This is a question I wanted. ‘I had keys. Dora and Mathilde of course. And Professor Wolf.’
There were cries of outrage in the room. The associate banged his own gavel.
‘Thank you, Dr Wesemann,’ the coroner said when the noise subsided. ‘You may stand down now.’
But I had not finished. I held on to the edge of the stand. ‘But Your Honour, we had death threats before this happened! Letters and phone calls—’
‘Now, Dr Wesemann.’ His tone was curt, as to a misbehaving child. ‘Thank you.’
The orderlies or watchmen or whatever they were moved towards me. I stood down before they could complete my humiliation.
Wolf was recalled. He flatly denied having keys to the flat.
It was 1.15 p.m. when the coroner summed up: two lives were worth precisely an hour and forty minutes of his time. He told the jury that Dora’s shorthand note–‘if she wrote the note, and if it was correctly translated’–indicated that she had committed suicide because of ‘unrequited love’. The fact that the door to the room was locked from the inside–a room on the top level of the building, inaccessible by any other means–was one that the jury needed to take into account in their deliberations. He said the situation in the case of Mathilde was ‘far less clear’, because it was unlikely a woman of her age and character would be dominated by her younger flatmate. It was possible, though, that Mathilde was suffering ‘the imbalance of mind known as depression’, to which many refugees were vulnerable in this country. He said that Dr Fabian may have administered the poison to Mrs Wurm before drinking it herself, though ‘of course this is a matter of fact for you to decide’.
The decision took twenty minutes. The foreman came back in and we rose.
‘We find that in both cases,’ the man read, ‘the deceased committed suicide whilst of unsound mind, by means of self-administered narcotic poisoning.’
The room was still. Then there were noises, but no uproar. The people were infected by the terror of what had happened to Dora and Mathilde, a terror magnified by what had just taken place in this room: there was no earthly authority to turn to, no one who would believe them and keep them safe.
The coroner left through a side door, the jury through one on the opposite wall. I remained seated as the room emptied. The world was closing over her. She wouldn’t leave a trace.
TOLLER
I stood outside the court smoking, walking up and down like a schoolboy on detention. I watched as they all spilled out onto the steps. The mood was worse than at a funeral, fear being more awful than sadness. Ruth didn’t come out.
I went in. The room was empty. Had they taken her away? And then I noticed the curve of a back, just visible in the front row. Bent over and rocking. When I reached her I saw that her mouth was open in a silent cry. She registered me.
‘I tried…’
I helped her up. The funeral was in one hour, at three o’clock. We had to catch the underground, then a bus out to the Jewish cemetery at East Ham.
They were plain wooden boxes, each covered in dark cloth. I’d say there were a dozen of us all told, gathered up the front of the synagogue. The service was short. Ruth sat sunk into a pew, sobbing. When I hoisted one corner of Dora’s coffin onto my shoulder it was horribly light. The rabbi led the way. The sky was low, rain falling on my face. Two fresh pits had been dug next to one another at the back of the cemetery.
‘Thou shalt not be afraid of the terror by night nor of the arrow that flies by day,’ the rabbi intoned. Ruth swayed beneath an umbrella but held herself upright. ‘He shall cover thee with His feathers and under His wings shalt thou take refuge.’
Fenner, Lord Marley and I took up shovels as they lowered the coffins. It is the turning away, the walking off to tea, that is the hardest part.
Outside the iron gates journalists had gathered, from News Chronicle, Daily Express, News of the World and Jewish Daily Post. I mounted the running-board of the hearse. Someone held an umbrella over me and I began.
‘We have buried here today a brave woman,’ I said. ‘She died fighting for us all–for the people of Germany who suffer under the tyrant, and for the peoples of Europe against whom he is determined to go to war.’ I was speaking over a huddle of black umbrellas. ‘I, personally, owe Dora a huge debt of gratitude…’
The umbrellas parted. Between their black-boned segments, something bent and white was pushing. I kept talking.
