The Age of Treachery (17 page)

Beside the line a man was selling textbooks from a barrow; or at least the remains of textbooks – many were charred, and most were missing their covers. And yet the students were examining them eagerly, exclaiming over finds, turning the pages with as much enthusiasm as if they had been pristine copies, fresh off the press.

“Can you tell me where I can find Professor Schopen?” Forrester asked, and soon he was making his way through the wrecked corridors, where lectures went on in bombed-out halls and students listened more attentively than they did at Oxford, while the wind moaned through the cardboard window-coverings.

Professor Schopen didn’t even have a building. He was lecturing in a wooden hut in a rubble-filled courtyard when Forrester finally found him. He was wearing a tattered overcoat and a scarf that looked as if it had been knitted out of sacking, and the spectacles perched on his nose had been broken and mended with dirty string. He also wore a hat against the cold, and had Forrester seen him crouched in a doorway he would have been tempted to throw him a
pfennig
.

“All intelligent thoughts have already been thought,” Schopen was saying as Forrester entered. “What is necessary is only to try to think them again.” Beneath the professor’s overcoat Forrester could see layers of newspapers wrapped around his thin body. But his students were hanging on his every word.

“You see, a person hears only what they understand,” the old scholar went on, “and age merely shows what children we remain. Goethe taught us that daring ideas are like chessmen moving forward. They may be beaten, but also they may start a winning game. Every day we should hear at least one little song, read one good poem, see one exquisite picture, and, if possible, speak a few sensible words – that is our goal.”

The students wrote assiduously, stubs of pencils filling sheets of old bills, torn magazine pages, account books they must have found among the ruins. Their faces were haggard; some of them still bore the marks of wounds. But none of them, at that moment, seemed to care. As their professor spoke they were in a world of artists and philosophers; a world their country had for twelve long years turned its back on. Schopen was coming to the end.

“And now I think we have done our duty to great thoughts for today,” he said, “and I am beginning not to be able to feel my feet, let alone the tips of my fingers, so I will end this lecture and thank you very much for your kind attention.” As he gathered up his papers, the class applauded.

As Schopen came abreast of him Forrester said quietly, “When ideas fail, sometimes a word comes in to save the situation,” and held up his army pass. To his surprise Schopen took it from him and examined the photograph closely, then looked at Forrester’s face.

“I love those who yearn for the impossible,” said the old man.

“I’m assuming Goethe wrote that,” said Forrester. Schopen smiled.

“Very little comes from my lips that did not once emerge from Goethe’s. For example, have you ever thought that ‘an overly sensitive heart is an unhappy possession on this shaky earth’?” Schopen’s wise old eyes met Forrester’s, and suddenly, quite without warning, he felt a strong desire to tell this ragged old man everything that was in
his
heart: his guilt over Barbara, his secret desire for Margaret Clark and how his efforts to save Gordon Clark were partly to make amends for it, his desperation to return to Crete and find his real purpose in life.

But he did not. Instead he found himself saying, as if he were a policeman, “I’m investigating Dr. Peter Dorfmann. I understand he was unfairly promoted over your head by the Nazis.”

Schopen smiled. “They say sixty million people have been killed in this war. Almost every city in Europe has been bombed and shelled; many have been razed to the ground. Six million Jews have died. And you expect me to complain about not getting a promotion?”

“What I want to find out is how close Dorfmann was to the Nazi hierarchy,” said Forrester.

“I have no idea,” said Schopen. “How could I know?” He looked at Forrester innocently, but Forrester sensed he was holding something back.

“You could know because he was a close colleague,” he said. “You could know because you are an intelligent man. You would have heard him in casual conversation. You would have seen people he associated with.”

Schopen rubbed his fingers together – the tips were indeed blue with cold. “It has been said of the Germans that they love to denounce one another. It’s true. I saw it when Hitler ruled us; I see it now the Russians and the Americans and the French and the British are here. I am determined not to be such a German.”

Forrester was silent for a moment.

“I respect that,” he said. “But you know this man is being groomed for power. If he was part of the Nazi regime, in whatever capacity, he should not be given power.”

