Hans–it was him, surely–was in a pale suit with a gold cravat at his neck. I started slowly, then broke into a run. People skittered out of my way. I tripped on a coiled rope or a bag or a person. When I reached the ship the ticket collector moved his body to block the gangway.
‘Biglietto, Signora?’
‘Where…?’ was all I could think to say, trying to look behind him. ‘Dove—?’
‘Venezuela,’ he said. ‘Biglietto?’
The man knew I wouldn’t have one; I was undernourished and had no luggage, my dress was wet and my wrists grazed red. I craned to see. Now turned away, Hans was pressing his right hand into a fur coat worn by a woman with dark hair up in a chignon. They vanished into the crowd on the lower deck.
I have seen him numerous times since then, in the way you might glimpse someone you once loved, or someone who died, in the shape of the back of a head on the ferry, or a distant, lax-legged walk. It brings the same sick lurch in the stomach, though it is not from love. I feel thrown away. Other times he has shown his face in my dreams. Then I feel fury. Sometimes something worse: wanting. Wanting his good opinion, wanting him. I wake disgusted that I have not been able to shake the power over me I ceded to him at eighteen, and get myself back, complete.
In Shanghai we foreigners lived under Japanese occupation. Because Germany was an ally the Japanese didn’t intern us, but we were crammed into a closed area, under curfew. I shared a partitioned room with a female tram driver from Berlin and I nearly starved. I fell pregnant to a self-taught Polish philosopher in exile. The doctor said if I could barely feed myself, there was no hope for carrying a child. I paid him for the abortion with a large tin of Nescafé, worth more than money on the black market. All my hair fell out. When it grew again it was still dark but thin, leaving white gaps of scalp when I pulled it back. The sorrow I felt from the abortion has gotten worse, not better, with time.
The news didn’t come to me until 1944. Fenner sent his letter care of the Shanghai Baptist College, where I was teaching by then. I took it to the park at lunchtime and sat on an ironwork seat around a tree. It was hot. Somewhere the toothless old man played his two-stringed erhu. Birds hung in cages in the trees, where people had brought them out to taste the air. In the part of the city where I lived there were no birds, they had all been eaten.
The Nazis never made the connection between Uncle Erwin and Dora. They never could account for how information about their secret air force got from Göring’s desk into the British parliament, and into the papers. They satisfied themselves with the thought that Bertie had somehow, through his arcane sources, given the facts to Dora.
After she was killed, Fenner kept in contact with Bertie, who was living in Paris. When the Germans invaded France Bertie was interned, but Fenner’s Independent Labour Party helped him escape to neutral Portugal. They installed him in a flat above a pet shop on Lisbon’s Rua Ouro while they tried to procure him an American visa. There was no guard, Fenner wrote, but the party was looking out for him. Their people warned him not to go for walks on the street, in fact not to leave the flat. They arranged for a woman to deliver food. It must have seemed to Bertie, though, so unlikely that he’d be followed here, from the internment camp at Le Vernet, over the Pyrenees to the backstreets of Lisbon. All he wanted was the newspaper. He could see the kiosk from his window. It would take five minutes.
The limousine had three men in it. Bertie was nabbed off the street and driven to Berlin, put in a cell on Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse. There, over months that turned into years, the other prisoners watched him get thinner and sicker. But he remained their unfailing source of hope because he never wavered: he was utterly convinced of an Allied victory. ‘Hold your head high,’ he told one of them, ‘don’t let the pigs see how beat you are.’
At the start of 1942 Bert had to have his teeth removed. Fenner believed the Germans were keeping him alive thinking he might have some exchange value for the Allies. In February, after a beating, he was taken to the prison hospital to die. He weighed thirty-two kilograms. The cause of death was recorded as tuberculosis.
Fenner wrote that he was saddened and very sorry. ‘I have failed you all,’ he said.
That was it then. Dora was gone, and Toller had been dragged under too, just before the war. Now Bertie.
