The murderers left him bleeding to death over his desk and ran out to the woods, where, in the hunt the next day, the dogs lost their scent. The men must have had a car waiting to take them back over the German border to their party bosses.
I can’t even remember the names of the nurses here now, and am always grateful for the badges they wear. But I do remember the names of Lessing’s assassins: Eckert and Zischka. They had been sent by Ernst Röhm, head of Hitler’s political police, the SA. After the war they found Eckert and put him on trial. He said they had been trying to kidnap the philosopher, ‘but something kept getting in the way, so the plan changed’. The amended order for murder had come directly from Berlin.
The morning after we got the news Dora was up uncharacteristically early, boiling eggs. Her eyes were red. A man I hadn’t seen before sat reading at the kitchen table.
‘Good morning,’ he said and went back to his book. After a moment he appeared to think better of that and closed it. Without quite meeting my eye he straightened the cutlery in front of him to make it symmetrical, adjusted the salt and pepper shakers to be equidistant between his place setting and mine. When his egg came he tapped it cautiously.
‘Usually,’ he announced, when he saw the yolk was solid, ‘I like a three-minute egg.’
‘I’ll bear that in mind,’ Dora said calmly.
After hearing about Lessing, Dora had called Fenner, who couldn’t come over. Then she called this man, the professor. No doubt for Dora it was desire, but it had nothing to do with romance. It had to do with staying close to life.
I’d heard of Wolfram Wolf back home, but the man in front of me was not what I’d expected. He had a long face like an Irishman’s and a dark moustache trimmed neatly under his nose. He wore a pale-green mohair cardigan, buttoned to the top, and pants pulled up high over a bottom that spread out to cover the chair. Wolf had been a legal academic before gaining some small fame as Minister for Justice in the brief Communist–Independents coalition government in Thuringia in 1923, before the army was sent in from Berlin to wrest power away from the left. Perhaps this dramatic end to his one foray into politics had sent him scurrying back to the university, under the grey bedclothes of theory. His wife, a prominent educator, was in Denmark setting up a progressive school. He was about fifty.
‘And you are a photographer, Dora tells me.’ Wolf put his spoon down and smiled a millisecond smile over his half-glasses. I heard in his question a hidden challenge to call myself a photographer, as if that would require the presumption of an awareness of form and aesthetics I could not possibly have.
‘Not really,’ I said. ‘I trained as a teacher. Photography is a habit–I mean, you know, a hobby.’ I was flustered despite myself. ‘Something I can do while we’re here. I’ll teach when we go back.’
‘Indeed,’ Wolf said. He was so softly spoken you were obliged to lean in to him, as if in deference to the delicate pearls of wisdom that might issue, in their own good time, from his lips. I looked to Dora for solidarity, or maybe a laugh, but she was studying the paper.
As I got to know him–for more and more frequently it was Wolfram Wolf at the breakfast table–his superiority acquired form and shape. We could have pulled up an extra chair for it. He made us feel that the inexorable grand march of history could scarcely be affected by leafleting, or raising money, or writing articles. In fact, his theory left our reality so far behind as to make the lives we were living already passé.
I saw his condescension as an attempt to leach the courage from our actions, so as not to have to account for his own timidity. To be writing but never publishing here, to be supported by his wife in Denmark–he was running no risks at all! I believe it took all the nerve he could muster to spend nights at our flat in the company of activists who were illegal not only in the Reich, but here too.
The next time I saw him at breakfast he held forth on the ‘failing courage of the socialist leadership’. I wondered how he dared, considering small beads of perspiration appeared on his hairline at the mention of Mrs Wolf.
When he left I started to scrape the plates. He’d eaten every skerrick of his egg and three pieces of toast.
‘I get it now,’ I said into the sink. ‘In theory the professor loves all humanity. It’s just that we individual specimens can be so damn disappointing.’
‘Leave the man alone,’ Hans said mildly. He was putting on his coat to go to the library. ‘He’s just trying to get by like the rest of us.’
