Then We Take Berlin (26 page)

Next to the bed was an upended crate that had once held oranges. Camenzind was using it as a bookcase. A couple of novels by German authors Wilderness had never come across, a volume of Schiller’s poetry, a maths textbook full of quadratic equations and a slim, paperbound physics treatise. He shook each book in turn, hoping for something concealed, or simply something being used as a bookmark.

Strips of torn newspaper fell from the Schiller and were nothing more than bookmarks a couple of inches across and ripped from the page regardless of the meaning of what was on them.

From the physics treatise fell the one piece that had been clipped with scissors. A photograph captioned in a language he did not recognise. But he recognised the photograph. It had been in one of Rada’s files—the one curtly, aptly labelled “Armageddon.” Her copy had been cut from the
New York Times
.

He looked at the title page of the treatise, and all the fragmentary unease he had felt from the moment he had first read Camenzind’s
Fragebogen
cohered, crystallised.

Über den Nachweis und das Verhalten der bei der Bestrahlung des Urans mittels Neutronen entstehenden Erdalkalimetalle

von

Dr. Peter-Jürgen von Hesse

Max Planck Institut

Berlin Dahlem

1939

Rada had sent him away with books as well as files—all part of the education she wanted him to have, and he was pretty certain Burne-Jones was insistent he had. Some he read with pleasure, some from duty, and some he abandoned as boring.

Peter Camenzind
by the Swiss writer Hermann Hesse had been one of the latter—he’d given up in less than fifty pages. A turn of the century bildungsroman. Something about an angst-ridden Swiss teenager with a bit of a thing about St. Francis of Assisi.

But . . . if you were looking for a change of name . . . it was wise to hang on to your Christian name—as you’d never answer to another—and from Hesse to one of the other Hesse’s literary figures? Well it saved stretching the mind too far. And what were the odds anyone had ever read the book?

So, he wasn’t Peter Camenzind, he was Peter-Jürgen von Hesse of the Max Planck Institute in the Berlin suburb of Dahlem. A place with quite a reputation. Einstein had been its first director in 1917.

The language on the captioned photo he concluded was probably Danish, as it depicted a gathering of Europe’s finest physicists in Copenhagen in 1937. Niels Bohr was in the middle, so readily recognisable. Lisa Meitner, not quite so recognisable, was on his right, a young woman he could not identify on his left, and standing, just behind her left shoulder, was the man posing as Peter Camenzind.

§79

Another “Where are you Nell?” was in the process of creation on the outside of the shelter. The one-eyed former soldier, brush in hand, was signing his name—Joe.

Wilderness asked, “Why do you do this?”

“In hope. And if hope proves false, proves worthless, then it is an elegy. You take everything away from us, would you take away our elegies too?”

“No.”

“Then leave me with hope. Hope that one day . . . Joe and Nell will find each other.”

Wilderness held out the packet of cigarettes that he’d opened for Camenzind.

“You smoke?”

“Of course, who doesn’t?”

“As a matter of fact, I don’t.”

Johannes—Joe the painter—laughed as he lit up, laughed out the flame on his match.

“God that’s funny . . . the only currency left is tobacco, and it doesn’t even matter to you. You English amaze me sometimes.”

“Keep the packet,” Wilderness replied. “It may well be the last I ever give away.”

§80

He waited for Burne-Jones at breakfast the following day. Burne-Jones was late. He read a three-day-old copy of the
Manchester Guardian
almost cover to cover.

Burne-Jones dashed in looking frazzled.

“Sorry, old man. Didn’t get in till after two. The RAF aren’t as reliable as the Great Western Railway I’m afraid. All getting a bit Heath Robinson these days.”

He looked around for a waiter. Gestured at the one he found and then turned to Wilderness.

“Have you eaten?”

“Nah. I was waiting for you. The service is better if you’re on the other side of the table flashing yer crown and pip. I’ve had three coffees though. I’m swimming in caffeine.”

“And bursting to tell me something.”

“That obvious, eh.”

“Rather.”

Wilderness placed the Danish photograph in front of him and pointed to Camenzind.

“Swedish?”

“Danish. A physicists’ conference in 1937. I have this bloke in a cell right now.”

“Good lord. Who is he? One of the rocket boys?”

“No. You got luckier than that. He calls himself Peter Camenzind, but he’s really Peter-Jürgen von Hesse. He wrote this.”

Wilderness slipped Camenzind’s treatise across the table.

“Bloody hell. What does it mean?”

“Your German’s better than mine.”

“No, I mean, what does it mean
mean
?”

“It’s about what happens when you fire neutrons at uranium. It’s one of the immediate precursors to the theory of a chain reaction.”

“You mean atoms and stuff?”

“I mean atoms, stuff, chain reactions, and bombs big enough to take out Hiroshima.”

“Ah,” said Burne-Jones. “The penny has finally dropped.”

“He’s not one of your rocket boys. He’s a bigger fish by far. If, and you’ll know better than me, Germany was trying to build atomic bombs this would be the bloke who made them.”

Burne-Jones said nothing while scrambled eggs, crisp bacon, and white toast were set in front of them.

It bought him thinking time and Wilderness could readily see that he was wondering how much to tell him.

