Read The Song Before It Is Sung Online
Authors: Justin Cartwright
As Axel sat with Elizabeth gazing at the electrified fence, the tower, the prison blocks of Sachsenhausen, had he realised
at last what he was up against in this world?
Was it possible for them to imagine what was coming? Mendel discovered very early on that awful things were in process, while
von Gottberg still chose to believe in the new order that was coming in Germany. But did he lose his faith outside Sachsenhausen?
Did he forsake
the fable of blood and desire?
After Elizabeth rejected him, after his Oxford friends turned away, and after the FBI trailed him in Washington, Axel von
Gottberg came back to Germany and later that year, four weeks after war was declared, married Dietlof Goetz's sister, Liselotte,
in the Pleskow village church. All the foresters and cowmen still left on the estate, formally dressed, and the village women
and children in their Sunday clothes, formed a guard of honour and threw flowers from their gardens in their way as Wicht
the coachman drove them from the church to the house in the shooting brake, which was garlanded with flowers. Pulling the
brake were the black and grey horses, Donner and Blitz.
In the pictures von Gottberg looks happy enough. Axel's best man is his brother, Berndt, who was to describe him as a traitorous
dog less than four years later. Berndt has a duelling scar beside his mouth, which seems comical, even absurd to Conrad. Von
Gottberg's father is not present, but in the formal wedding photograph his sisters and his mother sit on either side of the
bride and groom, with scores of relatives all around. Upper-class people have extensive family ties, and their members are
summoned for these occasions: like tastefully dressed migratory birds, they obey the summons. Within two months Liselotte
is pregnant.
Everyone who has children says your life changes, nothing prepares you for the reality. But also having children can be self-centred.
Some of Conrad's friends imagine that they have become creators, they have been trusted to keep the sacred flame alight:
zeugen,
to beget, which was a big idea with the German poets. They would beget a new society.
Later that afternoon before Emily has to go to pick up the children from school, which Conrad imagines is besieged every afternoon
by huge four-wheel-drive vehicles until the tiny hostages are released, showered with lavish praise and equipped with their
suspiciously accomplished works of art, she comes to the flat above the bakery. She is drunk.
'I had lunch with an old chum,' she explains cheerfully.
She has to take a phone call in the middle of their love-making. She is lying on her side and he is behind her. The shape
of her back and thighs seems to be expressly formed for this. The conversation is short and tense. Quickly she gets up and
dresses.
'Sorry, got to go. Love ya loads,' she says, fastening her skirt and then running her hands through her hair.
She bangs the door shut. Perhaps one of the children is ill or perhaps the mysterious Dion requires something of her. His
penis has responded modestly, by retreating into itself. It's a defensive posture. Very strange how it seems not wholly dependent,
like a small country whose foreign affairs are managed by a bigger, more sensible state. Like Andorra or Monaco or San Marino.
Conrad considers his life, so changed in a few days. He is sexually involved with a whacked Chelsea girl (girl-woman would
be more accurate); his wife is pregnant and hoping for reconciliation; it is possible he is a father. Also a man called Ernst
Fritsch claims to have knowledge of the film of Axel von Gottberg being hanged. There is no obvious link between any of these
facts. The flat has been quiet for weeks, just the papers and letters moving and drifting, but now the place is the focus
of energy, like those lay lines that new-age folk believe bisect the country at key places.
When he comes back with some milk and stamps, Tony steps out.
'Your bird was in a hurry.'
'She had to pick up her son from school.'
'She weren't properly dressed, you dog.'
'Jesus, Tony. Stick to baking.'
'Hehwah. I've got a nice focaccia for you. You got to keep your stremf up, mate.'
In Tony's eyes he's gone from recluse to dirty dog: Fuck a rat, it's the quiet ones you gotta watch out for.
The Bangladeshi who owns the corner shop is growing a beard. On the early evidence the plan seems to be to grow it straight
down and untended in the religious fashion; back in the flat he wonders why it is that people are always looking for the incorrigible
proposition. He remembers Mendel telling him that he took great comfort from the idea that life has no meaning. It frees you
from irrational practices, like growing a beard as a billboard for your views.
Emily's Holly Golightly behaviour does not trouble him. For the moment the arrangement, unclear though it is, suits him fine.
She calls, very cheerful, and suggests they carry on later where they left off.
'OK. I'm just going through the papers. I may have to go to Berlin soon.'
'Cool. They have some great clubs there. They really, really know how to party.'
In her world cities have no historical or artistic resonance; they are simply places to go and get mashed. Having a laugh
is an imperative for these people: they fall off ski lifts; they run their jet-skis on to coral after too many rum punches.
