Therefore Choose (28 page)

“It's not easy to understand.”

“I hate myself.”

“You're depressed.”

“You're saying that as a doctor. I'm not depressed. I hate myself because I'm hateful. That was what Sophie and Hans Scholl realized, in 1942: Blinden, Stupiden. Blind and stupid. That's what they called everyone who allowed themselves to be taken over by a gang of criminals. We were supposed to make sacrifices. What we sacrificed were our decency and humanity.”

“You say the Scholls were young. People get more cautious as they get older.”

“I was thirty-two when their first leaflet came out. Sophie Scholl was twenty. They could see that the intellectual workers, people who had read German literature, should be able to see how the Nazis were destroying everything we believed in. I was one of those intellectuals. I believed art was the salvation of humanity. Why didn't I see it? I had been an editor of a magazine.”

“They closed it down.”

“That should have been confirmation. I still didn't do anything. Not just the Scholls. Sebastian Haffner was a journalist in Berlin. He emigrated to England in 1938. He saw it all before the war. He wrote his book in 1939; it came out in 1940. The concentration camps. The bullying. The anti-Semitism. The Nazis' self-serving power grabbing. He says Hitler ‘negotiated as an equal at the conference table with people whose first duty it was to have him locked up.'”

Anna became silent and stared at the table.

“Why didn't I see that and do something?” she said. “Haffner says that after 1933, there wasn't anything that any individual, or any group, could have done. For the first time in history, the Nazis had it all tied up. One part of the people respecting authority, thinking it was absolutely right. The other part too frightened because of an apparatus that completely justified the fear.”

George looked round the coffee shop. There were two other customers. One was a middle-aged woman with a shopping bag, the other was an unkempt man who stared through the window. George and Anna weren't taking up space for which others were waiting. The waiter was in a back room.

“Look,” he said. “Your coffee must be cold. I'll get you another.”

“This is fine,” she said and took the smallest sip. She sat quietly for several minutes. “Haffner's book is thoughtful, but I don't think he's right. There's still the question of why more people didn't get together. Why didn't I do anything? What I did was draw a salary, spread ideas of racial hygiene.”

“In 1938, that was when you got together with Werner,” said George.

Anna glanced up at him, for the briefest moment. “Ilse was a totally decent person,” she said. “It was the end of 1938 when they shut down the magazine. I did not understand the meaning of it then, so when Ilse was arrested, more than five years later, it was thrust in my face again. It could not have been more clear. I still didn't do anything.”

George thought, 1938, that was when I didn't go to Berlin to see her, when her magazine was closed. Werner went instead.

Both sat without saying anything.

If I'd chosen to make my life with Anna, thought George, we would have been different together. Even if we didn't survive, we could have kept our pact. Her guilt is my guilt.

“You think now that your idea that humanity is really in art and literature was incorrect?” he said.

“It's the part that you were in too. I used to think that's the part that isn't ephemeral. Since the rapes…now I don't know.”

“What do you think you should have done?” said George. “Made a protest against the magazine's closure?”

“A sure way to prison. Perhaps there was nothing, but I didn't even think of what there might be.”

“You would have been just another one, but now you think …”

“I felt close to Werner,” she said.

Now she looked George directly in the eye.

“He was more knowledgeable than me,” she said. “I would not have got together with him if I hadn't trusted him.”

She looked at the table again.

“When it was closed, I thought perhaps the magazine had been an intellectual pastime,” she said.

“Things had gone beyond that.”

“Great literature is about truth and humanity. They were among the Nazis' first victims. I don't know whether I grasp it now.”

George was not sure he could follow her, as she swung from painful guilt to ideas of truth.

“Grasp what?” he said.

“The very essence of literature, what it's all about. But it's not what most people want. It is the opposite of us and them. ‘Us the virtuous' versus ‘them the despised' is appealing, much more acceptable.”

“It's what happens in war. Everyone's the same. The British came to hate the Germans.”

