‘Why do you keep your eyes closed?’ she asked once, afterwards. She was so slight that, hunched, her vertebrae made a ladder of bone, from nape to tail.
‘You know why,’ he said.
‘You close your eyes to be in prison when we make love?’
Part of the thrill of Dora was that she trained her intellect, impartially, on everyone. Just sometimes, it could be you.
‘Not in prison,’ he said quietly.
‘Well,’ she leant back against the pillows, a cigarette between two fingers, ‘in a prison dream then.’
He sat up and placed his feet carefully on the floor. Walked to the study and pulled the door closed. Again and again she would push for truth and end up four seconds later in a room all alone. Correct, but alone.
He must have taken the kidskin case with him. She reached up and found two others–one leather and one cardboard–on top of the wardrobe. She carried them across the hall to the study at the rear of the apartment.
The narrow little room faced the yard, her own desk tucked behind the door. He would sit with his back to the window, the day-curtain always drawn against the headaches that sometimes came in the afternoons. Dora sat in shadow, stockinged feet on some books or the rung of her chair, while he dictated, or they discussed corrections. One mind feeding into the other until their concentration collapsed under its own intensity and they would go across the hallway to bed.
She looked at the study window. The pale linen hung from its curtain rings, as always. If they came for her, she could jump to the yard from here.
She worked quickly. The most important thing was the story of his life. A first draft was nearly finished, the manuscript in two cardboard boxes with spring fasteners on the shelf nearest her desk. She opened the top one: ‘I Was a German’ where she had typed it.
The snap fastening caught and bit her skin as it closed, leaving a thin smudge of red on the page. She sucked her finger. She put the boxes into one of the suitcases, then turned to the correspondence, taking down the alphabetically labelled binders and putting them on the carpet. She sprang them open. She could fit more paper into the cases if it was loose.
From where she sat she saw the diaries on the bottom shelf. He’d written a lot from them. Look Through the Bars, as well as the autobiography. She had not read them, but she knew when he was lost he would pick one up and open it, looking to find himself inside. Some were leather-bound, some paper. The smallest was a tiny, cracked calfskin thing that had buckled to the shape of his body in the trenches. They wouldn’t all fit in the cases. She’d have to come back with another case.
Photos! She returned to the bedroom with her own bag and grabbed the one from the bedside table of his mother and sister smiling in front of the house in Samotschin. Scraps of paper underneath it fell to the floor. They were covered with writing at all different angles, scrawls he’d done without bothering to turn the light on. She gathered them up too, then opened the dresser for the other photos, loose in the drawer: Toller in uniform in 1914; with the actress Tilla Durieux in Munich before the revolution; at the Berlin premiere of Hoppla, We’re Alive! There were newspaper clippings, reviews. At the bottom of the drawer her fingers hit something hard–a coin? A medal? No, the tag from his puppy: ‘Toby’. She put it in too.
Her body reacted first. The skull contracting and a bird in her chest, trying to get out.
The telephone. Just the telephone.
But everyone knew he wasn’t here. Was it the neighbour Benesch, warning her? Or was it them?
She moved to the doorway and looked at the thing on his desk, ringing and ringing, black in its cradle. Fourteen rings. It stopped. She waited till her pulse faded.
Dora slung her bag with the photos in it over her shoulder, strapped the cases and tried to lift them. Paper is a trick of physics, words heavy as gold. She turned back to the phone.
‘Don’t come in,’ she told me. ‘Wait in the cab outside. And bring all your keys.’
Hans was still out so I dressed and went alone. It was raining. The cab idled outside Toller’s building, its headlights making twin yellow streaks on the road. Dora carried the cases down one at a time, holding them sideways in front of her.
‘Bornholmer Strasse allotments,’ Dora told the driver.
When we got to the gardens the driver kept the motor running. We took a case each and struggled out of the cab.
‘Night gardening, comrades?’ He smiled, cutting the engine. ‘Let me help.’ He looked kind, in his cap. He looked like one of us.
