Authors: Anna Funder
Dora found a towel to clear the bathtub of glass and showered quickly with the hand-held shower. Then she packed a briefcase with a change of clothes from my cupboard. A suitcase would almost certainly attract a guard’s attention. It would have been senseless to try to retrieve Toller’s cases from the garden shed. At Friedrichsstrasse station she bought tickets for Switzerland–there were two train changes.
Later she learnt they had been waiting for her at her flat–‘Three cars outside, no less,’ she said–to take her straight back in for a new period of remand, while the law was changed. She would never have got out.
Over the years, rumours circulated about her escape from Germany. They were mangled and magnificent, conflated like Chinese whispers until it was herself that Dora had smuggled over the border in the case, along with Toller’s papers. This made sense to people because the meaning of a tale is never practical; a story is not a how-to. The meaning of the tale was that she was small, brave and clever. But, as Dora joked, if she had packed herself into the case, ‘Who would have carried me?’
When Dora told Toller the rumour he smiled and said, ‘But where would you have put my papers?’
On 26 April 1933 Göring passed the first Gestapo law. It placed the political police under his own personal control so that the ordinary rules of criminal procedure did not apply. Uncle Erwin drafted it. It was his ‘Fabian amendment’.
Clara has gone to get our coffees for this morning (infinity lasts here–at least in the matter of bottomless cups–only for a single day). Small clouds shadow parts of the park, dappling it like something underwater.
If I can conjure Dora, I think I can get out of this room and deliver that note to Christiane.
While she worked for me, Dora also worked with the calm and stolid Social Democrat Mathilde Wurm. It was Mathilde who wired me at my hotel in Ascona: ‘Bird coming. 9.3.33.’ The code names were just starting then. So she was Bird.
But when she stepped down from the train Dora was more of a scarecrow figure in Ruth’s too-big clothes. Her eyes were set deep in shadowed sockets and her skin pulled thin to translucent over blue veins at her temple. She smiled broadly, swinging a briefcase at her side. Something in me I did not know was taut relaxed; I was home.
We didn’t make it back to my room at the hotel, but veered off along the creek and up under a bridge in deep shade. Small fires were burning on the bank, the litter and leaves turning into columns of smoke rising straight in the still air. Sometimes making love is making love and sometimes it is other things, a homecoming and an attack–stabbing to get back into the life that was nearly taken from you. Behind me the stone was cold but I leant into her, my hands under her thighs and her mouth on my ear, lost and found in the heat of her, her quick need. She exhaled. Stayed still a long moment with an arm around my neck, head in my chest.
‘Dora?’
When she stood back her eyes were full. She had let herself feel the fear she must have been beating down for days.
‘Let’s eat,’ she said, putting her foot back into a trouser leg.
The light on the promenade by Lake Maggiore was golden and slanted, stretching the shadows to comic proportions even in the morning. Dora stood where the foreshore sloped to the water for boat launching, first on one foot, then the other, dancing and dodging her larger, attached shadow-self and laughing. She threw it punches. ‘Come and get me!’
Ducks came up, curious and proprietorial, on the cobbles. Their heads phosphoresced a green and purple so regal we seemed a ragged, loose-limbed species, running from the law and copulating under bridges.
Dora took my arm and we looked for an open restaurant under the arcade across from the water. Most of the shops had their shutters drawn till April. Plane trees in two rows along the promenade were pruned to four or five stubby limbs, like black fists held up at the sky. Through some of them tiny lights were threaded, to be turned on in summer. Without tourists this place was restoring itself.
We ordered coffee and pastries and settled into a corner. Dora’s back was to the window and her face to me, in shadow. She started to tell how she had gone to my flat the night the Reichstag burnt and taken out the manuscript of my autobiography.
‘It was a hunch of Bertie’s,’ she said, unwinding her scarf. ‘Being there probably saved me from being rounded up. They were waiting for me at my place.’ She’d slept two nights in Ruth’s shed, she said, with the suitcases of my work. Before going back for my diaries.
I was incapable of thanking her. Thanks would have been pathetic given the risks she’d taken. And I wasn’t sure I could get the words out.
‘I’m sorry about the diaries,’ she said. She paused as the waiter set down coffees and water, sugared croissants.