Somewhere, though, Hans was at large in a land of mojito sticks and quietly available boys, probably still in the pay of the Germans. I did not want to share survival with him.
By 1947 I had enough money for passage to Australia. In Sydney I worked in a trouser factory in a suburb where trees would not grow, where the weather forecasters always had it a degree or two hotter.
Sometimes I would give Dora another life, one with a different ending. The human brain cannot encompass total absence. Like infinity, it is simply not something that the organ runs to. The space someone leaves must be filled, so we dream forever of those who are no longer here. Our minds make them live again. They try, God bless them, to account for the gap which the brain itself cannot fathom.
She goes on working from London after the war breaks out. Mathilde buys the stationery as usual from Cohn’s and Dora finishes her book about the psychological attraction of fascism for women, forgetting to eat the meals Mathilde has prepared and pacing the balcony trailing smoke. In her book Dora writes that women are taught to want an ideal man, a model from whom reality always falls short, so they are vulnerable to a leader who says he knows them and who promises to be ‘true’. He can remain ideal, their lives can continue to fall short, and in the space between, the women live with desire itself, which is a pleasure all of its own quite apart from its fulfilment. Dora’s book is celebrated. She is a German de Beauvoir: less sex, but more political. She stops seeing Wolfram Wolf, but continues to love others as a pastime, a benign diversion. Her victory is in decoupling the female fantasy from the instant pleasures called Fenner Brockway, Lord Marley, and then others–English, American, a Czech in exile. She stays in contact with Toller, who, despite her best efforts, has taken up permanent residence in a chamber of her heart, forbidding all others entry there.
Maybe he too survives. These things being contagious.
After the war she covers the Nuremberg Trials for the Manchester Guardian, compiles a book from these pieces and dedicates it to Bert. She calls it What We Knew. She shares a literary prize in America with Hannah Arendt, who only came to these things afterwards.
Then Eleanor Roosevelt invites her to America at Toller’s suggestion. She becomes provost of an elite women’s college, she publishes in The Nation and decries Korea, Vietnam. She goes on Johnny Carson’s TV show wearing lipstick someone must have put on her. It gets in her teeth.
I like to think of Dora, but at the same time it is also true that I take little pleasure in these imaginings. I do it as a way of trying to measure the dimensions of loss. As if it might, one day, be finite.
In 1952 a box of my things arrived in Bondi Junction. It had been packaged up by the Social Democrats-in-Exile and stored in London. The box contained two photo albums, my camera, the pink porcelain pig pot (of all things to follow me!) and my PhD certificate. Finally I could prove my qualifications from Germany and be accepted into a high school to teach languages. Slowly, I started to photograph this place, which made me see it better.
That same year I received the letter from Jaeger–Dora’s German embassy man in London–looking for Ruth Wesemann. I had long since resumed my maiden name. I wrote back, and we had a small correspondence.
Six months after Dora died Jaeger’s London posting had ended. He returned to Berlin, where he remained in the Foreign Office through the years building up to the war, then for the war and its aftermath. Passing information between Erwin Thomas in Berlin and Dora in London, he wrote, though it had not even been his initiative, was the single shred of evidence he had of his own decency. When it was all over he had requested, in some kind of atonement, to be transferred to the Reparations Payments Department in the
Treasury of the Federal Republic of Germany.
This man Jaeger, whom I never met, wanted to make sure I received my pension for the time I’d spent in prison. I accepted, of course, because a teacher’s salary was meagre and my parents’ villa and everything in it had been lost behind the Iron Curtain. Jaeger was also, gently, tying up loose ends. ‘You will know,’ he wrote, ‘the fate of my esteemed colleague Erwin Thomas.’ I had no idea. He said Thomas never forgot Dora. The day Jaeger returned to Berlin Thomas visited him in his office. ‘I was the only colleague he could come to.’ Thomas remembered a girl, he told Jaeger, standing on a red carpet giving him a lecture. He wept.