But Dora said, ‘We can manage. Thanks.’
‘At least let me wait for you.’
We sent him away. A high, inaudible whistle of alarm had sounded. We didn’t trust anyone.
We waited for his tail-lights to disappear, then started along the path through the garden plots near the train line. We made our way without a torch, the cases slapping against our legs and mud sucking our shoes. We could distinguish the little fences dividing each allotment. These had once been places of leisure–people grilling meat in summer, workers sitting on garden furniture with their shirts off, gap-toothed children larking on board-and-rope swings. But since the stock-market crash most people grew food here.
Hans and I had never used our plot, either for leisure or necessity: it came with the apartment. We went through the gate to the shed. Dora lit match after match while I worked the rusted padlock.
‘This is just for now,’ she said. ‘Till I can get them out of the country.’
The lock twisted and sprang open. ‘You can keep these.’ I handed her the keys. ‘I don’t need them.’ I tilted my head to look at her, her hair plastered to her cheeks, eyelashes wet. ‘When are you going?’
‘I’m not going anywhere, Ruthie. I have things to do here.’
‘But Bert said—’
‘I’ll go underground. Don’t worry. I’ll have someone else get these out.’
‘Who?’
‘I don’t know yet.’
‘Where will you stay, then?’
She pushed the door open for me with one arm, gestured inside grandly like a valet. ‘Ta-da.’
‘You’re joking.’ The shed was dark and smelt like wet concrete.
‘Not very funny, is it?’ She smiled.
‘No.’
Inside, Hans and I had stacked things we didn’t want in the apartment–boxes of papers, a horrible Biedermeyer sofa we’d been given as a wedding present. We hid the two cases behind the sofa and covered them with some coarse grey removalist’s blankets.
Then we made her a bed out of a couple more. I left her with two packets of matches.
They wouldn’t be coming after me; I could go home. The underground trains had stopped running. I walked with my face to the rain as if some small suffering of mine might mitigate someone else’s–the old crazy bargain with the universe.
As I rounded the corner to our apartment I smelt smoke. Hans still wasn’t home. From the living-room window there was no fire to be seen, so I went to bed. Whatever it was, it would be dealt with by morning.
TOLLER
I have been walking the room while we work through the letters: apart from Mrs Roosevelt, I have to respond to Grosz, Spender and the IRS. The light is fading gently over the park, turning everything into its silhouette. I hear the click as Clara turns on the lamp by her chair over at the little typewriter table. When I sit down and face her I see she has one bloodshot eye and a nasty graze high on her forehead.
‘What happened?’ I cry. Good Christ, does it really take a physical injury for me to pay attention to someone?
‘It’s nothing,’ she says, though I see she has singed the hair at her forehead as well. ‘We were trying to reheat the dinner on the Primus and it blew up.’
‘Did you go to the doctor?’
‘No, no. Really, it’s not serious.’
Of course, they don’t have the money for a doctor. ‘I’m sorry, have I…?’ I feel a queasiness in my stomach. ‘Have I forgotten to
pay you? These things, sometimes I just don’t think—’
‘No–stop!’ She has her hands up, laughing. The stoicism of women has astounded me all my life. ‘MGM is paying me, remember?’
My head is nodding for yes, but I still feel it in the pit of my stomach. A shadow rustles at the edge of my vision. If I turn my head quickly to confront it, it slips out of sight like a floater in my eye. Clara turns back and starts typing.
I once forgot to give my wife, a girl in a foreign land, any money to live on.
When I think of Christiane I feel the blackness coming; my nostrils fill with a stink which is not human but is not sulphur. It is burnt flesh, as in the trenches. I look to the bathroom and this time I catch the last dirty feathers scraping back under the door, dropping filth in their wake. They barely fit behind there.
Six weeks ago, Christiane left me for a doctor on East 61st Street, also a refugee. I do not blame her one iota.