Dora grinned and put her newspaper down. She had come to the conclusion that in some obscure way I was jealous, so she was being exaggeratedly patient with me. I was not jealous. I just didn’t want her to be someone who was so easily fooled.
‘It is true,’ she said, ‘that while Wolfram sees the general, he is very particular.’
When the front door closed behind Hans Dora lowered her voice to the jokey whisper she sometimes used to cajole me out of a bad temper. ‘Very particular indeed. He wipes his penis after sex.’ She raised the newspaper again. ‘From base to tip.’
You can’t be mad with love for someone if you say that about them, can you? After that sordid fact I no longer felt the need for tact.
‘Well,’ I shook my head a little over the sink, ‘what is it about him then?’
Dora put the paper down again and her voice turned respectful and serious. Wolf’s magnum opus, she explained, had reinterpreted communist theory for Germany so that we did not need to blindly follow Moscow; so that a local, autonomous variant of a more just society might take root on German soil. The Russians were running a nation of peasants, and doing it with a whip. But Germany was the most advanced country in Europe–we needed a more sophisticated, inclusive version of socialism. In Wolf’s view fascism and bolshevism were both deceivers of the working class, and educating the masses the only protection against them. His was a work of genius, Dora said, and of great feeling for the people. But Moscow had punished his apostasy by forcing him out of the party.
‘He’s a lone dog now,’ she said, ‘like me.’
The thrill of having someone explain the world anew to you was ingrained in Dora from her brilliant, patient father. Her most basic pattern of loving involved intellectual exploration: new worlds revealed, this one changed by thinking it different. I wanted to scream at her, But you are not alone!
But then, who can compete with lights going on inside you?
TOLLER
‘Shall we keep working?’ I ask. Clara’s shoulders are sunk. She seems uncharacteristically lost. ‘I understand if you’d rather be with Joseph right now,’ I add.
She shakes her head. Clara will manage to put her concern for her brother away, for the time being, and keep going. What else is there to do?
‘The next time I saw Dora was after Lessing was killed,’ I continue. I explain how Hitler, after making us stateless and poor by decree, then began sending hit squads outside the country. She is shocked; another thing she didn’t know.
‘Not your fault,’ I say. ‘It was barely reported, and then only in the émigré press.’
Lessing was assassinated in August ’33. The next day Dora was on our stoop. Christiane opened the door. When I heard Dora’s voice my heart sped; I tucked myself in and straightened the papers in front of me.
Christiane showed her in, then left us. She understood that Dora worked with the underground, and that for those who didn’t, it was safer not to know. Also, while my private cruelties may have seemed boundless, they did not extend to torturing Christiane with my love for Dora.
It was the first time I’d seen her since she’d left to live with her cousin. She was tanned; her hair was shorter, mussed at the back from how she’d slept, and one side of her collar was tucked under. She was pacing the room, rubbing one hand in the other and speaking quickly, not looking at me.
‘You’re on that list,’ she said. ‘And Goebbels’ speech–he named you. They’ve got von Ossietzky in Oranienburg, they got Lessing and, and…’
br />
I stood up to move to her, steady her, but she wouldn’t come into my arms. I stepped back to the bay window. ‘Look out there.’ I tapped the glass. ‘I have my own tail. Chasing me.’
‘Very funny.’ But she came over to see the fellow, a short man in a hat, propping his behind on the low brick wall across the road, a quartered newspaper in one hand. After I reported the hate mail, Scotland Yard had given me a policeman to follow me around. He seemed both dogged and useless. I was starting to feel a little sorry for him.
‘Doesn’t look like much,’ Dora said. And then, her face to me, ‘Ernst, I think they are sending us threats. In the speeches. I’m so—’
‘They wouldn’t dare do it in England.’ I put my arms over her shoulders.
‘No,’ she said. ‘I suppose not.’ She was blinking, her chin shuddering. ‘But I’m finding it harder and harder to believe there are limits to what they will do. Sometimes,’ she looked at me hard and pressed her lips together, ‘I think there aren’t.’ The light from the window caught her at temple, cheekbone, chin.
