Weizsäcker would be leading the discussion. ‘Do you understand? That means that the Foreign Office endorses the document. An outstanding achievement!'
Weller, who had enlisted Thomas, a step that had cost him ‘a stubborn struggle with dangerous elements, who don't like the idea and like you even less', regarded the great interest that the model had generated as a personal achievement, and he felt like the author of a great event.

On the morning of the conference Thomas woke up at exactly four o'clock. He lay in bed for a while and polished the first ten sentences of his lecture. When a phrase especially pleased him, he repeated it. Of course, he didn't write anything down: you had to know the crucial speeches of your career by heart. At five he took a cold shower, and rehearsed the final instructions that he would give to Weller before the participants gathered in the Foreign Office. When he came out, Clarissa was already making breakfast.

‘Did you think I would sleep in?' She laughed and pointed at the chair. ‘Little Clarissa doesn't like to get up early, but today I leaped out of bed as though the sheets were on fire.'

While they were eating she chatted—her skin smelled of soap and lemons—and regaled him with amusing incidents from her last trip with the NSV Women: the poor people of Germany were terribly funny, some of them didn't have anything in the house except bread and milk, but they still insisted on contributing. One woman in Solingen begged the organisation to take back the clothing that had been given to her.

He listened and from time to time he commented, and inwardly he thanked her for her efforts to relieve his tension. When they finished eating Clarissa cleared the table, and he lit his first pipe in months and sat in silence.

At exactly six she sat on the chair opposite him and he stood and gave his lecture to her. Not a muscle moved in her pretty face until he finished. That was at his explicit request: no encouraging smile, no complicit nod, nothing, since people were coming to the conference who regarded the whole idea as contemptible, who would look for flaws in the model, wanting to throw him off balance, and to report back to their masters that the Foreign Office hadn't a clue about the
Poles. After he spoke, Clarissa called his attention to several sentences whose tone sounded too defiant. They disagreed about this: in his opinion, defiance was necessary to promote a new idea.

He was heading to his bedroom to put on his suit, when Clarissa summoned him back. ‘Thomas'—her eyes sparkled—‘your wonderful speech will inspire everyone. Even the Führer's speeches don't come close to it. And it's not only the speech, you know. I read the model. You're doing something great for Germany.' She blushed, as though she understood that pathos didn't suit her, and she kissed his forehead.

The moment her lips left his forehead he wanted her. He adopted a teasing tone and said, ‘Enough, dear, enough, I don't need any more pressure. Tell me that today will be a triumph.'

She didn't answer but on her bare feet with her red toenails she minced over to the sofa, where she liked to sprawl while she was preparing for classes at the university.

Sometimes he succumbed to the urge to indulge her, and concentrated only on what she might want, but her wishes still evaded his understanding. She seldom showed annoyance with him, but his insistence on humouring her made her sad. Even on the matter of repairing the window in his mother's room it seemed that she objected to the ease with which he had given in to her. Once she told him that Charlotte, her married aunt, had told her that she didn't like men who stretched and shrank according to a woman's wishes; he understood that the words were intended for him. When she begged him to behave in a ‘natural' way, as if she were a guest, to do as he pleased in his own home, he felt as if he had been relegated to a twilight realm where anything he did would seem a form of artifice. If it sometimes seemed to him that ‘natural' was only another word for ‘indelicate', he was in fact anxious about the connection between them, which retained an insubstantial element, as though Clarissa had decided to set aside a certain amount of time for him, when she would grace him with her sympathy—and then one day she would disappear.

Sometimes he imagined her waking up on his mother's bed, rising from the pillow with a lonely expression as though seeking something
familiar, as every morning she learned anew that there was nothing familiar here. The plausibility of that fear terrified him; usually Thomas enjoyed fears that he didn't believe in. Erika Gelber claimed that he enjoyed them precisely because he didn't believe in them. Maybe he had feelings Erika hadn't plumbed. Very well, he thought, I won't cure all my mental anguish just this second. He was furious because he had failed to halt his distress in time. Standing before the mirror in his suit, he realised again that his future lay in his own hands; the model was an achievement, and the quibbles of his opponents were irrelevant. Onwards: go out and sell it.