Out of Such Darkness (22 page)

‘It’s an amazing story. What happened to your son?’

‘We lost touch after Geraldine died.’

‘That’s sad.’ Jay turned the pages of his notes. ‘This Bernie Gunther, the policeman. What happened to him?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe the authorities caught up with him. If the Russians found out he was SS
…
’ he drew a finger across his throat, ‘
…
kaput.’

‘It was amazing you got through the war.’

‘Yes, I was the great survivor … Geraldine too.’

‘It’s funny we’re talking about the past – about the Berlin you know at first hand – and you’re going to see it in the musical. How will you feel?’

He shrugs. ‘Who knows?’

‘You were part of all the things that Rabbi Stern is protesting about. You were there.’

Willy sighs and shakes his head. ‘Don’t remind me. I was young. I’m older and wiser now. I was in Oranienburg. The same prison they shot all the communists. I hated the Communists. I hated their flag but now I would stand for their right to parade it in the streets.’

‘And back then?’

He nods. ‘Maybe not so much, I admit it. But I wouldn’t have wanted them to be arrested and executed without trial. I don’t think so.’ He studies his slippered feet wedged in the stirrups of the wheelchair as if they hold an answer to thoughts that trouble him. ‘Yes I was in the Hitler Youth but after what the Nazis made me go through nobody hates the swastika more than me. How can you defend wrapping yourself in a flag? You must be able to laugh at any flag – yes, even the Stars and Stripes.’ He looks round as if he could have been overheard even though they’re alone. ‘And I only say this because you are English.’ He sniggers and wheezes.

‘So you’re coming to see my son on Saturday?’

‘Try and keep me away.’ He smiles and pats Jay’s hand.

And he’s sure the picket won’t put him off?

‘And you’re not worried by the picket?’

‘I’m old. I’m going to be scared away by a bigoted young rabbi who doesn’t know shit from Shinola? Now get out of here. I’m tired; I need to sleep.’

The first performance of
Cabaret
approaches and Ben is involved with rehearsals every afternoon after school and at weekends. His progress is the only subject that keeps Rachel and Jay communicating, this and the interference from Rabbi Stern’s congregation. The family feeds on the rabbi’s opposition. Rachel’s frost softens as the weather outside grows harsher.

The denizens of Burford Lakes go about their business with hardly a glance in the Halprins’ direction. The gentiles, Presbyterians and Baptists, Evangelicals and Episcopalians, stand alongside Rabbi Zwyck’s reform Jews in respecting that the family is taking a stand against prejudice – the prejudice of Nazism in the play and that displayed by the rabbi.

Their neighbours are anticipating the school’s Holiday production as never before. The Edlers and the Cochranes have their tickets. In the house opposite, Melissa Rosenberg sits at her computer setting up the review she’ll write for the
Buzz
. She’s already written the headline:
Jefferson Joy
. But she has a backup
Cabaret Calamity
just in case.

Ben comes home after the first performance with a make-up tide mark above his collar. There’s cuddling and congratulation while he assures his parents that it went well. They settle around the table to hear him tell his story and let his nervous tension subside. Rachel and her son have mugs of Cadbury’s drinking chocolate. Jay has a crystal glass with a finger of single malt whisky.

Ben is explaining that some cast members asked why his parents weren’t there. Rachel rests a hand on her son’s arm. ‘Maybe we should have booked tickets for
every
night as well.’

Ben dips his spoon into his drinking chocolate and licks it. ‘No! I think it’s real strange that they go every night. And Kimberley Arnott who plays Sally is going to get a bouquet from her parents every show.’

Jay snorts. ‘Let’s get this straight. What you’re saying is that all the parents of the cast members go to the show all three nights and that Kimberley’s parents take along a bouquet each time?’

Ben nods. ‘That’s what it looks like.’

Do they bring the same bouquet?

‘The same bouquet?’

Rachel laughs. ‘Jay!’

‘What d’you mean, Dad?’

‘Is it a new bouquet every night or do they put the old one in water when they get home and bring it back next day?’ He’s accentuating his dead-pan voice to emphasise that he’s being ironic but it doesn’t seem to be working.

Ben sighs. ‘I don’t know, Dad. I’ll check it out for signs of droop tomorrow?’