Uncle Erwin had no other contacts in the resistance. He survived for years deep in Göring’s ministry. To leave would have invited suspicion. In 1944 his chance came when von Stauffenberg and other senior insiders planned the bomb-in-the-briefcase assassination of Hitler. Erwin Thomas was their contact man high up in the Ministry of the Interior; he would be issuing the interim orders in Göring’s place once the Leader was dead. After the bomb went off, for the afternoon of a single day when the plotters thought Hitler had died, Thomas stood tall, gave the orders, started to undo his years of closely watched criminality. At four o’clock the news came that Hitler was still alive. The following afternoon Uncle Erwin was taken with von Stauffenberg and the others to the back of army headquarters and shot.
Jaeger thought I was also entitled to be told what the Foreign Office had known of Hans. He said, politely, that of course I may know this already. I did not. Apart from in dreams, Hans had been lost to me.
In Venezuela, Hans had tried to curry favour with the German embassy in Caracas by reporting on other émigrés. This had prompted the embassy people to keep tabs on him. Hans had married a wealthy woman and begun to breed a local species of water rat for their pelts. When he contracted malaria, thinking himself on his deathbed, he converted to Catholicism. The marriage did not last and the business failed. Desperate for funds, he tried to turn in the priest who had nursed and converted him, for spying. Still the Germans would have nothing to do with him, so he left for the United States.
Hans was in Texas when America joined the war. The Americans interned him as an enemy alien. When the war ended, the Socialist Workers Party members who went back to Germany sought to have him extradited to face trial for his crimes against them. Hans hired a small-time New York immigration lawyer on the Lower East Side and successfully evaded their demands. There were no further reports from that time.
Jaeger enclosed a copy of the very first report on Hans from the German embassy in London to the Foreign Office in Berlin. Dated 21 September 1933, it was typed on letterhead and marked ‘Top Clearance Only’.
From: Rüter, German Embassy, London
To: F.O.
CC: Reichsmarschall Göring
A Hans Wesemann, formerly a journalist in Berlin, came in today without an appointment, demanding an audience with the Ambassador. Herr Wesemann appeared to be in a state of high agitation, if not outright anxiety. He spoke with a pronounced stammer. He was brought in to me.
Herr Wesemann’s name will be familiar to you perhaps as it was to me: he is a member of the Socialist Workers Party and the journalist who penned the slanderous attacks on both the Führer and Herr Dr Goebbels.
Herr Wesemann led me to understand that it was now clear to him from the distance of exile that the agitations of his former self and of his former and current colleagues and associates both in the Reich and now in Britain were distasteful acts against the Fatherland. He expressed the view that one’s connection to one’s country is not severable by distance, and may even be made the stronger for it. This he has only come to realise, he says, when separated from Germany. He said he feared, were he not able to receive some support from us, that he would be drawn back into that world of treason.
In return for our protection and some payment (see below), Herr Wesemann alleges he has information and connections, from his association with Socialist Workers Party-in-Exile, which might prove useful in protecting the Fatherland. Wesemann mentioned in particular that he had the trust of Berthold Jacob and of Ernst Toller. Furthermore, he alleged that his wife’s cousin, one Dr Dora Fabian, formerly secretary to Herr Toller, is Jacob’s conduit for smuggling classified information from the Reich Government into Britain and arranging for its publication in the press.
In support of his claims Wesemann produced a document, allegedly from the office of Reichsmarschall Göring, outlining the air capabilities of the Reich (encl.). If this paper is genuine it would appear to indicate a leak from the Reichsmarschall’s office, perhaps via Jacob or another source, to Dr Fabian in Britain. Please confirm:
1. Origin and authenticity of the document and;
2. What action to be taken re Herr Wesemann, B. Jacob and Dr Fabian.
Herr Wesemann says that he is supported by funds from his wife’s father in Silesia, but that he is looking for an alternative source of income. Proposing payment of a weekly retainer for services and information offered. I gave him £10; request approval for instating more permanent honorarium.
