I drew level with Bernard and put my hand on his arm. ‘Stay out of this Bernard. You could get hurt.’
‘Nonsense,’ he said, and shook his arm free.
We arrived at the young man’s side several seconds before the kids. He smelled strongly of patchouli, which was not, to my mind, the true scent of Marxist-Leninist thought. Surely he was a fraud. I just had time to say, ‘Come on!’ and I was still tugging at Bernard’s arm when the gang arrived. He stood between the boys and their victim and spread his arms.
‘Now then,’ he said, in the old-fashioned kindly-stern voice of an English bobby. Did he really think he was too old, too tall and thin, too eminent to be hit? The kids had stopped short and were bunched up in a pack, breathing heavily, heads and tongues lolling in bemusement at this beanpole, this scarecrow in a coat who stood in their way. I saw that two of them had silver swastikas pinned to their lapels. Another had a swastika tattoo on his knuckle. I did not dare turn round to look, but I had the impression that the Turk was taking the opportunity to roll up his flag and slip away. The solicitor types, amazed by what their own violence had conjured up, had retreated deeper into the crowd to watch.
I looked around for help. An American sergeant and two soldiers had their backs to us as they walked to confer with their East German counterparts. Among the kids the bemusement was turning to anger. Suddenly two of them ran round Bernard, but the flag-man had already forced a way through to the back of the crowd, and now he was sprinting up the road. He turned the corner into Kochstrasse, and was gone.
The two gave half-hearted pursuit, then came back to us. Bernard would have to do instead.
‘Now off you go,’ he said brightly, shooing them with the backs of his hands. I was wondering whether it was more understandable, or rather more loathsome, that these people with swastikas should be German, when the smallest of them, a pin-headed tyke in a bomber jacket, nipped forwards and kicked Bernard on the shin. I heard the thud of boot on bone. With a little sigh of surprise, Bernard folded up in sections on to the pavement.
There was a groan of disapproval from the crowd, but nobody moved. I stepped forwards and swung out at the boy and missed. But he and his friends were not interested in me. They were gathering round Bernard, ready, I thought, to kick him to death. One last glance towards the guardroom showed no sign of the sergeant or the soldiers. I jerked one of the boys back by his collar and was trying to reach for another. There were too many for me. I saw two, perhaps three black boots withdrawing on the backswing.
But they did not move. They froze in place, for just then, out of the crowd there sprang a figure who whirled about us, lashing the boys with staccato sentences of piercing rebuke. It was a furious young woman. Her power was of the street. She had credibility. She was a contemporary, an object of desire and aspiration. She was a star, and she had caught them being vile, even by their own standards.
The force of her disgust was sexual. They thought they were men, and she was reducing them to naughty children. They could not afford to be seen shrinking from her, backing off. But that was exactly what they were doing now, even though the outward signs were laughs, shrugs, and the unheard insults they called out to her. They pretended, to themselves, to each other, that they were suddenly bored, that it would be more interesting elsewhere. They began moving back towards Kochstrasse, but the woman did not let up her tirade. They probably would have liked to run from her, but protocol obliged them to keep to a forced, self-conscious swagger. While she followed them down the street, shouting and waving her fist, they had to keep the catcalls coming and their thumbs hooked in their jeans.
I was helping Bernard to his feet. It was only when the young woman came back to see how he was, and her identically dressed friend appeared at her side, that I recognised them as the two who had swished past us on the June 17th Street. Together we supported Bernard while he tested his weight on his leg. It did not appear to be broken. There was some applause in the crowd for him as he put his arm round my shoulder and we shuffled away from the Checkpoint.
It took us several minutes to reach the corner of the street where we hoped to find a taxi. During that time I was anxious to have Bernard acknowledge the identity of his rescuer. I asked her her name – Grete – and repeated it to him. He was concentrating on his pain, he was bent over it, and he may have been in mild shock, but I persisted in the interest of, what exactly? Unsettling the rationalist? In him? In me?
Finally Bernard lifted a hand in the girl’s direction for her to take and said, ‘Grete, thank you my dear. You saved my bacon.’ But he was not looking at her as he said it.
