Authors: Anna Funder
At my feet a gecko moves in staccato bursts. A small boy runs up the ramp from the beach, holding out his hands. I can’t hear what he’s saying till he’s upon me. ‘It’s a jelly-blubber!’ he shouts, happy as if he created it himself. ‘Look! Jelly-blubber!’ In his palms wobbles a perfectly transparent piece of sea creature. It is so clear I can see the child’s little fingers cupped underneath. How can that bear life? I might sit down.
It is all residential here, large old homes or fancy apartments. Except for over on that corner, where there is a pink hotel with tables and chairs out the front under fig trees. I press the button and wait. Beside me a huge, cushiony pelican sits atop a lamppost. I watch the four lanes of traffic, full of the speeding wealthy in German cars.
When the lights change I step out from the pavement but not quite far enough–my built-up heel scrapes the kerb and the other foot cannot find purchase and time–pulls–apart. There is time to breathe in–even, as I move through the air, to wonder what will be broken. There is too much sky the earth slams close my limbs are useless as matches.
I lie smashed on the bitumen. For a moment I am afraid of the traffic. Then I close my eyes.
When I open them I am still here. A woman is standing over me. Her messy blond hair lifts about in the wind. Behind her on the road lies my wig, about to be run over by a four-wheel drive. The tyre clips it and it flips alive, coming to rest again on the white lines in the middle of the road.
I ran white lines once.
I look up at the woman. To one of her hands a child is tethered, a little girl of four, maybe five. The other hand she holds high over me, stopping the cars in this lane.
The little girl watches me, curious and unafraid. She is unafraid of the mess in front of her–a scraggy-pated crone with blood in her eyes and one functioning limb, which, still attached to a metal crutch, flails and scratches at the tarred road. Cars are lining up behind. I’m feeling bad about the traffic jam. Someone gets out and starts speaking to his mobile. Half his shirt has come untucked and it flaps in the breeze from the water.
The woman’s lips are moving. ‘Can you sit?’ she is asking. ‘Can I help you up?’
The girl looks on, as sober and distant as if this were just one of numerous, equally unlikely events dished up to her on any given day.
‘I… I…’
When I wake up I am in hospital and they have given me something that makes light of the world. I am unaccountably happy. The nurse is herself a cheery, one-woman party, festooned with lanyards and swipe cards and chinking keys around her neck. She tells me I just have to squeeze a button attached to the drip if I feel I need more.
‘More what?’ I squeeze before she can answer and the stuff slides cold and welcome into my forearm.
‘Pethidine.’ She picks up my hand between hers. ‘Morphine family. Takes away not only the pain,’ she smiles, ‘but even the memory of it.’
I look at her sideways. But I am not done with them yet! I am a vessel of memory in a world of forgetting.
When she leaves I look down at my arm. There’s a cannula taped on my skin, above the wrist.
Dora used morphine occasionally, discreetly, much as you might have a whisky to unwind. It had started with the abortion before she was married, but she always controlled it. She didn’t feel the need to hide the stuff. At Great Ormond Street the glass vials lived in a wooden stand in the bathroom cabinet.
I sat in the kitchen of the flat in Bloomsbury, barely breathing. A fly was making its way around the rim of a teacup, throwing a surreal, leggy shadow into the bowl. I was delicately focusing the camera lens to try to catch it before the shutter noise sent it off. The fly raised its two back legs and rubbed them together, in some kind of dyslexic glee. Hans was at the library.
A ringing broke the air. The fly vanished.
Our phone number was Holborn 7230, but we weren’t in the book so you had to be told. I picked up the receiver to nothing but dial tone. Then I realised it was the intercom for the front door that had been installed to call the caretaker down for parcels, or people who’d forgotten their keys.
‘Hello?’
‘It’s me,’ she said.
‘I’ll try this buzzer.’ Hans and I had our own keys, so I hadn’t used the system before. I started to fiddle with the switches.
‘Can’t you just come down?’
Dora was standing on the doorstep between a briefcase I recognised as Hans’s and a heavy typewriter case. She was wearing trousers and a grey rollneck and what looked like a man’s jacket, though it might have just been too big. It was raining.