And they get off their faces in clubs in Berlin. So he imagines.
He starts writing a letter to Mr Fritsch, using his dictionary. He intends to say that he would be very much interested in
meeting Mr Fritsch to discuss the filming both of the People's Court and the executions. Could Mr Fritsch suggest a suitable
place to meet? He will discuss financial matters when he knows what Mr Fritsch is suggesting. He wants to check his German
with a friend, but he decides he must keep his enquiries secret. He writes:
Sehr Geehrter Herrn Fritsch, Ich bedanke ihnen für ihre Brief. Das ist für mir, wie historicher Forscher, sehr bedeutend.
Darf ich bei ihnen in Berlin eine Besuch machen? Wenn siefilr mich etwas zeigen kann, dan kann wir uber Finanzen besprechung.
Mit freundlichen Grüssen.
Conrad thinks it is important to mention money right away: he imagines Ernst Fritsch in an East Berlin tenement desperate
for some cash. As a Nazi he would not have received a pension and life in the new Germany is hard for the Ossis anyway. He
seals the envelope and goes out again to post it, hoping it is not too full of errors.
He remembers Mendel writing that to be understood you have to share a common language and have the possibility of intimate
communication. By the time war broke out, it seems that the plea von Gottberg had made for trust was misunderstood. But also
it became starkly apparent that he and Mendel shared neither a common past nor common feelings.
WHEN BRITAIN AND France declared war on Germany on 3 September 1939, Oxford lost colour. It faded like an old carpet. For
Elya Mendel the finer points of academic philosophy seemed not only trivial, but even ridiculous now. Other young dons were
leaving town as officers, but he was not able to apply because of his foreign birth. He tried to take up the Foreign Office's
offer of work, but they seemed to have forgotten him. He waited in Oxford, reporting to the Town Hall to roll bandages and
check gas masks while the Foreign Office went through its checks. His birth in Riga was a handicap. He thought of moving to
the United States; he was frightened of what might happen to him if the Nazi invasion took place. He wrote to Hamburger suggesting
that some institution might be persuaded to employ him.
It was a miserable winter. His rooms were always cold and Oxford, despite Lionel's crazed bonhomie, appeared to be sinking
into depression. Then he received a letter from the Foreign Office saying that it did not wish to employ him in any capacity.
For a week he remained in bed. But — as Conrad sees so often in the correspondence — some important figure intervened on his
behalf and he was asked to go to London after all to advise the Russian section. He wrote to Hamburger that he was scared
of bombs, but went to work in London with joy. He had been shaken by his rejection, which was the confirmation of his foreignness
even though he was a fellow of All Souls.
My parents saw All Souls as their own acceptance in England. I haven't dared tell them that my first six years in Riga have
returned me to the ranks of the alien. Nothing like a war for the noxious gases to seep out of the cracks.
There is no mention of von Gottberg. The start of war was evidently the end of understanding. It may have been convenient,
in the same way that families can forget after a bereavement, each member seeing for their own reasons an opportunity for
an overdue dissolution of ties, something that happened at high speed when Conrad's mother died. He thinks that for Mendel
the threat to the Jews was sufficient reason to forget his old pal. It was a threat that von Gottberg had fostered in a small
way with his ill-advised letter. Von Gottberg was aware that he had lost Mendel's cherished esteem and he almost certainly
knew that Mendel had briefed against him in Washington.
Conrad, living in the mouse-nibbled margins of London just a few minutes from great wealth and imposing solidity, sees the
city not as home, but as a huge agglomeration of human frailty and greed, held in uneasy suspension. We live by assumptions
which in reality we know nothing of, but our faith is as firm as that of religious fundamentalists. War demonstrates - perhaps
it's designed to demonstrate - that we should not take any assumptions for granted. Elya Mendel was particularly sensitive
to the terrible possibilities of history, while for von Gottberg six hundred uninterrupted years in Pleskow must have suggested
something entirely different. For a Jew, six hundred settled years are an eternity.
Conrad has never felt settled in London. Wherever his home is, it is not here. London is too big, too burdened, to be held
in the mind whole. He doesn't really know how planets work, but he sees London as a gaseous body bound together in some mysterious
fashion like a planet.
The mystery of Emily's life is being revealed: Dion, who calls menacingly, is her drugs counsellor. He is himself a recovering
addict. Crack was his downfall, apparently. Emily thinks of drug addictions as somehow honourable, a sign of higher striving.
