Brakes squealed, right outside this time. We moved to the window. Four of them jumped off the truck. There was nothing to do. Nothing to be done.
Hans opened the door before they knocked. There they were: a plainclothes man and two SA boys in brown with automatic pistols. Plain Clothes nodded at one of the boys, who moved straight past us into the flat. My coffee was burning.
‘Gentlemen,’ Hans said, standing straighter than sober. I stood behind, pulled my dressing gown closed.
‘Herr Wesemann?’ The man was tall as Hans. ‘Frau Wesemann?’
‘Yes,’ Hans said.
‘You have twenty-four hours, sir. You must be outside the borders of the Reich within twenty-four hours. Or your citizenship will be revoked.’
‘I have done nothing illegal,’ Hans said. ‘I am a decorated veteran. And I am not a member of the Communist Party.’
‘Sir.’ The man pulled a folded piece of paper from his inside breast pocket and made a show of checking it. ‘The order is for Johannes Alois Wesemann and Ruth Wesemann, née Becker. Sir.’
‘Whose order?
‘Reichsminister Göring’s. Sir.’
The boy came back with my red flag from the closet. He handed it to his boss, and the three of them looked at us in silence. Then the little one behind broke it.
‘Count yourself lucky,’ he piped.
‘Lucky?’ Hans said.
‘You get a warning.’ The boy smiled a smile of pure power, the sudden enjoyment any mortal might have at being on the right side of the line.
By the time they got to us that morning, these boys and their fellows had already killed fifty-one people, and arrested more than four thousand. At first they worked from the membership list they’d stolen from the Communist Party headquarters, but then new orders came which were much broader–to capture or kill anyone who had spoken out against them. If they found you in a bar or café or some other public place they took you into custody; if you were at home you could be shot there, ‘attempting to escape’. Some they didn’t bother taking or shooting. When they found eight Communists hiding in a cellar in Mitte they simply boarded it up. People walking to work heard their calls from the vent at pavement level but no one dared help. It took two weeks for all cries to stop.
Before noon on the 28th of February Hitler presented to Cabinet his Reichstag Fire Decree, ‘for the Protection of the People and the State’, to counter the ‘act of terror’. It permitted arrests without warrant, house searches, postal searches; it closed the newspapers and banned political meetings. In essence, just as Bertie had predicted, it prevented campaigning by any other parties before the election. By the end of that day, thousands of anti-Hitler activists were being held in ‘protective custody’ in makeshift SA barracks–empty factories, a water tower in Prenzlauer Berg, even a disused brewery. Soon there was not enough room. That was when they set about building the concentration camps.
On the night of the fire, the authorities found a dishevelled Dutch ex-Communist labourer called Marinus van der Lubbe and arrested him. He confessed to the arson, insisting he had acted alone. But Göring’s people used the chance to arrest others who were nowhere near the scene–a Communist MP called Torgler and three Bulgarian Communists who were visiting Berlin. We scoffed at the idea that van der Lubbe had done this by himself. He was twenty-four years old, half blind and feeble-minded.
I don’t know why they warned us that morning. Perhaps we were protected by Hans’s notoriety–they couldn’t be seen to be killing well-known journalists, or not at first. Or maybe they were playing with us. We soon heard that lists with names and photographs of people they wanted to catch had been distributed to the railways and all border crossings. Perhaps they would get us in flight. We booked the 18:04 to Paris.
Later we heard our friends’ stories. Some had disguised themselves as mental patients or Fasching revellers in order to slip across borders, or they’d simply skied off-piste into France. They arrived with no papers, no clothes. Hans and I disguised ourselves too, I suppose, as casual holiday-makers, packing only one large case, and a briefcase each–more would look suspiciously like flight. I took two changes of clothes and filled the rest of the space with my camera and lenses, books and photographs. I couldn’t fit the albums, so I chose quickly, ripping pictures out of their corners: our wedding at the Majestic Hotel in Breslau, my parents and Oskar in the garden at Königsdorf, Dora and me as children at the Kleinmachnow fair, Hans asleep on our first night, the sheets rumpled light-and-dark like landscape.
