I have always been seduced by beauty. Seduced and consoled, and then betrayed. Then seduced and consoled again.
The cat’s at the door! Who let him outside the flat? Scratch, scratch.
Mein Gott, is my Arsch sore from sitting. I don’t have a cat. It’s a key in the latch. Someone is letting themselves in.
Bev stands over me. She looks unhappy. No doubt I am responsible. Although, as I examine her face, I see that there are other possibilities: the bottle-coloured hair a pinky-orange unknown to nature and her bad eye a bit twitchy today. Or, possibly, her thieving daughter Sheena, an ex-nurse with a heroin addiction whose sadness is the one and only terrible thing, I’ve discovered over the years, it gives Bev no satisfaction to talk about.
‘Well,’ she huffs. ‘Sitting around like a bottle of milk, are we?’
Mrs Allworth in Bloomsbury called me ma’am. ‘If you’d like, ma’am,’ she would say, ‘I could do the windows. From the inside only, mind.’ When she said ‘If ma’am would prefer’ I knew she was cross. I didn’t like ‘ma’am’, but this Australian ‘we’ is worse–it makes me feel like a Greek chorus, all the parts of me breathing and heaving together like some ancient, static, sore-arsed monster.
‘I’ve been down at the village with the oldies–’ Bev doesn’t bother waiting for a response–‘giving hand massages. Poor old ducks.’
Eastlakes Village is a retirement home and Bev must be nearly as old as the inmates. I think she goes there to ‘halp’ them so as to create a more definite distinction between her and them. She also goes to the Red Cross, partly because she wishes to be as good-hearted as she can muster, and partly, I believe, for the talismanic properties of ‘halping’. ‘There’s always someone more unfortunate than you,’ she likes to say, and she wishes to keep it that way. Bev brings me stories from both places and elsewhere, usually of cancers and deaths. Her expressions of sympathy involve ghoulish detail: the prostate ‘big as a rockmelon’, the hole in the throat where you ‘put the voice box straight in–so practical’. She prefers the death of someone she knows, or once knew, or at least someone who knew someone she knew. The closer the death is to her, the more it is a sign of a cosmic reprieve: she has been passed over. ‘There but for the grace of God,’ she says with a small shiver, and feels blessed.
Is to be passed over the same as being blessed? I do not feel blessed.
But today it is not illness, it is her neighbours in the council unit next to hers.
‘Those people next door,’ Bev says, ‘you wouldn’t believe it. It’s still goin on.’
Are they Portuguese? Pacific Islander? I can’t remember, but am still lucid enough to know I ought to remember, that this conversation has probably been going on for some weeks in instalments between us, and that she would break from me, internally, if I asked. I realise suddenly that I don’t want her to break from me, that I, Ruth Becker/Wesemann/Becker, with my thousands of lost photographs and my ostensible bravery, now have a need for company that surmounts both principle and distaste.
‘Those people,’ Bev is saying, ‘they put all their rubbish out in the lane on a Tuesday. They know the collection is not till Thursday. It’s disgusting. I’ve told er!’
Her bad eye is now uncontrollable. To be able to summon up righteous anger at will is, I think, a psychological skill more cathartic than meditation, or breathing into a paper bag. It is also quite entertaining to watch.
Bev sniffs the air and her bosom expands like a pigeon’s. ‘She knows I’m watchin er too. From my winda.’ She collects a couch cushion. ‘So do you know what she does?’
I say nothing; nothing from me is required.
‘She sends one of them children out with the bin.’ Bev punches the cushion. ‘Disgusting. Won’t dare do it herself now.’ She throws the cushion back and spies the half-eaten packet of biscuits on the table. I am suddenly aware of the spray of crumbs on my jumper–I am probably disgusting too. I check my teeth with my tongue for mashed Scotch Finger. But Bev goes on, ‘So many children. I think there are five. Disgusting. Like rabbits.’
So they’re Catholic. Portuguese then? Still, I don’t think I’ll risk it. Last week we nearly parted ways over Bev’s conviction that Aboriginals are born liars.