“We . . . that is the governments of both Britain and America . . . were always concerned that Germany might be building a bomb. Most of the boffins with the know-how were German after all, and while most them worked for us . . .” He tapped the treatise with his finger. “There were a fair few who stayed on. No real way during the war of knowing quite what they were up to, so we took out their heavy water plant in Norway just in case. In ’44 the Americans set up a special unit in London with one purpose, to travel with the Allied troops as they crossed France and Germany and find out just how far the Germans had got. Led by a chap named Boris Pash. Met him a couple of times. Tough cookie, as our cousins would say. First American into Paris. In fact, his unit tended to be the first anywhere. They didn’t follow, they led. In April last year they took a small town way down south, Haigerloch, not far from Stuttgart, and only about fifty miles from Lake Constance. They captured a wagonload of boffins and Germany’s nuclear thingie.”

“Thingie?”

“Cycle something. Science was never my strong point. I was more a Latin and Greek man.”

“Cyclotron.”

“If you say so, although quite how you know this sort of thing baffles me.”

“They don’t have public libraries in your neck of the woods? I used to sit in Whitechapel Library and read
Nature
while my mates kicked a tin can around the streets.”

“Quite an education.”

“Yeah. That and Cambridge and Rada.”

“Good old Rada. Where would we be without her? Now, have you talked to this chap.”

“Oh yes, he’s chatty.”

“Not too chatty I hope. Yateman doesn’t have your clearance.”

“I wasn’t aware I had my clearance, but there’s nothing to worry about. The good captain lost interest once Herr Doktor von Hesse revealed his
von
. Brought out the Pooter in Yateman. He hates toffs more than he hates me.

“I asked von Hesse why he was in hiding. He said he didn’t really know, but was perfectly happy to be in jail instead. He can smoke for Germany, so I kept plying him with fags and let him rattle on. I think, based on what you just told me, that he’s telling the truth. He was at Haigerloch. He maintains they were nowhere near building a successful bomb. And he lit out only a day or two ahead of your American pal getting there, headed north—on the assumption he’d be looked for heading south for Switzerland—and managed to lose himself in Hamburg. I think he knew he’d get caught one day, and decided we were preferable to the Americans. Once I’d asked him the first question the mask seemed to drop quite readily. As though I’d lifted a burden from him. He seemed to want to cross-examine himself. A lot of it was waffle. I got most of his life story, but in the end what it came down to was guilt by any other name. By that I mean he never used the word.”

“Guilt about what? The war? The Jews?”

“Guilt about staying on. What he fears is not arrest or imprisonment; after all, he’s had three of the squarest meals of his last year in the twenty-four hours since I picked him up, all the fags I could have sold on the black market and me last bar of Cadbury’s Bourneville—for which you owe me by the by—and the only charge he faces is lying on his damn
Fragebogen
. A smack on the wrist, a fine he can’t pay? And he’ll probably get to keep his
Persilschein
. What he fears is the judgement of fellow scientists. Einstein got out, Lise Meitner got out, Leo Szilard got out . . . he stayed.”

“Not a Nazi?”

“Not anything, and I think that’s what bothers him. He doesn’t know who he is any more. He teased that out into a whole thesis last night . . . what is Germany, who are the Germans? ‘
Wer sind wir, was sind wir?
’ He said, and this is illustrative of the way he thinks, he said, ‘How can I listen to Schubert lieder, how can I write a love letter, how can I describe the splitting of an atom in the same language that told a million lies in propaganda, created euphemisms such as
Die Endlösung
to disguise mass murder, and ordered children into gas chambers. It would be an obscenity.’”

“Obscenity?”

“That’s what he said, and he said it in English.”

“Who are the Germans?” Burne-Jones echoed. “Who are the Germans? I rather think we’ll all be asking that for many years to come. We now have the German question . . . perhaps it’ll replace the Jewish question? Although I was never wholly certain what that was.”

The German question?

And Wilderness thought of the one-eyed soldier in his hand-dyed Wehrmacht motley asking his own German question for years to come, perhaps asking for ever

Nell. I’m alive! Where are you? Joe.

§81

Lower Saxony
: August 1945

Nell stuck to unpaved roads. To limestone tracks that snaked across heathland, wound their way in and out of woodland copses, past farmhouses and barns.

On the third day, making slower progress than she had imagined, close to dusk, she could see in the infinite distance what appeared to be an encampment at the side of the road. It was the way she had imagined pilgrimages would end. Approaching the city, it seems to recede, to be always visible and always out of reach, its plume of smoke curling skyward merely to tantalise.

It was a caravan—much in the gypsy style.

It had been off the road a while, grass and bindweed in the wheels, the shafts tied up, pointing to heaven and the cart horse put out to graze.

By the side of the track a child of indeterminate gender was stirring an indeterminate stew over an open fire, with a Wehrmacht helmet serving as the cauldron.

The child’s trousers—baggy like pantaloons—puzzled Nell. Who would dress a child in bright red out of choice? But who had a choice? Then she saw the black arm of a hakenkreuz peeping out at the seam. And the faint rattle she had been hearing for the last minute began to make sense. A sewing machine. Someone, someone close and out of sight, was sitting at a treadle sewing machine turning Nazi flags into children’s clothes. The 1945 revision of “swords into ploughshares.”

The child had noticed her.

“Mutti!”

Nell followed as the child ran around the end of the caravan.

An old woman was indeed paddling away at a sewing machine, her hair tucked up in a headscarf made from the same material, her hands feeding more of the red and the black under the needle.

“Hullo dearie. Come far have you?”

“From Celle.”

“I don’t know where that is. Are you hungry?”

“Yes, I suppose I am.”

“Well . . . there’s enough for three. There is only me and Gretchen now.”

She pulled the redefined flag from the sewing machine, snipped the trailing threads and held it up—another pair of baggy pantaloons. The Third Reich rendered into the costume of a circus clown.