The Dower House (35 page)

‘Here,' he said when they broke.

‘What?'

He fumbled in his pocket. ‘My mother's engagement ring – now yours. Hand!'

The moment it was on her finger she flung her arms around him and hugged herself tight into his chest. ‘So precious,' she whispered.

‘Nothing like so precious as you.'

She broke from him and held her hands up to his face, palms to his nostrils. ‘Smell that,' she said – then immediately plucked them away and, bunching them into a tight fist, said, ‘No! I'm sorry.'

‘What?' he asked.

‘Nothing.'

But he had already caught a whiff of what she had wanted him to smell. Gently he took her wrists between thumb and one finger and raised them again to his face. As in a trance, she watched him unfold them, finger by finger, and press them to him. He sniffed deeply, then closed his eyes and murmured, ‘My God! That's it! That's it!' He opened his eyes again. ‘What is it?'

‘Wild geranium.' She let her hands fall to her side and gestured vaguely to a clump growing above the tideline. ‘A mad woman once told me that if I ever needed to remind myself how the
KL
smelled, just crush geranium leaves. At least I thought she was mad then . . . now . . . I'm not so sure.'

‘It's exact,' he said. ‘Wash it off.'

They went down to the water's edge, where she slipped off the ring and handed it for him to hold while she used wet sand to scour her hands clean again.

They kissed and he replaced the ring on her finger. ‘It looks a bit loose to me.'

‘It's fine. Food parcels from Germany will take care of that.'

They took a few aimless steps while she held her hand splayed before them, admiring the simple gold band. ‘I met Herr Sanders,' she said.

‘And?'

‘He asked if you were the son they thought had died in a
KL
– the famous artist. I said you were and he said thank God you survived. So they never told him you survived! Anyway, I asked what he thought about the others – the
millions
who didn't survive. He just shook his head. He was too choked to speak.'

Felix sensed she had not finished but he did not press her. At length she continued, ‘I told him I was an
SS
-
Führerin
 . . .'

‘You didn't!'

‘I wanted to see if he'd change his tune. But he didn't. He actually backed away from me. So then I said I protested at the
Vernichtung
and they put me in Ravensbrück, and d'you know what he said?'

‘What?'

‘He shook my hand and said, “So you spoke out in time!” I just laughed and said my little gesture didn't save a single life, and he said, “That's not what speaking out in time means. It's when you
suffer
for speaking out – that's what matters. You spoke out in time to suffer. And now the rest of us must suffer for
not
speaking out.” D'you think he's right?'

Felix gave the easy answer: ‘In your case, yes.'

‘I told him something Nicole once said to me, which was . . . we were talking about resistance to the Nazis and she said it was like standing at the edge of a vast marsh, a horizon-to-horizon marsh, and shooting arrows into it at random. In the dark. The pleasure . . . no, the
reward
was simply in firing off the arrows. It didn't really matter whether they hit anything or not. You just had to keep firing. And hoping.'

‘Let's walk – or d'you want to go back to . . . ?' He nodded toward the house he could not quite call home.

‘Walk. I want to hear what happened.'

‘Then you should have stayed!'

She dug him sharply with her elbow. ‘Why d'you say Sanders was right “in my case”? Don't you think he was right in your case, too?'

‘I never spoke out – not in any situation where I'd suffer for it. I took great care not to. So I was like any other German – and a good many French and Poles and Dutchmen. And Italians, too.'

She swept a hand vaguely out toward the sea, much as to say,
What's the point?
‘Anyway,' she went on, ‘tell me all about it – this unexpected reunion.'

After a pause he said, ‘Vati didn't know we are Jewish. Were Jewish.'

‘Until they arrested
him
?'

‘No. He got warning from someone in the Brown House. Anyway – we both got away. When I first read those letters, it intrigued me to think that while I'd been on the run in the south of France – after the Nazis occupied the whole country and we couldn't rely on the corruption of the Vichy authorities – Vati had been undergoing a similar ordeal in occupied Denmark. But it's more amazing still. Listen! We both had false papers in the name of Brandt!'

‘Someone you know?'

‘No!
That's
the extraordinary thing. We each chose it out of the blue. It held no special significance for either of us.'

‘Apart from being close enough to Breit for you to answer to it – without much hesitation, that is.'

‘Well . . . yes,' he conceded. ‘There is that.'

She giggled. ‘Sorry. Am I spoiling it? I won't say another word.'

‘My father has learned – this was only last year – he's learned how old Billy Breit – born Solomon Breit – became Christianized. My great-grandparents, about whom we know nothing, were wealthy Orthodox Jews living in Berlin and, because they couldn't even turn on a light switch on the Sabbath, they employed Christian servants, who could break all those old laws for them. And so baby Solomon had a young Catholic nursemaid. And when he got whooping cough or measles or something, the girl got in a panic at the thought that this little baby whom she loved was going to spend all eternity in hell if he died. So she asked her priest what to do and he told her how to baptize the baby. Which she did. He lived, of course, but the priest then invoked the law, which said that a baptized Christian child could not be brought up by Jews. And they seized him. The priest came with a squad of police and they seized him. And they put him for adoption with a violently evangelical Protestant couple – childless . . .'