‘Well–I am The Great Toller, as you say. They love me.’
She cupped my face roughly. ‘If you would only believe it.’
RUTH
The S-Bahn carriage is empty. The windows are open and the wind is trapped in here with us, wild and trying to get out. Dora is here!
Why haven’t I seen her for such a long time? For decades? And we are just girls–I am thirteen, so she must be eighteen. She holds on to the pole and spins.
Things are distilled, clearer than life. It’s hot. As she spins, Dora’s hair comes loose from its inadequate plait; there’s a wet strand in her mouth; her black eyes are huge. At Schlachtensee station we run down the steps, coming out at the lake. It is rimmed by spindly, eager trees bending to the water. With a piece of my reason, I know that in the many hollows and bowers other people must be picnicking and reading and stepping off to bathe, but I see none of them. In a bower of our own Dora and I hang our dresses and underthings on branches. These ghosts of us flutter and wait while we, naked flesh-and-breath creatures, step out on underwater roots and part the lake.
It is still hot, so hot when we come out. We lie on the ground, limbs sleek-shiny as fish. Dora places a wet palm, low and firm, on my abdomen.
‘It’s locked?’
I can’t speak. I sink into the earth and into her hand; I become the melted lake, an open, aching universe of rivulet and stone, animal and flower, and–no! no!—
An emergency bell is sounding. It must be from the boat hire, or an air-raid, or a ship’s horn, or a car alarm, or the anxiety of church bells—
An alarm has gone off in the hospital somewhere, and there’s knocking at my door. I open my eyes. It’s the cheery nurse.
‘Good morning, Ruth,’ she says. She wears a white coat and sensible shoes which make little sucks on the floor, some syncopation happening now with the keys and cards that jingle around her neck. Suck suck jingle, suck suck jingle.
‘Good morning,’ I say. I didn’t know it was. The nurse–her badge says MARGARET PEARCE–presses a button and the torso half of my bed rises up. The Risen Ruth. I hope I didn’t say that out loud.
She opens the curtains. ‘Sleep well?’ she asks over her shoulder.
‘Yes. Thank you.’ I can barely tell the difference now. The sleep is more alive than the waking.
She looks at my chart. I can’t help feeling that there might be information on it about myself that could be useful, all things considered, for me to know. I might see progress plotted there. Or time elapsed. Time to go. But they like to keep it to themselves.
Nurses in this country are highly trained. There are universities for them and extension courses and a career path with promotions and pay rises and conferences at salmon-coloured resorts. Not like the well-bred, good-willed amateurs of my youth. But these women also have something that cannot be taught, something the doctors rarely attain. There is nothing they have not seen, no soiled pan or suppuration or botched attempt at words they do not know. Unlike the doctors, for whom I am a bundle of symptoms to be managed, the nurses are on my side against the depredations of my body–this time a fractured hip and wrist, a damaged head bandaged right round over one eye–and of my mind. We are together in this–whatever you might call what is going on in this bed. And it is exactly the businesslike, professional nature of their thousand tendernesses that is the magical thing: their respectful, first-name ministrations restore my dignity, though I am now barely more than bones and skin hung together.
MARGARET PEARCE has wiry hair in curls that must once have been red spiralling out from her head, and half-glasses that sit down her nose. She holds my wrist between her thumb and two fingers and looks at her watch as she feels my pulse. Scratches the biro into that chart. ‘You are due for an increased dose of this, Ruth.’ She holds the drip tube. ‘But only if you feel you need it.’
I nod for yes, and then she leaves me, safe to dream.
One morning in the kitchen, Hans and I heard Dora arguing with Wolf in her room. Her voice was insistent, and rising. I caught ‘solidarity’ and ‘money where your mouth is’. Wolf’s responses were a low, controlled rumble, the words indiscernible. When Dora came out she left the door to fly open. She was red-eyed and scratching her forearms and made straight for the coffee pot. Behind her the professor slipped by and let himself out.
‘I don’t give a damn that he won’t be seen with me in public,’ Dora said, plonking her cup down on the table so roughly it spilt over. ‘He can pretend we’ve never met, for all I care.’ Her voice was incredulous. ‘But he won’t even come.’
