Out of Such Darkness (3 page)

He shakes his head. ‘I’d forgotten when I missed the train. It was a senior team meeting today. Everybody was due in early – by 8.30. Perhaps someone else was late like me.’

She turns to him. ‘Why did you miss the train? You left in good time.’

His eyes look out of the windscreen but he sees only the morning’s horrors. ‘I saw it go in. I knew it was our floor, Rachel. I ran. I ran away.’ He presses his fingers into his eye sockets to force the tears away and the accusations rain inside his head.
You survived. You left them to their fate. They were your colleagues but you didn’t lift a finger.

The car swings into Ponds Lane. Jay registers Ben sitting with the screen door wedged open by his body. He’s bent over as if examining the ants’ nest that Jay knows is there in the crack between the steps. Of all the things to say that scroll through Jay’s mind, the one he elects to use as he approaches is, ‘Don’t leave the screen door open like that, Ben. The house will be full of flies.’

Wolf was shivering as I undressed him in the bathroom. Naked, his ribcage showed blue through his vellum-like skin. His shrimp-like penis cowered in the seaweed twist of his pubic hair. His buttocks were hollowed out and pale. The steam from the bath rose around us and I sensed Wolf’s fear passing from him to me like an infection.

I sat on the edge of the bath dribbling hot water on to his chest from a sponge with my right hand as I massaged his neck with my left. Despite myself, I could feel the stirrings of my arousal and I was disappointed to see that he was unmoved by my ministrations. “What happened?” I said. “You’re safe now. You can tell me.”

He closed his eyes; the fair lashes fluttered. “I’m sorry, Cammie. I lied to you. You are not my only friend.”

It was a dagger in my heart but it was something I knew had to be true. Beautiful boys like Wolf were in demand and I often wondered why he had chosen to spend his time with me. I was generous, of course, and I knew he held a genuine affection for me – but I was only one of … how many?

“Ssh, Wolfie. Don’t worry about that now. You can tell me anything. Where have you been?”

“I’ve been staying with an SA troop at a barracks in Munich. I will be too old for the Hitler Youth soon and I, and some other boys, had been singled out for officer training with them. I always wanted to join the SA.”

I didn’t let him know how much this disappointed me. The SA rabble were the worst of Hitler’s thugs. They beat people nearly to death for no more than not giving way on the sidewalk. The sight of their brown uniforms made Jews scurry in any direction to avoid being in their path. “So it was a recruitment weekend?”

“An induction. We were introduced to the SA tradition.”

It was difficult to imagine an organisation of quasi-criminals having “a tradition” when it had only been in existence for a decade but I declined to demur.

He closed his eyes. “The Hitler Youth boys were all chosen because we are … the way we are. They paired us up with experienced men – men who are also like us. We were all in the dormitory together.”

I had heard rumours that Ernst Roehm, who founded and led the SA, had adopted the Sacred Band of Thebes as the model for his bodyguard. “You were to become lovers?”

He covered his face with his hands. “Yes. For the good of the unit. We would have incredible fighting spirit – willing to sacrifice ourselves for each other.”

I shuddered. “Tell me what happened.”

His tears started and I held his shaking shoulders as he leaned forward, head bowed, sobbing. “We were settling down after … you know … it was an orgy … I am so ashamed.”

“Try to tell me, calmly,” I said, stroking his back.

“Suddenly, the doors at the far end of the barrack-room burst open and the Blackshirts ran in. They lined up against the wall and started shooting. My man, Max, was hit in the first seconds. I used him as a shield. I could feel more bullets hit him. I slid back onto the floor. I was one of many scrabbling around. My clothes were there next to me so I grabbed them and crawled under the beds to the end of the room where the showers were. I escaped through a window. I ran away naked. Others stopped to get dressed. I don’t think they made it.”

His forehead was touching the water. I spooned some suds onto his blond hair and began to rub the soap into his scalp. “Go on.”

“I hid in some trees and put my uniform on. I knew better than to go to the railway station. I got my bearings and walked to the road. I waved down a truck and the driver took me to Leipzig. I hid there for most of the day and then persuaded another truck driver to bring me to the outskirts of Berlin. Then I walked here. I knew you would look after me. You will, won’t you, Cammie?”