‘The point is, Jay, that they expected us to be there tonight. They think we should go tomorrow as well as Saturday. But I’m a Brit and I don’t care what
they
think.’ She straightens her back and lifts her chin. ‘
We
will show restraint.’ She nods in affirmation. ‘We’ll stick to our plan – Saturday only.’

‘Good,’ Jay says. He turns to Ben. ‘How was Rabbi Stern’s demo?’

‘We – the cast – didn’t see anything. They were only there for later – when the crowd arrived. They’d gone home by the time we left. It’ll be worse Saturday, though.’

‘What do you mean?’ Jay asks.

‘Well, they’re not going to be there tomorrow because it’s Friday?’ He lets the implication of this sink in. ‘But Saturday they reckon to stay outside all through the performance chanting so they’ll be heard in the auditorium.’

‘How do you know?’

‘One of the Jewish kids in our year has an older brother who’s in Stern’s crowd.’

‘But it went well tonight – your part?’ Rachel asks, not for the first time.

Ben nods. ‘Yeah. Like I said – it was good. My song ends the first half and the audience whooped and hollered – like it was the
Letterman
show on TV? There was a standing ovation at the end. You’re gonna have to let go when you come – not stay in your seats clapping politely like English people.’

Jay and Rachel look at each other and smile. Can they fake it – American exuberance? ‘We’ll see what we can do,’ Rachel says.

Jay stands and tousles his son’s hair. ‘Sounds like you did well, son. We’re proud of you.’ He tosses back the last drops of his whisky. ‘I’m for bed.’

Rachel takes the two cocoa cups to the kitchen. She calls out over her shoulder. ‘I’ll be up as soon as I’ve rinsed these.’

Next day Jay is on the telephone to Willy Keel. ‘I can pay for the taxi.’

‘You think I can’t afford a cab from White Plains?’

‘It’s not that–’

‘I make sure the car takes my wheelchair, no problem. Order it special.’

‘If you’re sure. I’ve reserved you a wheelchair space at the end of a row so you can stay in it for the performance.’

‘I could have walked to a seat.’

‘I know, but it’s easier this way.’

‘Okay. But you don’t have to worry about me.’

‘I won’t. We’ll see you at the school then, Willy.’

‘One more thing, Jay.’

‘What’s that?’

‘I’ve sent you something in the post. It’s something written by my old friend Cameron – Cameron Mortimer. It’s a kind of life-story … Berlin. It will help explain everything.’

‘What do you mean everything?’

‘I’ll tell you after the show.’

Jay puts down the phone and thinks about his new friend. Willy will be alone again when they go back to England. He’ll have only the other residents in the home for company and half of them are gaga. He wonders whether he should offer to track down Willy’s stepson. Perhaps the boy – although he’d be a man now – would like to be in contact again. After all, he should be grateful that Willy was able to give him such a good start in life.

You should interfere? Your daydream could be Willy’s nightmare.

Jay dismisses the MC’s negativity and nods. Yes, he’ll visit Willy on the Sunday after
Cabaret
, and ask him for more details. He should have thought of it while they were on the phone. Willy could have held on to the Cameron papers – whatever they are – and handed them over on Sunday. Or why not Saturday at the show?

Maybe it would be too ambitious to aim for father and son to be reunited for Christmas but even after he’s gone back to England, with them collaborating on Willy’s life story, it’s the sort of thing he could do on the Internet. It’s a project for after the show.

I trudged up the stairs to Leo’s studio when I returned to the Green House. He opened the door holding four brushes that he was cleaning with a colour-stained cloth. He looked at my face. “It didn’t go well, Cam.”

“So humiliating. The commandant was one of us – mine – you know. He gave me the impression …”

He sighed wearily, “What did you do?”

“Enough to feel very stupid and abused when he laughed in my face – just after he’d done something else in it.”

“Poor Cam. Come here.” Leo held out his arms and hugged me close to him. It was the most unselfish act I had ever experienced. He knew what I was but he was able to comfort me. And it
was
comforting to lay my head on his shoulder sobbing, taking in the scents of paint and turpentine with each wracking breath.

“What will you do?” he asked.

“I can’t stay here with these dreadful people in charge.”

“You’re right. I haven’t given up on Berlin but I rather think that Berlin has given up on us.”

A tight feeling of dread invaded my chest and wrapped itself around my heart. “I can’t abandon Wolf.”