For months Dora had been working to make the Commission of Inquiry into the Reichstag Fire a success. Every German refugee in London would be there, and every British politician, committee member, churchman and concerned citizen who supported us. Except, it seemed, the professor.
No one but Dora could have got the witnesses into Britain. The Home Office had not been keen to admit ‘foreign leftist elements, including many Israelites, seeking to upset relations with the Reich’. Through her friendship with Lord Marley and his old school contacts in the Foreign Office, Dora had circumvented the Home Office altogether and managed to get temporary visas issued for people who would testify against the regime. Some of them were even in false names, where the repercussions for the witness and their family in Germany would be too severe.
I remember Dora laughing and hugging her ribs when she got off the phone from Lord Marley. ‘With true British restraint,’ she beamed, ‘the FO has told the Germans that “it possesses no legal power to prevent such purely private proceedings”. This will be the most public event we can make it.’ She stretched her arms out. ‘Worldwide publicity! What a lesson to Berlin from a place where the government knows its limits! It’s absolutely brilliant.’
Göring and Goebbels planned to use their own trial to justify to the world the Nazis’ seizure of power, and to fix in the public mind the Nazi story–that the Communists had set fire to the Reichstag as a signal to their cells across Germany to start burning down all essential government buildings before moving to take over the country. Hitler had got his extra powers to lock up every stripe of suspect and ‘keep the people safe’. Guillotining poor van der Lubbe and the others would terrify anyone else who had it in mind to oppose the new regime.
The counter-trial had been carefully planned for the week before the Nazis’ trial. It was a Thursday morning in mid-September when Hans and I caught the tube to Chancery Lane. The counter-trial was being held in the courtroom of the Law Society in Carey Street. A throng buzzed and milled outside. Women adjusted the handbags under their arms and men cupped pipes to flames in the breeze. A fellow in a brown felt cap wheeled a gaily painted coffee cart into the crowd.
In the excitement of the days leading up to this, Dora seemed to have recovered her equilibrium about Wolf, or at least quarantined her expectations of him. She wasn’t about to let his cowardice s
poil her big event. I fingered the tickets she had given me in my pocket.
The courtroom was not huge but it was nevertheless grand, with a dark-panelled dado and a podium at the front. There were so many of us there, emerged from our tiny flats and boarding-house warrens, that we squashed in shoulder to shoulder, lining the walls and spilling into the aisles. As Hans and I walked to the front we passed famous faces of the Emigrandezza, noble creatures in fedoras and mended coats greeting one another as at a bar mitzvah. We saw Otto Lehmann-Russbüldt, Kurt Rosenfeld, Mathilde. Hans acknowledged former colleagues from Die Welt am Montag and Die Weltbühne. Fenner Brockway was there, and Lord Marley, the suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst, and old Mrs Franklin.
And the place swarmed with British and international press. Dora had warned us not to speak with anyone whose accreditation we didn’t carefully examine first–there could be spies among the journalists as well as the refugees, people recruited either for Scotland Yard or for Berlin. But that day I was incapable of fear. I was swept up already into something public, protective, and British.
We found our seats three rows from the front. As I took out my camera a tipstaff banged his rod on the ground. The crowd shuffled and went silent, like a single, hopeful creature.
The judges filed in from a side door, magnificent in black robes with white jabots at their chin. They had come from the United States, France, Sweden, Britain, Denmark and Belgium, and there was a woman judge from the Netherlands. The room exploded with flashes. It might have been only a ‘mock’ trial or, as the Nazis were putting about, ‘a Marxist propaganda front’, but as these eminences mounted the podium and took their places, I saw that in the hands of the British the proceedings had a dignity that would be hard for the world to discount.
The famous English barrister Sir Stafford Cripps KC held up his hand. We were welcome, he told us, to photograph members of the bench. But then, if we pleased, the cameras were to be put away. He held up a copy of the Völkische Beobachter, its headline screaming about ‘overseas traitors’.