‘I wish you hadn’t…’ I started. It wasn’t true. I was upset she had so nearly been caught–she would have been killed. But I was pleased beyond price that my manuscript had been saved. The shame choked me.
‘Don’t thank me yet,’ she said, pulling apart the pastry. She wielded a corner in each hand and waved away my distress. ‘I still have to get the cases out of the country.’
‘Please don’t do anything—’
‘Stupid?’ She raised her eyebrows. ‘I’ll try not to.’
Dora didn’t want to embarrass me. When she told me how they’d caught her in my study she added quickly, ‘And there’s me like a film bandit about to get away with it–but of course I’d forgotten about the bars.’
She couldn’t have known of the bars. My eyes smarted.
Sometimes I think that the physical peculiarities of a situation bring out the strangest things. If I had been able to see her face clearly, I might not have told her. I wonder, now, about interrogation chambers: why do they think bright light brings the truth out of people? They should try the seduction of shadows, where you cannot watch your words hit their target.
I signalled the waiter for a fresh ashtray and shifted in my chair. I leant in to her. ‘I have chosen every flat since prison,’ I said slowly, ‘for one small room. And I have had bars put on it.’
She said nothing.
‘It’s a superstition,’ I went on. ‘To remind me of my most productive time. I need the…’ I looked down at my hands. My fingers had threaded through one another into a futile arch. ‘Containment.’
She nodded, this free bird. Trying hard to understand the need for limits. The liberty they might give a soul like mine with its tendency to dispersal.
‘I need it in order to write.’ I opened my hands. ‘Bad poetry.’
‘Not just the poetry,’ she said.
I laughed. The light coming in behind her kept her face in the dark.
Her tone changed. ‘Is
that
why you refused the offer of clemency?’
I looked at my plate. ‘I feel terrible.’
She was shaking her head.
‘No–honestly,’ I said, ‘I was hugely sustained by your campaign to free me. I just…’ I shifted my shoulders. ‘Well, and I wouldn’t have left the others in there, of course.’
‘I see.’ She nodded. ‘But I took Hans’s
head
off for it. I’ve never stopped blaming him. For putting you off the outside world.’ She laughed. ‘You know, with his Great Unbearable Charm. Giving you a taste of the sycophants and social climbers and slobbering attention-seekers that awaited you.’
I looked up at her. ‘I didn’t think he was so bad.’
‘Oh, he’s not,’ she sighed. ‘He’s just insufferably lucky. If I’d known you
wanted
to be in there, I wouldn’t have… Oh God.’ She put her forehead into her palm, a cigarette still in two fingers. Then she laughed–that beautiful, wide mouth. ‘I’ll have to apologise to him now. Damn.’
I wanted her then; I wanted to erase this conversation with a physical act.
We stayed eight days in Ascona and over that time my throat constricted less when I looked at her in unguarded moments. I tried to catch glimpses of her as others might see her. I watched her chat with the vendors across the market stalls in broken Italian and shameless hand gestures. Or press her face to the wind on the ferry bow; step steaming and unselfconscious out of the shower. When you are in love with someone you cannot see around them, you cannot get their human measure. You cannot see how someone so huge to you, so miraculous and unfathomable, can fit, complete, into that small skin.
Towards the end of our time in the hotel we turned away the maid and went to bed in the afternoons, the room a litter of clothes and papers and plans, shoes muddy from our walks and the air bearing its combined trace of us.
Sleeping was difficult for Dora. Some nights she took Veronal, mixing the bitter powder with coffee. Once I woke to see her standing in a robe on the balcony. The sky was pricked with stars. Below us the lake was a vast black gap, its far shore marked only by a line of tiny, sparkling lights.
I leant over the rail. After a while she spoke.
‘I’m an atheist,’ she said.
‘It’s “I’m an atheist
but
…” isn’t it?’ I joked. Water slapped at unseen boats; halyards pinged their masts.
‘But I think my father was looking out for me.’ Her voice was tight. ‘Back there. With Erwin Thomas.’
‘Nothing spooky.’ I turned to face her but she kept looking straight ahead. ‘He taught you the protection of the law of criminal procedure, and you protected yourself with it. Hugo would have been proud of you.’