“There's something deeper. There's something universal in our capacity to be cruel. Cruel to others who we think are not like ourselves. Russians, Jews, women living in a Berlin cellar. That's what happened. All of us, you too.”

“I know.”

“It's in all of us. Some unfortunates, one by one, let it out in anger and kill someone. We call them murderers and hang them. But what if this thing within each of us joins with the same thing in everyone else? With our minds joined, we became all alike in our desire to punish others. It becomes godlike.”

“Did something else happen, something you're not telling me?”

“There's something in novels about individuality. You have to imagine being a specific character, in as much detail as possible. The thing with ‘us and them' is that there are no individuals, only … I don't know how to call it. Only notions, generalizations — Jews, Gypsies, Russians — all the rest of the thems. It's as if you have little printing plates that print little editions of ideas: ‘Jews and Communists are the same, they want to take over the world, they went too far, they've got it coming to them, we Germans were unjustly held back, eliminate unhealthy elements.' I went along with that.”

“We went along with the same kind of thing, the British.”

“Of course you did. These are thoughts but not thoughts. Really, they are mental parasites. Before you know it your mind is filled with them.”

Anna was silent. She stared at her feet.

“Why is it so difficult to get to that other layer?” she said. “People as people? In everyday life we seem to be able to do it. Now of course, people justify themselves. ‘There wasn't any alternative,' they say. But when someone like you thinks about it, someone English, you can only think of alternatives: ‘How ever can the Germans have done that?' That's what you think.”

“I ask myself what I would have done … I ask myself what I did.”

“It's not enough. Don't you see? It's not enough.”

George looked at her, thought she was going to break down, wanted to reach over to her. Then she recovered.

“There's some lines I can't get out of my mind,” she said, “from Dante's
Inferno
. They keep returning to me.

Fatte non foste a viver come bruti
Ma per seguir virtute e canoscenza.

“In English they are ‘We were not created to live like brutes but to follow virtue and knowledge.'”

Anna looked, again, as if she might cry, then she continued. “I imagine myself in the
Inferno
. Dante and Virgil come to visit me. I'm down there. I'm stoking the furnaces in which my fellow human beings are being burned. In the insufferable heat, I have to look at each one of them, killed by me and people like me, as they are thrown into the fire.”

“This is how you occupy yourself? With thoughts like these?”

“Dante was right. People in the
Inferno
became who they were not because they were more wicked than you and me. They were there because of what they chose in life. By choosing to act in a particular way, it became their essence, for eternity. The
Inferno
is how certain human choices are seen in the eyes of God.”

Some part of the old Anna remained, still intense, the believer in literature. Why couldn't she hold on to that aspect of herself? George remembered a time when he would have been able to take her in his arms. Not now. It would have been like trying to embrace someone whose limbs had been broken in a terrible fall, whose fractures were so vulnerable that they could not be touched. He couldn't even say, “What can I do?” There wasn't anything he could do.

“Can I walk with you a bit? Take you to where you live?”

“I'm not fit company. You've not seen yourself in the kind of mirror that I've seen myself in.”

“Can I see you tomorrow?”

“Perhaps tomorrow.”

“Why don't we meet here again? The same time, nine o'clock?”

Life can only be understood backwards
. That's what Kierkegaard said. But then he said, The trouble is one has to live it forwards.

What George understood was that when, ten years before, Anna asked him to live with her, he had narrow and ordinary views, and he was anxious about his medical training. He did what he thought was the proper thing.

George thought about the Café Bauer, on that day in the summer of 1936. He thought, Was that the moment of decision? But in 1936 the world had already changed. Like that farmland in those hills around Lyme Regis, where if you walk on the fields you come across deep fissures that people tell you were not there a year before because the land lies on a layer of mud, hundreds of feet beneath, and it is all sliding gradually into the sea. And when the land reaches the sea it crumbles off to make those earthy cliffs, and to throw out huge fossil ammonites onto the beach. Without knowing, everyone had been sliding faster and faster, and there was nothing stable anymore, only fissures, only vortices into which we were drawn, ancient primitive life forms thrown up.