Hans packed his typewriter, his folio and his evening clothes. He came in as I was closing the case. ‘Room for this?’ He held out his hand. It was the porcelain pâté pot from the TicTacToe. ‘For cufflinks,’ he said. He must have souvenired it. The knob on its lid was a chubby pink pig lying on his back, laughing regardless.
‘You’re unbelievable,’ I said.
No one on the platform spoke to one another, and no one started conversations in our compartment. When I heard the ticket collector coming down the train corridor, my heart banged in my throat. As he opened the glass door I sat very still. While the others reached quickly into purses and bags for tickets, Hans slid his hand casually into his jacket pocket and pulled out a napkin. Then, corner by corner, he unwrapped it to reveal a single, perfect, hard-boiled egg.
‘Mahlzeit,’ the conductor said. Bavarian for Guten Appetit. A round fellow with bushy sideburns, for whom Berlin was, hopefully, a faraway place with faraway problems.
‘Thank you,’ Hans said.
I didn’t trust my voice to come out properly. I passed over our tickets. The conductor punched them, then dropped his puncher back into the pocket of his leather apron.
‘You change at Frankfurt for Paris,’ he said, as if it were the most ordinary thing. ‘Platform two.’ He left.
‘An egg!’ I hissed. ‘When did you do that?’
‘While you were packing.’ Hans smiled, pleased with his magic trick. He had always been good under fire. The others in the compartment chuckled, and started chatting–it turned out every one of us was fleeing. Hans reached into his pocket again and pulled out an egg for me, then a twist of paper with salt in it.
Once over the French border we allowed ourselves the dining car. From Paris we went to Calais, where we got a boat to Dover. Then one more train and we were in London.
Hans and I must have been safely over the border when Dora went back with a duffle bag for the diaries.
It was three o’clock in the afternoon. She snibbed both locks behind her inside the apartment and placed the keys on the little bookshelf. Slipped off her shoes.
The bedroom held no power over her today. The desk was as he’d left it, messy with current business–the white rock from the beach at Rügen sitting on letters to be answered, an open matchbox with a muscled sailor on the lid, undrunk coffee blooming aqua and white in a red china cup. She took the cup to the kitchen, washed out the mould. It made a sound as she placed it on the draining board. Too loud. She froze. A man’s cough outside the front door. A knock.
She wasn’t here. The kitchen was the first room on the right off the entrance hall. Whoever it was stood listening three metres from her. She did not breathe.
Dora slid out to the hall, edging along the floor so the boards would not creak. She was an animal, or a child–unprotected, elemental. If she could reach the study, she could get out the window to the yard.
Perhaps it was just a delivery? She’d laugh at herself later.
‘Open the door please.’ A man’s voice. The neighbour again? She was halfway down the hallway.
‘Frau Fabian! We know you are there, Frau Fabian.’
Them. She flew into the study, slid her desk across the door. She heard thumping, then a gunshot, shocking and unmistakable. The sickening groan of the wood splintering. A flash of her–bizarrely–felt responsible for the damage.
And then a shout. They were inside. Shot while attempting to escape. It would be the irony of he
r life if she proved with her death their truthfulness. How is it that in terror there is time to think this?
She kneed up onto Toller’s desk to reach the window. Fist first, then head. From the yard she would get through to Sächsische Strasse–no, they’d have someone there. To the cellar–but the keys were back in the hall.
They were coming, room by room.
‘Not here! Sir!’
‘All clear!’
To Benesch’s apartment then, up the back stairs–a risk, but what choice was there? She shoved away some papers to steady her feet and then she saw the white rock. Yes! She hefted it in her right palm and ripped the thin curtain aside–
Christ, Toller!
Bars. Black iron bars, a hand-width apart.
There was no sound.
They must be outside the door.
They are long, the moments trapped in a room, waiting for the end.
A knock. ‘Frau Fabian. Wieland, Ministry of the Interior. I am asking you to open this door.’
Fear can open up silence and make it hum. Revealing, finally, the sound of the universe shifting quietly, making ready to accommodate you.
No answer from the room. The three of them stood outside, the boy holding her shoes and the offsider with his gun in both hands, trained on the floor. The orders were to take her alive.