“Can’t you go home to your parents?”

“The SS will have my papers. They know I was in Munich. They will go to my house looking for me. You are my only hope.”

I knew then my time in Berlin was over. I would leave and, somehow, I would smuggle Wolf out with me.

In his book Isherwood admits that “To Christopher, Berlin meant boys.” This implies that he was an open and obvious bugger in those days but none of us was ‘out’ in the same way as we are now. If you were like Crisp – which I never was – you flaunted your campness in London and risked ridicule, arrest or outright hostility and violence. For the rest of us it had to be enough to move in the same shadowy circles and haunt the same dubious nightspots. I could never live truly as myself.

I went to live in Berlin because of money. I had written the first Dexter Parnes mystery,
The Silver Eagle Device
, when I was still at Oxford. After I came down I had a job in a dreary insurance office in Cheapside, London. For three years, while I tried to impress a publisher, I filled in forms, calculated premiums and copied line after line of policy details into ledgers. It truly was a Bob Cratchit life. My only adventures involved furtive gropings with men in the public gardens behind the back entrance (yes, really) of the commuter station in my home town of Surbiton in Surrey.

Sidgwick and Jackson took
Eagle
when I was 23 and published it the following year. It earned out its advance inside twelve months by which time I had finished the sequel,
The Seven-Second Timepiece
. It too sold well. Sidgwicks contracted me for two more Dexter Parnes adventures.

With this behind me I worked out that, if I could find somewhere inexpensive to live, I could leave the insurance business and write full-time. That’s where Berlin came in. With the outline for the third book in my suitcase I caught the boat-train to Paris and thence to Berlin.

Anybody who, like me, went to a minor public school during and after the First World War will admit that adolescent fumbling – mostly involving mutual masturbation – was rampant. In fact, it was quite the norm. Most boys knew that they were going to ‘grow out of it’ when they had the opportunity to interact with girls.

But, even at school, I knew I was different. Boys weren’t second best. I enjoyed giving pleasure and this made me a popular onanistic companion. If I could find a boy to love, it would be a relationship of the heart as well as body. Despite my promiscuity I failed to find the right boy at school.

At Oxford I had my physical urges satisfied by the occasional fling, once or twice even with young women, but without a true love appearing. So, in terms of a fulfilling relationship, I was still a virgin as the train steamed into Bahnhof Zoo.

Besides my valise, which was large enough to have smuggled in a small boy for my gratification, I carried my passport and the name of a hotel near the station. This had been arranged by my agent, Peter Everley. “I know you’d prefer to be in the Nollendorfplatz area, Mortimer, but you’d never get any work done. Carmerstrasse is opposite the University of the Arts. The academic air will be good for you. Stay away from the Nolli,” he had said.

My heart was thumping as I hauled my bag along Hardenbergstrasse. In London I would have accosted a likely-looking layabout and asked him to carry it for me for a few pennies but I had no way of knowing whether this was the done thing in Berlin. Goodness knows there were enough men loitering on street corners with their jackets hanging off their wasted frames and with sleeves or trouser legs pinned up because they had thin air where the limb should have been.

I was unsure how to buy a ticket for the tram that ran along the centre of the bustling street. Motor cars beeped as they passed the occasional horse-hauled cart piled high with barrels, crates or bound sacks each stencilled with words I didn’t understand. There were unintelligible posters on columns that seemed to have been constructed purely for their display. The air was tainted with the exotic tang of foreign cigarettes.

The nearside traffic came towards me as I walked along the left-hand pavement and this added to my sense of disorientation. I worried about how I might cross the first road I encountered. The city was strange to me. But I was the stranger, the outcast. Perhaps I had made a mistake …

The Halprin’s next-door neighbour Katy Cochrane had left Ben in the house alone. ‘You don’t want me around when your father gets home,’ she had said.

As soon as they turn on the TV, Jay notices that the North Tower has gone. His legs give way and he collapses onto the sofa where he slumps watching the screen between his fingers. He can’t imagine ever being anything other than cowed, stunned, uncomprehending ever again. If only he could sleep and never wake up.