‘I need my own space,’ she said. ‘Can I stay here?’ Her eyes were red and puffy.
‘You need to ask?’ I hugged her.
Dora hadn’t been sleeping. That first night she took Veronal and slept till morning. At breakfast she came into the kitchen in Toller’s burgundy pyjamas and poured herself a coffee. She ripped open another sachet of the drug and emptied the powder in, flicking it with her index finger to get it all out. ‘I’ll be caught up by this evening,’ she said, and went back to bed. She knew intricately about dosages–too many grains at once and the sleep would be permanent, so she’d do it in two stages.
In the evening she woke up fresh-faced and sparkling, and left us for a meeting of the International Women’s League for Peace and Freedom. Hans and I went to see the new picture
King Kong
; we watched the monster climb to the top of the building and bellow at the world.
From that time on, the three of us lived in the eyrie flat at 12 Great Ormond Street, circling and dodging and loving one another in our own particular ways.
When Dora wasn’t sleeping, or with a man, she was working. Her English was fluent–from school, and stays in Britain–so innumerable refugees came to see her at the flat for help. She translated documents to prove who they were to the British authorities, and wrote supplicating letters to the Home Office. Through Fenner Brockway, she got to know other left-leaning members of the House of Lords, one of whom, Lord Marley, who chaired the Relief Committee for the Victims of German Fascism, became a close friend.
Dora was soon the best-connected refugee in the city, the ‘go to girl’ with a reputation for being able to fix things with the inscrutable British administration. Under a pseudonym she wrote articles for the
Manchester Guardian
about political prisoners and German rearmament. She worked to help free political prisoners in the Reich and on the Nobel Peace Prize campaign for Carl von Ossietzky. She worked with Toller on his speeches and his vast correspondence. Most of what she did was unpaid, but she managed to scrabble money together from committees, a little from journalism or from work with those few famous refugees, like Toller, who could still pay. Sometimes she asked me for a cheque to tide things over. It was usually for someone she considered needed it more. Funds circulated through her; she lived on air, crumbs, smoke and hope.
Yet in all this work, with all these people calling on her energy, I never saw her flustered. Like many people who work all the time, she seemed, paradoxically, always to have time. In her presence others became calm, all panic seemed childish, or at least unproductive. I watched desperate and downcast refugees in our kitchen regain a sense of themselves as the activist, politician, poet or journalist they once were, while she heard them out quietly, toes on a chair rung, cigarette between thumb and forefinger. They were restored by a secular faith: her sense that something could always be done.
Dora’s busyness put Hans and me to shame. Although I was happy enough exploring the city with my camera and doing bits and pieces for the relief committees, he was cranky and listless. So I suggested we offer to hold the meetings of the Socialist Workers Party-in-Exile at our flat. I thought that might put us, or him at least, more in the centre of things. A few other members of our little party had washed up in London, and they were keen to keep on meeting. We started to gather Tuesday nights in our kitchen, with me taking the minutes on Hans’s typewriter. I found I liked being behind the machine almost as much as behind a camera; it gave me a purpose, and a protection.
The first through the door was always Helmut Goldschmidt, a typesetter from Mainz. Helmut was a large man, as friendly and volatile as a bear. He had rust-coloured hair and no-coloured eyelashes and a thick bottom lip that hung loose if he forgot to close it. Before the war he had been an apprentice roof-tiler, but afterwards he developed a passion for books and retrained. During a lull in a meeting he would heft a book like a grenade and quip, ‘An idea is a weapon to change the world!’
Hans secretly rolled his eyes to me at such displays of earnestness, but it wasn’t as if we could be choosy about our membership. Helmut addressed us always as ‘comrade’ and took his shoes off when he came in.
Our friend Mathilde Wurm–Dora’s old boss–came too, often with cheese and brown bread, herbal teas, and her knitting in a basket. Mathilde had been a stalwart politician, but standing at the door in her sensible shoes and with her basket of supplies, she gave the impression that what our movement most needed now was correct feeding and clothing, after which changing the world would naturally follow. Eugen Brehm, a quiet, bespectacled bookseller from Berlin, was also there, and a short blond boy with waxy skin who was always hungry and whose name I forget.