“We were all part of the Nazi regime, in whatever capacity we worked, if we were not in the resistance,” said Schopen.

Suddenly Forrester was gripped by a seething impatience. Here was a good man, behaving as he thought was right – and in doing so denying him the help he needed. He wanted to shake him, to shout at him, to make him answer, and he felt in his bones how power corrupts. Instead he said, “I understand what you say, Professor. It makes perfect sense. May I tell you why I want information about this man? I may have given you the impression it’s for official reasons. But it’s not.”

And he proceeded to tell Schopen the whole story, almost as if he was speaking to some sort of father confessor. When he had finished Schopen shook his head, smiling to himself.

“We are in the midst of great historical forces,” he said, “and yet it is our own dramas which dominate our lives. Age merely shows what children we remain. We are never deceived; we deceive ourselves.” Forrester held himself in check, waited.

“The truth is,” said Schopen, “that in the midst of all the carnage I
was
outraged at Dorfmann’s advance within the university, and consoled myself by saying it must be because of his Nazi connections – for which pettiness I despised myself. Now he is the coming man, and again I despise myself for resenting his success. And you want to know if my suspicions of him during the era of the Third Reich were correct, so that you can save your friend. The truth is I don’t know; I looked the other way, as we all did, and immersed myself in the past. It seems petty to bring it up now.”

Again, Forrester wanted to argue with him, to convince him to give way to denounce his enemy. But he knew his only means of getting at the truth was to let this man reach that decision himself.

“Thinking is easy, acting is difficult,” said Schopen, “and to put one’s thoughts into action is the most difficult thing in the world. The truth is I saw Peter Dorfmann with certain people who seemed to me to be people of importance in the government. I formed the impression he was valued by them, cosseted by them, but that was only an impression, and no basis on which to denounce him.”

“Can you give me any names?” asked Forrester.

Schopen shook his head. “As I say, I looked the other way,” he said. “Perhaps I should not have done so, but I did.” He smiled sadly at Forrester. “Believe me,” he said, “I would tell you more if I knew more, but I do not.”

Forrester believed him, and ground his teeth. Here was the tantalising scrap, the hint that something about Dorfmann was not what it seemed – and it looked as if, thanks to this man’s determination not to give way to envy, a tantalising scrap was all it would remain. Schopen saw the disappointment in Forrester’s face. “I’m sorry,” he said. “This must be very frustrating for you.”

“Yes,” said Forrester, simply – and then a woman came up to them and spoke softly to the old academic.

“A Goethe evening?” he asked her, surprised.

“Yes,” said the woman. “The invitation comes from Colonel Tulpanov.”

“Then I had better respond,” said the old man. To Forrester he said, “Our Russian occupiers place a great deal of emphasis on culture. I think they are trying to make us forget their behaviour when they first arrived.” Behind him, Forrester felt the girl stiffen. He had heard something of what the Soviet troops had done when they reached the city. But as he looked at her, something clicked in his mind.

“Is this lady your secretary?” he asked.

Schopen smiled. “Frau Kruger looks after all of us professors in the Literature Department,” he said. “Without her we would be like so many lost children.”

“Were you secretary to the department during the war, Frau Kruger?” Forrester asked, but she shook her head.

“I was working at Siemens during the war,” she said, “making radio equipment.”

Forrester turned back to Schopen.

“Do you know who Dorfmann’s secretary was?” he said. “Is she still here?”

A shadow crossed Schopen’s face.

“No,” he said. “Greta has left academic life.”

Almost automatically, Forrester glanced at Frau Kruger for corroboration, but she avoided his eyes; however a few minutes later, as he was getting back into the jeep, she came running after him.

“If you go to the Blue Cat Club around nine or ten, Greta Rilke will be there. She knows what happened.” And before Forrester could ask anything further, she had vanished into the crowds of students, each carrying his or her piece of cardboard, each searching for the wisdom that had eluded their nation for a generation.