He has to ‘pull himself together’ for Ben and Rachel, who sit alongside him like relatives at a death-bed, and robot-like he turns to one of his business techniques – an ‘action pathway’. First, he’ll find out what has happened at Straub, DuCheyne. If, as seems likely, all his colleagues have perished he’ll talk to the widows of the men who brought him to New York. He can’t imagine how these conversations will go. After that, he’ll know where he stands workwise.

While the images flash and the commentators prattle he tries to think of something normal – routine. He recalls the evening of Ben’s first day at school nearly a week ago when he had made sure he was home in time for dinner. The garlic-rich smell of a pasta sauce had met him as he opened the screen door.

‘Jay, how was it?’ Rachel tried to lift her tone but the fragility in her voice was obvious.

‘You know that company
Heroes of the Alamo
– the one I went to see in San Antonio?’

Rachel shook her head. ‘Companies here and their strange names …’

‘Well, they’re coming round.’ He shucked off his jacket and hung it over a chair-back. ‘That’ll be two clients inside a month. Glenn and Francois are already talking end-of-year bonuses.’

‘That’s good. Ben has news as well. He’s happy with how it went.’

Jay loosened his tie. ‘Where is he? Up or down?’

Rachel signalled ‘up’ with her forefinger.

Jay went to the bottom of the stairs. ‘Ben, I’m home. Want to come down and tell me about your day?’

Rachel was at the table pouring sauce over the tagliatelle by the time Ben’s fast feet percussioned down the stairs and he fell into the room.

‘This is good, Rachel. Delicious.’ Jay said it before the food had passed his lips. He rubbed his hands together. ‘So what’s your news, Ben? Everything okay, first day?’

Rachel looked across the table. ‘Go on. Tell your dad your news.’

Ben looked down at his plate. ‘They had an audition for chorus–’

‘Chorus?’ Jay said.

‘It’s what they call the school choir. Anyway, I sang a bit and they got all excited.’ He blushed. ‘I’ve been a bit self-conscious about my voice – haven’t sung anything since it started to break and it was all over the place. Well, they loved it. Said I’m a natural counter-tenor, whatever that means.’

‘And …’ Rachel tapped a fingernail on the table-top.

‘And they want me to audition for the school show at Christmas.’

‘Really? What is it?’ Jay asked.

‘
Cabaret
,’ Ben answered.

A frame from the film loomed up in Jay’s mind. The cabaret’s Master of Ceremonies, in white-face makeup and painted-on eyebrows was leering into the camera. Jay tapped a foot as the music crawled into his ear. ‘Doo doo de, Ca-ba-reyey,’ He swayed his upper body in time with his singing and clicked his fingers. ‘Doo doo de, Ca-ba-reyey.’

‘Da-ad!’ Ben put his fingers in his ears.

‘Sorry, Ben. It’s great. Go for it.’ He looked up and saw Rachel frowning and making round, dark eyes. ‘You won’t hear any more singing from me – promise.’

Now, there’s something more significant about the image that came to him that day – the chalk-complexioned, ruby-lipped Master of Ceremonies. An idea as elusive as an eel on a boat-deck is squirming in and out of the foreground of his mind. He focuses on it, trying to pin it down but it slips away.

He switches to yesterday when Ben came home agitated with news of the audition.

‘They’ve given me a part!’

‘Who? What?’ Jay said, looking up from the dinner plate. Rachel gave her husband a scowl.

Ben put on his talking-to-a-moron voice. ‘
Cabaret
? The audition on Friday?’

Jay noted how his son now punctuated the majority of his statements with question marks.

‘Dad?’

‘Jay!’ Rachel put down her knife and fork. ‘Ben wants to tell you something.’ Her articulation was precise and she emphasised her warning with a nod of her head.

‘Sorry, Ben. I was miles away there for a moment. The show –
Cabaret
. Go on.’

‘They want me to sing a solo.’

‘Wow!’ Jay was impressed but at the same time was concerned. He couldn’t imagine his shy son carrying it off. ‘Which part?’

‘Not one of the main characters. They showed us the movie in lunch-break? So we’d know the setting – the rise of Nazis in Germany and all that?’