I think you’ll have to, old man,” he said, as he patted me on the back. “We’ll see Frau Guttchen and tell her we’re leaving.

That was July 1934. There was a tearful goodbye to Frau Guttchen at the end of September and Leo and I travelled back to Blighty together. I put Wolf’s passport in an envelope with a letter giving my London address and entrusted it to Frau Guttchen. When Wolf returned he would know where to find me. Torn apart by the feeling that I was abandoning my love, I returned to life in London. Leo and I went our separate ways.

The Glass Madonna Codicil
, the Dexter Parnes I had written in Berlin, was published in 1936 and while I was waiting for it to come out I was approached by Associated Talking Pictures to write the screenplay for a film based on
The Silver Eagle Device
. All the while I pined for Wolf and I sent Frau Guttchen regular telegrams but I never heard news.

As Europe sped to war Peter Everley suggested that he could secure me a publishing deal in America and at the same time Warner Bros asked me to go to Hollywood. They liked what they had seen with the ATP’s
Eagle
and wanted me to develop a string of Parnes pictures for release as B-movies on both sides of the Atlantic.

Writing for Warner Bros was not a happy experience and the contract was rescinded by mutual consent. I entered into an agreement with Patriotic and with their scriptwriters doing the work there was no need for me to stay out west. I moved to the East Coast where I found the climate and artistic scene in New York much more conducive to my well-being and accepting of the sort of man I am. I kept Frau Guttchen aware of my whereabouts.

Then the war came and I couldn’t go back to Britain. How could I have fought against Germany? If Wolf was still alive, how could I even consider it?

So I hunkered down in New York for the duration and with Dexter Parnes VC books and movies proliferating I was able to consider moving out towards Connecticut. I had sold my brownstone and was waiting for the movers when Wolf, his wife and her son arrived on my doorstep.

Wolf never blamed me for deserting him nor for what had happened in Germany after I left. He didn’t like to talk about it but from the snippets he did share, I understood that he had been released into the army in 1937 and had reached the rank of Oberleutnant in a punishment battalion by the time war started and he had to stay in. He fought in Poland, France, Russia and France again. His survival was a miracle.

At the end of the war Wolf went back to Steinplatz and found Frau Guttchen living a life of total privation in the ruins of West Berlin where she was lucky to be in the British Sector. The Green House had survived largely intact and she had spent most of 1945 and ’46 cowering in the cellar with her neighbours. She was able to pass my letter to Wolf. The passport had expired but a wartime renewal endorsement was forged and it played a part in his escape to England.

The story of Wolf and his wife’s flight through Europe is essentially the plot for my book
The Green House Envelope
, which became the biggest grossing Dexter Parnes VC movie of all time, so there’s no need to rehearse it here. Suffice it to say they were able to travel with the boy to the United States using legitimate papers as refugees.

I owed Wolf. I had never lost the guilt about leaving him in Sachsenhausen. Giving him, his wife and stepson a secure place to live was the least I could do. So Mr and Mrs Willy Keel worked for me until Geraldine died in 1960.

The son went away to school and Wolf and I stayed together. We were never intimate in this second life. In fact, we never discussed our love. We always had Berlin but the war had damaged him.

“I have seen so much death,” he once said. “Some deaths in the camp and so many more in the war. I must have held the bodies of hundreds of comrades as they slipped away. I would sit there in the frozen mud of the Eastern Front feeling the displaced air stinging my face as the bullets or shrapnel fragments zinged close to my head, passing me but blowing apart the man next door.”

“There came a time when my comrades didn’t know whether to try and crowd into my invincible space or keep away because it was always the man next to me who took it. They all died.”

I asked him why he had married.

“She was a Jew. Did you know? God knows what she must have done to survive in Berlin.”

“Didn’t you ask?”

“Why? Why would I want to listen to her shame? I have enough of my own. I didn’t need her to tell me how much being a survivor damaged her. It was the same for both of us.”

Since that conversation with Wolf I often thought about what keeps us together – why we live the way we do. Now, now that I’m dying of the plague that has descended on my kind, it has become clear. The reason Wolf married the Jewess? The reason she married him? The reason I took Wolf, later Willy Keel, back into my life? We all had our guilt. It was the cement that kept us together. It was the guilt.

© Cameron Mortimer 1984