Christiane Grautoff was fifteen years old when I first laid eyes on her, the child star of the German stage. For two years I courted her virtually without touching her, the thing between us remaining pristine and unreal, like a perfect future. She was a slender, energetic, blond-mopped person with slanted green eyes, unphilosophical and self-reliant. She came, as they say, from a good family, which is to say nothing about goodness, but only about money. The money was from her mother’s side. She was a self-absorbed minor novelist. Her father was an art historian with one of the coldest hearts I have ever encountered. When Christiane was eight they packed her off to a children’s home for four years of brutality–partly because she was ‘wild’, mostly because they were busy. She might have thanked them in the end: the home made her an acute observer, as are all the best actors. She learnt the working-class Berlinerisch within days, and she learnt to entertain the tough kids, and the overseers. But her father’s cruelty also meant that her standards of decent treatment from a man were way too low to protect her from me.
‘I am poison to you!’ I told her at the beginning, even as I courted her. ‘Caveat emptor!’
Christiane is the only woman I ever lived with. She saw the worst of it, in London, when I stayed in a dark room for months. My contempt for myself at these times contaminated my feeling for her; it killed the love and replaced it with itself.
A girl from Christiane’s background was not expected to cook, but in London she tried, apologising for every meal she boiled or burnt or drowned in butter as I waltzed out the door to a restaurant. Nor could she darn. My socks lay about our Hampstead room like demands. When we were invited to a grand country house, she knew the servants would unpack our bags and check our things for missing buttons or caught threads, then mend them before putting them away. Christiane packed four pairs of my disintegrating socks for a weekend trip, and imagined I’d be pleased at the result. When I saw them all perfectly darned I did not speak to her for three days.
Once, I took her to get a permanent wave. (Did I want her to look older? Shame.) My silken-haired girl sat trusting in the chair while I chatted with the hairdresser, who left the stinking, burning solution on too long. Christiane came out looking, as she said, like a poodle. But she decided to comfort me. ‘Not to worry,’ she said, ‘berets are all the fashion this winter.’
It didn’t stop when we got to America. Her talent was obvious to everyone; a big studio offered her a contract that would have made her a star. I forbade her to take it. I also forbade her to tell anyone I had done so. Then she said she wanted a baby, and I forbade that too. I despise myself.
It is not their fault, the spouses who come after, that we do not love them as we loved before. Christiane loved me no matter what I did to her. Because of this, I felt her love like a provocation. (Look at that! Can it be true that I continue to blame her, even now?) She excused all my private cruelties with the idea that I was a great man. I was fighting to save humanity–what matter that I left her alone in London for a three-month book tour in Russia, forgetting, simply forgetting, to give her any money? She was eighteen years old, a refugee and not allowed to work. What matter that when I got back I scolded her for failing to tell me she needed funds, for working illegally so she could eat, and for then starving herself to buy me a short-wave radio I had wanted for my birthday–childish! I said. Irresponsible! Too thin!
Dora said I could be more intimate with thousands than I could be with one.
I move to the small desk by the window and write Christiane a note. It is in part an apology, which I know she’ll shoo away with one hand. So I make it mostly of thanks, and genuine–truly–good wishes for her future. I tell her she will be a star. I seal the envelope and resume my chair.
Clara brings across the letters for my signature.
‘Oh, and another thing,’ she says, slipping the cover over the typewriter, ‘I had Mr Kaufman on the phone yesterday. He says MGM will pay your passage, first class. He said it was the least the studio could do.’
I shake my head a little. ‘That’s nice.’
‘Yes, it is,’ she says.
‘I mean of you. To think of asking him.’ She shrugs off my compliment. ‘You should go and see Christiane’s doctor friend. He treats refugees for free. On East 61st Street.’
‘I’m fine,’ she says, at the door. ‘Try sleeping, will you?’
Once Clara is gone, I pick up the note again. I could just walk right out there into the night lights, get a cab across Central Park South and deliver it to her in person. I might surprise her.
I look towards the bathroom. The door is shut. I can leave it; there’s a lavatory in the lobby. I collect my Burberry trenchcoat from the closet and put it over my arm. I can’t remember the last time I wore it.
