With my flask on my lap I sat on at the bedside, thinking.
‘I wouldn’t be hard to find.’ Slowly I got to my feet. ‘It’s time, sadly, dear. I’ll have to take my leave of you, Tantchen. Tantchen?’
But Gerda was comprehensively, abysmally asleep.
‘Bless you, my angel,’ I said. I leaned over and put my lips to her waxy brow, and then joined the others in the truck.
Gerda had cancer of the uterus and died ten days later, on April 26, 1946. She was thirty-seven. And poor Volker, always a sickly baby and toddler, died the same year. He was three.
With me this had been the case for some time: I couldn’t see beauty where I couldn’t see intelligence.
But I saw Gerda with eyes of love and even on her deathbed she was beautiful. The stupid beauty of Gerda Bormann.
*
3. HANNAH: THE ZONE OF INTEREST
In September 1948 I sent myself on a fool’s errand.
The Fourth Germany, by that time, could no longer be very faithfully described as an almshouse on a slag heap. During the hyperinflation of my adolescence, money held its worth for only a few hours (on payday everyone did their week’s or their month’s shopping, and did it instanter); by contrast, in the post-war period money was worthless to begin with. Once again the answer lay in a change of banknote. The currency reform of June 20 put an end to the Zigaretten Wirtschaft – a state of affairs in which a Lucky Strike became too valuable to smoke – and introduced the Soziale Marktwirtschaft, or the free market (no rationing, no price controls). And it worked.
In the quixotic spirit of that summer, I procured a car, a filthy old Tornax (whose blackened and oft-needed crank kept making me think of a broken swastika), and boldly drove south-east. My purpose? My purpose was to get closer to the end of hope – to exhaust it, and so try to be rid of it. I was quieter, older, greyer (hair and eyes losing colour); but my somatic health was good, I quite liked translating for the Americans (and I had become genuinely passionate about a pro bono job I was doing on the side), I had men friends and even lady friends, I was plausibly to be seen in the office, in the PX store, in the restaurant, at the cabaret, at the cinema. Yet I could not construct a plausible inner life.
My OMGUS colleagues liked to say that ‘Ich Wusste Nichts Uber Es’ was the new national anthem (I Didn’t Know Anything About It); and yet all Germans, around then, as they slowly regained consciousness after the Vernichtungskrieg and the Endlosung, were meant to be reformed characters. And I too was a reformed character. But I could not construct a self-sufficient inner life; and this was perhaps the great national failure (which, at least, I did not seek to relieve by ‘joining’ anything). If I looked inside myself, all I saw was the watery milk of solitude. In the Kat Zet, like every perpetrator, I felt doubled (this is me but it is also not me; there is a further me); after the war, I felt halved. And when I entertained memories of Hannah (a frequent occurrence), I didn’t have the sense of a narrative gallingly unfinished. I had the sense of a narrative almost entirely unbegun.
Earlier I said that you couldn’t live through the Third Germany without discovering who you were, more or less (always a revelation, and often untoward); and without discovering who others were, too. But now it seemed that I had barely made the acquaintance of Hannah Doll. I remembered and still tasted the complex pleasure I derived from her, from the shape of her stance, the way she held a glass, the way she talked, the way she crossed a room – the warm comedy and pathos it filled me with. And where exactly were these interactions unfolding? And what was that syrupy stench (which walls and ceilings were powerless to exclude)? And was that man her husband? . . . The Hannah I knew existed in a sump of misery, and in a place that even its custodians called anus mundi. So how could I defend myself from thoughts of a Hannah reborn and reawakened? Who would she be – who would she be in peace and freedom, trusting, trusted? Who?
Under National Socialism you looked in the mirror and saw your soul. You found yourself out. This applied, par excellence and a fortiori (by many magnitudes), to the victims, or to those who lived for more than an hour and had time to confront their own reflections. And yet it also applied to everyone else, the malefactors, the collaborators, the witnesses, the conspirators, the outright martyrs (Red Orchestra, White Rose, the men and women of July 20), and even the minor obstructors, like me, and like Hannah Doll. We all discovered, or helplessly revealed, who we were.
