The Song Before It Is Sung (11 page)

'Not even God.'

Elya swings his plump leg over the side of his armchair, so that he is facing Axel.

Of course Elya doesn't understand. Western Europe is a bulwark against savagery, a repository of civilised values. Germany
and England must never be set against each other and weakened.

'To be continued, dear Elya,' he shouts as he leaves the room and jumps two at a time down the stone stairs, across the quad
and out of the porter's lodge. The duty porter is startled: perhaps he has never seen anyone running in All Souls before.

'Late, I'm late,' Axel shouts.

Alone in his rooms Mendel plays a gramophone record. A yellow Deutsche Gramophon record: Furtwangler conducts Beethoven's
Ninth Symphony. Certainly if music is the touchstone Germany is the most civilised country on earth. In what sense, philosophers
ask, can a piece of music be said to have meaning? Music evokes great emotion, but does it contain meaning? And how does it
evoke emotion? This recording always causes him to feel deeply personal thoughts, linked to ideas about places and memories
of Rosamund. Nietzsche believed that music revealed the pain and suffering at the root of human existence. And what Axel would
say is that mystic experience, for example, the concept of a sacred Germany, which is a state of mind, are just as real in
their effect as this Furtwangler recording on me. I am listening to this record and my emotions are stirred, and Furtwangler
is, apparently, a Nazi. And Axel's man, Hegel, says that art contributes to the synthesis we require between the personal
and the external worlds. But the Nazis see art as particularly subversive. Art has no morality, yet art can cause people to
think about the abstract and the mystic.

The third movement is so beautiful; with the evening charged already, Elya feels himself and the world at a juncture. Beethoven
was almost deaf but gloriously defiant when he wrote this; his pain and suffering are very evident. It's not simple: Axel
is unable to distinguish this secret Germany from the actual Germany that is spinning into the abyss. And I, he thinks, cannot
separate Axel the saviour of Germany from the Axel who has had sex - how many times? — and shared intimacy of thought and
body with Rosamund, my first love. Rosamund is Jewish yet she is hopelessly in love with him still. Elizabeth, thank God,
hasn't told her that Axel proposed to her at Pleskow. There is something deeply dishonest about Axel, for all his charm and
his warmth and easy friendships. He claims to love women, but women to him are part of his domain, which is granted him of
right. Perhaps it is just the basic aristocratic instinct, unknown to Jews from Riga.

He goes down to the Common Room to eat something. The food is usually very bad. He takes a collection of Turgenev's short
stories. Reading at table is supposed to indicate that you don't want to talk, but everyone knows he is unable to stay silent.
John Plamenatz, a Montenegrin, who was elected at the same time as him, comes over.

'I just have to sit with you, Elya, in case some Englishman wants to talk to me. Englishmen make me feel very alone.'

'I am an Englishman.'

'A sort of Englishman.'

'You think I am trying, like all Jews, to make a good impression? An amateur gentile?'

'No, you've done that long ago. You've become a necessary figure . . .'

'A licensed fool.'

'No, you are a public figure, but you haven't lost your insecurity. I hear Axel von Gottberg is in town?'

'Yes, he's on an important mission.'

'Do you believe him?'

'I believe he believes he is on an important mission. This is a wonderful time for the world-historical figures to emerge.'

'Is he a Nazi?'

'I don't think he thinks he is a Nazi.'

Axel returns at eleven. He is exhilarated. The Master of Balliol and the Warden of Rhodes House have been very helpful. The
Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary have both agreed to see him. He finds Elya in his rooms reading and listening to
Beethoven. Elya lifts the spindle off the record and close the box.

'Saved the world?'

'I'm trying.'

'Did you have a good dinner?'

'Master's lodgings. Very good. The best wine, of course. And you?'

'Brown Windsor soup, a cool lamb cutlet and spotted dick. It's the price you pay for the honour of a fellowship, you eat absolute
muck. Sometimes I take the train up to London just to eat my mother's pirogi.'

