The Numbered Account (5 page)

Julia, entranced by this glimpse into the past, asked what her beloved Mrs. Hathaway had been like as a girl.

‘Plain,'
Herr Waechter said flatly; ‘and her mother did not dress her well. But she had a merry laugh, and great intelligence; also she was always what now I believe you call “tough”, though the word was unknown then.'

‘And was it her toughness you fell in love with?' Julia asked, absorbed by these revelations.

The old man laughed.

‘Miss Probyn, you are rather clever! I never phrased it
to myself in this way, but in fact I believe that was what I fell in love with.'

Their heavy luggage arrived about 4 p.m.; a telephone call from the quay announced its arrival, and the manservant went down with the hand-cart to fetch it. There was nothing to pay, since the railway was at fault. Again Julia blessed the Swiss.

Mrs. Hathaway had to keep her bed for several days, but once Watkins had got the hang of the house, and could wait on her, Julia was fairly free, and her host insisted on taking her out with him in the car, which a chauffeur drove, when he had to go anywhere. The first of these occasions was a visit to his wine-merchant in Brunnen; Julia in her ignorance was astonished at every meal by the excellence of the Swiss wines she drank, and was delighted at the idea. She was even more delighted by the reality. Accustomed to the urban precincts of Messrs. Berry Brothers or the Wine Society, she was startled to drive into a cobbled yard flanked by a low line of buildings backed up against a steep wooded hill-side; when Herr Waechter, escorted by the foreman, walked all through the sheds, piled high with crates and barrels, to inspect the bottling of some wine in which he was particularly interested, she found it fascinating to see ferns and hazel-boughs poking in at the barred windows. Out of curiosity she enquired about the price of whisky, and was led into a cupboardlike room on whose high shelves were ranged whiskies of every conceivable sort. The well-known brands, owing to the low excise duty, were about the same price as in England, in spite of the high Swiss rate of exchange; but unheard-of varieties were priced at as little as twenty-four shillings.

‘Can one drink this stuff?' she asked, holding out a bottle labelled
Bonnie Bluebell
to Herr Waechter.

‘That, no. But this, and this'—he reached two bottles down off the shelves—‘are quite good. Do you drink whisky? I have plenty.'

‘Yes, I do—and when we leave you I shall want some; Mrs. Hathaway likes it, too. I'd like to buy a little, as I'm
here, and with you to help.' She left with five bottles of
Claonaig Cream
, which cost her only six pounds and proved to be a very tolerable whisky indeed.

They drove on to Schwyz, where Herr Waechter said he must see a cousin who made cement—‘I have a small interest in the firm. And you should see Schwyz; it was the birthplace of the Confederation, and it is a charming town. I ought also to call on two of my sisters-in-law, widows, and not very interesting; but their houses are pretty.' Indeed as they drove across the flat plain towards the twin peaks of the Grosse and Kleine Mythen, which stand up like two gigantic stone axe-heads above the small town, they could see the cement-factory away to their left, its buildings all floury with grey dust. ‘It is rather a defacement,' Herr Waechter said regretfully; ‘but it gives employment, and brings in money. We seem compelled, today, to live in an increasingly ugly world.'

But there was nothing ugly about the world into which he soon introduced her—the old Swiss families in the old town of Schwyz. They lived in large houses in big high-walled gardens, full of flowers and fruit-trees; the houses themselves were as stuffed with walnut panelling and period furniture as his own, though without the rugs and French pictures—and they all, it seemed, were related to endless other families alike engaged in industry. Julia got that afternoon, and on subsequent occasions when the calls were returned in Gersau, an unusually intimate picture of the
original
European democracy—since the Greek and Italian republics have not survived. All these people kept hotels, or made watches or machinery, or precision instruments; but their homes were in these ancient houses, full of inherited treasures, and they could trace their ancestry back four or five hundred years.