Dion has become a zealot for living clean, as he puts it. He has a hold over Emily, established when she was in rehab. She
probably had sex with him; she seems to have had a lot of sex. In theory it doesn't worry him, but in practice he finds he
wants to know not how many she has slept with, but on what basis she makes her choices. Their first encounter suggests that
she doesn't need much evidence at all. What was it she saw, or glimpsed, in him? Whacked though she is, he has become very
fond of her. Her calm, practical sexual expertise is at odds with her girlish, upbeat manner. It's as though all the categories
in her world have blurred, so that life is now one long, looped film containing sex, drink, marijuana, ex-boyfriends, music,
inchoate creative impulses -poetry, screenplays, painting are mentioned - all these melding into a whole that keeps revolving
seamlessly.
And sometimes at night Conrad finds that his picture of the People's Court is like that too, played endlessly, as von Gottberg
stands with his hands crossed speaking calmly and quietly, crossing his hands again, then speaking calmly again. These few
minutes go round and round and they are unbearable because Conrad knows and von Gottberg knows that if the film stops he will
be slowly hanged from a meat-hook, whatever he says, however considerate his demeanour. But something sustains von Gottberg
and makes him calm. Even though he has small children and a young wife, and despite the fact that he has been tortured. And
this is a mystery.
While von Gottberg was establishing himself in Berlin, his new wife stayed at Pleskow. She was welcomed by the family, especially
warmly by von Gottberg's older sister, Adelheid, whose first marriage ended when her Jewish husband went insane in New York.
He had been taken to Bellevue one night after he set their apartment on the Upper East Side alight. Adelheid told her new
sister-in-law that the sight of her husband in handcuffs being pushed into a Black Maria had broken her heart. A financial
blunder had unhinged him. At least he wasn't going to come back to Germany to face another kind of madness. Adi had visited
him in Bellevue where he sat silent. Axel had visited him more recently in New York and reported that he did not recognise
him. The doctors had given him a new treatment, electro-convulsive therapy.
Von Gottberg took a small flat near the zoo and sometimes, when he had to go to the main building in Wilhelmstrasse, walked
the whole length of the Tiergarten, passing at last beneath the quadriga on the Brandenburg Gate. He went back to Pleskow
when he could, taking the train to Schwerin to be met by the coachman; or sometimes he drove up in his car. His spirits always
lifted as the house came into view, firstly across the lake, and then as they turned into the drive, by the oaks and the huge
barns. The first thing he did when it was not too cold was to swim in the lake. The water had a unique taste and smelled of
gently decomposing vegetable matter and aquatic plants, a scent that took him instantly to his childhood. Lake water, his
own lake too. Next to the bathing hut was a wooden tea-house and there he and Liselotte, his mother and his sisters would
meet over English tea. Liselotte said that there was always laughter and music although Axel was gloomy about the war. The
panzer rush through Belgium and into France would make it more difficult to remove Hitler, he said.
Von Gottberg's life in Berlin was increasingly dangerous as he sought out others — there were many — who thought that Hitler
was steering the beloved country to disaster. But he enjoyed the danger; he was a young man, plotting to save his country;
he found the late-night discussions with like-minded colleagues in the Foreign Office and the Army and his meetings with Helmuth
James von Moltke and his circle, his
Krets,
exhilarating. He was forming the idea of an alternative Germany of spiritually conscious people, enlightened Germany, which
would inherit when Hitler was gone. His friends in England did not understand; they wished to crush Nazi Germany into the
dust. But they didn't realise that by saying this they were offering the German people no option but to stick with Hitler.
He couldn't tell his family the details, but he was travelling to Sweden and Switzerland to pass on to the governments of
Britain and America the information that there was an opposition that should be encouraged. He also passed on plans of annexations
and invasions. Meanwhile, more and more reports of brutal killings by
Einsatzgruppen
were coming out and these too were passed on. In the spring von Gottberg went again to Sweden to met an English bishop, with
details of the opposition in the Army and the Foreign Office, for onward transmission to Churchill. Soon after he met a young
officer called Claus von Stauffenberg and reported to Liselotte that he had at last found a true friend.
The two cities, London and Berlin, where the old friends now found themselves, were sexually charged by war. With death in
the air, sex scuttles in to fill the vacuum. Women stopped wearing hats all of a sudden, as if hats were keeping them down.
Hair and sex became synonymous. Von Gottberg believed that casual sex with other men's wives or with girls he picked up in
nightclubs or with waitresses in Kurfürstendamm did not count as adultery. And in London, Mendel found that he could translate
his charm and urbanity into sexual activity. Women were liberated by the sense that the old world, for better or for worse,
was finished.
Kaputt.
