Authors: Anna Funder
At Dachau I managed to negotiate a ceasefire with the forces from Berlin. But that same afternoon, from over on our side, a saboteur started firing. That gave the Whites their excuse. One hundred thousand of them stormed into Munich against us. Our rag-tag troops, half armed and slipshod and hungry, numbered at most a fifth of that. It was May 1919, and the blood ran in the streets. Most of our leaders were slaughtered. I would have been too, but friends persuaded me to hide in their homes.
And for this I first became famous: Red Toller rides into battle against the Whites! But I was never a communist, I was an Independent, and I was not riding into battle, but to sue for peace. Like all the reasons for my fame, it does not quite square with the truth. From the minute I put those wads in my shoes I have never been able to get the public Toller to sit faithfully on the facts of the private one.
The WANTED poster of me was up on bollards and lampposts and train stations all over Bavaria, plastered over my proclamations. My supporters defaced it. I pitched in and defaced myself, growing a beard and dyeing my hair red with peroxide so I no longer matched it. When I caught myself reflected in a shop window I saw a crazed John the Baptist and averted my eyes.
An artist offered me sanctuary. I spent three weeks in a cupboard behind a false wall at his house in Schwabing while the Berlin forces continued murdering our leaders. In my head everything that had happened, that was still happening outside, whistled and whirred. Some poor detective had the misfortune to resemble me. When he rang the bell at a flat looking for me the owner shot him dead on the spot. Newspapers reported my demise–my driver identified my corpse at the mortuary. When my mother read of it in Samotschin she sat for three days on a low stool, surrounded by shrouded mirrors, and mourned.
In the end they came to the artist’s house, knocked on its walls and found me. But those three weeks saved my life. I got a trial; Albert Einstein, Thomas Mann and Theodor Lessing came to vouch for the honourable motives of the revolution, and for my integrity, if not my political acumen. I was sentenced to five years.
Clara has been sitting quietly in the other comfortable chair.
‘What we couldn’t know back then,’ I continue, ‘is that on the night right back at the beginning of it all when the workers and soldiers elected Eisner our leader in the huge Mathäserbräu beer hall, the night that he proclaimed the Republic of Bavaria, if we had looked closely among the faces on the bench seats we would have seen in a corner an undistinguished, jowly returned corporal, not drinking but watching.’ I tell her how this man seethed at Germany’s defeat, denied the Kaiser’s responsibility for the war and its loss. Instead he blamed progressive Jews, pacifists and intellectuals for bringing Germany to her knees–we who had been left to clean up the mess when the government responsible for it fled.
‘In 1923, while I was in prison, this man, Hitler, tried to take over Bavaria by force. He was given a lenient sentence with privileges. Actually, you might take this down.’
She readies her pencil. I clear my throat.
‘It is a revolving-door system in Germany; the prisons of the twentieth century connect one regime or revolution with the one that follows and crushes it. Leftists and rightists have intimate knowledge of the same cells, mop up each other’s blood. We could leave generations of graffiti messages scratched into the limewash, argument and counter-argument, and maybe in a thousand years an answer would be there for all to read.’
I watch Clara’s lips silently shape the words I have just spoken, as she takes them down in her strange, curly marks.
‘Now,’ I tell her, ‘Hitler is rekindling the war. He wants the victory he felt we took from him. He’s made a list, and he is working through it.’
She puts a hand up to her mouth, then removes it. Her wrists are slender, somehow familiar. ‘So,’ she says, ‘you are on the front line. Again.’
I look out the window. In the park there’s a hot-dog cart with balloons attached to it, and rainbow whirligigs for the children. ‘Hardly.’
There is still light in the sky, but it’s time for Clara to go. She and her husband Joseph are living with his cousin, in a small place on the Lower East Side. Joseph was second violinist in the Cologne orchestra but he has not found work yet, and he waits each day for her to come home.
And then I know. I get up so fast the chair behind me tips back onto the carpet. ‘I need to go home!’
Clara looks stricken.
‘I mean England–not home, of course. Can you book me a passage. Tomorrow?’
She is waiting, hoping I’ll make more sense, come back to her.
‘Not to
go
tomorrow! For, say, next Friday. Yes–that gives us a week. If you book we can pay in a couple of days. I’ll find some money, somewhere.’
‘All right,’ she says slowly. This is not how she thought things would go here. But I am now galvanised with purpose. Her green eyes follow me around the room.
‘You should come tonight, then. To say farewell.’ Clara says this in a measured voice, the voice of someone aware that their efforts, though appreciated, will likely come to nothing. ‘They would love to see you–’ she closes her bag and looks up at me–‘before you go.’
Since Christiane left me, Clara has been trying to get me ‘out of myself’. I’m not being very cooperative. (Though if I believed this were literally possible, I’d do anything she said.) Lately, her efforts have taken the form of urging me to meet with my refugee friends–George Grosz, Klaus and Erika Mann, Kurt Rosenfeld–at their Thursday gatherings at Epstein’s restaurant downtown.
‘Good idea,’ I say, rubbing my hands together and smiling.
This day has decided to be full-throated and beautiful. Shadows are sharp on the road out front; everything throwing its shape around. Workmen in blue singlets and Blundstone boots traipse in and out of next door.
In 1952, when I bought this house, Bondi Junction was cheap, a place of lazy Californian bungalows, cars in side driveways and street cricket. Now all around me homes are being bull-dozed on million-dollar blocks; new glazed bunkers for peering at the ocean over steel-rimmed balconies are being erected to the boundaries, dwarfing me in my house like a relic from another time. Bejewelled real-estate vultures circle about in BMWs, put cards and letters in my box. They are waiting to match my death notice to their title search, to whip out the Deceased Estate signs they have preprepared in the boot and plant them, triumphant, all over my lawn. Get your piece of
Lebensraum
! they might as well cry. A
Platz an der Sonne
going for a song!
But they will not win. The beauty of this city is too elemental, too fecund and raw, to be tamed by mere money. Though the financiers and bankers and dot.com millionaires hug the shoreline, their topiary palaces and towered developments will never conquer this landscape. Bougainvillea and wisteria, ficus and monstera treat it all just as food and trellis and will, if unchecked, devour the lot. And there, smack in the middle, the sparkling, billowing harbour–the earth is alive here. This beauty is a force, and it will never lose.
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.