‘It was Dora Fabian who smuggled out of Germany, at risk of her life, my manuscripts…’ My mouth kept moving but Ruth had all my attention. ‘And I tell you today, categorically, that there can be no connection between this alleged note to Professor Wolf and her death…’
Ruth had taken off her jacket and dropped her bag; her white shirt was stuck to her torso and her red skirt stained dark with streaks of water. She walked to the cemetery gates. When she reached them I watched her face into the sheeting rain, turning each way down the street. She could not know the area, which direction to take. She walked halfway across the street, stopping at the white lines in the middle. Took off her shoes. The rain was pelting now, the sky had broken its moorings. She started running. Cars had their lights on, honked at the racing woman to get off the road. Curtains in houses parted to see: a picture of lopsided grief, a bull in the ring trying to outrun its pain.
RUTH
The funeral does not bear remembering.
Afterwards Toller cruised the streets in a cab with my handbag and shoes. When he found me, he took me back to Great Ormond Street. We sat on the edge of her bed together; there was nowhere else to be. I hadn’t touched it. The pillows still had their hollows in them. We stared out the window, me soaked and him holding my bag. Grief was making of us a club of two.
‘You’ll be all right?’ he asked, after a time.
He was asking this of himself, as much as of me. Whatever strength he’d found to address the journalists had deserted him. He started to weep. Then he turned and put a hand to the pillow where her head had been, and moved as if to place his cheek in the indentation. Something in me snapped.
‘You should go home. To Christiane.’
I sank into her bed where she had been. I planned it there.
I don’t remember telling anyone what I was going to do, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t let it slip. I was heedless, desperate.
Three weeks after the funeral I went to visit my parents in Poland. When she saw me my mother said, ‘You are not in your right mind.’ She assumed it was grief. I had no faith that my mind had been right before at all.
My plan was to go back into the Reich, up to Berlin. I would retrieve Toller’s other suitcase from the garden shed on Bornholmer Strasse. No one else knew where it was, apart from Uncle Erwin, and he would never risk sending it directly to Toller. It seemed to be the one part of Dora’s work I might be competent to finish. While I was doing it I could maintain my connection to her, to our common project. And if they got me, I deserved it.
I took with me The Other Germany leaflets we’d printed. One hundred and fifty of them, on tissue paper pressed flat against my stomach, crossways under my navel. I borrowed the Polish passport of a school friend who resembled me and got the tram to the station.
They were waiting for me there. Two Gestapo agents, and a woman to do the body search. She asked me to undress and took the leaflets. I suppose they’d been watching me. They put me on the same train to Berlin I had a ticket for, keeping guard outside the compartment door. That arrest has provided me with the one heroic act I have retold my whole life, and in which I cannot, of course, believe. Having failed to do it myself, I was now getting Them to do the punishing for me.
In a cellar at Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse they splayed me like a starfish on the wall and shot around me clockwise, the bullets spitting plaster between my legs and hands and onto my hair. They wore earmuffs, as for target practice. The interrogator wanted information about our party meetings in London; he wanted to know Dora’s source for the document
s from Göring’s office. After the last shot he said, ‘The next one goes into you.’ When I turned my head to look at him he saw that I did not care, so he would not give me the satisfaction.
My father hired the best Nazi lawyer he could find. The judges–twelve of them, no less–were all in Nazi uniforms, but when Father came into the courtroom, an old Jew with a war injury and his medals jangling on his chest, they stood to honour him. At that early stage, they still loved the war more than they hated the Jews. The prosecution wanted to put me away for twelve years. If that had happened I would have been killed in the camps like all the others. But money will buy you many things. I only got five.
I spent most of them in solitary. Alone in my cell I was required to make 144 fake chrysanthemums every day, scraping a metal implement over wax paper to curl each petal. My fists cramped in pain. Such idiotic work, making decorations for the salons of the Berlin bourgeoisie, that if the other prisoners didn’t have political ideas when they came in I thought they’d develop them quick enough. My own thoughts turned mostly in a small personal circle, around all I did not see, and all I did not say. They turned around Hans and Bertie and Dora and me.