‘He taught it to
him
, too.’ She started to cry silently, shaking her head a little.
‘Thomas?’ I said. ‘Well, yes.’ I reached for her hand. ‘But he won’t have much use for those principles any more.’
She turned her face to me, noble and destroyed. ‘Do you think they are so easily thrown away?’
On the second-last night I said, ‘Let’s leave Europe. Go to Africa, India.’ Dora’s PhD had been about workers’ rights in the colonies; now she was planning to translate her English friend Fenner Brockway’s book on colonial India.
‘You think you can escape politics?’ she said. I was sitting on the bed. She stood in front of me and held my head. ‘If we left here we’d be abandoning our lives for coconuts.’ She let go and sat down, hands open in her lap. ‘Our lives are given to us; they are not entirely of our own choosing.’
‘Do you love me?’ We weren’t looking at each other.
‘Yes.’ Straightforward as a fact. But not enough, not enough.
‘I mean, do we belong together?’
‘No one “belongs” to anyone any more. Rule number one, remember.’ She was smiling, fully aware of the ridiculousness of rules for living.
I would not be deterred. ‘What if you got pregnant one of these nights?’
Her smile faded. She turned to me. ‘I wouldn’t have the baby.’
I searched her face. She tried to explain. ‘It doesn’t seem part of my life to me.’
‘So India and babies are not part of what is given to you?’
‘I can take these risks for myself. But not for a child.’
I don’t know what I was asking her. Was it as simple as whether she could put me first? Or even herself? I went to the window. The moon had risen. A lone oarsman pulled the water, wrinkling its silver blanket.
When I turned back her resolve had vanished. Her face was a mask of distress.
‘I can’t … leave … this.’ Her hands fluttered about, over the papers in the room, over Germany, over what had been given to her to do. Her eyes were full and blind and trapped.
I put my hands on her shoulders and breathed in. I would never be hers above all things.
‘You should take a leaf from your cousin Ruth’s book. Choose beauty!’ I joked. ‘Choose pleasure!’
She blew her nose, loudly, then looked up. ‘I do choose pleasure,’ she said, and pulled me down.
In the morning we walked up the hill behind the village, where there was an eleventh-century fort. The tops of the hills here all had forts on them, and closer to the lake squatted all the churches–war and peace at two hundred paces. We went down to the church. It was cold and empty and smelt of stone. From the back pew we watched shafts of light enter through the high windows, feel their way down here.
‘How’s the little one?’ Dora asked, in a tone that implied we were discussing a mutual acquaintance.
‘Christiane,’ I said. She could never say her name. ‘Fine. She just refused to play the lead in a Nazi film about Horst Wessel.’
‘Good for her,’ Dora said, and we left it at that.
Dora had decided that my attraction to Christiane consisted largely of my basking in her admiration. Dora had also decided, I believe, that this was a fantasy which would be of limited sustenance. Her own idea of me was of a man who did not need such things.
Dora may have been right about why I wanted Christiane. But Christiane had other charms, and not just the obvious. She had no sense that things might end, which is, I suppose, the definition of youth. Everything lay ahead of her on an even plane of wonder: all the cruelties and beauties of a world she took no responsibility for. More than her nymph’s body or her faith in me, I wanted what any older man wants: to recapture the anticipation of the unfolding world.
From Ascona we tried to make arrangements to get our things out of Germany, and money too–Dora with her mother, and me with my publishers. We had no idea how the future looked, together or apart, and no idea how to fund it. The economics of whole societies had always seemed more manageable than our own.
Dora left for Paris, then went down to Strasbourg to see her friend Berthold Jacob, and from there to Ruth and Hans in London. I bought three cream Italian silk shirts and continued on my lecture tour to Palestine, untethered now from Germany and looking for a new home.
When Clara opens the door she lets in odd strains of music from the room across the way. Strauss, I think. Starting and stopping. She puts down the coffees and looks at me strangely, welded to my chair. It is a look I know. She is realising that the famous, her elders, are just as flighty and full of foibles as she or anyone else, and that although we do not grow out of this, neither do these things bring us down. The miracle of life indeed. But what frightens me is I can see in her face that instead of breeding contempt for me, this insight makes her fonder.
Don’t waste your time!
I want to warn.
I am poison to you, girl
.