Gossip from the Forest (26 page)

The numbers he wrote down this Sunday in the forest did not assert themselves on the page in the old way.

Weight of boys at 1 yr
. (he wrote)
down 41%
.

And, after a long wait,

Weight of girls ditto down 32%
.

He was sure that was right. Or nearly.

In Büttenhausen they say of my brother Heinrich the postman, he never forgets the smallest detail about changed addresses or anything like that. In Stuttgart they say of my brother the typesetter, it's as if he'd written the copy himself. They'd both found safer uses for their congenital memories.

In Stuttgart.

He wrote:

Stuttgart in receipt of
⅓
prewar supply of milk
.

Klagenfurt 11%
.

Graz 6%
.

Crick-necked Vanselow and then the other two returned from the Marshal's train. They sat about saying nothing; the count even fell asleep.

A WHISKY TIPPLE WITH GEORGE

Sunday dinner, and the Marshal had no wise repented of his vision. History (he still believed) would, like black ball in corner pocket, slot down into the neat cavity of his presumptions.

Provoked this way, Wemyss took to his cabin and spent the early afternoon resting and having a whisky tipple, from a private bottle in his valise, with George Hope.

Wemyss:
Did you take a nap, George?

Hope:
Not really, sir.

Wemyss:
Pity. It will be a long night's argument if word comes from Berlin.

Hope:
I'm used to long watches, sir.

He was proud of it.

Wemyss:
Indeed. Well, another crossing tomorrow, whatever happens, truce or not. Your wife meeting you at Folkestone?

Hope:
No, sir. My daughter's not able to be left alone.

Wemyss:
I'm sorry.

Hope:
She lost a husband.

Wemyss:
It's appalling. Do you know? The French picked up a signal detailing a British air raid tonight. Transmitted
en clair
by our people! The dying isn't over, George.

Hope:
No.

In shirt sleeves the First Sea Lord scratched his left breast, less because it itched than as the first act in some rubric he used for coming to decisions.

Wemyss:
I want to ask you something, George. I don't want to embarrass you but I know you're a good man. I don't mean good in the frightened,
pallid
way we English use it, but
really
good. Close to … close to …

Hope:
God, sir?

Wemyss:
That's right.

Hope:
I'm not frightened of being accused of that.

Wemyss:
So let me know, what do you think, George? Are those people lying? About chaos? About famine? About Bolshevism?

The blue eyes pulsed once with a certainty appropriate to Savonarola but then returned to their proper Anglican repose.

Hope:
You know the beggars are lying, sir.

A STAG OVER YOUR SHOULDER

That afternoon the sun still stood quite clearly over the forest and the sentries took their trench coats off and every now and then their fingers raked around inside their collars to wipe away mild sweat or scratch the smallest of heat itches.

Erzberger asked the count if he'd care for a walk through the woods. In spite of all the man's freakish behavior, Matthias still looked to his company as to a last true friend.

They escaped their train and took the first path they could find. The forest made its own strange light beneath its boughs. Its breath was cold on the cheeks. There was, as well, a stag presence in the place. The tremulous could easily imagine a great beast breaking cover to gore them. This afternoon Matthias was tremulous.

Alfred Maiberling seemed tense. Perhaps he expected reprimands from his head-of-mission. As if I'd dare. As if we wouldn't end brawling like two stevedores.

At last a conversation got started.

Maiberling:
What was your mother's name, Matthias?

Erzberger:
Katarina.

Maiberling:
Did you see much of her?

Erzberger laughed.

Erzberger:
Of course. It was a small house. And Büttenhausen is full of Jews and Protestants who didn't mix much with us. Nor, to tell the truth, us with them. Yes, I saw a lot of her.

Maiberling:
Servants …?

Erzberger:
None.
We
were the servant class.

Maiberling's high forehead struggled to ingest this alien condition.

Maiberling:
You were lucky. I can tell: your little wife …

Erzberger:
Paula.

Maiberling:
Paula. She's that sort of mother, a good country mother. Who gives a damn if she lacks style? Her children won't care.

