Earthly Powers (74 page)

       "It's a Circus," I said, "not a Platz." And it dawned on me that I might never see Piccadilly again.

       I was permitted, under a military rifle and a Schupo pistol, to dress properly and pack my bag. Strehier was allowed to use the toilet, though with the door open. He sat there a long time reading one of the old copies of Punch he kept there in piles to beguile his costive waiting. The Gestapo snarled at him and went on about Jewish shit, but he said in a courtly manner that that was precisely what he could not conjure. Then he winked at me and I knew he was secreting the British passport inside the issue of June 20, 1934: at least that would not enter into the charge or charges of either of us. We were marched across fields and through the wood, with a soldier, Schupo and Gestapo man each, the seniors of all three arms being reserved to me, but Strehler's party well ahead. I was very lighthearted. This is often the way when the abandonment of personal responsibility is enforced: neither wronged innocence nor just guilt can seriously impair the sensation of freedom one has. That Strehier's heart was light I could tell from his trolling of the old song of the archpoetMifti est propositumwhich came from the nationless Middle Ages when Germany was the Holy Roman Empire. I was seeing the last of him; he had produced great work which would outlast the Nazis; he had every right to be content, despite the proddings and the execrations. He even had Vindobona in his case, but I doubted if he would be allowed to finish its translation. For me, I had used what talent I had in the service of popular diversion; I had eaten and drunk well; I had attempted a worthy act even if I had botched it. If I were shot there might be a statue erected for me in some London square, as for Edith Cavell.

       On the road there were an Opel Medium Truck Type S and a Porsche KŸbel and a few interested villagers were being kept off by three or four soldiers under a Feidwebel. All this struck me as wasteful, but probably they knew best. I, being a dangerous English spy, was encircled by riflemen in the open truck, while Strehler was thrust into the back of the Kubel. The Gestapo as well as the two Schupos were travelling by courtesy of the army: there was a fluidity, or reduplication, of authority in the Nazi system which I have never well understood. Strehler and I waved goodbye to each other, and that was the last of him. He joined, I presumed, that anonymous Jewish force which was to be exploited to the brutal limit and then, in a cleansed Germany, to fertilise those large white asparagus which are still on sale in May in both the Berlins. But Strehler is alive, like Heine and Mendelssohn, and the Nazis are merely the stuff of television movies.

       Strehler neglected on parting to mention poor Heinz, from now on to be both fatherless and fosterless. I did not mention him either, and yet he was much in my mind as the cause of my present trouble. Indeed, I was surrounded by a group of Heinzes on top of the Opel Medium Truck Type 5, all with foreskins and fixed bayonets, their postures of military alertness no mockery, however.

       To be quick about it, a combination of various authorities in Vienna was efficient to establish that I was no spy. My roll of film was developed and found blank except for a portrait of a bad-toothed innkeeper and his wife. Abwehr and SS and a rather charming chain-smoking professorial man in a doublebreasted tunic of dovegray whom all deferred to got my situation typed out and indexed and sped on the wire to Berlin. I was Kenneth M. Toomey, distinguished British novelist who, believing there would be no war, had innocently come to rural Austria for a vacation and had been staying in all innocence with another even more distinguished novelist whose criminal Jewishness had somehow failed to register as it had failed to register with the Swedish Academy. No harm done. Regretfully I had to be sent off to an eventual camp for hapless enemy aliens of similar innocence; meanwhile I was to dwell under guard in what had formerly been a small nursing home for epileptics on the Stromstrasse.

       My fellow internees included two Poles who, having learned something of the Nazi doctrine on the expendability of Slays, feared for their lives in bad German. There was also a French newsreel team, their camera confiscated, who had been picked up entire in the Zillertaler Alpen. They snarled a good deal at myself as one of an untrustworthy nation that had dragged France into a useless war. Their deprived cameraman was muscular and aggressive. There was no one of my own nation to support me except an ancient Lancastrian toymaker who had worked all his life in Graz and wrongly assumed that he was a naturalised Austrian. "Bloody Frenchies," he said. "Couldn't rely on't' buggers in't' last lot and it'll be't' same in this. Only good Frenchie's a dead 'un." After two weeks I was told loudly by one of the guards that I had to pack in readiness to be moved off. This was a rainy morning in the dayroom, the French quarrelling loudly over a poker game. They jeered and made throat-cutting gestures at me. "Bloody frogs," said the toymaker. "You watch yourself, mate. Don't stand no nonsense."

