The Song Before It Is Sung (13 page)

Your grandfather came in from the little station at Bobitz, driven by the coachman through the snow. He looked so extraordinarily
handsome in the uniform of the 9th Infantry underneath a grey cloak with the gold chain fastening it that I couldn't believe
that the country of Ratty and Mole stood a chance. Christmas was a splendid affair; the cellars were raided and a fat goose
was served with potatoes roasted in goose fat. It's a strange thing, but at important moments all nations take comfort from
their traditional food. Later that winter we were eating squirrels and crows. But what has remained with me is the beauty
of the frozen lake, which was green, blue, turquoise and purple, stubbornly beautiful, the product of the deep, deep cold.
Your grandfather told us that he had been promoted to the rank of Lieutenant General, on the General Staff. I'll never forget
my mother saying, 'We are so proud of Papi, aren't we, children?' When Axel asked, 'Are you going to kill all the English,
Papi?' and your grandfather replied, 'I have no quarrel with the English, Axel, I am just trying to save Germany,' Axel and
the children did not understand, but I did: we were losing this war.

When the pigs were slaughtered that winter I saw the blood on the snow as the blood of our soldiers at the front, but also
the blood of the Tommies. It seemed that blood, snow, mud and the honour of Germany were inseparable.

Oh God, how sheltered and self-important we are in Oxford. And he tells Elizabeth what Axel said about Israel's Department
Store.

'Wilfred Israel was one of Axel's mentors,' she says. 'Axel helped him get people out with false papers from the Auswartiges
Amt.'

Elizabeth is troubled. She is torn by two completely irreconcilable desires, one to do something useful to try to stop what
is coming and the other, to go to her little house in Kent and live a quiet life until it is over.

Elya tells her that Axel is in Washington trying to speak to important people. Always, important people.

'Elya, don't be harsh with Axel. He's not really an intellectual like you, but then you're not really a man of action like
him.'

'Men of action have always caused trouble.'

'Don't go, Elizabeth. I apologise. It's possible I am jealous of Axel because of Rosamund and it's also true that that as
a Jew I see things from a partial position.'

There are tears in his eyes. She places a hand over his.

'I'm sorry, Elya. I'm so sorry if I hurt you. We must stick together, come what may. Axel is a great believer in the idea
that friendship transcends borders and difficulties and time.'

Mendel still cannot speak. Friendships cannot transcend borders just because Axel says so. As usual he takes refuge in high-minded
banality.

After lunch Mendel walks down to Whitehall to be interviewed for a job in intelligence. It is believed on the network that
his knowledge of Russian and German will be useful in what is to come. The interview is conducted in the country-house-mated-with-boarding-school
fashion that high civil servants favour. Elya agrees, in the event of war, to read and analyse Russian intelligence on Hitler
and to write reports for the Foreign Secretary.

On the way back to Oxford he thinks of Axel and Elizabeth outside Sachsenhausen, a few yards from evil, while he is safe in
buggering All Souls. Meanwhile Axel is on a steamer heading for New York, leaving his fiancee in Germany, on his mission -from
whom? — to talk to FDR, to save Germany from its appalling lapse of taste. Back in Oxford Mendel goes straight from the station
to see Lionel in his grand lodging, the Warden's House, and tells him what Elizabeth has said about Axel.

'You're a sentimental chap, Elya. And that is one of the many reasons we love you.'

Lionel offers him a cocktail. He has taken to the whole rigmarole surrounding cocktails. His young men like them and it amuses
Lionel that he is the only head of a college who serves them rather than the dreary sherry.

'I'm mixing a Manhattan. Would you like one, Elya?'

'All right.'

'I promise.'

'Lionel, Axel took Elizabeth to Sachsenhausen. Six thousand Jews are in there.'

'Why did they go to Sachsenhausen? They went because Axel wants to convince Elizabeth that he is not a Nazi. And because he
knows that Elizabeth will tell you, and not even God knows how many important people you will tell. I can just imagine him,
his beautiful features screwed up with concern for the human spirit, demonstrating to earnest young Elizabeth that he is a
sensitive soul in a troubled world.'

'There is another possibility, of course. In logic'

'And that would be?'

'And that would be that he isn't a Nazi and is deeply disturbed by what is happening to the Jews.'

'All those upper-class Germans want a pure, Germanic Germany. Axel may be having trouble now with the reality of achieving
this, but that is not the point. They all created the Third Reich with their fucking forests and Wagner and their silly green
clothes and their hunting horns and their Teutonic knights and their turgid poets like Stefan George.'

'Are we so different?'

'Are you speaking as an Englishman or as a Jew, Elya?'

'As an English Jew.'