‘Protestant?'

‘I'm sure money changed hands. Anyway, they brought him up as Billy Breit, the famous artist and anti-Semite. It took half a dozen words and a splash of water to make him Christian but it took five kilos of the Nuremberg Laws and the most ruthless bureaucracy in history to turn us back into Jews again. Funny old world.'

They had reached the northern end of the beach, where municipal sand gave way to heathland; there they turned and strolled slowly back again. She was silent so long that he was at last forced to say, ‘Well?'

‘I don't want to come back to Germany for quite a while,' she said. ‘Certainly not to live.'

He gave a baffled laugh. ‘Was that ever on the cards?'

‘It was at the back of my mind before we set out from London – and still just about possible in Paris, even after . . . you know – the Eiffel Tower.'

‘We both have a much brighter future in England. In London – don't you think?'

‘Yes, of course, but apart from that . . . I mean, seeing the way Germany is recovering now . . . when I left, they were defeated. Now they're realizing that actually it wasn't defeat but liberation. The Allies liberated us just like they liberated France and Holland and so on. And it seems obvious to me that liberated France and liberated Germany, or half-Germany, are going to dominate the rest of Europe. The English have no idea. At the
BBC
I can listen to the news from anywhere, not just what they distil for British ears. But even I had no idea how things really were until this trip. You heard how young Treite speaks. That's the voice of the new Germany. It shocked me. I thought it would be decades before any German would speak like that again. But the English don't listen to foreign news at all. They have absolutely no idea of what's going to happen here in Europe. They
must
wake up! They must join in. They must make a balance between France and Germany in the new Europe or it will all go wrong again. The state will triumph over the individual.'

Felix stared out across the sea, to the horizon that hid Denmark. Was this going to be their first serious quarrel?

She pressed him for an answer . . . some word of agreement.

‘Include me out!' he said, aping Willard. ‘The English will never belong in Europe.'

‘Not immediately. But eventually they must.'

‘They
ought
to, but they won't. Ever. The mentality of a nation that has only ever been the conqueror has no place among nations whose history has alternated between victory and defeat.' He laughed drily. ‘If we try to convert them, we'll just be known as The Breit Bores!'

She shook her head. ‘Only if we go about it crudely. Not go for conversions – just . . . bearing witness.'

Friday, 10 October 1947

A week later, on the train back to Cologne, and thence to Paris, Felix took out the Wannsee transcript and said, ‘You came all the way to collect this, and you haven't even looked at it.'

‘I know what's in it,' she said. ‘Of course, I always did know – in general . . . a fading memory. But seeing it again, exactly as I typed it, has brought it all back. And now I don't think I can.'

‘Because?'

She sighed and it was a long time before she answered. ‘Because . . . because one day, when I was delivering some tapes from Giesebrechtstrasse to B-IV, I went to the Ladies and there was a Jewess there – part of some liaison or welfare committee. You know how the Nazis liked the Jews to administer as much of the resettlement programme as possible – because it gave confidence to the proceedings. I assume she was on one of those committees. She had an escort, of course, but that woman was in one of the toilets. I could just have whispered, “Don't believe in
Resettlement
– it's a cover-name for
Vernichtung
.” I could.'

‘And risk her shouting, “What? What are you saying?” . . . Or just the give-away look on her face when her escort came out? Or her telling everyone on the committee and word of it getting back to the Gestapo, who would trace it back to you? Or—'

‘Felix!'

‘What?'

‘Darling! Of course
all
those objections raced through my mind at the time, but whenever I thought about it afterwards, I could never be sure that I didn't simply fail to overcome a decade of Nazi indoctrination . . . that I could not risk my life for a bloody
Jew
!' After a pause she added, ‘And that suspicion would haunt me through every single page of this transcript. Anyway – just holding it in my hand . . . smelling the paper . . . official German paper had a particular smell in the war. Have a sniff. That takes me right back, so I don't actually
need
to read it again.'

He sniffed the paper and said, ‘God, you're right.'

He settled back and opened the package.

A verbatim protocol of a meeting held at Interpol Headquarters, Am Großen Wannsee 56/58 on January 20, 1942, secretly recorded on tape and wax by me,
-Führerin Angela Wirth, on the orders of
-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich. This transcription from that tape was made without his knowledge and the tape itself was made without the knowledge of any of the participants.

It is now my intention to convey it, through certain channels, to a neutral embassy, so that it may become known to the world.

Angela Wirth

1 March, 1942

[In the anteroom – a meeting exclusively of the
SS
]