Matthias was used to the sideways compliments of the upper classes. But thought, what is this style business and who has it if Paula hasn't? And what an oaf I must have seemed when I first came up to the Reichstag from Biberach.

Maiberling:
Think of my mother. She had style. She used to visit us once a day—that was her style. An administrative visit, by and large, a visit to the colonies. If we were lucky it lasted ten minutes. The nursery was a great room at the top of the house. There was one little coal fire there. I bet you spent your childhood around a great stove.

Erzberger:
Yes. I did. There you are. We had nothing else.

Maiberling:
We had a nanny who used to take fits. She would become very still on a chair in one of the cold corners. My older brother Hans was a real bastard. He would put a flame close to her eyes and she wouldn't move—perhaps she wanted to move, perhaps she was in a fever of fear but she couldn't do anything about it. Her eyes did not blink. Hans would make experimental cuts in her ankles with his penknife. When she came around she never mentioned them or tried to punish Hans. She was ashamed of having fits and didn't want to mention them by name. My mother said to us one day, if Nanny should fall down in a fit I want you children to force her jaws apart and put a pillow between her teeth. It's something Nanny does now and then. That was bloody dangerous advice, as it turned out. Nanny could have bitten our little pink fingers off. I suppose it would have all helped to make us reliable German gentry.

Erzberger felt uncomfortable to hear the count speak of his parents this way. His peasant respect for ancestors trembled in him, but he could think of nothing to say.

Maiberling:
My father was high in the Foreign Office, higher than me, a friend of Holstein's, in fact. We sometimes saw him on Sundays but he was more interested in his theoretical friends in chancelleries from Tokyo to London than he was in my friendship, or in Hans's. Or even in my sister's. I
had
a sister. Called Lisa. When she was nine years old Hans murdered her one evening in the nursery. He had always had what my father called unhappy leanings. Nanny slept in front of the fire, this night. Alix stood in a corner. Thoughtful. I was doing a jigsaw puzzle. Hans was whittling away at one of the peg dolls we'd all had as children. He'd started into all our old toys with a scout knife three evenings before and hacked away with a vengeance. He resented those things, he resented the fact we ever depended on them, invested them with personalities, and so on. The night I'm speaking of, he simply stood up and put his knife into Lisa's stomach. I heard her grunt. She was a correct little girl and a grunt wasn't in her usual repertoire. So I looked up from the pieces. Hans was leaning on her. I heard her say, don't. He stepped away. She sat in the corner and fell on her side. He had a whetstone in a cigar box that he used for sharpening his scout knife and you could have shaved with that blade. He'd put it into Lisa's waist and cut downward. She was very quiet. She said, please get my mother, to no one in particular. Perhaps to God, because it would have taken God to get my mother up to the nursery at dinnertime. She told me, Alfred, wake Nanny. I went to Nanny and shook her shoulder and said, Nanny, Hans has put his knife in Lisa. Hans was at the water basin rubbing his clothes down with a washcloth. The flow of blood from Lisa amazed me. Even though I had a brother like Hans who used occasionally to slice up kittens. I didn't suspect humans carried so much blood about with them and I'd never guessed it'd leave them at such a rate. Nanny walked around the mess and put her hand on Lisa's shoulder. Lisa's eyes were already remote. She didn't seem to hear anything when Nanny spoke to her. Mother and Father left a dinner at the Russian Embassy to hurry home. A dead daughter has power to claim things a live one can't. Amongst my class that's so, anyhow. Because it was an important dinner: he was always a member of the détente-with-Russia school in the Foreign Office. It would have taken murder in the family to bring him home.

Matthias felt cold, the stag breathing on his shoulder.

Erzberger:
What can I say? It's the most horrible thing …

Maiberling:
Is it? I suppose you've fought all your life to have the same advantages as me. Now you can see what my advantages were.

Erzberger:
Your brother …?

Maiberling:
My father sent him to a military school. But even the insanity of that sort of place wasn't enough to cover him. When he was fourteen he had to be put in an asylum. He's still there. It's in Potsdam.