'I believe we are different. Although, of course, when you are led by an ass like Chamberlain, you do find yourself wondering.
Do you know why I have taken to mixing cocktails?'

'Tired of buggery, perhaps?'

'No, Elya, I want to be usefully employed when we all run for America.'

Europe is a pantomime. Ridiculous leaders strut about in costumes they have designed. Goering clutches a jewelled baton. In
England the absurd old gentlemen who run the country are more interested in shooting grouse than in facing the problem, and
everything is on the scale and in the style of Adi's sets, fantastical and irrational.

After a week in New York he see Europe through different eyes: it is a poisonous, superstitious, deluded landscape inhabited
by the blind. Here in New York, which is enormous, vibrant and hopeful, it all seems so simple. He is consumed by a sense
of shame that his country could have thrown up Adolf Hitler and made him its leader with barely a second thought. He is desperate
to demonstrate that this is not the real Germany, but nobody is listening.

In the club car on the train to Washington, a cheerful Negro attendant brings him a Bloody Mary and a club sandwich. This
is a place that seems to live life without a need for that stultifying European introspection and snobbery and all those backward
glances. Seen from New York, Europe is exactly a pantomime: a mishmash of styles, costume and sentimentality, a farrago of
nonsensical and comic dialogue, yet full of menace. Half an hour or so before the train arrives in Union Station, another
Negro shines his shoes; he kneels in front of Axel to apply some polish and to brush the shoes, which he buffs with a soft
leather. As he works he glances up from time to time, smiling broadly. Axel gives him a big tip.

'Yessuh, thank - you - suh. I hope you have a fine stay in our great capital city, suh.'

The train pulls into Union Station. The attendant helps him with his baggage and summons a red cap.

'This boy is going to find you a cab, suh.'

'Yes, I am, suh.'

He is staying at a club to avoid the embassy, although he will have to pay his respects. The club, on New Hampshire Avenue,
has brass spittoons in the lobby, large fans turning slowly on the ceilings, and Negro servants in livery. How they smile,
how they make themselves agreeable. The club was once a mansion built for the owner of a brewery. In his room Axel lies down
on an enormous bed under a slowly rotating fan. He is soon asleep. In the morning he takes a cab to Michael Hamburger's house
near Georgetown University, where he was a professor of law before going back to Harvard in the late twenties. Later he was
a visiting professor at Oxford. Now he is back as a Supreme Court judge.

Hamburger is wearing a print shirt and capacious trousers. His house is small, red-brick and clapboard, with dark-green shutters.

'Axel, my boy, how are you? Long time no see.'

He looks like his patron FDR, with his rimless glasses and abundant grey hair. His English is more accented than Axel's although
he left Austria when he was ten years old.

'I am very well, sir. I haven't congratulated you on your appointment to the Court, sir.'

'Thank you. And now, how is Elya? I believe you saw him recently?'

'He's very well. He sends you his warmest regards. But he may be a little restless.'

'Aren't we all? Come in, come in.'

His wife, Frieda, comes to greet Axel. She has her hair tied back quite severely, but her face is extraordinarily serene,
like a nun's, as if she has had secret revelations.

'We have cake and coffee in our garden room. Come through.'

After coffee she stands up.

'I know you boys have a great deal to discuss and Michael has to get down to the Court by noon.'

Hamburger looks at Axel and shrugs.

'Strange town this, don't you think?'

'I like it. It seems so open.'

'It's just a southern town with some oversized monuments.

Now, Axel, I would like to ask you about how you found Oxford, but perhaps we should get straight to business. You wanted
to see me?'

'Sir, I wanted to explain to you firstly how I see the situation in my country and then, secondly, what steps I think the
world should take to contain Hitler.'

'Are you not working in the Auswartiges Amt, my boy?'

'I am, sir, but I want to help my country and Europe avoid a disaster.'

'Is it coming?'

'I think it is. Unless Germany is contained.'

'How can that be done?'

Hamburger settles himself into a judicial pose.

'Sir, I think Germany must be hemmed in. At the same time the German people must be given some recognition, some form of recompense
for the humiliation of Versailles, but also they must know the limits that the world will impose on any aggression.'

'What is this recompense, Axel?'

It is probable that Hamburger has already been told by Elya, and perhaps Lionel, that Axel proposes that Germany should be
allowed to bring all its kindred people under its control. He pauses before he speaks.

'What I believe, sir, is that the German people don't necessarily want Hitler, but Hitler is offering them their pride back.
It's a pact with the devil, it's Faustian, but they don't seem to realise it.'

'Do they know about the Jews?'

'To be absolutely honest, most of them think it is a good thing that Jewish influence in the law and in business and in academic
life has been lessened.'

