All That I Am (41 page)

She goes on working from London after the war breaks out. Mathilde buys the stationery as usual from Cohn’s and Dora finishes her book about the psychological attraction of fascism for women, forgetting to eat the meals Mathilde has prepared and pacing the balcony trailing smoke. In her book Dora writes that women are taught to want an ideal man, a model from whom reality always falls short, so they are vulnerable to a leader who says he knows them and who promises to be ‘true’. He can remain ideal, their lives can continue to fall short, and in the space between, the women live with desire itself, which is a pleasure all of its own quite apart from its fulfilment. Dora’s book is celebrated. She is a German de Beauvoir: less sex, but more political. She stops seeing Wolfram Wolf, but continues to love others as a pastime, a benign diversion. Her victory is in decoupling the female fantasy from the instant pleasures called Fenner Brockway, Lord Marley, and then others–English, American, a Czech in exile. She stays in contact with Toller, who, despite her best efforts, has taken up permanent residence in a chamber of her heart, forbidding all others entry there.

Maybe he too survives. These things being contagious.

After the war she covers the Nuremberg Trials for the
Manchester Guardian
, compiles a book from these pieces and dedicates it to Bert. She calls it
What We Knew
. She shares a literary prize in America with Hannah Arendt, who only came to these things afterwards.

Then Eleanor Roosevelt invites her to America at Toller’s suggestion. She becomes provost of an elite women’s college, she publishes in
The Nation
and decries Korea, Vietnam. She goes on Johnny Carson’s TV show wearing lipstick someone must have put on her. It gets in her teeth.

I like to think of Dora, but at the same time it is also true that I take little pleasure in these imaginings. I do it as a way of trying to measure the dimensions of loss. As if it might, one day, be finite.

In 1952 a box of my things arrived in Bondi Junction. It had been packaged up by the Social Democrats-in-Exile and stored in London. The box contained two photo albums, my camera, the pink porcelain pig pot (of all things to follow me!) and my PhD certificate. Finally I could prove my qualifications from Germany and be accepted into a high school to teach languages. Slowly, I started to photograph this place, which made me see it better.

That same year I received the letter from Jaeger–Dora’s German embassy man in London–looking for Ruth Wesemann. I had long since resumed my maiden name. I wrote back, and we had a small correspondence.

Six months after Dora died Jaeger’s London posting had ended. He returned to Berlin, where he remained in the Foreign Office through the years building up to the war, then for the war and its aftermath. Passing information between Erwin Thomas in Berlin and Dora in London, he wrote, though it had not even been his initiative, was the single shred of evidence he had of his own decency. When it was all over he had requested, in some kind of atonement, to be transferred to the Reparations Payments Department in the Treasury of the Federal Republic of Germany.

This man Jaeger, whom I never met, wanted to make sure I received my pension for the time I’d spent in prison. I accepted, of course, because a teacher’s salary was meagre and my parents’ villa and everything in it had been lost behind the Iron Curtain. Jaeger was also, gently, tying up loose ends. ‘You will know,’ he wrote, ‘the fate of my esteemed colleague Erwin Thomas.’ I had no idea. He said Thomas never forgot Dora. The day Jaeger returned to Berlin Thomas visited him in his office. ‘I was the only colleague he could come to.’ Thomas remembered a girl, he told Jaeger, standing on a red carpet giving him a lecture. He wept.

Uncle Erwin had no other contacts in the resistance. He survived for years deep in Göring’s ministry. To leave would have invited suspicion. In 1944 his chance came when von Stauffenberg and other senior insiders planned the bomb-in-the-briefcase assassination of Hitler. Erwin Thomas was their contact man high up in the Ministry of the Interior; he would be issuing the interim orders in Göring’s place once the Leader was dead. After the bomb went off, for the afternoon of a single day when the plotters thought Hitler had died, Thomas stood tall, gave the orders, started to undo his years of closely watched criminality. At four o’clock the news came that Hitler was still alive. The following afternoon Uncle Erwin was taken with von Stauffenberg and the others to the back of army headquarters and shot.

Jaeger thought I was also entitled to be told what the Foreign Office had known of Hans. He said, politely, that of course I may know this already. I did not. Apart from in dreams, Hans had been lost to me.

