Hans listened intently. Ten minutes later the voice said, ‘And I leave you, friends, till 18:00 GMT or 19:00 Berlin time tomorrow.’
Bertie’s face broke into a grin, half-clown and half-cemetery, with his crazy hair and crooked, tombstone teeth. ‘So, can you guess?’
‘Couldn’t have put it better myself.’ Hans was shaking his head, smiling. ‘Is it from inside Germany? That would be out-and-out suicide.’
Bert shook his head.
‘The voice is familiar somehow.’ Hans smoothed his tiny moustache. ‘I give up.’
‘Rudi Formis!’
Rudi had staged one ‘technical difficulty’ too many at the state radio station in Berlin and the Nazis had come after him. He escaped over the border into Czechoslovakia and immediately started assembling a secret radio transmitter in the roof of an inn at Slapy, smuggling in antenna parts and everything else in his suitcase. And from there he had started broadcasting anti-Hitler messages.
Bertie leant back with his hands behind his head. ‘Unbelievable, eh?’ he said.
‘The man is a genius,’ Hans said. His eyes were bright. ‘He must need people–we could write for him?’
‘No.’ Bertie’s tone was definite. ‘He’s being very careful. Won’t tell anyone where he is. I’m one of the very few who know.’ He couldn’t help the pride in his voice. ‘Sometimes I send him information, but it’s through an intermediary in Prague.’
‘Priceless,’ Hans said.
‘Yoo-hoo.’ There’s a curtain on a rail that runs inside the door of my room, to give me privacy, and so people don’t get a fright, opening straight onto a spectacle such as moi. But you can’t be protected from everything. A hand and some pinkish fuzz appear on one side of it.
‘You right for visitors?’ Bev’s voice is businesslike and caring at once–so she knows the drill too?
‘Come in.’
‘Well then,’ she says. She pushes aside the curtain with a swoosh and there she is, a huffing and puffing reminder of my other life, the outside one with biscuits and banter and sunshine walks. Bev is wearing a long white T-shirt which hangs down over her pillowy body, and leggings underneath. Around the neck of the T-shirt there are coloured sequins, and for an instant I can think of nothing but a life-size vanilla ice-cream cone with sprinkles. She bustles about, finding a chair and pulling it over, plopping a bulging supermarket bag on her lap.
‘What’s goin on here, then?’
‘Not a lot,’ I smile at her.
She smiles back. ‘I brought you some things from home.’ She takes my toiletries bag out. ‘Shampoo and a toothbrush and baby powder and this.’ She puts my hearing aid in a ziplock baggie down on the night-table. ‘And I got you today’s paper.’ She hands over the horrible tabloid I do not read, all the junk advertising in its guts spilling out. ‘And,’ she reaches down to the top of her handbag, ‘these.’ Bev holds out a little wicker basket. Inside are four of the most luscious purple-green figs I have ever seen, resting in some kind of hay.
‘Out of season,’ Bev sniffs, ‘four dollars each.’ This is as close to a declaration of love as I have had in a long time.
‘Exquisite,’ I say. ‘Thank you very much.’ Bev knows how I love fruit, even if she laughs at me for sometimes eating it with a knife and fork. I touch them. The precious, soft-skinned figs bring their pregnant beauty into this sterile place. They have cost her nearly an hour’s pay.
‘They are just perfect,’ I say, and I see she is chuffed. To deflect her pleasure she picks up the newspaper.
‘Them tree killers are at it again over in Woollahra,’ she says, whacking the paper with the back of a hand. Woollahra is a grand suburb, where developers have been known to sneak out in the dead of night to poison 150-year-old Moreton Bay figs so that their flats will boast broader harbour views. Like many things here, it is only evident in the perpetrators’ denial. ‘Disgusting,’ Bev tuts.
