Authors: Anna Funder
I pushed my case up the steps. When I turned round she was already gone–halfway back along the carriage, walking briskly, shoulders hunched. Then she turned sideways and disappeared, a red coat swallowed by a grey crowd.
In Paris I took a flat by myself in Neuilly. There were many more of us refugees in Paris than in London, and I felt less conspicuous in France. Perhaps because of my darker colouring, or perhaps because it is possible for us Germans to speak virtually unaccented French, whereas in English we can never lose the trace of our mother tongue altogether. I worked in the office of the party, helping out as best I could. Walter directed my days.
In Dora’s first letter she wrote that Mathilde had made the flat into a home, with ‘massive good cheer and moderate housewifery’. Mathilde and her late husband had had staff to run their grand house in Berlin but she could still, by some personal alchemy, make corners of order herself. Small bunches of jonquils appeared in drinking glasses, and she ingeniously hung kitchen implements from a rack she had the caretaker drill into the bricks behind the stove, so that now even the dresser drawers could be filled with papers. Mrs Allworth was delighted, Dora wrote, and Nepo, after two days curled in mourning on my bed, was slowly coming round. The changes to the flat didn’t bother me; I had no love for those walls and floors. The main thing was that Dora wasn’t there alone. I had not abandoned her.
There’s a man at my door. The light is off here and he is faceless and silhouetted, pausing to look. He sways a little, touches something on his chest. I close my one eye and slyly press my finger-button for him to go away, for more ice inside of me.
He’s still here. It’s Walter. The concierge must have let him in to my Paris building and he is standing in the doorway. I say, ‘Come in,’ but he speaks before he moves. He was always sweet to me. Sweet and tactical. His eyes are small and hooded and grey-blue and his hair is pushed back, thinning. In another age he would have been a loyal Frankish warrior protecting his tribe, routing out traitors. He wears a dark coat, torso sliced into diagonals by his satchel strap. He takes off his gloves. He is not smiling. He is not coming in.
‘They’ve got Bertie,’ he says.
Ice will creep into your veins and stop your heart.
He moves his gloves into one hand, watching my face. ‘I thought you should know.’
No.
No
—
‘Mrs Becker? Mrs Becker?’
I open my eye. The doctor is about twenty years old. I must seem prehistoric to him. At least a hundred and fifty; a heavy-lidded tortoise, an evolutionary relic long since surpassed, washed up by some freak disaster, coughed out of the earth and into this modern hospital bed.
I crane my neck from the pillow and know it wobbles loosely; it is reptilian, criss-crossed with deep dry crevasses. Around his own smooth neck the boy doctor has a stethoscope with a yellow plastic stem. A toy. Sideburns creep improbably across his babycheeks.
‘You seemed distressed in your sleep,’ he says. ‘You were calling out. I came earlier, but you were asleep then too.’ He unhooks my chart and examines it, not pausing for answers. ‘I’m finishing up now, wanted to check on you before I leave. You sleeping well?’
I wonder if he listens to himself, let alone to anyone else.
‘Any pain?’ He looks at me, pen poised, like a doctor on daytime TV, an underage actor cast to suspend disbelief. Next they’ll require me to believe in my own recovery, walk out of here as the credits roll for the century just passed, ready to combat the return season of terror in a world that never learns.
‘None I can’t account for.’
‘Pardon?’ He hangs the chart back.
‘I’m fine. Vivid dreams, that’s all.’
‘Let me see.’ The hairy infant picks up the chart again. ‘Sometimes with more … senior patients, we recommend a mild antipsychotic along with the pain relief.’
‘I am not hallucinating.’
‘No. No, well. It’s entirely up to you.’
But that’s the thing, boyo, it’s
not
. This vast life–the real, interior one in which we remain linked to the dead (because the dream inside us ignores trivialities like breath, or absence)–this vast life is
not
under our control. Everything we have seen and everyone we have known goes into us and constitutes us, whether we like it or not. We are linked together in a pattern we cannot see and whose effects we cannot know. One slub here, a dropped stitch there, a bump encounter in that place, and the whole fabric will be different once it is woven.
I look into his clear, caramel eyes. Who knows what trace I might leave inside of you, boy?
‘They are all so real to me,’ is all I say. I still have a modicum of control.