In Venezuela, Hans had tried to curry favour with the German embassy in Caracas by reporting on other émigrés. This had prompted the embassy people to keep tabs on him. Hans had married a wealthy woman and begun to breed a local species of water rat for their pelts. When he contracted malaria, thinking himself on his deathbed, he converted to Catholicism. The marriage did not last and the business failed. Desperate for funds, he tried to turn in the priest who had nursed and converted him, for spying. Still the Germans would have nothing to do with him, so he left for the United States.

Hans was in Texas when America joined the war. The Americans interned him as an enemy alien. When the war ended, the Socialist Workers Party members who went back to Germany sought to have him extradited to face trial for his crimes against them. Hans hired a small-time New York immigration lawyer on the Lower East Side and successfully evaded their demands. There were no further reports from that time.

Jaeger enclosed a copy of the very first report on Hans from the German embassy in London to the Foreign Office in Berlin. Dated 21 September 1933, it was typed on letterhead and marked ‘Top Clearance Only’.

From: Rüter, German Embassy, London

To: F.O.

CC: Reichsmarschall Göring

A Hans Wesemann, formerly a journalist in Berlin, came in today without an appointment, demanding an audience with the Ambassador. Herr Wesemann appeared to be in a state of high agitation, if not outright anxiety. He spoke with a pronounced stammer. He was brought in to me.

Herr Wesemann’s name will be familiar to you perhaps as it was to me: he is a member of the Socialist Workers Party and the journalist who penned the slanderous attacks on both the Führer and Herr Dr Goebbels.

Herr Wesemann led me to understand that it was now clear to him from the distance of exile that the agitations of his former self and of his former and current colleagues and associates both in the Reich and now in Britain were distasteful acts against the Fatherland. He expressed the view that one’s connection to one’s country is not severable by distance, and may even be made the stronger for it. This he has only come to realise, he says, when separated from Germany. He said he feared, were he not able to receive some support from us, that he would be drawn back into that world of treason.

In return for our protection and some payment (see below), Herr Wesemann alleges he has information and connections, from his association with Socialist Workers Party-in-Exile, which might prove useful in protecting the Fatherland. Wesemann mentioned in particular that he had the trust of Berthold Jacob and of Ernst Toller. Furthermore, he alleged that his wife’s cousin, one Dr Dora Fabian, formerly secretary to Herr Toller, is Jacob’s conduit for smuggling classified information from the Reich Government into Britain and arranging for its publication in the press.

In support of his claims Wesemann produced a document, allegedly from the office of Reichsmarschall Göring, outlining the air capabilities of the Reich (encl.). If this paper is genuine it would appear to indicate a leak from the Reichsmarschall’s office, perhaps via Jacob or another source, to Dr Fabian in Britain. Please confirm:

1. Origin and authenticity of the document and;

2. What action to be taken re Herr Wesemann, B. Jacob and Dr Fabian.

Herr Wesemann says that he is supported by funds from his wife’s father in Silesia, but that he is looking for an alternative source of income. Proposing payment of a weekly retainer for services and information offered. I gave him £10; request approval for instating more permanent honorarium.

Heil Hitler

Rüter

First Secretary

Seeing it in black and white, the sale of us for money and protection, comes always, every time I read it, like a stab.

Later, I heard other things from Jaeger’s successor. In 1956 a tall European man was arrested in Oaxaca, Mexico, for a crime against the morals of a minor. He gave his name as Ernst Toller, but within a week Interpol revealed him to be Hans Wesemann, born 1895.

Then the details got sketchier. Hans tried to make the fugitive Nazis in Mexico his friends, but even they did not trust him. The last report was from 1961. Hans bought dried rabbit meat from a woman at the covered market in Ciudad Juárez, telling her he was setting off into the Chihuahuan Desert with a donkey and supplies. He was going to peddle the meat to villages close to the US border and make a killing.

I hope I have outlived him.

TOLLER

This hotel chair is low, I can lie right back. I am a small man, bigger inside–I liked to think–than my frame could reasonably be expected to bear. My chest lifts and falls of its own accord. I look over my belly and hips, groin and legs, feet. Those feet embarrassed me all my childhood, dangling from chairs and never touching the ground. But really this body has served me well, been faithful in pleasure and done its best in pain. I hold up my hands. I know every word they have written, gun they held, caress they’ve given.