I look at the paper and recognise the spot where the magnificent tree used to be. The underside of the fecundity of this place is its avidity: for sex, for money. This town is all about getting away with it. If I close my eyes I can see Seven Shillings Beach below where the tree was, a strip of white sand looking across the water to the city, with an aqua boathouse at one end. A small sign on a cyclone gate declares it to be a private beach belonging to the mansions behind it, from the high-tide mark up. But the gate is always open and everyone, mansion owners and public alike, completely ignore this rule. We are all dazzled by beauty here; it is a prelapsarian world where people kill for the view but everything is always, already forgiven.
‘Pardon?’ I say. Bev is saying something.
‘How about a hand massage then?’ She leans into her bag for a tube of cream. ‘Oh yes,’ she says, ‘and here’s your mail.’ She puts the letters on the bedside stand, all of them uninteresting window-envelopes I know I won’t open. I see now, that it has come down to Bev and me. She will have to do so much for me.
Bev takes her rings off and starts to massage my left hand. It feels surprisingly lovely, the freesia smell, the touch.
‘Am I one of your old ducks now?’
She laughs. ‘Nah.’ She is kneading along the sinew behind each knuckle. ‘You’re too tough.’
I look down at my gnarly old hand. ‘You’re right about that.’ She is working it, her head bent so I can’t see her face, just her bright hair as it goes, sparse and strange, into her waxy white scalp. She is pummelling my palm, then pulling finger by finger. She catches her breath.
‘You’re,’ she pulls, ‘my,’ she pulls again, ‘eagle.’
It was around then, in the spring of 1934, that we started getting hate mail at Great Ormond Street. It was always locally postmarked, usually a phrase typed in the middle of the page, addressed to each of us individually. You couldn’t call it inventive, but it was effective. ‘PREPARE TO DIE BITCH’ was one of Dora’s. I got ‘JEW CUNTS WILL DIE’ and Hans ‘YOU CHOSE THIS.’ There were others. We showed them to each other and then burnt them in the stove.
After a couple of months there were calls in the night too. You’d answer the phone to emptiness, not even audible breath. The first few times I screamed, ‘Who’s there? Who’s there?’ into the handpiece. Dora put her finger on the lever to cut off the call. ‘Don’t give them the pleasure,’ she said. Hans simply didn’t pick up.
One day, I stood at the kerb on Farringdon Road, momentarily stuck, the flow of life on the pavement opening and closing around me like a stream around a rock. I wondered if fifteen paces back someone tailing me had stalled too. In this place our fates were being determined by forces which occasionally revealed themselves–in an unsigned threat, a shadow, a silent call, a plague of white paper in the flat. I felt like a bear in the Colosseum thinking that the situation he sees before him–overwhelming as it is–is the world to be dealt with, yet below him a thousand slaves on pulleys are changing every scene and the end is predetermined by forces greater than the greatest strength he might muster.
A traffic policeman stood on a podium in the road, arms moving from the elbows like a puppet. A scarlet bus careened into the kerb, disgorging its passengers, all of them with somewhere to go. They filed past a street-sweeper in a soft cap with a long-handled dustpan, they wove as if of a single understanding around a group of children being walked out of school. All around me life moved but I could not grasp it.
Although I knew then that there were real forces bearing down on us, this feeling has remained with me all my life, whether in the bustle of London or the beauty of Sydney, on water or land: that there is complex machinery at work, there are invisible roads in the sea, and there is a meaning to all this which I cannot, for the life of me, uncover.
But we were better off in London than in Germany. That last week of June 1934, home was a slaughterhouse. Most of the murders were made public. They trumpeted them about, so we didn’t even need to rely on party sources in Germany. The Nazis called it the Röhm Putsch, as if their actions
had been in response to a coup attempt. We saw it for the meticulously planned massacre it was and called it the Night of the Long Knives.
On 30 June, before dawn, Hitler had flown from Berlin to Munich. He’d called a meeting with Ernst Röhm, at Röhm’s hotel by the lake at Bad Wiessee. Röhm may have thought the Leader was coming, finally, to offer him control of the army. He and the leaders of the SA were sleeping off hangovers. Hitler, his chauffeur and some armed SS men ran through the corridors of the Hanselbauer Hotel, bursting open doors, screaming at the groggy men to wake up, get dressed, get out. When some were found in bed together Hitler pretended outrage and ordered them to be shot immediately in the hotel’s grounds, though he had long known of Röhm’s penchant for young recruits. Others were bundled into cars, taken to Stadelheim Prison in Munich and shot there in the yard.