Erzberger:
But the police …? The little girl
was
murdered, after all.

Maiberling:
A Foreign Office official interested in a détente with Russia can't let people think that his children are killing each other upstairs. He talked to the highest police officials, who thought he'd suffered enough without having his son tried for juvenile fratricide. He got a death certificate from a physician that said Lisa Maiberling, aged nine years, had died in a fall from her nursery window. He was sole witness in the coroner's court. He said that she had always been an adventurous child and he wept and the coroner was very sympathetic. In the nursery the boards were scrubbed with carbolic and no knife allowed. I ate with a spoon until I went away to school at eleven. My parents found it easiest to assume we were all killers.

They came to open sward. A grandiose vista ran amongst the trees down hill, up hill, down and up another, past terraces to the pale masonry of the Château of Compiègne.

Maiberling:
Napoleon slept there. I bet he was a bastard of a parent too.

French soldiers stamped across the turf toward them, gesturing them back.
Allez. Allez
.

Erzberger would have liked very much to continue in that sunny avenue and to sit amongst the urns on the warm terraces.

Allez
.

The soldiers of the French republic raked the air energetically with bayonets.

Matthias and the count turned back down the deer path, re-entering the forest murk slowly, finding it an unseasonable element.

Maiberling:
I could have forgiven my father if he'd been an insensitive man. But when I left university and was taken into the Foreign Office myself he invited me to his club and told me that a lot of Germany's problems in foreign relations rose from the Kaiser's unhappy boyhood. The Kaiser was kept in the nursery, hardly saw his mother, and was tyrannized by his tutor, that old pansy Hinzpeter. Hinzpeter taught him to ride by forcing him into the saddle at five years of age, withered arm and all, and lifting him off the ground and putting him back into the saddle every time he fell out. One day his mother watched the whole screaming riding lesson without making any protest. She took him from the nursery only to show him her shrine to her dead baby, and to tell him that none of her other children could make up for the loss of dear little Sigismund and to force him to look at the wax dummy of the infant she kept in a cradle and to make him pray over it. My father told me, the Kaiser is an emotional man and too much of his foreign policy is in terms of his emotional reaction to his mother. And his mother is, as you know, an English princess.

For the elder Maiberling (whom he had never met) and perhaps for his distrait son, Matthias wanted to deflect the conversation to mere politics.

Erzberger:
I believe that's a perceptive assessment of the Kaiser's shortcomings.

But Maiberling had hooked his left arm around the trunk of a birch and made a fist as if to rough it up. His voice became basso and insistent.

Maiberling:
That bastard who begot me! How do ordinary people feel? Their lives, their intimate bloody lives in the hands of men who don't even love their children?

Again Erzberger believed he heard hooves on the heavy earth behind him. He was too ashamed to drag his eyes, however, from the count's pathetic history.

Erzberger:
What can I say, Alfred? Such a tragic life. Your sister and now your … your Inga.

He saw the count blush and flutter his hand in a dismissive way.

Maiberling:
I expect you to be a friend, Matthias. And forgive me easily.

Clump
went the mythic stag somewhere behind them, its tines at their soft backs.

Erzberger:
Forgive you?

Maiberling:
Inga wasn't killed. She simply dropped me. I felt myself flying apart in Spa, you see. Had to tell you something.

Matthias said nothing. The muscles around his shoulder blades twitched.

Maiberling:
Now don't carry on at me about it.

Late in the afternoon two copies of a document entitled
An Answer to Observations on the Conditions of an Armistice with Germany
arrived in the German carriages. It seemed to have a stimulating effect on the general and Vanselow. They began writing annotations on its margins.

Maiberling:
You have to give it to those two. They're workers.

After dark, there was a message for Erzberger from Weygand.

As the time allowed for coming to an agreement expires at 11
A
.
M
. tomorrow, I have the honor to ask whether the German plenipotentiaries have received acceptance by the German Chancellor of the terms communicated to him and if not, whether it would be advisable to solicit without delay an answer from him …?