'Lessened. What does that mean?'

Hamburger leans forward now and Axel sees that he must tread very carefully.

'It means that they believe that the Jews have had too much influence. They say, for instance, that sixty-five per cent of
all lawyers in Berlin were Jewish.'

'And how many Jews do you think are enough?'

'Sir, I have no inclination to, or indeed see no necessity, to think of Jewish Germans in any way as separate from the rest
of us.'

'But your countrymen do.'

'I think they do, many of them. But I don't believe they imagined things would go as far as they have.'

'And what is the reward the Germans should be given to get them back on the path of righteousness?'

'All the lost territories should be united under the sovereignty of Germany and the Danzig corridor should be opened.'

Hamburger is sitting in a swivel chair. He turns around and looks out of the window towards the garden for a minute at least,
before turning back.

'Grossdeutschland. That means they should keep the Sude-tenland and be allowed a free hand in Poland or anywhere else that
German is spoken. And that means in practice legitimising this regime.'

'The problem, sir, will come if Hitler moves into the rest of Czechoslovakia and Poland anyway, and France and Holland and
even England; then it will be impossible to convince the German people that they don't need him, and that he is a disaster.
Then he will be confirmed as the Leader and Superman. I beg you to express clearly to the President that is it only by containing
Hitler, by giving him limited gains, which recognise the grievances of the German people, that this disaster can be avoided.'

'Axel, write a paper, if you haven't already, and I will pass it on if I can. Most of the American people don't want to become
involved in what they see as another of Europe's wars. They don't want the government to become involved.'

'Sir, can we speak in the garden?' Axel whispers.

Hamburger looks startled. But he stands up.

'Sure.'

He takes Axel's arm as they step down into the garden, which is in an impatient transition from winter: the hostas are beginning
to produce spears that look like asparagus and timorous bulbs are poking upwards.

'What is it, Axel?'

'Sir, do you think you could arrange a meeting with the President for me?'

'Why, Axel?'

'I have a message directly from my superiors.'

'From whom?'

'From Weizacker and Haeften.'

'Can I ask you what it contains?'

'I am afraid I can only speak directly to the President.'

'That may be a tall order, but I will try. Axel, lots of Germans pass through Washington these days, people who claim to be
speaking for this or that party, the Abwehr or the Council of Churches, or, like you, for the Foreign Office. We have had
princes and captains of industry and even openly declared Nazis. So the waters are already muddied. But I will try on your
behalf. Very good luck with your speech to the Huntingford Institute. I can't be there, unfortunately.'

As Hamburger turns to go back inside, Axel stands in his way.

'Sir, unless those in Germany who want to get rid of Hitler have your support, they will never succeed.'

'I must get ready now, Axel. I am very grateful that you came and only sorry that we have no time to talk about Oxford, a
place, as you know, that I love. I'll give you a ride downtown.'

Axel waits with Frieda while Hamburger dresses; she says that Washington is beastly hot in summer; this, and the fall, are
the best seasons. The driver carries the judge's papers to the car. It's a Packard, large, black and covered in chrome, twice
as big as Axel's DKW. The passenger section has a cigar lighter and a row of large brown tortoiseshell knobs which open vents
to let air in. There is a sunshade over the windscreen like a kind of visor. Hamburger reads his papers as they drive to the
Supreme Court. They are sitting on a well-stuffed banquette, almost a sofa, covered in a pale buttoned cream material. The
car is trimmed in wood and the door handles are made of what looks like pewter. There is a small cupboard attached to the
upholstery just above Hamburger's face.

'It was a foolish letter. What I should have said was that the court system was trying to be fair under terrible duress, despite
the laws. But I was temporarily blinded: I saw a lot of smug people in England who were unsympathetic to our struggles.'

'Where do you wish to be dropped?' asks Hamburger, as they approach the Court.

'I'll walk from here, sir.'

'Good to see you again, my boy. I'll do my best.'

The car glides away. He is standing near the Library of Congress. An Austrian Jew, driven by a Negro, is in the vanishing
car. He is one of the most powerful men in America. And Axel sees what Hitler in his madness is doing to Germany: he is drawing
down the night. This is the pattern of German history, the periodic retreat into darkness. The courting of the night.

All around him the secular religion of America reproaches him for his naivety: the rule of law, the will of the people, the
equality of all men are celebrated in huge monuments. But in our benighted country Jews are being treated worse than dogs,
much worse than dogs. As FDR says, it is barely believable that such things can happen in the twentieth century. Axel knows
that, unless he can stop it, Germany will drown in blood.

And nobody is listening. Not in Oxford, not in London, not in Washington DC.

He remembers what Elizabeth said and he writes her a letter from the club.