Who somebody really was. That was the zone of interest.
And so it came about that I resumed my search for a maiden name.
Hannah met Paul Doll in Rosenheim, and they spent time together in Rosenheim, and it seemed reasonably likely that they were married in Rosenheim. So I went to Rosenheim. With much snorting, knocking, and pinking, and then stalling, and then bounding, the terrible Tornax completed the sixty kilometres from Munich.
Rosenheim comprised eighteen boroughs, each with its own Standesamt: births, weddings, deaths. My project, therefore, would effortlessly consume an entire week’s leave. Well, ‘furloughs’, by now, were being audaciously referred to as ‘vacations’. Besides the abruptly available goods and services, there was something unrecognisable in the air. Whatever it was, it was not the return of normality. There had been no normality to return to, not after 1914, not in Germany. You had to be at least fifty-five to have an adult recollection of normality. But there was something in the air, and it was new.
I arrived on the Sunday, and established myself at a guest house on the fringe of the Riedergarten. First thing the next morning, in solemn consciousness of futility, I cranked the Tornax and started on the concentric circles of my rounds.
At five in the afternoon of the following Saturday, sure enough, I was drinking a glass of tea at a stall in the main square, my throat inflamed and my eyes weakly watering at the far corners. After the expenditure of much drudgery, cunning, obsequiousness, and money (those valiant new Deutschmarks), I had managed to peruse a total of three ledgers; and without the slightest edification. The trip, the enterprise, in other words, had been a ridiculous failure.
*
And so I stood there, dully looking out at the peace and freedom of the town. That was undeniable: there was peace and freedom (the capital was under blockade, and there was little peace, and no freedom, in the Russian mandate to the north-east, with rumours of hectare-wide mass graves). And what else? Many years later, I would read the first dispatch from an American journalist posted in Berlin, which consisted of four words: Nothing sane to report. The year was 1918.
In January 1933, when the NSDAP picked up the keys to the Chancellery, a narrow majority of Germans felt, not just horror, but the dreamlike fuddlement of the unreal; when you went outside, you were reminded of the familiar, though only as a photograph or a newsreel reminded you of the familiar; the world felt abstract, ersatz, pretend. And that was what I was a witness to, maybe, that day in Rosenheim. The beginning of the German compromise with sanity. Social realism was the genre. Not fairy tales, not Gothic novelettes, not sagas of swords and sorcery, not penny dreadfuls. And not romance, either (an outcome I was beginning to accept). Realism, and nothing else.
From this certain questions would inevitably and persistently follow.
From above? said Konrad Peters in the Tiergarten – fastidious Peters, who died in Dachau covered in nightsoil and lice. From above, Bismarckian Realpolitik degraded to the nth degree. Combined with hallucinatory anti-Semitism and a world-historical flair for hatred. Ah, but from below – that’s the real mystery. It’s a common slander of the Jews, but it’s no slander of a huge fraction of the Germans. They went like sheep to the slaughterhouse. And then they donned the rubber aprons and set to work.
Yes, I was thinking, how did ‘a sleepy country of poets and dreamers’, and the most highly educated nation the earth had ever seen, how did it yield to such wild, such fantastic disgrace? What made its people, men and women, consent to having their souls raped – and raped by a eunuch (Grofaz: the virgin
Priapus, the teetotal Dionysus, the vegetarian Tyrannosaurus rex)? Where did it come from, the need for such a methodical, such a pedantic, and such a literal exploration of the bestial? I of course didn’t know, and neither did Konrad Peters, and neither did anyone in my sight, families, limping veterans, courting couples, groups of very young and very drunken GIs (all that strong, cheap, and delicious Lowenbrau), tin-rattlers collecting for causes, black-clad widows, a moving, threading line of boy scouts, and sellers of vegetables, sellers of fruit . . .
Then I saw them. I saw them over a great and populous distance – and they were receding from me, walking away from me to the far edge of the square. It was the configuration – that was all. A mother and her two daughters, the three of them in straw hats, swinging straw bags, and dressed in crenellated white.