He looks at me quizzically. There’s an indentation in his left ear where he’s taken an earring out. As he leans over me I allow myself to wonder about tattoos insinuating themselves across the soft inside of his upper arm, perhaps a bull’s head and horns in the sweet hollow of his back where his shirt tucks in. The mind is a curious thing, spooling and unspooling.
‘May I?’ he says as he pulls down my bottom eyelid without waiting for my answer. ‘What about some B12 then? I’ll arrange for it tomorrow.’
I couldn’t really care. What he cannot yet know–oh, why are we taught so little? and it is such a basic, basic thing–is that one does not remember one’s own pain. It is the suffering of others that undoes us.
I lift myself onto one elbow, which is the most emphasis my ruined body will allow. ‘I’d like to go home.’
He looks at me as if the idea had never occurred to him as a possible clinical outcome, as if it were an ambition above my station. He folds his lips together.
‘I’ll discuss it with the team,’ he says. ‘We’ll get back to you on that, Mrs Becker.’ As he tucks his pen into the pocket of his gown he holds my gaze, and then he smiles, lips still closed. It is a sympathetic look: he is wondering whether I know what he knows. And then he pats the bed twice, a brisk parting coda, and walks out the door.
‘Doctor Becker, actually,’ I mutter to his crisp white back.
Eventually, it all came out. The pieces were filled in, reported, documented in a court case and in letters that flew all over Europe. Memory cobbles together what I knew then with what came later. Standing in my Paris doorway, Walter Fabian, the philandering, charismatic, balding, hardworking, ex-underground ex-husband, was trying to read in my face what I knew then.
‘Bertie!’ My mind was racing and my mouth flapping with it. ‘Is he…?’
‘Alive as far as we know. They have him at Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse.’
My thoughts flew to the football game with Hans at the border, the waiting car. ‘They lured him over the border? They trapped him—?’ I must have been shrieking; my hands like panicked birds in the doorway. Walter grabbed one of them.
‘Just a minute, Ruth. You need to sit down.’
He helped me along the hallway and sat me down on the sofa. I held my stomach. He disappeared into the kitchen. Outside the clouds hung, bruised and inert over slate roofs. Walter came back with whisky in two glasses. Its colour was the only colour in the room.
‘Let’s start from the beginning,’ he said. He hitched his trousers to sit, opening a gap of white shin between sock and cuff.
I realised–not a neural process at all, but one in the body, a creeping freeze–that this was an interrogation.
‘You and Hans had been sending Bert money,’ he said slowly, watching my face for something, perhaps surprise, feigned or real. Or recognition. I felt none of those things. I was walking along the black and charred lip of a crater: if Bertie does not live I will be drawn into it and burned to dust.
‘Yes. We were.’
‘To get a passport?’
‘Yes. And to live.’ The whisky was fire down my throat. ‘Hans and Dora both tried to get him a passport. But even the non-Nazis left in the embassy in London could do nothing. They are all issued from Berlin, so, so…’
Walter leant forward with his elbows on his knees. I saw he wore a mint-green shirt and his new wedding band. He was a snappy dresser, in a careless, flamboyant way.
‘But you know this already,’ I added.
‘Yes,’ he said. He shifted a little in his seat. ‘We’ll get back to that. Let me tell you what else we know.’
I bit my lip. Walter watched my face. ‘A German acquaintance of Bert’s,’ he said, ‘a man he trusted, lured him into a trap.’
There are things in that black hole. Waiting for me.
‘Bertie was taken in a car from a restaurant meeting with a so-called passport forger in Basel straight over the border. Gestapo had come from Berlin.’
He sat back. ‘That’s all we know for now. All our sources can tell us.’ He threw back his head to finish his drink, then placed the glass carefully down on the coffee table in front of him.
‘Does Dora know?’ I am trying to think of more questions, there are more questions to steer this—
‘Yes.’ He turned to me. ‘She asked me to come to you. Ruthie—’
‘But he–they–were always so wary.’ I am picking my way round that black, steaming place, dread weaselling in my gut.
‘Ruthie.’ Walter took the glass out of my hand and set it down. ‘The friend was Hans.’
And then I fall. It is dark and hot and silent. There is breath in my ear, a heated rhythm I need to get away from. I stagger down the hall to the bathroom and retch. The whisky burns and stinks again. I check in the cabinet, then close it, holding on to the basin.