When Hitler got to Röhm’s door he had the guards open it without knocking. He told Röhm to put his clothes on. Röhm mumbled a sleepy ‘Heil, mein Führer,’ and went downstairs and found himself an armchair in the lobby. He ordered coffee from a waiter. Then they put him into a car for Stadelheim too.
But this was broader than Hitler’s annihilation of a too-powerful paramilitary. He and Göring had already drawn up a List of Unwanted Persons. When the killing in Munich was done, Hitler phoned Göring in Berlin and gave the order for SS cells in towns all over Germany to open their sealed lists of names, their slices of the master list of the unwanted. Then the local Nazis got to work.
General Kurt von Schleicher, the former Chancellor, they shot in the study of his villa, along with his wife, who tried to protect him. They shot the leader of Catholic Action, Erich Klausener, at his desk in the Transport Ministry because he’d spoken out against Nazi violence. They shot Father Bernhard Stempfle, a priest who had helped Hitler write Mein Kampf while he was in prison and knew too much about him. They shot Karl Ernst, a Berlin SA leader who may have been involved in the burning of the Reichstag and needed silencing. By nightfall on 1 July more than two hundred associates, acolytes and committed Nazis, as well as independents, conservatives, military men and political leaders, had been slaughtered. Over a thousand more were under arrest.
But Berlin, we heard, celebrated. Hitler declared the next day, 2 July, to be a flag-waving holiday. In a speech to the nation he declared himself above the law.
It is a mystery to me how people can believe they are being made safer when events clearly show that it is no safer to be a friend than an enemy, and that you might be switched from one column to the other on a whim.
Some saw it, though, for what it was: the consolidation of a killer’s state. And within that state one, at least, was turned.
They have added something to the drip. It is collapsing time. I see things I have imagined so many times that they are fact to me. And other things I have known without seeing.
The problem with life is that you can only live it blindly, in one direction. Memory has its own ideas; it snatches elements of story from whenever, tries to put them together. It comes back at you from all angles, with all that you later knew, and it gives you the news.
I knew him once. His hair is receding and his glasses have no rims. His suit is fine and on his little finger he wears a signet ring with the family crest. His new office is large; heavy curtains in red and gold frame the windows in the Berlin Ministry of the Interior. The rich carpet muffles his footfalls as he walks the room. Erwin Thomas is in too much pain to sit. Yesterday they killed his dear friend and mentor Kurt von Schleicher. The thought of Kurt and Ada slumped over the desk at their villa in Neubabelsberg with bullets in their brains makes his jaw clench and his fists curl till his nails bite the palms. It is partly anger, and partly to hold his resolve.
The phone rings.
‘Yes,’ he says. ‘It is drafted.’ He listens to the receiver for a moment. ‘It is a single article.’ He is looking at the paper on his desk. ‘No sir, I do not foresee any difficulties there. Sir. Heil Hitler.’
He resumes pacing. His secretary knocks and comes in to remind him of a lunch appointment. He tells her to cancel.
‘Your ulcer?’ she asks.
‘That will do.’ She is a fine girl.
He picks up the phone again and puts it down. On his desk lies the law he has drafted, at Göring’s personal request, to justify the killings this week. Though it is but a single article, it is enough to undo all his faith and training. He reads it once more, still standing.
3 July 1934
Law Regarding Measures of State Self-Defence
The measures taken to put down the seditious and treasonous attacks of 30 June and 1 and 2 July 1934 are hereby declared lawful as ones of state self-defence.
Thomas knows there is no such thing as state self-defence. There is only political murder. But he did what he was told. Again.