'Elya, after my meetings in London I am going to Washington.'

'So you said. Are you doing it for the Auswartiges Amt or for your friends?'

'Please trust me. There are certain compromises I have been obliged to make. For the greater good.'

Elya looks at him through the round glasses. Axel knows that he is not so much thinking of what to say, as deciding what not
to say.

'Is Wilhelm Furtwangler a Nazi by conviction or out of expediency?'

'That is a strange question. I think he is confused.'

'Are you confused?'

'No. I have had to make compromises, as I said, but I am not confused.'

'What were you going to ask me?'

'When you write to Michael, whatever your doubts, please remember what I asked, that you trust me. That's all I want. Nothing
is as it seems to be.'

'Of course not. Lionel's coming over to see you. Do you mind?'

'No, not at all. I'm delighted. But don't tell him about Hamburger, please, or Balliol.'

'No. But cloak and dagger is not really our crowd, as Lionel calls it.'

'Our crowd. It's very strange how one short period in one place like this can have so much influence, don't you think? Our
crowd. In three years here I felt we were at the centre of the world. More so than I do in Berlin. Berlin, the town, seems
to be floating somewhere on the fringes of the world in a sea of unreality. Do you know the Nazis took over the department
store where we have all shopped for more than a hundred years? They just told the Israel family to go. It brought home to
my mother exactly how ruthless they are. You will say it's taken her a long time, but it's the crudeness of their thinking,
their absolutely unnecessary cruelty, that has affected her so badly.'

Axel is still buoyed up after his dinner; they talk excitedly in front of the fire, which Elya prods vigorously from time
to time, as though it is a reluctant farm animal. Elya ranges from the recent elections, to Munich, to the Jewish refugees
flooding to Hampstead. His voice is as seductive as ever, as liquid as the calling of doves in Jerusalem, and then dissolves
unexpectedly into giggles. He recites one of Lionel's scabrous poems, which concerns Penelope Betjeman's love of horses. He
quotes Turgenev saying that, though he is fascinated by radicals, he is quite unable to be one himself.

'That's me, I'm afraid,' he says. 'I have no capacity for action. All I can do is talk.'

Axel knows that behind his back people say that Elya lacks courage and is too eager to please, but Axel sees that Elya is
a product of his history: he has been uprooted and is only shallowly planted in this soil.

They hear Lionel's booming voice some time before he appears.

'I want to see my Junker friend,' he shouts. 'I want to see the duelling scars on his bottom. Let me in.'

Lionel comes crashing in. He is large and roughly carved. Axel, who is himself quite tight, can smell alcohol on him as they
embrace.

'How is life in the Third Reich?' he asks, as Elya pours him a drink.

'It's difficult.'

'I hear you have a plan. Are we allowed to know what it is?'

'No plan. Just trying to help. Elya recited to me one of your latest poems.'

'Filthy, I trust.'

'Absolutely.'

Lionel slumps in a chair. These chairs have been so battered over the years that they can be sat in from any direction. Lionel
places his large head on the worn carpet.

'Axel says, I believe, that the thing about Hitler is that he is playing on something real and that is the sense that most
Germans have that they have been treated badly. The ordinary person remembers unemployment and chaos only too well. We - you
and I - have to start from that position.'

'Elya, can you start from that position?'

'No, I've told Axel that it's not possible. I start from 1933.'

'But let's accept, Axel, as a theory, that the German people are keen to have their amour-propre restored. Then what must
we do?'

Lionel is gazing at the roof as he speaks and now he raises his head to the horizontal in order to sip his drink.

'Western Europe must acknowledge Germany's right to regain the lost lands. Then they will see that Hitler is not the only
way.'

Lionel stands up surprisingly nimbly and his drink falls to the floor.

He lurches towards the door and can be heard stumbling down the stairs. Elya and Axel are silent.

'He's drunk,' says Elya finally.

'But he meant it.'

'I'm afraid he did.'