I hurried after them through the holiday crowd.
‘You’re too old now’, I said shakily (with a fizz of distress in my sinuses), ‘and too tall for ice cream.’
‘No we’re not,’ said Sybil. ‘We’ll never be too old for ice cream.’
‘Or too tall,’ said Paulette. ‘Oh come on, Mami . . . Mami! Oh please. Come on.’
I bought the girls banana splits in the lounge at the Grand. Their mother eventually agreed to have an orange juice (and I ordered a large schnapps) . . . When I touched her shoulder, at the foot of the sloping alley, and as I said her name, Hannah turned. Her face took on the stasis of recognition; and then all she did was widen her eyes and raise a white-gloved hand to her mouth.
In a thick voice I was saying,
‘The fancy word, young ladies, is lustrum. Five years. And there’s no other lustrum that changes a person as much as thirteen to eighteen. You’ve changed particularly, Paulette, if I may say so. Your beauty has come in.’
And this was incidentally and providentially true; she had grown five or six inches, and you could look at her now without seeing the long upper lip and the cluelessly staring nostrils of the Commandant.
‘What about eighteen to twenty-three?’ said Sybil.
‘Or nought to five?’ said Paulette. ‘There. What about nought to five.’
A smart shopping arcade adjoined the glassy atrium of the hotel; and I had the expectation that the twins, in the end, would be unable to resist the pressure of the neon lights, the costly materials, and the scents and blooms of the florist’s.
‘Can we, Mami?’
‘Not now . . . Oh, okay. Five minutes. No longer.’
The girls ran off.
I leaned forward with my hands on my thighs. ‘Forgive me,’ I said. ‘I didn’t realise you’d remarried.’
She straightened up. ‘Remarried? Yes, I’m really good at that, aren’t I? My status’, she said slowly, ‘is widow.’
‘. . . I’m due back in Munich tomorrow evening,’ I said (I had intended to leave that night, and my suitcase was already in the rusty boot of the Tornax). ‘Can I see you very briefly before I leave? Morning coffee, say?’
She had that flustered look, as if the room temperature was too high for her, and her left knee was bobbing up and down. Most ominously of all, she was repeatedly closing her eyes – the upper lids staying where they were while the lower glided heavenward. And when a man sees a woman doing that, all he can do is mumble something polite and make his way to the door. She said,
‘No. No, I don’t think there’s any point. Sorry.’
I thought for a moment and asked her, ‘Can I show you something?’ I reached for my wallet and extracted a small strip of newsprint. It was an ad I had placed in the personal columns of the Munich Post. ‘Would you do me the honour of reading this?’
She took it from my fingers and said, ‘Lawyer and translator, thirty-five, seeks a) professional tuition in Esperanto, and b) professional guidance in theosophy. Please reply to . . .’
‘In case your parents saw it. And now I’m thirty-eight.’ I managed not to try and nudge her curiosity by promising an account of the last hours of Dieter Kruger. I just said, ‘You’re too generous to deny me a little of your time. If you would. Please.’
At this point she made a decision and matter-of-factly told me where and when, and for how long. On my asking she even gave me her address.
‘Part of the trouble’, I said, ‘was that I didn’t know your maiden name.’
‘It wouldn’t have been much use to you. Schmidt. Now where are those girls?’
It seemed to be a dusk-to-dawn delirium, and of viral force – shallow, semi-conscious nightmares, nightmares of impotence. I strained to lift or shift an endless series of cumbrous and almost immovably heavy objects; then I tried and failed to force my way through thick portals made of gold and lead; in shameful incapacity I fled from or cowered before grinning enemies; naked, and shrivelled to nothing, I was laughed and taunted out of bedrooms, boardrooms, ballrooms. Finally my teeth began to waltz around my jaws, changing places, hiding behind one another, till I spat them all out like a mouthful of rotten nuts and thought, It is done. I cannot eat, talk, smile, or kiss.
Outside the weather was neutral, only exceptionally still.