‘Frau Fabian,’ Wieland said into the door, ‘you have nowhere to go.’ He nodded to the marksman. ‘Stand back!’ he commanded.
A voice from the room. ‘Don’t shoot!’
When they opened the door, what did they see? A tiny woman, a beaked bird with a glossy black head–was she twenty? Or thirty? Stockinged feet hanging below the desk and a white rock smooth in the cleft of her lap. Trying to strike a match on a box with fingers bitten to the quick.
The man trained the gun on her. The boy held her shoes.
‘We have orders to arrest you,’ Wieland said. ‘On suspicion of treasonous activity against the Reich.’
‘I work for Mr Toller.’ The voice was husky, low. ‘I am doing nothing wrong here.’ Black eyes through the smoke.
‘It’s the law, ma’am.’
‘A new law?’
‘No, ma’am.’
‘New Reich then?’ She smiled at him.
‘Yes, ma’am.’
She blew out the match. They had no humour, these people.
He nodded at the others to get her.
She put up a palm. ‘It’s all right, gentlemen.’
The boy held out her shoes by the laces. The scraps of leather and sole were suddenly intimate things, moulded by her body, open and loose-tongued and revealing. The boy gawped as if he had never in his life watched a woman slip her foot into a shoe. She jumped down from the desk.
On the way to the car an Alsatian, his face in a cage, kept to her side. She scratched his ears in consolation, or comfort. ‘Inside everyone the ice hounds bark,’ she said.
On my crutches in the street people look away from me, a legacy of their mothers hissing ‘Don’t stare!’ when passing puppet-spastics, the violently birthmarked, dirty flashers or dwarves. Or they give me sympathetic smiles, encouraging me in these, they assume, my precious last steps. I could scream at them: ‘You have no idea! How–lucky–I–am!’ Something in me wants to say ‘blessed’ but I stop myself. I am not a pitiful old woman hanging on to her mind while her body shuts down. I am a woman on her way to eat cake.
The shops in Bondi Road show the transformation of this place. The older ones have been transplanted straight from Riga or Stettin or Karlovy Vary, but the greengrocer now calls itself a ‘Fruitologist’ and the butcher is organic. The Hungarian bakery still has the best Gugelhupf.
I have loved Gugelhupf since I was a child, its heaviness and vanilla scent, the swirls of dark poppy seeds in the thick white cake. I order, then manoeuvre myself onto a stool at the front counter and lean my crutches against the window. When the cake comes it is more friable than usual. I lift the fork carefully from plate to mouth, a distance which has increased with age and is now full of treacherous possibility. The cake drops off just before it reaches my lips. I hope no one is looking. It is the pity of passers-by I don’t like.
‘Dr Becker?’ A voice at my ear. ‘Dr Becker?’ At my age everyone thinks you are deaf, or slow. Already half departed.
I turn as much as I can on the stool and the face looms in to me–I see molars, and smell perfume like an advance guard of verbena.
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Hello there.’ It is a middle-aged woman with rectangular tortoiseshell glasses and streaky-blond bobbed hair. She could be anyone. Every now and again one of these creatures accosts me, sweetly, gratefully.
‘Trudy Stephenson,’ she says. ‘Trudy Winmore I was at school.’
‘Oh yes. Trudy.’ I have no idea. ‘Of course. How are you?’ I look closer at the face–kind, deep-set eyes, and a small gap between her front teeth–trying to summon the girl underneath. People say babies look alike, or the very old, all grey and sexless and sunken-skinned. But for me it is the middle-aged women of the eastern suburbs who are so hard to distinguish. They are all neatly, crisply put together, stout-bodied under striped shirts with their collars up, the hair streaked and smoothed to the exact same substance. I taught at the ladies’ college for twenty years. So many, many girls. But as I squint longer at this one the years peel off her till she is an earnest, pudgy, sweet-faced girl in my matriculation German class.
‘Do you remember?’ she is saying.
‘Yes,’ I say, ‘I do.’ They like to be remembered.
She chuckles. ‘And do you remember my father?’
Oh God. ‘I’m afraid…’ I start.
‘You taught us Goethe’s love poetry,’ she smiles. Is that a blush?