It strikes me that Bev must be lonely too, which might be why she rings the council to complain about her neighbour’s rubbish. They haven’t yet computerised the service and she gets some poor person on the other end whose every conversation is recorded as a guard against irascibility and other human responses. For Bev, it is as good as a friend.
‘You stayin here?’ she asks.
I nod.
‘I’ll start out the back then.’
She plods down the corridor to the laundry. Her bustling and banging out there gives me an odd reassurance. I am strongly enough in the present that I can go back.
I could still find my way around the villa I grew up in with my eyes closed, if I needed to. I could slide my way down the four flights of the banister, I could trail my feet in socks over the parquetry, opening the double doors from room to room. I remember each of the eighteenth-century enamels–landscapes of the seasons–set into the magnificently tiled, floor-to-ceiling heaters. Ours was the grandest house in Königsdorf, a smallish coalmining town in Upper Silesia where my father owned the lumber mill. It was a German town until I was twelve, when the war ended, and then the area was ceded to Poland. The new border ran four kilometres away from the villa, and I kept on catching the tram every day to school, which happened, now, to be in another country. We stayed completely German.
Because Dora was an only child, our families had encouraged us to think of each other more as sisters than cousins. After my operation, almost every school break I went up to Berlin, so the two of us grew up with holiday intimacy and reprieves during term in between. I had an inkling of the luck of this arrangement even as a child: the time apart allowed us to escape the friction of siblings. I suspected I would have been annoying to her, full time.
Still, I shadowed her. I joined the Independents in Königsdorf at sixteen. By eighteen, when I finished school, I was desperate to get to where the action was. It was spring 1923 when I went to visit Dora at Munich University.
Dora had finished her PhD on the economics of the German colonies, and was staying on at the university to teach for a year. She had written to me about the campaign for Toller’s release she was running from her room on campus. Though Dora had never met Toller–he’d been in prison since 1919–he was our party’s most famous member. From his cell he’d sent four plays into the world–searing works about the human price of war and the need for peaceful revolution, freedom and justice. One of them had played for more than a hundred days. Ernst Toller was the wunderkind of German theatre and the conscience of the republic. As long as he was locked up, we considered the new Weimar Germany to be as bad as the Kaiser’s old, warmongering one.
Dora couldn’t make it to the station in Munich to meet me, but she’d given me directions to a café. As I walked through the Englischer Garten, I watched a brother and sister flying a kite papered with green scales. When I got closer I saw they were banknotes. In her letters Dora had described women running from factories to bakeries with their pay in wheelbarrows, hoping to buy a loaf of bread before the prices inflated. I knew the hyperinflation was caused by the government simply printing more currency to pay off its war debt, but it was still a shock to see the money worthless in front of me, dipping and tugging at the air.
Dora wasn’t at the café yet. I ordered a coffee for 5000 Reichsmarks. When she opened the door I saw her first, as she scanned the room. Her hair had been cut short, and she wore a pale-blue collarless shirt and trousers. As she pulled out a chair she apologised for not having met the train. She didn’t offer a reason.
‘Was it hard to convince your parents to let you come?’ Dora smiled, taking out a tobacco pouch and starting to roll a cigarette.
I nodded. ‘They think I’m here to lose my virgin
ity, though they can’t bring themselves to say it.’
She laughed. ‘Well, you are here for the cause. And you are a materialist like the rest of us.’ She removed a stray piece of tobacco from her bottom lip, her smile wide as a plate. ‘We would say it’s silly to value something for its non-use.’
We laughed so hard that Dora started coughing and people stared.
When the bill came it was for 14 000 RM–Dora’s coffee had cost 9000 RM. The waitress shrugged. ‘If you want the same price, ladies,’ she said, as if explaining a natural phenomenon to children, ‘you need to order at the same time.’
Dora took me back to her room. I could stay there with her. Over the bed hung the WANTED poster of Toller I knew from her bedroom at home. She’d glued the top over a rod and tied a string to each end. She told me it was forbidden to put more hooks in the walls, so she’d taken down the crucifix that had been there and used its pin. I supposed she’d put the Christ away in a drawer.