My room is five storeys up but I take the stairs. When I get down there, the lobby is a vast acreage of swirly-patterned carpet and potted palms between me and the revolving door to the street. Capped busboys criss-cross with trolleys and people are moving all about, from the door to reception, reception to the lifts, or up the little stairs to the bar. I have a few seconds before my stillness is noticed.
My shirt is sticking to my skin and my mouth is dry. My heart pounds. I want, I really want, to get through that door and into the glittering night. But am not sure my legs will do my bidding. I turn and make it, just, into the men’s.
In the mirror an ashen-faced man stares back at me, grey hair spiralling off his forehead. My mother is dead now, but I try to find, here, some remnant of what she loved.
The taps are the same as in my bathroom upstairs, ‘H’ and ‘C’ in enamel buttons on them. If I leave the building the wings will make their escape and their blackness will foul this city. Or is it the other way? The wings are a function of me: if I walk out of here will they come with me and contaminate it then? Either way it will be my fault. I have to stop them.
RUTH
Bev is in the doorway, armed with a spraygun and a fluorescent yellow microfibre cloth. It’s a stand-off.
‘I might go for a walk then,’ I say. ‘To the library.’
‘By yourself? But I was going to get you some lunch, after.’ Everything Bev says contains an inbuilt reproach.
‘I’ll get something at the shops.’
‘Suit yourself.’ She runs her eyes over me, as if I am doing this purely to thwart her and my comeuppance is nigh, nigh, nigh. ‘I’d change my top if I were you,’ she says, picking up the biscuits and my cup in her pink rubber hands and turning on her heel.
When she’s gone I pull out my cardigan. There’s a hand-sized coffee stain under my breasts. I am long past shame; it is the pity of passers-by I don’t like. I try to get out of the chair but my arms seem weaker than usual. I can’t get up enough momentum to–push–off.
Bev reappears with my crutches and handbag and a fresh cardigan.
‘Well, then,’ she says from her height. ‘Not a lot goin on here.’ But she helps me up, and off with the old and on with the new, and as I put the crutches under my arms–the metal jangle of them
rings like freedom’s bells to me–I bow my head to her and she hangs the handbag over my neck.
When I’m at the gate she can’t help herself and darts out to open it.
‘You’ll be right, will you?’ she asks. She reaches up and straightens my wig. Her face is a picture of mock tragedy over what I recognise, with a stab of surprise, as genuine concern.
‘I think so,’ I say. ‘Thanks.’
And then I am free on this glorious day, down the street with its pavement cracked open by the roots of the Port Jackson figs that will not be contained. And the sun close enough to kindle sparkles of response from the bitumen, way down here.
The morning after we hid Toller’s cases, trucks woke me before it was light, rumbling over the cobbles of our street, then brakes screaming into the corner. Next to me the bed was untouched. I moved to the window and saw an open vehicle full of uniformed men. It had happened before that Hans, carried away with the night, had not come home. I went to the kitchen and put the coffee on. I could never eat first thing. I heard more trucks.
The door flew open and Hans threw his shoes down hard, one then the other in the hall. He leaned on the doorjamb to the kitchen.
‘They’re raiding homes!’ he panted. He ran his hand through his hair. ‘I came as soon as I heard.’ I caught his air of vodka and cigarettes.
I stared. ‘I’ve been here,’ I said. ‘I’m fine.’
‘Look at this!’ He passed me the Völkische Beobachter. The headline was huge: ‘Communist Terror Plot: Reichstag Burns!’
‘But it’s not … but they didn’t—’
‘Of course not,’ he said. ‘There was no plan to do that.’
I read aloud the Leader’s words: ‘“The German people have been soft too long. Every Communist official must be shot. All friends of the Communists must be locked up. And that goes for the Social Democrats and the Reichsbanner as well!”’ I looked up at Hans, who was lighting a cigarette. I read on:‘“You are now witnessing the dawn of a great epoch in German history. This fire is the beginning.”’