Von Gottberg was working under enormous danger right from the beginning. He was never able to write a letter or use the phone
or tell the names of his closest friends to other friends, for fear that when the reckoning came they would tell all. It was
quite different in Whitehall, where Mendel treated his fortnightly digest of Russian intelligence as an essay. Very soon colleagues
were talking of the brilliance and wit of his observations about Russian intentions; without demonstrating too much learning
-never a good idea - he was able to suggest from his deep knowledge of Russian literature and history how the Russians would
react.
In the Kreisau Circle there were endless arguments on matters of principle about whether Hitler could legitimately be killed,
and about the attitude of the members to the threat from the East and the composition of the new government. Von Gottberg
warned of the dangers of trying to restore a monarchy, or of allowing the proposed putsch to be the property of the
Alte Herren
of the Army and the aristocracy. England would not be keen on such a thing, he said. He was probably remembering Mendel's
warning about the high-handed member of the Prussian aristocracy who had visited Oxford and caused outrage. Von Gottberg tended
to see England and Oxford as the same thing.
Conrad sits above the bakery waiting for Fritsch. If Fritsch has anything for him he will go immediately to Berlin. What happens
next depends on Fritsch. This old man - he pictures Fritsch as a sickly, shabby figure, trying to make a few euros out of
his sordid past - may have the film or may know where it is. If he has been harbouring it for all these years it is probably
only because of a sense of shame that he has not tried to sell it before. After all, he saw men being hanged. Or perhaps Fritsch
is finding that his old mind is like a shallow boat, mostly gliding undisturbed, but occasionally touching on something submerged.
Germany is full of people who would rather not remember. But then, Conrad's father was one of those too. Forgetting the unpleasant
is a natural defence, probably Darwinian, and the belief of Freud's bastard children in recovering memory is utterly contrary
to nature.
For more than a week he has rushed down for the post, but still there is no word from Fritsch. Meanwhile a child is growing
within Francine, and it may be his child. Von Gottberg had three very young children when he was hanged. They were three,
two and nine months old. It must have occurred to Mendel when he knew all the facts and when he met Liselotte for the first
time in the seventies that nobody sacrifices himself recklessly if he has children. And now Conrad tries to imagine himself
as a father.
He leaves the flat, hoping to avoid Tony, who has an unnatural interest in his new sex life. He can see him in his white coat,
with his back turned, and tries stealthily opening the door to the street, which they share. The door has an electric buzzer
attached, which makes secrecy impossible.
'You look a bit pale. Keeping your stremf up?'
'Tony, you have turned from the king of Camden's artisan bakers, maybe the only one, a legend in the field of farinaceous
products, to a pervert. For Christ sakes keep out of it.'
'Orright, orright. Keep your 'air on, mate. I'm just joshing. You're a lucky bunny, that's all I'm saying, no more. That's
it,
bast a.
No offence?'
'I didn't take offence, it's just that I am beginning to feel persecuted. I can't go out of my own fucking front door without
you or your little pal leering at me.'
'We're just jealous. Good luck to yer. And if you need some more fuel when you come home, there's loads of olive bread left
over.'
'Oh Jesus. Bye-bye, Tony. Don't wait up.'
He is off to meet Emily. But passing the decrepit church on the corner just past the minicab office and the shop selling rubber-foam
shapes - do-it-yourself furniture - he turns into the overgrown churchyard and towards the Victorian church. It has a tall
steeple, not soaring but workmanlike, the sort of job you got for limited money in 1862. The porch smells of urine. Inside
it is vast and unseasonably cold. He kneels on the floor and folds his hands across his face, in case anybody should be watching.
There is some movement over to the right beyond a pillar and he sees between his fingers a man sitting on a pew eating something
quickly and surreptitiously, like a dog picking up rubbish in the park. He hasn't been in a church on his own for years, although
of course he's been to a few weddings and christenings. Guiltily he remembers his two god-children, who he has neglected criminally.
He has never sent either of them a single present.
Mendel, who was an atheist, believed that religion should stick to its guns: the precepts of religion could not be altered
at will.
And me? What do I believe?
He closes his eyes and tries to re-create the feeling of his few religious years at boarding school in Cape Town. The feeling
was genuine, but was it, in any meaningful way, real? And, to his surprise, he finds he can re-create the feeling in part,
through the physical: the pew against his buttocks (which Emily described, gratifyingly, as 'lovely tight buns') and the feel
of stone under his knees and the sense that above his head there is a lot of unused, significant space. Religious space. The
essence of religion is thought to live up there somewhere, although it can be lured into the heart by the bait of good behaviour.