When I came out I saw Walter sitting in his mint-coloured shirt on the sofa, more innocent than I would ever be.
He watched me sit down.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘but I need to ask you this.’ He had an activist’s grief-and-anger and he had come to show it to me, to get as close to the culprit as possible. I couldn’t blame him. ‘You said Hans went to the German embassy in London?’
‘For a passp—’
‘You saw him there.’
I nodded. My stomach turned again.
‘He was getting his instructions,’ Walter said slowly, articulating what we both knew. ‘And delivering Bertie up to them as proof of his turning.’ Walter rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. ‘Also Rudi Formis–we think.’
I was screaming, but nothing was coming out. After a minute Walter put a hand on my shoulder.
‘Is there anything else,’ he said more gently, ‘you think we should know?’
I shook my head. The question hurt.
‘Are you sure?’
There was nothing left. We sat for a few minutes in silence.
‘They will want Bertie’s sources,’ I said, trying to pull myself together, to show some inkling of the strategic thinking I so clearly lacked. ‘But he barely has any. He gets all his information from–’
Walter cut me off. ‘It’s his
outlets
they want. They want the link between Bert and the British papers.’
It was as if a rifle sight were trained on her.
‘Bert will never give Dora to them,’ I said.
Walter breathed in sharply, running both hands over his head with his eyes closed. ‘They don’t need him to.’ He got his voice under control. ‘They have Hans for that.’
After a few moments he put his arm around me and squeezed my shoulder. He must have decided that my guilt, all that I saw but refused to see, would punish me without any help from him.
He stood, retrieved his coat from the back of a chair.
‘Dora will need to change the locks,’ I said.
Walter nodded, but we both knew that our world–Dora’s and mine and who knows who else’s–had been blown open to Them, locks now a gesture as futile as the boards over the fanlight.
‘Nothing you want to ask me?’ He was putting his satchel strap over his head.
I looked up. I couldn’t say his name.
‘Well,’ he said. ‘I’ll tell you what we know. Hans ran off from the Gestapo car at Weil am Rhein. They made a play of shooting him but no body has been produced. My guess is he’s either back in Berlin with his masters or gone to ground somewhere.’ He placed a hand on my shoulder. ‘I want you to promise me something, Ruth,’ he said. ‘If he contacts you, you let me know.’
I nodded, humiliated to have to be told to do the right thing.
In the hall Walter said, more kindly, ‘I don’t feel right leaving you alone.’ But he went anyway.
The whisky bottle was on the kitchen bench, under cabinets of a soft, unnatural green with turned-bone handles. I poured another. The plumbing flushed loudly from the communal toilet on the stairwell.
In the bathroom cabinet there were two sachets of sleeping powder in the box. I had never taken it before. I didn’t know if two would be enough. I considered the question at a distance, like a hypothetical, even as I stood there at the basin with the box in my hands. Extraordinary, really, to have the means of escape in every sleepless refugee’s cabinet: a small box with ‘Veronal: Good Nights’ written on it in cursive script. So many of us, then and later, took this way out, each into their own good night–Zweig and Hasenclever, Tucholsky and Benjamin. I needed a glass from the kitchen. But as I examined the grey face in the mirror, I failed even to have a sense of my own life as tragic enough for the gesture.
And I would not leave Dora.
Just as she would not have left me. Though it is the hardest thing, to work out one’s weight and heft in the world, to whittle down all that I am and give it a value.
I washed my face and left for the post office, to telegraph her that I was coming, and then to book a train. I walked along the median strip between the plane trees separating opposing streams of traffic. Women in suits and seamed stockings were leading dogs, taking children to run about in the
bois
. A boy on roller skates tumbled into me to brake, the mother so kind, apologetic, as if, God knows, we were all in this together, and how could she control it?
Pardon, Madame, je suis desolée. Desolée
. We are all desolated here.
There were no seats available on the ferry for two days. When I got back to the flat in Neuilly I pulled the blinds and went to bed.
In the afternoon her reply came, slipped under my door by the concierge. ‘All well here LX,’ Dora wrote. ‘Swiss investigator coming. Using your room 1 week for interviews. Please come after. Waiting for you Thurs am.’