When my father’s heart failed in the third year of my term, my mother offered to pay for a private police escort of six armed men so I could attend the funeral. Permission was denied.
I was released in October 1939. War had broken out. Some have found it strange–another piece of undeserved good luck, their veiled looks say–that I was released at all, and not simply sent to be gassed and burnt like all the rest. But unlike the rest I had the benefit of a sentence imposed by the law, and it required, at its end, that I be set free.
The Nazis duly stuck to the letter of it, but added a creative ultimatum. At the prison gate I was given twenty-four hours to leave the Reich: if found on German soil after that time, I would be sent to a concentration camp. I was a grouse, being set into flight before hunters. I thought back to when Hans and I had been given twenty-four hours to leave. This time they weighted the stakes in their favour by confiscating my passport.
I boarded a train to my mother’s villa in Königsdorf. When the ticket collector came I hid in the toilet, and when the military police did their sweep I stood on the outside platform behind the last carriage. My brother had left for Switzerland, so Cook had moved into the house to keep Mother company. When I came in Cook held my face in two hands, tears leaking silently. In the entrance hall a letter with my name on it sat on a silver salver, postmarked three years before.
‘I knew you would come to get it,’ Mother said. That small sentence carried the freight of a lifetime’s undeclared love.
I need to go home. They are waiting for me in my front room.
I hope I didn’t say that aloud.
I tell the nice nurse MARGARET PEARCE I want to leave. She says she’ll see what she can do. When she comes back she tells me the doctor isn’t happy about it, but, as she reminded him–and her tone implies that these child doctors need corralling–‘We have a new policy of letting people go home, so long as palliative care can be arranged.’ It’s the first time anyone has said ‘palliative care’ to me.
Do I have anyone to care for me? she asks, jangling and smiling behind her half-glasses. This is clearly a step-by-step procedure. Nothing to worry about, all quite by the book.
Bev picks me up from the hospital. She opens the drawers next to the bed without asking, packs my things into my toilet bag. I submit to this invasion of privacy because at my age one needs mothering, again. And again, I think, as she clatters about and I look at the hospital triangle hanging above me where once hung a butcher’s rig, one must accept the mothering however it comes. My head is bandaged this time as well. I am reduced to an eye on the world, a single aperture.
I watch Bev work with a brusque kindness I know will turn into a story in her own honour later. Her spotted hands are covered in cheap gold rings. I wonder if she would eat her own fist to make me laugh.
In my kitchen Bev gives me instant noodles and puts my pills into a lurid fluorescent container she has bought specially, as she tells me. It has compartments for every day of the week, morning, noon and night. The pills sit in there in their colours and shapes ready to push me, in plastic-coated increments, into my future. She holds my hand in hers before she leaves. She says, ‘Dear. Dear.’ She is crying.
After the war I came to this sunstruck place. It is a glorious country, which aspires to no kind of glory. Its people aim for something both more basic and more difficult: decency. I couldn’t see it at first, but now it is all around me, quiet and fundamental. It is in the hydrotherapy angel and the smiling Melnikoff, in Trudy Stephenson my pupil and the scrap-haired woman holding the traffic at bay, in the nurses and the baby doctor. It is, I would hazard a guess, in Bev.
The letter on my mother’s salver was from Bertie. I have kept it with me through all that came afterwards. I must have read it a hundred times. It is five pages long. The last page, with his best wishes and blessing, hangs framed in my kitchen. I take it down now and place it on the bench next to the pills.
The Swiss government’s protest worked: the Nazis set Bert free after six months in custody. He went back to France, while Hans languished in a cell in Basel. Though Hans begged the German government to make the same kinds of protests on his behalf to get him back, the Nazis left him there to rot.