On Kochstrasse I thought I would have time to ask Grete and her friend Diane about themselves, but as soon as we arrived we saw a taxi dropping people off and we called it over. There followed the hiatus of easing Bernard in, and thanks and farewells and thanks again during which I hoped he would at last take a look at his guardian angel, the incarnation of June. I waved to the girls out of the rear window as they walked away, and before giving the driver his instructions I said to Bernard, ‘Didn’t you recognise them? They were the ones we saw by the Brandenburg Gate, when you told me how you used to expect a message from ...’
Bernard was arranging his head, tipping it right back against the headrest and he interrupted me with a sigh. He spoke impatiently to the padded ceiling of the car, inches from his nose. ‘Yes. Quite a coincidence, I suppose. Now for goodness sake Jeremy, get me home!’
Part Three
Majdanek. Les Salces.
St Maurice de Navacelles 1989
THE FOLLOWING DAY he did not stir from the apartment in Kreuzberg. He lay on a couch in the tiny living room looking morose, preferring the television to conversation. A doctor friend of Günter’s called round to examine the injured leg. It was likely that nothing was broken, but an X-ray in London was recommended. I went out for a stroll in the late morning. The streets had a hung-over look, with beer-cans and smashed bottles underfoot and, round the hot-dog stalls, paper napkins smeared with mustard and tomato ketchup. During the afternoon, while Bernard slept, I read the newspapers and wrote up our conversations of the day before. In the evening he was still untalkative. I went out for another stroll and had a beer in a local Kneipe. The festivities were beginning again, but I had seen enough. I was back in the apartment within an hour, and we were both asleep by half past ten.
Bernard’s flight the next morning to London, and mine to Montpellier via Frankfurt and Paris were only an hour apart. I had arranged for one of Jenny’s brothers to meet the plane at Heathrow. Bernard was livelier. He hobbled across the terminal at Tegel looking well-suited to the walking-stick he had borrowed, using it to hail an airline employee and remind him of the wheelchair that had been ordered. It would be waiting, Bernard was assured, by the departure gate.
As we walked in that direction I said, ‘Bernard, I wanted to ask you something about June’s dogs ...’
He interrupted me. ‘For the life and times? I’ll tell you something. You can forget all that nonsense about “face to face with evil”. Religious cant. But, you know, I was the one who told her about Churchill’s black dog. You remember? The name he gave to the depressions he used to get from time to time. I think he pinched the expression from Samuel Johnson. So June’s idea was that if one dog was a personal depression, two dogs were a kind of cultural depression, civilisation’s worst moods. Not bad, really. I’ve often made use of it. It went through my mind at Checkpoint Charlie. It wasn’t his red flag you know. I don’t think they even saw it. You heard what they were shouting?’
‘Ausländer ’raus.’
‘Foreigners out. The Wall comes down and everybody’s out there dancing in the street, but sooner or later ...’
We had arrived at the departure gate. A man in a braided uniform manoeuvred the wheelchair behind Bernard and he lowered himself with a sigh.
I said, ‘But that wasn’t my question. I was looking at my old notes yesterday. The last time I saw June
she told me to ask you what the Maire of St Maurice de Navacelles said about those dogs when you had lunch at the café that afternoon ...’
‘The Hôtel des Tilleuls? What those dogs had been trained to do? A perfect case in point. The Maire’s story simply wasn’t true. Or at the very least, there was no way of knowing. But June chose to believe it because it fitted nicely. A perfect case of bending the facts to the idea.’
I handed Bernard’s bags to the flight attendant who stowed them behind the wheelchair. Then he stood with his hands in the pushing position, waiting for us to finish. Bernard leaned back with his stick across his lap. It bothered me that my father-in-law should take so easily to his invalid status.
‘But Bernard,’ I said. ‘What was the story? What did he say those dogs had been trained to do?’
Bernard shook his head. ‘Another time. Dear boy, thank you for coming along.’ Then he raised his rubber-tipped stick, partly in salute, partly as a signal to the attendant who nodded to me curtly and wheeled his passenger away.
I was too restless to make good use of my hour’s wait. I lingered by a bar wondering if I needed one last coffee, one final German thing to eat. At the bookshop I browsed at length without buying even a paper, having glutted on them for three hours the day before. I still had twenty minutes, time enough for another slow wander round the terminal. Often, when I am in transit in a foreign airport, and not bound for England, I glance up at the departure board, at the London flights, to gauge in myself the tidal pull of home, Jenny, family. What came now as I noted only one flight announced – on the international flight map Berlin was a backwater – was one of my earliest memories of my wife, prompted by something Bernard had just said.