Jay nodded. ‘I’ve seen it hundreds of times. It’s a great film. Liza Minnelli as Sally Bowles – what a great performance. What a tremendous character. I read the Isherwood book that started it all –
Goodbye to Berlin
– years ago. Have you read it, Rache?’

Rachel gave him her turn-to-stone look and nodded towards Ben. ‘Tell your dad about
your
part, Ben.’

‘Well, mine is the bit where the American writer and his German friend go to the park? And the boy sings. It’s a sort of traditional German song? Only it turns out the boy’s a Nazi and it’s actually a Nazi song. And the crowd all sing along? Well, that’s me. I’m going to sing the song,
Tomorrow Belongs to Me
. I have to do it twice?’

As Jay recalled the scene from the film, chills prickled his neck. He pictured the rosy-cheeked boy with the fascinating voice and looked at his son. Ben sat opposite, straight-backed and blond. His brown eyes gleamed with the obligation to carry one of the key moments in the show.

Jay saw a Ben he hadn’t recognised before. Yes, he thought, he can surprise me. He can be that boy, this son of mine.

One side of Jay’s brain focuses on the rolling news coverage. The other recalls the voice that has taken up residence inside his head. Its intonation has always sounded foreign and Jay now decides it has a German accent. The presence from the train – dancing along the aisle, perching on the seat beside him – assumes a white face, centre-parted hair and it leers into a non-existent camera. His was the insistent voice that urged Jay to replay the horrors of the victims over and over in his mind. It was the Cabaret’s Master of Ceremonies who let the dogs out.

Now it’s the MC who leans in so close that Jay can feel his breath on his ear as he whispers:
Ben is your salvation. It will be a distraction – therapy even – to help him. Show an interest. Activity is the best antidote to depression.

The television news presenter is saying that 20,000 people worked in the two buildings of the World Trade Center and up to half of them could be dead. The casualties on the ground at the Pentagon, where the third plane crashed, are fewer but all the passengers and crew died. It emerges that there was a fourth hi-jacked aircraft and it plummeted into a field in Pennsylvania. Again, all on board were lost.

New film footage comes in and the Halprin family watches over and over again, from this perspective and from that, as the planes strike, as the towers collapse, as the people run. The pictures of the men and women jumping etch themselves onto Jay’s retina. The MC’s voice encourages him to superimpose the faces and mannerisms of his colleagues on the jumpers.

If they were in the office they would simply have vaporised. Come on Jay, which was the worst fate: vanish in an instant, jump or burn? Which would you have chosen?

Workers in the floors above where the planes struck were able to phone home and talk to their loved ones knowing they would never get out. Passengers on the fourth plane, United Airlines 93, used the on-board telephones after it had been hi-jacked and had described their plans to recapture the aircraft.

Each development reinforces Jay’s sense of survival and cements the MC’s invasive voice in position. Rachel and Ben stop watching and creep around as Jay sits mesmerised by the screen – a voyeur at an auto-wreck.

Rachel calls both sets of parents in England. ‘No, he’s really not up to talking. He’s in shock, I think. We’ll talk again tomorrow. He’ll feel better then.’

As the sun sets, Jay goes to the window to pull the curtains. His face is swollen, his eyes raw. His caustic tears sting as he watches the houses opposite shine out their flickering TV-blue lights. Nobody in America is going to sleep worry-free tonight.

It’s 3.23am on 9/12 and the MC prods his finger into Jay’s side. In the fug of waking Jay watches him blow a kiss, smile and hunch his shoulders with delight. When Jay shakes his head, the image falls from his memory as mercury slips from a tray – leaving only a smear. He checks the illuminated numbers on the bedside clock.

A vision of the collapsing North Tower creeps into his head. The top floors concertina down as if a vacuum below is drawing the building in on itself. The MC’s voice:
The fragments of your colleagues’ bodies that still remain after the explosion were pulverised into powder. All mixed together they’re a Cup-a-Soup version of the company that was there. 1) Open the sachet and pour into a medium mug or cup; 2) Make sure there is enough water in the kettle and switch on to boil the water; 3) When the water has boiled, pour into the cup or mug and stir with a spoon; 4) Leave to cool a little and drink. Go on, Jay, drink my tasty soup. Could it be thicker? Could it have more body? Are you the missing ingredient?