I read the police description: ‘Toller is slightly built, about 1.65 to 1.68 metres tall; has a thin, pale face, clean-shaven; large brown eyes, piercing gaze, closes his eyes when thinking; has dark, almost black, wavy hair; speaks standard German.’ I looked at the photo on the poster. An intense young man stared through the camera as if to somewhere else. He didn’t look like a dangerous revolutionary to me. He looked like someone riding backwards on a horse.
Dora slid her arms around me from behind and gave me a squeeze. Her cheek came up to my shoulder. ‘We’re getting there,’ she said. ‘Thomas Mann and Albert Einstein have both written to the newspaper in support of the campaign.’ She let go and turned away to her desk, feeding a piece of paper into the typewriter. ‘Glad you’re here, by the way.’
I started to unpack. My things were strewn all over the bed when there he was at the door. A tall man with blue eyes and a full mouth. He wore an open white shirt belted at the waist in the latest style, like an urban pirate. He had a newspaper rolled up in one hand.
‘Am I i-interrupting?’ he smiled. The voice was big, lazy, deliberate.
‘Not at all,’ Dora said. ‘This is my cousin Ruth.’ She gestured loosely. ‘Ruthie, this is Hans.’
He nodded at the bed. ‘Nice underwear,’ he said. ‘“Koenig’s, when only the best will do.”’
Dora rolled her eyes and laughed. ‘This is not normal, Ruthie,’ she said, ‘a man who can tell the brand of silk at fifteen paces.’
Hans chuckled. ‘It can be a useful thing to know,’ he said, looking at me squarely.
I wasn’t affronted, or even embarrassed. I wanted to get into this adult realm, the new world they were making where intimacies might be public and desire stated plainly. I felt the thrill of it in my stomach.
I cleared a space and sat down on the bed. Hans sat on the floor and leant against it, opening out his newspaper. He had come to show Dora an article about another Independent. I heard their words, but I wasn’t taking them in.
‘Bertie’s really taking it up to the government now,’ Hans said.
A man called Berthold Jacob had publicly accused the government of assassinating a pacifist. I saw over Hans’s shoulder a picture of the dead pacifist, his head leaking blackness onto the cobblestones, and next to him one of Berthold Jacob, a thin-faced fellow with round glasses and a goatee. Hans’s fingers, long and smooth, held the paper apart.
‘If Minister von Seeckt only talks about it in parliament but doesn’t lay any charges against Bertie, it’s proof that he’s right.’
‘I’m sure he is,’ said Dora, turning and leaning over her chair back, chin on her hand. ‘They’re trying to stamp out the last embers of the revolution.’
‘Bertie’s moving to Munich, you know. Next month. Wants to come to our meetings.’
‘Really?’ Dora’s eyes lit up. She took the pencil she was chewing out of her mouth. ‘That’s great.’
The two of them spoke of Bertie as one might a famous person, or a shared, important secret. I had never heard of him. I noticed a rivalry in their admiration, a ratcheting up of the details each of them knew about this man, ostensibly in order to tell me, but really as a game with one another.
Hans said, ‘He’s taken an apartment in Schwabing.’ Dora countered, ‘He works twenty hours a day, they say, summer and winter.’ Hans, whose friendship with Bertie went back to the war, had deeper sources. He parried: ‘He was gassed at Mons, you know.’ They became absorbed, sparring and laughing. I stopped listening. I watched Hans’s chest moving under his shirt, the soft sheen of his skin. I forced my gaze away to his feet but my eyes travelled back up over his legs, long and splayed, and I wondered how he was made.
When Hans was leaving I stood to shake hands, but he pulled me in. ‘Welcome, Comrade Becker,’ he smiled, and gave me a kiss.
The door closed behind him. I touched my cheek. ‘Who was that?’
‘Hans Wesemann.’ Dora had already started to type something.
‘From the paper? The Hans Wes—?’
‘M-hm.’