In October 1981 I was in Poland as a member of an amorphous cultural delegation invited by the Polish government. I was then the administrator of a moderately successful provincial theatre company. Among the group were a novelist, an arts journalist, a translator and two or three culture bureaucrats. The only woman was Jenny Tremaine, who represented an institution based in Paris and funded from Brussels. Because she was both beautiful and rather brisk in her manner, she drew hostility from some of the others. The novelist in particular, aroused by the paradox of an attractive woman unimpressed by his reputation, had a racing bet with the journalist and one of the bureaucrats to see who could ‘pull’ her first. The general idea was that Miss Tremaine, with her white freckled skin and green eyes, her head of thick red hair, her efficient way with her appointment book and perfect French, had to be put in her place. In the inevitable boredom of an official visit there was a good deal of muttering over late-night drinks in the hotel bar. The effect was souring. It was impossible to exchange a word or two with this woman, whose sharp style, I soon discovered, merely concealed her nervousness, without some of the others nudging and winking in the background, and asking me later if I was ‘in the race’.
What made me angrier was that in a sense, only in a sense, I was. Within days of our arrival in Warsaw I was stricken, lovesick, an old-fashioned hopeless case, and for the gleeful novelist and his friends, a hilarious complication. The first sight of her each day at breakfast as she made her way across the hotel restaurant towards our table caused in me such a painful tightness in the chest, such a hollow, falling sensation in my stomach that when she arrived I could neither ignore her nor be casually polite without revealing myself to the others. My hard-boiled egg and black bread remained untouched.
There were no opportunities to talk to her alone. All day long we sat in committee rooms or lecture theatres with editors, translators, journalists, government officials and Solidarity people, for this was the time of Solidarity’s ascendancy, and though we could not know it, only weeks from its end, its banishment after General Jaruzelski’s coup. There was only one conversation. Poland. Its urgency swirled around us and pressed in as we moved from one dim, grubby room, one cigarette haze to another. What was Poland? What was Solidarity? Could democracy flourish? Would it survive? Would the Russians invade? Did Poland belong in Europe? What about the peasants? Food queues were growing longer by the day. The Government blamed Solidarity, everyone else blamed the Government. There were marches in the street, baton charges by the Zomo police, a student occupation at the university and more all-night discussions. I had never given Poland much thought before, but inside a week I became, like everyone else, foreigners and Poles alike, a passionate expert, if not in the answers, then in the right kind of questions. My own politics were thrown into turmoil. Poles whom I instinctively admired urged me to support the very Western politicians I most distrusted, and a language of anti-communism – which until then I had associated with cranky ideologues of the right – came easily to everyone here where Communism was a network of privileges and corruption and licensed violence, a mental disease, an array of laughable, improbable lies and, most tangibly, the instrument of occupation by a foreign power.
At every venue, somewhere, several chairs away, was Jenny Tremaine. My throat ached, my eyes stung from cigarettes in unventilated rooms, I was dizzy and sick from late nights and daily hangovers, I had a heavy cold and could never find tissues to blow my nose on, and I ran a constant high temperature. On my way to attend a session on Polish theatre I was sick in the gutter, to the disgust of the women in a nearby bread queue who thought I was a drunk. My fever, elation and affliction were, inextricably, Poland, Jenny, and the gloating, cynical novelist and his sidekicks whom I had come to despise and who loved to count me in their number and provoke me by disclosing where, according to them, I stood that day in the running.
At the beginning of our second week Jenny astounded me by asking me to accompany her to the town of Lublin, one hundred miles away. She wanted to visit the concentration camp of Majdanek in order to take photographs for a friend who was writing a book. Three years before, in a previous job as a television researcher, I had been to Belsen and had promised myself that I would never look at another camp. One visit was a necessary education, a second was morbid. But now this ghostly pale woman was inviting me to return. At the time we were standing outside my room, just after breakfast. We were already late for the first appointment of the day and she seemed to want an immediate answer. She explained that she had never visited a concentration camp before and preferred to go with someone she could think of as a friend. As she arrived at this last word she brushed the back of my hand with her fingers. Her touch was cool. I took her hand and then, because she had taken a willing step towards me, I kissed her. It was a long kiss in the gloomy, un-peopled emptiness of the hotel corridor. At the sound of a door handle turning we stopped and I told her that I would gladly go with her. Then someone was calling me from the stairs. There was no time to speak again until the following morning when we arranged to travel by taxi.