There’s solace for Jay in knowing these are the MC’s words, not his own. In the immediate aftermath, on the train or in the car with Rachel, when each morbid obsession or ghoulish thought entered his head, he wondered whether he might be going mad. But now he can assign these grisly introspections to a second person, surely this means he hasn’t lost his mind.

The MC interrupts these fragments of half-asleep thoughts with another, more collected idea:
the complete personnel roll of Straub, DuCheyne, is understood to be dead.

As one of the workers on the 95th floor, he’ll be listed among the missing. Only his family and the Cochranes next door know that he’s alive. He resolves to tell ‘the authorities’ in the morning. This only prompts more confusion about whom ‘the authorities’ might be. He drags a pillow over his head.

He hopes, prays even, that his colleagues have souls. Something of them has to be left for their families to cleave to. In this country where ‘which church do you go to?’ is a more common question than the British ‘what do you do?’ the families will have the compensation of knowing their loved-ones’ souls are safe. They will have already consulted their priests, their rabbis, maybe even their imams.

Rachel has nobody to visit her. The family has no spirituality. There’s no religious element to their Jewishness. Out of nowhere, Jay sees the image of a clothes hanger. He thinks about the story.

Hymie Shapiro, a great-uncle on his mother’s side, ran a tailoring business in London. Jay had never met Great-Uncle Hymie. He didn’t even know of his existence. But, when Hymie died some twenty years ago, he decreed in his will that every traceable relative should receive a clothes hanger from his shop. So one day, without notice, Jay received a parcel from Gold and Oppenheimer Solicitors and in it was a letter and Jay’s clothes hanger. The letter only explained the fact of the bequest; it gave no clue as to Great-Uncle Hymie’s motive.

The clock now shows 4.13, two hours before Jay would normally rise and make a cup of tea. But the thought of the clothes hanger has taken root and the tendrils fill his head. Rachel’s unbroken snoring reassures him as he slides off the mattress and creeps to the wardrobe. He opens the door and silently thanks the landlord for installing an interior light. He looks across to check Rachel’s still form.

Taking the weight from each clothes hanger before sliding it, he moves his suits one by one. He’s looking for a white plastic plaque and there it is under his well-loved but seldom-worn Harris Tweed jacket. He takes the jacket down and, with all the exaggerated stealth of a cartoon burglar, he leaves the room and tip-toes across the landing to the bathroom. He closes the door, flicks on the light switch and squats on the toilet. The MC sits opposite him on the tiled floor with his back against the door, watching.

Jay removes the jacket from the clothes hanger, absent-mindedly checks its distinctive trademark label and leans forward to drape it over the side of the bath. Now he’s holding the clothes hanger by its metal hook and he caresses its shoulder as if it’s an artefact plundered from a museum. He imagines Great-Uncle Hymie himself describing it.

‘Look at the hook in your left hand, Jacob. See the gauge of that steel wire? It’s over-engineering, but such quality. This hook is never going to straighten out. No matter if it’s carrying an extra-outsize, double-lined astrakhan coat with mink collar. And the bobble on the end, Jacob. That’s it. Pass your thumb across it. Even a mistress’s tender skin would not take a scratch from such smooth.’

Jay runs his palm down the flank of the arm. ‘Slick as a rabbi’s blessing, Jacob. Only a dense-grain wood could take such sanding. No suit lining, not even my finest silk, could pick a snag from such a finish. Notice how I have designed an angle to the arms. This way the jacket drapes just perfect. A customer could only be impressed with a jacket on such a clothes hanger.’

Tears cascade from Jay’s chin onto his shorts as he hugs the hanger to his chest. The chamber echoes with his low moan. Great-Uncle Hymie’s voice is now fading, ‘Thank you for keeping my clothes hanger, Jacob. A blessing upon you for this.’

The faux-ivory plate pinned across the join where the two angled arms come together captures Jay’s attention. There’s an old-style telephone number,
Wat
erloo 5561, and then the word ‘Hymie’ in slanted, black script across the centre. To the right of this in red are the words, ‘The Tailor’ and an address, like the telephone number in smaller, black font, ‘48 Lower Marsh, London, S.E. 1’. Jay traces the indented characters with his fingertip.