A couple of days later they drove to Zurich. Herr Waechter was writing a history of Gersau, and had already completed a rather learned book on Swiss furniture, now in the press; he wished to discuss these with his publishers there. They lunched at the Baur au Lac (one of the best hotels in the world) in the glass-enclosed outside restaurant
between the green-flowing river on one side and the great garden, brilliant with flowers, on the other. The restaurant was full of people, all apparently Germans or Swiss—it was early in the season for Americans; Julia commented on the fact that there seemed to be no English. ‘I have so often heard people at home speak of the Baur au Lac.'

‘Oh, the English can't afford to come here any more,' her host said, matter-of-factly. ‘Not with this quite ridiculous travel allowance, for which there is really no excuse at all! The pound stands well; this limit of £100 is purely a bureaucratic
idée fixe
. And it does harm to England's reputation.' He paused, and sipped his wine. ‘In Switzerland,' he went on, ‘we know a good deal about the standing of all currencies, and we regret this folly very much. The Germans, whom you defeated, can come here and spend as they please; so can the Belgians, who surrendered and left you
plaqués
outside Dunkirk; so can the French, who ran away. It is only the English, who stood alone for a year and a half defending European freedom, who may not travel in comfort on the continent they—and they
alone
—saved!' The old gentleman spoke the last words with savage severity.

‘Good for you, Herr Waechter!' Julia said with warmth. ‘I couldn't agree more. I wish you'd write a letter to
The Times
about it.'

‘Perhaps I shall, one day. Here in Switzerland we feel deeply about this. We have not forgotten that our tourist and hotel industry, which is of great importance to our economy, was in effect started by the English—the mountaineers who came to climb, who also really created our corps of guides. Hence our first hotels—and we do not like, now, that English visitors should be forced to stay in second-class places.'

Julia was moved by this, remembering Mrs. Hatha-way's remarks a few days earlier.

The offices of Herr Waechter's publishers were as much of a surprise to her as his wine-merchant's. She had once or twice been taken to cocktail-parties given by London firms, in stately premises in Albemarle Street, or more
functional ones nearer the Strand, and expected something of the same sort. Not at all. The car bore them up to a hillside suburb overlooking the city, where lilacs and laburnums bloomed along shady streets, and stopped outside a modern villa, with a plate on its gatepost bearing the words ‘Eden-Verlag'. Herr Schmidt, the principal, a middle-aged man with a clever face, greeted her host with respectful warmth and bore him off upstairs, first installing Julia in a sunny room full of flowers and armchairs, and inviting her to amuse herself with the books which lined the walls—‘We do some fine illustrated books.' He laid several on a centre table. While Julia was examining these the door opened and a rather shaky little old man, with tufts of grey hair round his baldish skull, came in and introduced himself in rather bad French as Herr Schmidt's partner; he proceeded to lead her round the shelves, pointing out various books, including several translations into German of novels by well-known English writers. Julia's inveterate curiosity suddenly moved her to ask him whether any of these people used numbered accounts? The question produced an extraordinary outburst.

‘Numbered accounts!' He almost spat out the words. ‘Oh yes, often we are asked to pay royalties into numbered accounts by people who do not wish to pay taxes at home! They come here and spend it on winter-sport. But
these
can get their money when they want it—unlike the heirs of the wretched Jews and Poles and Hungarians, to whom it was refused by the banks.' Again he almost spat the last word, his face twisted with a sort of despairing anger.

‘Refused? But why on earth?' Julia asked.

‘Because death certificates shall be produced before the bank will pay! And how many death certificates were given of those who perished in the gas-chambers at Oswieczim' he used the Polish name for Auschwitz— ‘or were beaten to death at Mauthausen, or died of starvation in Belsen and Buchenwald? So those who looked ahead and sought to make some provision for their children used their prudence in vain; those of the younger generation who escaped were denied their heritage.'

‘How ghastly,' Julia said; though she was horrified, the little old man was so wrought up, and the story sounded so extraordinary, that she wasn't sure if she quite believed it. ‘It sounds impossible,' she added.

‘Oh, everything is possible! There was more than that,' Herr Schmidt's partner went on. ‘The Lüblin Government, the Communist clique forced on us by the Russians, asked the Swiss Government to pay to them 300 million dollars of Polish money, deposited in Switzerland. The Swiss Government paid—I leave you to guess from where they got the money!'