They talk until about 3 a.m., when Axel, turning from the window, finds Elya asleep. At six, when Mendel wakes on the sofa,
he sees that Axel has gone. At eight he returns, haggard, his skin pale, his eye sockets deep and dark.

'Where have you been?'

'I've been walking around Oxford.'

'Are you all right? Lionel was drunk. He's often drunk and outrageous these days.'

'I've tried to explain. But I see I have no reserves of trust left after all.'

'You do.'

'Goodbye, Elya. I am sure I will never see you again.'

Later that morning Mendel writes to Michael Hamburger in Washington:

Nine days later, Hitler invades Czechoslovakia and Elya Mendel's nagging guilt in writing to Michael Hamburger, the President's
counsel and Supreme Court judge, warning against his friend Axel von Gottberg, is soon forgotten.

'I couldn't live in Lunnin with all them Pakistanis and such, what they call Muslims and mullahs. I don't know how you can
do it. If they don't like it, they can always go back where they came from.'

'I like them,' says Conrad.

This is not strictly true. He only knows three, one who sells him his newspaper and two who run the local tandoori takeaway,
a hatch in the wall, which he has used a lot recently.

This shuts the driver up for a while.

'Do you come down here often?'

'First time.'

'Boo-iful place, Cornwall.'

'Compared to what?'

'Well, you can just see.'

He can see very little from the back seat as they head down a deep tree-shrouded valley where the new leaves are being thrashed
by the wind. He is wearing a dark suit borrowed from Tony at the bakery, who goes to a lot of funerals. Tony says they are
dropping like flies. Conrad is not sure who he means. Tony is sorry Conrad will be moving out. He sees Conrad as something
of an exhibit, the man holed up with a thousand books and some fancy ideas, who doesn't know his arse from his elbow, despite
all the books. The books are now mostly in storage, and the flat, newly sanitised, is comparatively austere.

Francine has written him a curious letter. Her style is usually more direct, a phone call or a terse email. Now she is demanding
a face-to-face meeting. He wonders what she wants.

Conrad laughed.

'It's not funny. I'm serious.'

'You're not really, Osric. You just need a little counselling.'

They were getting drunk in a bar in Shoreditch.

Francine seems to be hinting in her letter that things are not going all that well with John. It's difficult, she writes,
both working on his team and seeing him after hours. Conrad has heard from one of her loyal friends, Kelly-Ann - women wield
the knife with great finesse — that John is finding it hard to ditch his wife because one of their children is suffering panic
attacks before her GCSE exams, which are six months off. Kelly-Ann says that Francine understands this dilemma. It's a strange
thing, this tendency to claim for oneself the higher moral ground. It's tactical rather than real and it's increasingly common,
so that people routinely excuse themselves on the grounds of their higher feelings. They are cursed, as they gravely admit,
with a more acute consciousness than other people.

By the end of the evening with Osric, Conrad had convinced him that his new aggressiveness is a product of the deep sensitivity
that drew him to journalism in the first place.

'Do you think so, mate?'

'I do, Osric'

'I'm not a psychopath?'

'No, it's just exactly people like you with deeply sensitive natures who react in this way to the problem of evil, when they
see it close up. It's known as Fellgiebel syndrome.'

Osric spent the night on the sofa in the flat above the bakery and woke in the morning hung-over but calmer.

'What was that syndrome you mentioned?'

'Fellgiebel syndrome.'

'You're not bullshitting?'

'No, of course I'm not. Google it. You're one of my oldest mates.'

'The Editor offered me a three-month sabbatical.'

'Take it.'

'It may be too late. I told him to stuff it.'

'I doubt if it's too late.'

'What are you doing today?'

'I'm going to a funeral.'

'Sounds like fun. So fun.'