After she died London was empty for me. Christiane and I left for the New World. Hollywood didn’t want me, but I hope this place will be kinder to Christiane.

I close my eyes. I am tired. But there is work to do–she always says it is about the work, not about me.
Grossly exaggerated
, she says, sand squeaking under her elbow. Bells outside. A peal of life, shunting the hours of the day. Who would have thought? Her hair has grown longer, but it is the very same hair, in luscious black waves. The very same neck. How ridiculous to have been so sad for so long when here she is, right in front of me! And there’s so much to explain. All the things she’s missed out on, all the work we have to do. For which I suddenly, mysteriously, have the energy. I won’t ask where she’s been, she’ll only laugh at me. Her
freedom
, remember. Main thing is, she’s here, feet on the rungs of that chair, tanned forearms hovering, bitten fingers edging the steno pad. Only do
not
turn! That hair I have run my hands through, tight at moments of communion.

Do
not
turn around.

And these four years lived with a hole in my heart and the wind soughing through it–for what? She’s right.
Monstrous waste of time
. We must get down to it now. The world needs us; together we can do it–find some way around Franco. His stupid victory parade two days ago. I wonder if she knows Berthold Jacob is safe and in France? We can do it with him!

And I am filled, now, with something else–something that makes the sorrow inside me ridiculous and small, a personal indulgence in a world I had come unstuck from. No. It is more, even, than that. Suddenly I am a different man. It runs through me and I hover above the world; I have breached a membrane that keeps us from seeing, and from pity, and I am filled, filled in this chair to the brim with the calm, visceral certainty of us all being forgivable. And all, ultimately, saved. It is a peace that spreads through me like warmth. It is a gift, a final, unaccountable joy. If I were a religious man I would call it grace. The black-winged reproaches are laughable compared to this truth. I laugh.

She turns. This girl who is not her.

The room is small, cream coloured. I am empty. The act of remembering Dora did bring her back. But, as it turns out, it was better to live with the idea that I would get to her one day. Now that I have summoned her up and written her down she is more dead than before. Am I the only person to carry her with me? Will the world forget we tried so hard to save it?

I wonder if her cousin still lives.

Clara is standing there, a question on her face. She must have asked me something.

‘Sorry?’ I say. And I am. Clara’s kindness is my all.

‘The usual for you today?’ There is no impatience in her voice. She has lived with me through these weeks and this morning, through my reckoning and tears, and just waited, unafraid, for the story to come. She knew not to comfort me or the spell of my girl would be broken. And, now that it is over, she knows–how does someone so young know this?–that my girl is gone. It is to practical things that we must turn. In this case, bagels.

‘I think I’ll have rye today. Instead. Please.’

‘Okay.’

‘Oh, and would you deliver this to Christiane for me?’ I pass her the note.

‘Sure.’

But she makes no move to the door.

‘Anything else? Coffee?’

‘Yes. Coffee. Thank you.’ I smile up at her as if everything’s all right, she can go now.

She does not believe me. ‘Why don’t you come too?’ She pulls some hair out from under her jacket collar. ‘Stretch your legs.’

‘I just want to sit.’

And then the unexpected. She, I think, as surprised as I am. Clara places one hand on the arm of the green-and-gold chair, bends to my cheek and kisses me softly, quite long. My eyes close.

‘You did well,’ she says into my ear. It is finished.

I can’t speak.

At the door she turns. ‘I’ll be half an hour, at the most. All right? Just…’ She’s stuck for words. ‘Just wait.’

The door closes behind her. One minute there is life in the room, the next it goes out. I am nothing. I am an eye with nothing behind it, an eye on the closed steno pad on the desk with my love inside it, and next to it the photographs of the dead children of Spain whom I also failed. The newspaper still folded: somewhere deep inside it the beginnings of this war we have not prevented, and a ship of Jews being sent back into it. And the curtains behind the desk–I notice for the first time there’s a flower pattern running over (or is it under?) the stripes, like embossing. Christiane’s cord tying them back.