‘Good God! That really was too much,' Julia exclaimed.

‘Quite so.' Her agreement seemed to soothe the little man; he went on rather more calmly. ‘This created a certain scandal; now the Government here are more discreet—other requests of the same nature have been refused. But all over Switzerland these banks are putting up wonderful new buildings—with the money of the dead, while their heirs starve!'

Julia was distinctly relieved that at this point Herr Waechter reappeared, and took her away. What she had heard disturbed and worried her; she wondered if it could be true, and longed to ask her host, but for some time she refrained, assuming that a man of 80 would be tired after such an expedition. But quite the contrary; the old gentleman seemed so brisk and spry, quite cheered up by his outing, that eventually Julia asked him what truth there was in the story of the death certificates?

He frowned.

‘The old Petrus will have told you this, of course. It is true that payments are withheld unless a death certificate is produced; this is perfectly natural, and correct; otherwise the door would be open to every sort of fraud. And latterly matters have been arranged better, at least as far as Germans—Jews mostly, of course—are concerned; the German Government is very liberal about granting death certificates to those presumed dead, and also the United Nations circulates lists of names, partly from the very ill-kept
records of the prison-camps, asking whether there is any evidence as to the life or death of those so listed—if there is no evidence that they are alive a death certificate is granted. But this was not the case in the first years after the war; the machinery had not been established, so the banks were helpless—they had to abide by their rules.'

‘Of course—I see that,' Julia said. Then she asked about the payment to the Polish Government?

‘Oh, everyone has heard this story!' Waechter exclaimed—‘and here also the thing is complicated. No bank may pay out the money of a private individual to anyone but that individual or his legal heirs; that is why the private fortune of the late Czar of Russia is still lying in your banks in London, in spite of repeated requests from the Bolshevik Russian Government that it should be handed over to them. Government money is a different matter; one government may, quite reasonably, hand this over to the established successor of a previous government in a foreign country. What became of those lorry-loads of gold bars which the Polish Government sent down through Rumania to Constanza when the German invasion threatened? You should know—your own Consul helped to carry them on board ship!'

Julia didn't know; she had never heard of this episode and enjoyed visualising a sweating Consul humping gold bricks up a gangway in a hot Black Sea port.

‘I've no idea,' she said. ‘Do you know where it is now?'

‘No. It has been suggested that it came here—we are such a repository! If it did, our Government would have been perfectly within their rights in handing it over to the Polish Government. But though there has been endless talk about this payment, there is no evidence that it was really made—and never will be!' he added with finality.

Julia was fascinated by these glimpses of international finance, about which, like most people, she knew nothing. Herr Waechter obviously knew a good deal, and she decided to try to clear up the substance of another of the old publisher's complaints while the going was so exceptionally good—she asked if it was true that the splendid
new bank buildings in Switzerland were really being paid for out of ‘the money of the dead,' as old Dr. Petrus had said.

Herr Waechter fairly exploded.

‘This is complete rubbish! and libellous rubbish too! I have already told you that machinery is now in operation to clear the accounts of those who died in the prison-camps; but in any case our banks have no need of such moneys. When German shares and Mark obligations were far down, after the War, our banks bought them up—to the great relief of the holders—and since Germany's wonderful recovery these have enormously increased in value; so much so that our banks hardly know what to do with their money. Very sensibly, they are using it to bring their premises up to date; this gives employment, and helps our young cement industry.'

Suddenly the old man did look tired, Julia saw with compunction.

‘I'm sorry I bothered you with all this,' she said. ‘But I was upset by what that old man told me.'

‘Of course you were, and rightly. Justice and injustice, and human suffering are things about which
all
must be upset.' He spoke with emphasis. ‘But may I ask you a question?' he went on. ‘How come you to know about numbered Kontos? From Dr. Petrus also? For the English public, I understand, has hardly heard of them, though many English, even in official positions, are now using them.'