The taxi pulls up at a bed and breakfast outside Padstow. The rain comes down solidly: there is absolutely no hint that it
might ever stop, not in this winter nor in this century. You don't get rain like this in London. Yet no sooner has he been
shown to his room by a small, taciturn man with heavy Celtic eyebrows than through the window he sees that the rain has stopped
and Elizabeth's beloved bay has become a flow of molten pewter, wrinkled and creased, moving determinedly and rhythmically
out to sea. Von Gottberg wrote to Elizabeth about landscapes that became precious because you were happy there. We long for
our lost innocence, first love, for instance, so that we come to believe that there is a causal connection between the landscape
and our innocence. This is why the seaside has so powerful a hold, and why Rosamund and Elizabeth brought their friends here.
And why Elizabeth wanted to be buried here. Von Gottberg sometimes spoke of the island of Poel as a landscape of childhood,
his mother's family's summer home, where they spent happy holidays.

Conrad shares von Gottberg's sense that seawater and fresh air are almost spiritual. His own father, before his downfall,
had been a cheerful man who preached the virtues of seawater: it worked both on the temperament and the sinuses. The last
funeral Conrad went to was his father's, six years ago. Two years after Mandela's release from jail, it was shown that his
father had been accepting money from the government to back the opposition to the ANC. Some of the stories were planted by
the security services. When he last saw his father alive, he was living in a small grim house near the sea, right on the railway
line before it reaches Simons Town. When he asked his father why he had done it, he said: 'I've never believed in saints.
Or arse-licking.'

'But, Dad, some of the stories you printed were untrue.'

'Do you think that the true stories were true? The outgoing government were bastards. The new ones are no better. You'll see.
Just different forms of dishonesty.'

'They say you took money.'

'The newspaper took money for our educational foundation. We used it for scholarships for journalists to study in England
and America. I saw it as a form of redistribution. My theory was that the lies on each side were about equal. You know that
history is always written by the victors. It was true, by the way, that certain of our new rulers were in the pay of the government
or the KGB when they were in exile. God help anyone who says it now that his son is living among us.'

So these are the reasons for Conrad's presence here: the bisecting of lives, Conrad's, his father's, von Gottberg's, Mendel's,
Elizabeth's and Rosamund's, linked by seawater, landscape, lies and delusion; and it is his task to give a coherent account
of these lives, and so perhaps of his own. His father's way of making some sense of his life after his disgrace was to depict
himself as an iconoclast, even an anarchist, against all forms of sycophancy and presumption. Conrad remembers him telling
his mother that the security police had delivered a dead dog to his office. His father thought it was hilarious, but Conrad,
aged eleven, was devastated. He wondered, too, how the dog had died. A few months later his mother died of breast cancer and
the two deaths seemed to be related in some way.

That night he sees the lighthouse signalling from Trevose Head out into the night. There is something about lighthouses, now
doomed, that touches us deeply. It's probably the blind, hopeful attempt to reassure small fragile boats; lighthouses offer
their steady pulse of light against the utter unpredictability of the sea; it's an offer of safety. He goes to bed between
slippery purple sheets. Outside he can hear the implacable sea, groaning and chafing on the shore. The beam of the lighthouse
just touches the top corner of his window and for a moment the lace curtain flares.

She licks her glossed lips before reading:

Later, after a wheezy hymn, the second girl takes her turn at the lectern. She holds a piece of paper up briefly, the evidence.

'Great-Granny Elizabeth asked that this letter be read at her funeral. It is from Axel von Gottberg, and it is dated August
1944.'

The small group of mourners, including Conrad, is deeply affected by the two readings; the unmistakable sap-rising sexual
quality of the two girls, their express contrast with the exhausted, harrowed old people, the keen appeal to their shaky hope
that their lives may have had purpose, and the suggestion that their lives in addition may have had poetry; and then the final
churning declaration of love for Axel von Gottberg, an authentic modern martyr. All this is overwhelming. Conrad is the last
to leave the church behind the coffin on its short trip to the churchyard. He stands riven some distance from the others as
the coffin is lowered. The two girls embrace each other and he cannot avoid seeing that their buttocks are lean and nervous.
He feels the connection between sex and death sharply and personally.