       I was taken to the Viennese headquarters of the Reichspropagandaminis terium and, in a beeswaxed office with swastikas and a portrait of the FŸhrer as Parsifal, was introduced to Doktor Franz Eggenberger. He was a small swarthy man with hair on the hacks of his hands like a sketch of fur gloves and he spoke excellent English whose rhythms had been arrested at the prep-school level. He had been educated, he told me, at a place named Hyderabad House near Bridport in Dorset, his father having been a great believer in the British ruling class educational system, cold baths and spare diet and Latin. "So here we are, old chap," he said, passing me a box of Stolz cigarettes. "Read one or two of your things. Rather liked them. Just had the great Joe Goebbels on the line."

       "Ah."

       "Seems to think the world of you. I think you'll be able to guess what he's after. A two-minute radio interview. In English, of course, since it's meant for British listeners. Nothing treasonable, from your angle I mean. Nothing too nasty from ours. A bargain, call it."

       "You mean you're letting me go?"

       "The idea is everybody suddenly turns their backs. A special exit permit to a neutral country. Plane to Milan was suggested, and then you're on your own. It seems a very civilised idea to me."

       "We're not supposed to bargain with the enemy, are we?"

       "Nobody's forcing you, of course."

       "The question is: what will they say back home?"

       "Well, you can't really expect us at this end to worry overmuch about that, can you? I mean, be reasonable. There is a war on, you know."

       "I'll do it, God help me."

       "Stout chap, thought you would. Joe Goebbels will be pleased."

       So they put me up at the Josefstadt on Lederergasse and sent this pleasant young official to prepare me for the interview. He apologised for not liking my work: he had had Dr. L. C. Knights as a tutor for a year at Cambridge and had been taught a rather rigorous approach to literature. And so, on the rainy evening of September 29, I found myself saying: "Misunderstanding is always a great pity, especially when it turns into war."

       "How, Mr Toomey, do you define the term nation?"

       "Well, as I think I've already said in some of our private conversations, I think in terms of a certain continuity of culture literature, of course, chiefly—"

       "And literature's made out of language, isn't it?"

       "Well, yes. In a sense you could say that England is the English language and Germany the German. You may, indeed, say that Luther was the creator of Germany as he was the creator of modern German."

       "And Germany is wherever German is spoken, whether it be Austria or Danzig or the Sudetenland?"

       "You could say that, yes."

       "You were surprised on your holiday visit here to the Reich to hear that war had broken out between our two countries?"

       "I was surprised to discover that after conceding the Anschluss and the Czechoslovak business both Britain and France felt so strongly about Poland, a country they were in no position to comfort or assist—"

       "When you say England and France, Mr Toomey, you mean, I presume, their political leaders?"

       "Well, of course. To be loyal to the democratic system, if not to the elected leaders now in power, I feel compelled to register a vote of very little confidence in Mr Chamberlain. This, I must emphasise, is not disloyalty. Unlike your own people, we British have the privilege of changing our leaders."

       "That is perhaps because you have no real leader, Mr Toomey. If you had one, you would not talk of changing him."

       "There may be something in that. Democracy has its price. So, of course, does dictatorship."

       "You regret this war then, Mr Toomey?"

       "I regret all wars with their wasteful expenditure of young lives. Young blood and high blood, as Ezra Pound once put it, fair cheeks and fine bodies. For an old bitch gone in the teeth—"

       "For a botched civilization. I know the poem. It was a text for practical criticism when I was at Cambridge. You say in your book about religion, Mr Toomey: 'Something gets into a man, some force beyond his control, something we must term diabolic and learn how to drive out.' Do you still believe that?"

       "Yes, I do. I believe these destructive forces can be overcome if we try hard enough. Exorcizo te, immundissime spiritus, omnis incursio adversarii, omne phantasma, omnis legio—"

       "What is that you are quoting, Mr Toomey? It sounds very impressive."