Bert wanted me to know that he too hadn’t seen what was coming. He wanted me to know how it happened. Bertie wrote that he’d met Hans at the restaurant in Basel. Hans was at a table with two others, a man he introduced as Mattern, and the forger. Bertie hadn’t been expecting anyone else, but Hans explained that both men worked together. Bert produced the photo he had brought for the passport, and the forger wrote down his date of birth, height and eye colour on a piece of paper. Without asking, the man wrote ‘Religion: Jewish’ in his notes.
They drank fairly solidly for an hour and a half. Then the forger said that ‘for the money part’ he would prefer them to come to his flat in Riehen. Bert said he looked at Hans, who nodded calmly: it must have been part of the plan. Downstairs a car was waiting. ‘What self-respecting forger doesn’t have a car with a chauffeur?’ Bertie wrote.
Bert and Hans got in the back of the car, Mattern and the forger sat in the front next to the driver. Bert didn’t know where the district of Riehen was. They passed a train station on the edge of town, then drove into the night where there was nothing. The car was going fast. He looked at Hans, who shrugged his shoulders as if to say, Who knows how these things are done? There was enough alcohol in Bert’s system to be second-guessing his first responses, telling himself to calm down.
Until they got to a guard’s hut with the Swiss flag hanging from it. The border! Instead of slowing as the sentry stepped out, the car accelerated. The man had to leap clear to save himself. Bertie cried out then, and Hans too. Mattern and the forger snapped around to rest the stubby snouts of Mausers on the back of their seat.
‘Gestapo swine!’ Hans shouted. Mattern pistol-whipped him, hard, across the face. When the car reached the German boomgate, it was already raised.
At Weil am Rhein they sped down Adolf-Hitler-Strasse to the police station, pulling up around the back. Men were coming out of the building, shouting. Hans was hunched on his side, one hand holding the door handle. Bert was cowering too, but in all the movement and noise he felt oddly calm. After all, he wrote, some kind of end is not unexpected, not unimagined: so this was it. And Hans was with him.
Then, without speaking, Hans turned away and opened the door. In seconds he was a white shirt disappearing into the dark. ‘He didn’t say a single thing to me.’
Mattern took his time aiming and shooting a single bullet. ‘Shot while attempting to escape,’ someone said. There were snickers. The choreography of the scene gave them away. ‘I wasn’t even angry at first,’ Bert wrote. ‘It was more an emptiness, as if my soul had been removed.’
Bert asked to
see Hans’s body; of course they refused to produce it. The interrogation in the provincial police station lasted till after midnight. Then they put him, under guard, on a train for Berlin.
Bertie said that Dora had died trying to save him. He said we were tied together like climbers on a mountain and if they picked one off the rest would fall. And about Hans he wrote, ‘I was fooled to the end, so how could you not be?’
But Bert had not known all that I knew. I have kept his letter hung up in my kitchen to remind me at what price my survival has come.
Bertie added a postscript about Wolfram Wolf. The British, he said, though availing themselves of Wolf’s story so as to avoid any conflict with Berlin, didn’t believe it themselves. Shortly after the inquest they expelled him from the country. Wolf wasn’t politically active in any way, but they knew he was the cover guy for the Nazi action. A cover they themselves had made use of.
My mother had two identical dresses made for me from the blue-and-white curtains in the vestibule at home. She stayed there until, after their invasion, the Germans requisitioned the villa as their headquarters for our region. Then she fled east, my poor, proud mother. I heard that she suicided under a train in Warsaw, before it took off for the camps.
From Königsdorf I managed to get a train to Genoa, where the docks were filled with Germans and Poles, Romanians and Estonians–every spectrum of humanity fleeing the coming cataclysm. At the ticket window I paid for passage in steerage to Shanghai, the only port that would accept refugees without passports. People slept about the docks. Children dozed on bags or wriggled in their mother’s arms; men sat on the ground playing cards for matches. I had three days to wait.
The morning of my departure I was washing my alternate dress in a tub on a ramp near the water when I saw him. There were still boats that accommodated first-class passengers. Well-dressed people with decent luggage and papers boarded in a leisurely, ceremonial way, with the staff lined up in greeting and a bugler, bugling. In full view of us human detritus. I dropped the dress.