The leadership of the party had installed itself in Paris. We were an outpost given three tasks. First, to raise money, which the party would send to Germany for members in hiding who needed feeding, or those in prison or concentration camps who needed legal defence. It wasn’t clear how we were meant to raise this money, short of standing on a street corner with a tin (for which we’d have been arrested). Our best idea so far had been to produce a bulletin on what was going on in Germany and charge a subscription for it.
Our second task was to try to alert the British public to what was really going on at home. The world needed to understand the threat Hitler posed, not only to Germans, but to the rest of Europe. But this too was an ‘activity of a political nature’, for which we could be sent back to our deaths. Lobbying members of parliament, publishing articles in British newspapers, even our relationship with our British sister party, the Independent Labour Party, all held the danger of expulsion.
Our third job was to produce leaflets and to somehow smuggle them back into Germany. The boy, especially, had some good ideas for how to do this: we could make tiny-print tissue for the lining of cigar boxes, or print them on wax paper to wrap around packages of English butter, or, more boldly, fold them inside Nazi pamphlets. Hitler might have muzzled the press but we thought that thepeople, once properly informed, would come to their senses and prefer their freedom. (As it turned out, we underestimated the liberation from selfhood the Nazis offered, the lure of mindless belonging and purpose.)
Each of these tasks–producing a bulletin in order to raise money, alerting the British and making the leaflets–depended on us having sources inside Germany who could get fresh information out to us. We didn’t. We relied on new refugees arriving to tell us what they’d heard, and on interpreting what was already in the press. We ended up deciding to repackage this mixture into our bulletin and the leaflets.
At our meetings an undercurrent of fear made us tetchy and indecisive. Squabbles about the past broke out easily; the present and the future were too murky to navigate. We wasted time arguing about which left faction–the Social Democrats, the Communists or our own little party–was more responsible for allowing the Nazis their victory in February. The boy rambled on like a scout about invisible ink and letter-drop boxes and barrels on the collars of dogs. But our main problem remained how to get information out of Germany first. We simply didn’t have the contacts. We were stuck. We hadn’t even been able to decide, in the past two meetings, on a name for our bulletin.
Dora didn’t come to these gatherings. She had left our party in January, before the election, arguing that its very existence would split the left vote against ‘the rabid little brute’ even further. As usual, she was right.
And by mid-1933 she was involved in something much bigger. Dora referred to it as the counter-trial, but it was officially called the Commission of Inquiry into the Reichstag Fire. This was to be a spectacular event: a mock trial in London before some eminent international judges. It was ostensibly to examine the evidence against poor mad van der Lubbe and the others indicted for arson, so as to discredit their upcoming trial in Germany and hopefully save their lives. But its true purpose was to put the Nazi gang itself in the dock–to show the regime’s terrorist beginnings in the fire and the crackdown that followed. Then, we thought, it would be impossible for Britain to continue to ignore or tacitly support Hitler.
Dora couldn’t talk about her work, but I knew she was using her underground contacts to help smuggle witnesses from Germany into Britain. Once, she was so thrilled she let slip that she had managed to get the former Berlin President of Police–who had overseen the investigation into the fire–to come. She had been spending her nights translating into English these witnesses’ testimonials for the judges.
Through her friendship with Lord Marley, Dora had ensured high-level British support for the trial. Lord Marley was a handsome, serious, stubborn man with large dark eyes, a prominent brow, a jet-black moustache and a significant girth. He had had an illustrious war he never spoke about, after which he had taken up difficult causes as if there were no matter of conscience involved, but simply because ‘one mucked in and did what one could’. He was as much a man of deep persistence as deep principle: he had tried five times, unsuccessfully, to be elected to parliament (before he was raised to the peerage) and it took him four visits to the flat before he agreed to stop calling me Dr Wesemann, but only if I would call him Dudley. Because of his work helping refugees, he had recently had to shrug off the title ‘Jew-lover’ in the papers. ‘Not much of an insult,’ he said to me over breakfast with a grin, ‘now, is it?’