He sits and takes fresh letterhead from the desk drawer. He is a man in command of language, argument. He is one of the best educated, he is the epitome of culture and loyalty. Look where that has got him. He picks up a fountain pen. Puts it down. Taps a cigarette on his silver case and lights it.
And then it comes to him: the one thing she will recognise. He starts to write. The note is very short. He seals it in an envelope which he does not address, slides it inside his breast pocket. He collects his coat and hat from the stand near the door, shoots his cuffs without thinking and walks into the July heat of Wilhelmstrasse, in the direction of the Foreign Office.
The flat at Great Ormond Street had come to seem like a place besieged, by phone calls and mail and eyes under hat brims in the street. We tried not to think about it too much; we would have gone mad if we had.
I found myself more and more often at the docks. The boats came in and went out to all the untouched places of the world: to Monrovia and Singapore and Fremantle. Through Mr Allworth I became friendly with a manager, Mr Brent, who let me go wherever I wanted, as long as I looked out for myself. I was making a series of prints about the work in the dry dock, starting with the Muscatine, a huge, anvil-bellied ship, magnificent as a building. It rested on wooden blocks, each the size of an automobile. At the front its anchor chain spewed down, hundreds of metres long, and lay coiled on the ground as if it were the intestine of a majestic beast. Men in overalls and caps checked the links, pecking over them like tiny, cleansing birds.
One morning a worker came to tell me that a lady was waiting for me in the site office. When I got there Dora stood up, pale as if she’d been punched.
‘Is there somewhere we can go?’ she asked. I took her to my favourite teashop nearby.
A letter had come this morning, after I’d left the flat. She passed it to me across the table. It wasn’t in a plain envelope, like the others. This one had the crest of the Reich Foreign Office on it.
‘Open it,’ she said. Inside was another envelope, with ‘Ministry of the Interior’ embossed on the left-hand side.
‘The—’
‘Just read it,’ she snapped.
The note was very short, handwritten, unsigned. It is finished, this being a fig leaf over power. Please call First Secretary Jaeger at Whitehall 7230.
Fear was like static in my brain. I knew the expression ‘fig leaf over power’ from my childhood but I couldn’t make sense of the note.
Dora slid her forearms across the table and took the letter back. She folded it and slipped it into her bag between other documents. I waited for her to speak. When she did, her voice had the clipped, businesslike tone it got when she was afraid.
‘Is this what Helmut got? An invitation to call the German embassy?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘He had his papers cancelled by the Home Office here–it was all done through the English. After that he had to report to the German embassy, because they said he’d be illegally on British soil.’
‘Right. Right.’ Dora breathed in. Chewed her cheek under her hand. She looked around. People were eating soup, or sandwiches cut in perfect triangles, drinking tea with their meal.
‘It might be a trap,’ I said. The idea of something happening to Dora was a worse terror than something happening to me. My mind raced. What could they possibly want with an exiled opposition journalist other than to do something harmful? They were singling her out. Unless it had to do with her mother back in Berlin–oh God, what could they be doing to Else? We knew other refugees whose family members had been taken hostage and put into camps in order to force home those who’d left.
‘Yes,’ she said. She started to pick and tear at the ragged skin around her thumbnail with her index finger, then put it to her teeth. She put her hand down crossly.
‘You might not come out,’ I continued despite myself, my voice high with the effort not to cause a scene. ‘They might send you—’
She reached for my hands. ‘Shhh. I’m not going in there. We can agree on it, second it and minute it.’ She forced a smile. Her fear seemed to have transferred itself onto me; being the comforter made her stronger again. I blew my nose. She let go of me and started spinning the sugar bowl around between her hands. ‘It’s just that…’ She looked over my shoulder. The waitress had appeared. We ordered ham sandwiches and tea and the girl cleared the table.
‘It’s just that what?’ I asked as the waitress left.
‘I know who the letter is from,’ Dora said. She put the sugar bowl back.
‘Who?’
She didn’t answer me, but spoke as if to herself. ‘Which is not to say it isn’t still a trap.’ She wouldn’t be drawn further.