‘“O Mädchen, Mädchen wie lieb’ ich dich!”’ I start. O girl, girl how I love you…
‘“Wie blickt dein Auge!/Wie liebst du mich!”’ The look in your eye!/How you love me! She takes it up like a long-cherished thing, a mantra she has muttered throughout her life at particular times, never telling anyone about it. ‘“Wie ich dich liebe/Mit warmen Blut.”’ How I love you/It heats my blood. She laughs and her eyes are suddenly full of tears. ‘We’d never heard anything like it! We didn’t think you were allowed to speak those things.’
‘Ach,’ I say. ‘Australia in the ’50s.’ Those things–like love, like desire, the most precious–were to remain subterranean for your whole little life. It was as if these Anglos thought the feelings were tainted by the involvement of the bodies needed to express them. I never got used to it.
‘My father,’ this Trudy starts. And then I do remember. It is all still inside of me. Her father wrote a letter to Miss Blount, the headmistress: ‘Who is this fellow Goethe anyway? It would be better for the girls to learn something useful instead of this filth.’
‘I remember now!’ I say. I am so pleased. ‘“This filth” he called it, didn’t he?’
‘I’m afraid so.’ Trudy purses her lips mock-ruefully, then smiles again. The tears are gone. ‘But we loved it.’ She touches my forearm. ‘We loved you for it.’
‘Thank you, dear.’
She leaves, square-bottomed and tidy as a tug, a box of cakes dangling in a stork’s triangle from the plastic bag on her arm.
The girls knew I had been in one of Hitler’s prisons for my political activities. I told them about the five-year sentence, three of it in solitary so that I, as a ‘political’, wouldn’t infect the others–abortionists, prostitutes, thieves, poor souls–with ideas of social justice. But at their age the girls were more interested in love, of course. They imagined, because I had been married and unmarried, that I had a scandalous degree of experience. They believed I taught them Goethe’s poetry of desire as if I could vouch for it. None of us–teacher or taught–realised how an imagined romantic life can sustain you as a possibility, a hope, and remain just that. Like parallel train tracks, it runs alongside, but will never meet, the life you are living.
The
Gestapo had nowhere left to take her. Every possible cell was full. And in any case, they wanted Dora to be alone, to soften her up. So she was put in an ordinary cellar in the old police building–a dirt floor and the vestiges of a pile of coal in the corner. Two buckets in another corner, one with water, one empty. There was no light and the cellar was unheated. She spent her time pacing in the dark to keep warm. She had one army blanket and she shared it with lice.
The arrests were taking place so quickly that there were no arrangements for feeding the prisoners; dear Mathilde Wurm heard that they had her and immediately took in baskets of rolls, wurst, bananas, underwear and cigarettes.
They kept Dora for five days before the interview, which was as long as the law allowed. As the guard undid the padlock she said, ‘You would be my Orpheus, come to rescue me?’ He stared blankly at her. She apologised. In the light of the yard she saw that her clothes were covered in dirt and her hands were rimmed in black. As they walked to the administrative building the boy motioned to her forehead. ‘You might want to…’ He gestured a rub.
‘Thanks,’ she smiled back, ‘but it’s not my filth.’
The bare electric bulb in the interview room hung from a brown cloth-covered cord. Dora blinked after the dimness of the cellar. The interrogating officer was not an ordinary policeman, but one of the newer, black-uniformed ones. His face was shiny, small eyes stuck in deep, like raisins. He asked her what she had to say in her defence.
‘So far as I know,’ she said, ‘I am not on trial here.’
‘You have been apprehended on the grounds of lèse-majesté and suspicion of high treason.’
‘On account of what?’
He looked at the sheet in front of him. She knew he would have been studying it well in advance.
‘On account of membership of the Independent Social Democratic Party and its successor the Socialist Workers Party. And of your editorship of this…’ He pushed an edition of a pacifist journal across the table. She stared at her name, next to Walter’s, on the masthead. ‘Not to mention,’ the man continued, ‘certain writings such as,’ he put his finger on another page in front of him, ‘“the ecstasies of women for the Leader are a sign not of loyalty, but of need. This need will not be satisfied by him, nor the husbands he promises, nor any man.”’