I fell back on the bed. I knew Hans from his ‘Despatches from the Front’, which had appeared every week or two in our newspaper at home. I knew he’d been leading a platoon near enemy lines when he stopped ‘ostentatiously’ (he’d admitted it himself) to light a cigarette, and a piece of Tommy’s shell tore through his neck and pierced his windpipe. He coughed and hacked till it came up again, and then pocketed it as a souvenir. I knew that other times, when the smoke from his pipe got in his eyes as he took aim, he’d put the whole thing in his pocket alight, to save on matches. And I knew he’d helped carry his mate Friders, killed six minutes before the armistice took effect, back to Germany in a zinc bathtub. I saw in Hans’s pieces a heroism and anti-heroism combined, a willingness to do the deed but a reticence about taking the glory that was seductive beyond all measure. I know it’s possible to fall in love with someone by falling in love with their writing, because I already had.
‘But he’s so young,’ I said.
‘Went to war at nineteen.’ Dora didn’t look up. ‘Lots of veterans are young. Toller’s the same.’
In this way I was swept up at eighteen into Hans and into the party at the same time. If Stockholm Syndrome describes a prisoner falling in love with her jailer, there should be a name for how a cause cements two people, masks their differences as secondary to the purpose at hand. We were all of us subsumed into an aphrodisiac atmosphere of self-sacrifice. So many of our generation had lost their lives for Germany that now, though we did not fully know it, the stake for our commitment to stopping it happening again was our lives.
I stayed in Munich for two months. When all the local members of the Independents met, we used a hall at the university. There were probably fifty of us. But more often a few, a sort of unofficial leadership, would get together in Dora’s room. It felt like being at the centre of the world. We drafted leaflets, arguing over the wording. We worked the cyclostyle to print them and made pails of lumpy grey glue. We went out nights pasting them up all around town, making sure to put plenty around the electoral offices of local members. We addressed student meetings in smoky rooms and crowds in the quadrangle. Half our energy came from the cause, the other half from each other.
As the weeks went by, I was infected by the others’ excitement about Berthold Jacob coming. Bertie, I learnt, had served on both the eastern and the western fronts with distinction, but after he was gassed his life developed a single, pacifist focus that, Hans said, ‘borders, quite sanely, on mania’. Bertie had become celebrated by progressives all over the country when he uncovered documents that proved Germany’s responsibility for starting the war. This made a lie of the government’s claims of a defensive war.
Since I’d joined the Independents I had become used to talk about opposing government measures and proposing new ones, but it was an entirely novel notion to me that the government would lie to the people, even in the most serious of matters, such as sending men to war. I can remember the shock of t
his awareness, the feeling of radical aloneness: if we couldn’t trust the authorities, who could we trust? The answer was: us.
Bertie was now, Hans told me, on a mission to stop the new war this government was planning. He had turned his energies to revealing the secret, illegal build-up of the Black Army, and the manufacture and stockpiling of weapons to furnish it. His method was ingenious. Bertie sought out information already on the public record–in military bulletins, official government publications, the conservative press–information that most people did not know how to interpret. He monitored the personal columns in the local papers of hamlets, looking for sudden increases in population–more weddings, births–and would find, when he visited, young men on the football field being drilled twice a week in ‘gymnastics’, with batons standing in for weapons. Alone in his attic Bertie had calculated, from the huge number of men on its official payroll alone, that the German military was in a position to take command of one million troops. And they were not, as Hans put it, ‘training for nothing’. Bertie’s mission left him no time for formal study, but in our circles his articles brought him the respect of a zealot, or a savant.
The morning he arrived he stood just inside Dora’s room and put a hand on his chest. ‘Berthold Jacob,’ he said, as if the rest of us might not know, as if we hadn’t been waiting for weeks.
Hans sprang up. ‘Bertie!’
I watched Hans shake his friend’s hand, holding him at the elbow. Bertie was not what I expected a famous, fearless radical pacifist to be. He had hunched shoulders and a neck that bent forward. His small brown eyes looked at us from behind round, rimless glasses. A goatee only partly covered his gas burns, nasty things that reached like pink and hairless stains down under his collar. (Wasn’t the gas so cruel? Always attacking the tender bits: lips, groin, ears.) His hair rose in tufts in all directions and he wore too many clothes, like someone insensible to heat and cold, or someone wearing all he owned. His voice was high, friendly, uncertain.