*
Hannah had told me to meet her at the bandstand behind the Freizeitgelande – the recreation ground. Everyone knows it. She also said that she had an hour. This was stated, simply. I resolved of course to be punctual; and I would be punctual in my leaving, too.
I went downstairs and ordered a breakfast I couldn’t eat. So I went back up and bathed and shaved, and when it was half past ten I took from the sink the bunch of flowers I had bought the evening before, in the Grand, and started off.
Three times I asked the way, and three times I was directed with the same grave attentiveness (as if these passers-by were prepared to accompany me – or even carry me – to my rendezvous). I circled the train station, which was evidently functioning (though you could see in the middle distance a giant’s climbing frame of mangled track), and crossed two block-sized bomb sites, cleared of rubble but still redolent of doused gasoline. All this (according to one of my guides) from the raids of mid April ’45, the last of them on April 21, by which time the Russians were in Berlin and already shelling the Chancellery. The bombers were British – the least hateful and the least hated (and the least anti-Semitic) of all the combatants. Well, I would later think, wars get old; they get grizzled and smelly and rotten and mad; and the bigger they are the faster they age . . .
Next, the playing field (three teenagers with a soccer ball each, playing keepy-uppy), and the circular pond – a clan of ducks, a lone swan. The great bell of St Kaspar’s, with portentous three-second intervals, was gonging eleven as I settled on a bench in plain sight of the circular bandstand, where a few old bods in worn blue serge with gilt buttons were packing up a few old trumpets and trombones. Against a sky as colourless and as neutral as tracing paper, rather sedately dressed in matching jersey and long skirt, all cotton, all dark blue, here she came – reduced (we were all reduced), but still tall, broad, and full, and still light-footed. I stood up.
‘These of course are for you. To make you feel like a film star.’
‘Amaryllis,’ she said, in sober identification. ‘With stems as thick as leeks. Give me a moment and I’ll wedge them in the water.’
She had to kneel to do it. When she straightened up, and removed a blade of grass from her sleeve, I felt again that complex pleasure, with its strange elements of pity and delight. Doing this, or that, this way, and not that way. Her habits, her choices, her decisions. With sharp desire, and also with a press of dread, I knew that her hold on my senses was intact and entire; it was plangent but also humorous somehow, this hold, making me want to laugh, making me want to cry.
‘Please be assured that my expectations are very low.’ I had my hands face to face as if in prayer, but they moved, too, nodding in time as I said, ‘A correspondence. Perhaps some kind of friendship . . .’
This was acknowledged. I said,
‘Because it may well be that nothing can be salvage
d. That wouldn’t surprise us, I don’t think.’
‘No, it wouldn’t.’ She looked around. ‘Nothing else has lasted, has it, from that time. Not even a building or a statue.’
I produced a pack of Lucky Strike; we both took one, and the flame of my lighter was solid and still (no wind, no weather). ‘Mm, I suspect I know why you were unhappy when I – when I reappeared.’
‘Look, I don’t want to be mean. But what makes you think I’ve stopped being unhappy? I’ve gone on being unhappy. I’m unhappy now.’
This in turn was acknowledged. She said,
‘Don’t think it’s just you. I’ve been living in dread of seeing anyone at all from back then. I don’t think I could even bear seeing little Humilia. Who’s all right, by the way.’
Her tone was untheatrical – flat and straight, like the level address of her eyes. The dense dark brown hair was the same, the wide mouth was the same, the manly squareness of the jawbone was the same. Two vertical furrows had established themselves on either side of the bridge of her nose – and that was all.
‘I have to be in town by three anyway. At noon I’ll be gone.’
‘. . . If that’s neurotic, or just plain weak, then I’m just plain weak. It was too much for me. I wasn’t up to it.’
My eyebrows continued to undulate sympathetically, but I found that the whole of my being, and not just my heart, resisted this – rejected it; and with a firmness I couldn’t yet understand. I said nothing.
‘I can’t stop imagining I’ll see Doll. That’s how nuts I am. I’d die if I saw him.’ She shuddered, she writhed, and said, ‘I’d certainly die if he touched me.’
‘He can’t touch you.’