Forrester spent the rest of the day at the Control Commission and visiting the headquarters of the other political parties to see what else he could discover about Dorfmann’s activities, but came away with precious little: as far as the records revealed, he’d simply been an ordinary academic who’d been lucky enough to keep his head down and survive.

In the early evening he returned to the villa on Fasanenstraße and fell sound asleep. At 8.00 p.m. Flint came in and woke him as instructed, and they set off through the ruins to find the Blue Cat Club.

They heard the band first, clear in the frozen air, and Forrester was reminded of Noël Coward’s remark about the extraordinary potency of cheap music, especially when heard at a distance. Here, as it echoed down the wrecked street, it seemed to mock the devastation. The two men walked down cellar steps slick with melted snow, the walls dripping with moisture, but as the door at the bottom opened, a blast of warmth rushed up to envelop them.

The cellar was packed solid with servicemen of all nations – French, Brits, Russians and Americans; the air was solid with cigarette smoke and down here the noise of chatter almost drowned out the music. Waiters carrying trays loaded with beers hurried through the room as customers yelled out their orders; there seemed to be a woman at every table, sometimes several, their carefully hoarded make-up doing its best to hide faces pinched by hunger.

Flint went off to join a group of other drivers in the far corner and Forrester found himself a seat at a table being vacated by an American airman, who was leaving with a sloe-eyed blonde. As he ordered a beer from a passing waiter he heard a voice he recognised at the table behind him.

“I can give you a hundred and twenty yards of copper wiring,” boomed the speaker, “in return for ten rolls of newsprint.” Forrester glanced around: it was the dark-haired captain from the villa on Fasanenstraße. The other man at the table said something in reply, and the captain said, “Alright, seventy yards for seven rolls. Done?” There was the sound of wine behind poured into a glass.

When the waiter came back with his beer Forrester asked him if he knew a woman called Greta Rilke. “You’re listening to her,” said the waiter, and Forrester swung around to look at the singer.

She was a slight brunette, with a face that reminded Forrester of a monkey. At first it was off-putting, but as she sang he was reminded of the French phrase “
jolie laide
”. There was a hint of savagery in that face, a hint of the primitive that held its own erotic charge. Her silvery dress hugged her thin figure, clinging tightly to her small breasts. She sang in German, English and Russian about love, betrayal, loss and longing. Her voice was low and husky, seemingly too deep for that fragile body. By the time her set was over Forrester had almost forgotten why he was there.

There was applause for her act, but not wild applause; she was soon replaced by a big-bosomed blonde who to the crowd’s delight shook her ample body and ladled innuendo over every phrase. As Forrester was about to leave his table to find Greta, she sat down beside him, smiling at his surprise.

“The waiter,” she said. “He will expect a good tip.” And as if in confirmation the man brought an ice bucket with wine and two glasses, winking as he did so. As Forrester poured out the wine, he introduced himself, explaining his mission and his meeting with Professor Schopen. Greta smiled sadly.

“How I wish I was with him now,” she said.

“Why did you leave?” asked Forrester.

She looked him in the eyes. “The university couldn’t afford to pay me, I could not afford to eat, and they offered me a job here. Then the Russians came. You know what happened then.”

Forrester did know. As Russian troops pursued the retreating German Army across Eastern Europe, there had been an almost systematic campaign of mass rape, often gang rape, if possible carried out in front of the husbands, fathers or children of the victims. It was part of the Soviet revenge for the horrors the Germans had inflicted on them in their years of victory. It had reached its climax when Berlin fell, when an estimated hundred thousand women were violated. Of these, several thousand had committed suicide. Whole families sometimes hanged themselves after a daughter was raped.

Knowing what would befall them if they were seen by the Russians, women had hidden in attics, cupboards, laundry baskets, coal cellars; they appeared on the streets only when the Soviet troops were sleeping off their previous night’s drunkenness, and they stopped going to work.

“I hid too, of course,” said Greta, “but they found the daughters of the woman in the apartment below. She thought it would save them if she betrayed me, and they dragged me out of my hiding place. There were six of them, and I knew at least one of them was a killer. The others would use me; afterwards that soldier would kill me – I could see it in his eyes. So I threw myself out of the window.”