George walked towards the Russian sector. Two urchins scrambled in the ruins of a once-grand house. Urchins, that's what we are now. The Café Bauer, the clinking of spoons in cups, the roof of Dagmar's flat, where we lived, overlooking the River Spree, where we made love, where I peeped over the balustrade. Is she the same person?

What if she says no? thought George. What if she says it's too late? What if she thinks that for her, I am just a memory?

George looked at a balustrade that lay broken on the ground. It had fallen from a roof. Like the one on our roof when we lived together, he thought … but having met, surely something remains, something between, that can be taken up again. Doesn't something remain after people have been separated?

What was in the past can't be taken up. There is only a sequence of present tenses. It would be like grasping a mist.

A British army lorry goes past, making an unnecessary noise. Young men in khaki sit in it and look back along the street it has come along. British boys from Surbiton and Stoke Poges. What do they see when they peer backwards, here in this foreign land? Have they got girlfriends? Over here perhaps. Are they following regulations? No fraternization. “Numbers of German women will be willing, if they can get the chance … most of them will be infected.” And what of a lorry full of farm boys from the Russian Steppes, peering out with the same incomprehension, who, in the evening would take the guns with which they had been issued and break into women's flats to rape them? The boys are us. Do we think they haven't done that, that we haven't done that?

Next day George arrived
at the coffee shop with the oak panelling at ten minutes to nine. He waited until a quarter to ten, then went to the place where she lived. She wasn't there. He went to find the concierge. Anna had left a largish envelope with his name on it. He opened it. There was the diary he had read, and a letter.

Dearest George,

Have you ever wondered how criminals, when they are arrested, are content with themselves? When they come out of prison, they get on with their lives. I can't do that. I am too much ashamed. I'm an example of what the American and British newspapers would like us Germans to be. They want us to say: “We did bad things, inhuman things.” I do say that, and I can no longer live with it. By the time you receive this letter, I shall be no more. My body will not be found for weeks or months.

I want to tell you I loved you. I saw in you something that was thoughtful, and affectionate, not rigid in the way it is in so many people. You had a balance between what you had decided (to go to medical school) and what might be possible, perhaps with me. I know what I proposed was too sudden; but from what I knew and what I'd seen in you, I didn't want to let slip the possibility of putting it to you. Had the time been more right, we might have been able to choose together.

Thank you for coming to find me. It's the most important thing that has happened for me for a very long time. I don't want you to feel bad or to blame yourself. There is nothing you could do now to keep me alive. We were born into a time in which the kind of life of which we were capable became impossible. I think of your coming back to find me as a kind of ending. I know you will be sad, but if I'm still important to you, try to think of it as I do. Do not think that what I do now is a tragedy. There was a tragedy, but it happened long ago, in 1933, before we met. It should have been clear to us that summer when Hitler broadcast proudly on the radio to the whole of Germany that the people who opposed him had been shot or imprisoned on his orders without recourse to the courts. We didn't recognize it for what it was: the coming of a slave state. I became a slave. Now I free myself. I bequeath to you my diary, which you have read, to which you did not react with horror. I don't know if it has any value. Perhaps it is a document that records a certain moment in history. I know I said that I never wanted to write anything myself. Forgive this exception. If a time comes when you want to be my editor and publish it, please do so.

For now, my long-ago relative, the von Kleist who was mad and became famous, has entered me. I don't want you to join me in death, but, like him, I do see death as a freedom. And you too. See it as an end of that kind. There is a verse in Deuteronomy, in your English King James Bible. Having failed to heed it myself, I offer it to you. “I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing: therefore choose life.”

I think I know you. I can recognize, still, the you whom I loved, not the same, but more developed. The person you saw in the last few days, who you thought was me, was a ghost from another world, able to exist in this world only as a vapour. I see that you have not been damaged in the way that I have been. I think you loved the me who I was then. Remember me as that person.

Anna