In those days the Polish zloty was at its most abject, and the American dollar was supreme. It was possible to hire a car to take us to Lublin, wait for us there overnight if necessary, then drive us back, all for twenty dollars. We managed to slip away without being observed by the novelist and his friends. The kiss, the feel of it, the extraordinary fact of it, the expectation of another, and of what lay beyond, had preoccupied me for twenty-four hours. But now, as we headed out through the drab outskirts of Warsaw, conscious of our destination, this kiss receded before us. We sat well apart on the back seat of the Lada and exchanged basic information about our lives. This was when I learned that she was the daughter of Bernard Tremaine whose name I vaguely knew from radio programmes and his biography of Nasser. Jenny talked about her parents’ estrangement and her difficult relations with her mother who lived alone in a remote place in France and who had abandoned the world in pursuit of a life of spiritual meditation. At this first reference to June I was already curious to meet her. I told Jenny about my parents’ death in a car accident when I was eight, and growing up with my sister Jean and my niece Sally to whom I was still a kind of father, and how adept I was at moving in on other people’s parents. I think
that even then we joked about how I might insinuate myself into the affections of Jenny’s prickly mother.
My unreliable memory of the Poland that lay between Warsaw and Lublin is of one immense brownish-black ploughed field traversed by a straight treeless road. It was snowing lightly when we arrived. We took the advice of Polish friends and asked to be dropped in the centre of Lublin and set out from there. I had not fully understood how close the town was to the camp that had consumed all its Jews, three-quarters of its population. They lay side by side, Lublin and Majdanek, matter and anti-matter. We stopped outside the main entrance to read a sign which announced that so many hundreds of thousands of Poles, Lithuanians, Russians, French, British and Americans had died here. It was very quiet. There was no one in sight. I felt a momentary reluctance to enter. Jenny’s whisper startled me.
‘No mention of the Jews. See? It still goes on. And it’s official.’ Then she added, more to herself, ‘The black dogs.’
These last words I ignored. As for the rest, even discounting the hyperbole, a residual truth was sufficient to transform Majdanek for me in an instant from a monument, an honourable civic defiance of oblivion, to a disease of the imagination and a living peril, a barely conscious connivance with evil. I linked my arm through Jenny’s and we went on in, past the outer fences, past the guardroom which was still in use. On its doorstep stood two full bottles of milk. An inch of snow was the latest addition to the camp’s obsessive neatness. We walked across a no-man’s-land, and let our arms drop to our sides. Ahead were the watchtowers, squat huts on stilts with steeply pitched roofs and shaky wooden ladders; they commanded a view between the double inner fence. Contained by this, the huts, longer, lower and more numerous than I had imagined. They filled our horizon. Beyond them, floating free against the orange-white sky, like a dirty tramp steamer with a single stack, was the incinerator. We did not speak for an hour. Jenny read her instructions and took the photographs. We followed a party of school children into a hut where wire cages were crammed full of shoes, tens of thousands of them, flattened and curled like dried fruit. In another hut, more shoes, and in a third, unbelievably, more, no longer caged, but spilling in their thousands across the floor. I saw a hobnail boot beside a baby shoe whose nursery lamb still showed through the dust. Life turned to tat. The extravagant numerical scale, the easy-to-say numbers – tens and hundreds of thousands, millions – denied the imagination its proper sympathies, its rightful grasp of the suffering, and one was drawn insidiously to the persecutors’ premise, that life was cheap, junk to be inspected in heaps. As we walked on, my emotions died. There was nothing we could do to help. There was no one to feed or free. We were strolling like tourists. Either you came here and despaired, or you put your hands deeper into your pockets and gripped your warm loose change and found you had taken one step closer to the dreamers of the nightmare. This was our inevitable shame, our share in the misery. We were on the other side, we walked here freely like the commandant once did, or his political master, poking into this or that, knowing the way out, in the full certainty of our next meal.