       "Oh, it's the old Rituale Romanum. I was thinking of my friend, almost my brother, Monsignor Campanati, Bishop of Moneta in Italy. He has always stoutly held to the view that man was created good and that evil is from the devil. I saw him once at work, driving out demons. I trust he is at work now, exorcising the demons of war that infest this world of ours. Meanwhile, the rest of us can at least pray that peace will soon come again."

       "Amen to that, Mr Toomey. If I may ask you a general question, what do you consider to be the finest thing in life?"

       "Marcus Aurelius put it rather well, I think. He said, 'For us creatures, knowledge that heaven exists beatifies life—'"

       "Very beautiful, Mr Toomey."

       "'—Or opens doors yielding noble actions. Zeal inspires sanctity.'"

       "Have you a message for both the German and the British peoples?"

       "Yes. May all your hearts in the long eras rolling relentlessly on teach innocence, not hate. Everyone everyone—"

       "Yes, Mr Toomey?"

       "Learn love."

       "Thank you, Mr Toomey."

       The red light went out.

       Next morning Dr. Eggenberger accompanied me to the airport in a polished Daimler. "Gorgeous weather," he said. "England should be looking lovely just now." In the departure zone he rasped at Lufthansa officials in what seemed very theatrical German. So might he have acted some cardboard jackbooted Prussian in an end-of-term comedy at Hyderabad House near Bridport. I half expected him to wink at me to show that the gross barking was just an act. He did not wink. It was his English that was the act. "Got everything? Passport, cash, traveler's checks?"

       "Everything. And thanks for everything."

       "Well," he said, "let's have you out of the bloody Reich." And in terrible earnest he took a smart pace back, raised his right arm in the ancient European salute, and cried: "Heil Hitler." Bridport was very far.

       On the plane I sat next to an American journalist. "Europe," he jeered, "playing its little lethal games. This time you're really going to be out for the count." I had to be a European, not being an American, but he was incurious as to what sort of European—Icelandic, Latvian, Attic or Spartan, all one to him.

       "Europe's not an entity. That's the mistake you Americans are always making. And it will go on resisting being an entity. That's why Hitler won't win."

       "We'll be in at the end like last time to save all your asses." He then got stuck into a copy of Time with an American senator, unknown to Europe, on the cover: Idaho's George F. Schlitz or somebody. I saw Alps like ruined pastry below. We landed at Graz, then at laked Kiagenfurt. The American got out. "See you, fella. Or maybe not." Then we sailed over the border at Tarvisio and I was safe. I celebrated with a doze until we got to Milan.

       Once in the Federated Malay States, visiting a Chinese patient old and bedrid with Philip, passing through the back room of the jeweler's shop above which that dried fish of an ancient dwelt, I saw in an otherwise empty bookcase a copy of The Cloud of Unknowing. Bagaimana kitab mi datang di.sini? I asked the Mah-Jongg players. How the hell did this get here? They did not know, nor did they care. And now, in the taxi that took me from Milan airfield to the Milan rail terminus, I found, equally baffling, a copy of Hobbes's Leviathan. It was, moreover, from the Molesworth edition of 1839-45, the only complete edition of Hobbes that, before Professor Howard Warrender got to work very recently, was, so I recently was told, available. I asked the driver what it was doing there, and he shrugged and said Ta' tahu, I mean Non to so. I opened the volume, dog-eared, pencilled over, bought at Brentano's in New York but by whom was not indicated on the flyleaf, and found myself looking at Part IV0fthe Kingdom of Darknesse. I read: Besides these Soveraign Powers, Divine, and Humane, of which I have hitherto discoursed, there is mention in Scripture of another Power, namely, that of the Rulers of the Darknesse of this world, the Kingdome of Satan, and the Principality of Beelzebub over Daemons, that is to say, over Phantasmes that appear in the Air: For which cause Satan is also called the Prince of the Power of the Air: and (because he ruleth in the darkness of this world) The Prince of this world: And in consequence hereunto, they who are under his Dominion, in opposition to the faith full (who are the Children of the Light) are called the Children of Darknesse And then he spoke of a Confederacy of Deceivers, that to obtain dominion over men in this present world, endeavour by dark and erroneous Doctrines to extinguish in them the Light, both by Nature, and of the Gospell; and so to dis-prepare them for the Kin gdome of God to come.