Heil Hitler
Rüter
First Secretary
Seeing it in black and white, the sale of us for money and protection, comes always, every time I read it, like a stab.
Later, I heard other things from Jaeger’s successor. In 1956 a tall European man was arrested in Oaxaca, Mexico, for a crime against the morals of a minor. He gave his name as Ernst Toller, but within a week Interpol revealed him to be Hans Wesemann, born 1895.
Then the details got sketchier. Hans tried to make the fugitive Nazis in Mexico his friends, but even they did not trust him. The last report was from 1961. Hans bought dried rabbit meat from a woman at the covered market in Ciudad Juárez, telling her he was setting off into the Chihuahuan Desert with a donkey and supplies. He was going to peddle the meat to villages close to the US border and make a killing.
I hope I have outlived him.
TOLLER
This hotel chair is low, I can lie right back. I am a small man, bigger inside–I liked to think–than my frame could reasonably be expected to bear. My chest lifts and falls of its own accord. I look over my belly and hips, groin and legs, feet. Those feet embarrassed me all my childhood, dangling from chairs and never touching the ground. But really this body has served me well, been faithful in pleasure and done its best in pain. I hold up my hands. I know every word they have written, gun they held, caress they’ve given.
After she died London was empty for me. Christiane and I left for the New World. Hollywood didn’t want me, but I hope this place will be kinder to Christiane.
I close my eyes. I am tired. But there is work to do–she always says it is about the work, not about me. Grossly exaggerated, she says, sand squeaking under her elbow. Bells outside. A peal of life, shunting the hours of the day. Who would have thought? Her hair has grown longer, but it is the very same hair, in luscious black waves. The very same neck. How ridiculous to have been so sad for so long when here she is, right in front of me! And there’s so much to explain. All the things she’s missed out on, all the work we have to do. For which I suddenly, mysteriously, have the energy. I won’t ask where she’s been, she’ll only laugh at me. Her freedom, remember. Main thing is, she’s here, feet on the rungs of that chair, tanned forearms hovering, bitten fingers edging the steno pad. Only do not turn! That hair I have run my hands through, tight at moments of communion.
Do not turn around.
And these four years lived with a hole in my heart and the wind soughing through it–for what? She’s right. Monstrous waste of time. We must get down to it now. The world needs us; together we can do it–find some way around Franco. His stupid victory parade two days ago. I wonder if she knows Berthold Jacob is safe and in France? We can do it with him!
And I am filled, now, with something else–something that makes the sorrow inside me ridiculous and small, a personal indulgence in a
world I had come unstuck from. No. It is more, even, than that. Suddenly I am a different man. It runs through me and I hover above the world; I have breached a membrane that keeps us from seeing, and from pity, and I am filled, filled in this chair to the brim with the calm, visceral certainty of us all being forgivable. And all, ultimately, saved. It is a peace that spreads through me like warmth. It is a gift, a final, unaccountable joy. If I were a religious man I would call it grace. The black-winged reproaches are laughable compared to this truth. I laugh.
She turns. This girl who is not her.
The room is small, cream coloured. I am empty. The act of remembering Dora did bring her back. But, as it turns out, it was better to live with the idea that I would get to her one day. Now that I have summoned her up and written her down she is more dead than before. Am I the only person to carry her with me? Will the world forget we tried so hard to save it?
I wonder if her cousin still lives.
Clara is standing there, a question on her face. She must have asked me something.
‘Sorry?’ I say. And I am. Clara’s kindness is my all.
‘The usual for you today?’ There is no impatience in her voice. She has lived with me through these weeks and this morning, through my reckoning and tears, and just waited, unafraid, for the story to come. She knew not to comfort me or the spell of my girl would be broken. And, now that it is over, she knows–how does someone so young know this?–that my girl is gone. It is to practical things that we must turn. In this case, bagels.
‘I think I’ll have rye today. Instead. Please.’
‘Okay.’