“Harriet and I had a son.”
Please don’t tell me this! We are not close friends. That’s what I wanted to say. But I didn’t. I suppose the secret soul of a man is eternally seductive.
“We had a son, though I did not know of this until it was too late. How could I? War swallows up all the normal rhythms. I must have another drink.”
I saw my opportunity: “I don’t know why I came and I’m incredibly sorry and … and I must go. I’m sorry.”
And I made an inelegant effort to rise from that uncomfortably low sofa.
“Please do not, Olivia. Please do not go. I do not normally make requests and only with Harriet do I beg.”
I looked away. And then I remembered that my father had told me of the long-ago conversation that he’d had with this man. “A man of some particular understanding, Olivia.” And I remembered the gate. Would Dada want me to stay? Oh Dada, should I stay? Oh Dada, where are you? This man seems in agony. I sat down again. As my father would have done. Thomas Middlehoff continued to pace around. I know that necessity.
“… I received a letter from Munich, dated the fourth of July 1944. It read like a love letter. A love letter from Harriet is a most unusual matter. If I’d died that day, and so many did, I felt I would have died happy. That was but a momentary feeling. It was followed by an urgent, overwhelming desire to see her, which of course was not possible. I had been wounded and was in hospital. On the eighteenth of July, for three solid hours, Munich was bombed. Hamburg, we’d hoped, would be the end of summer bombings. Hamburg, August 1943. Two hundred thousand dead in Hamburg they said. In Munich? How many? Was
she
dead was all I wanted to know. Was
she
dead? Millions die and we are so designed that we are broken only by the death of those we love. The others are lost in history. We are not good. It’s the self, always the self. Was
she
dead? I left the hospital where I was being quickly made whole again in order to be sent back to fight. I cannot even remember how I managed to get out of this. I was heed less of the risk I was taking in ‘so undermining the morale of the armed forces.’ Absent. I searched for her. I searched for her knowing that if I saw her I would live. I would be triumphant. A victor in the land of the defeated. I knew I would have pulled what made life bearable, my life bearable, from that place. I would rejoice in a city in which others had perished. Where others had died, sucked down in melted asphalt, no way to drown. Others had been incinerated, made into ashes in a second. Gone. Some had been shrunken into compact completeness. Men no bigger than children. I will stop. The rushing roar of the thing was over when I got there. It was quiet. Shock, at its most profound, is silent. It is the silence that seems to stop time. Many, I saw, were smiling. Real smiles. Real radiance. Until you saw their eyes and you knew they were now mad. And some were truly elegant. Yes, elegantly picking their way as ball-gowned ladies and the formally dressed men who guide them do as they cross a courtyard to the sound of music, carefully judging the position of each foot in case they slip and fall. And one figure seemed to me to be of particular elegance. That’s how she appeared to me. A woman of particular elegance. Elongated. A Modigliani figure. Behold the woman!
“Behold Harriet. Hare-ee-et, the name means home-ruler in German—God! The Harriet that only I know. That Harriet before she made herself Harriet Calder, and how ever she remakes herself she will always be that Harriet to me. But the future was impossible to imagine that day as I moved, and I moved quickly, quickly, though I did not run towards her, remembering her contempt for obvious signs of my desperation. She stood quietly watching a number of men carefully place parts of bodies in a sack. She seemed lost in contemplation of them. She was carrying a suitcase. I whispered, ‘Harriet,’ as though it were the most natural thing in the world to sound out her name softly in a steaming broken street where many who had choked to death lay around. ‘Harriet?’ She did not acknowledge me. Then I put my hand out to carry the suitcase. She pulled it closer to her as though I were a thief. I tried again and she blazed out at me as though she would burn me with hatred. I stepped back. I almost tripped on pieces of masonry. She did not respond. If I’d fallen I think she would have simply stepped over me and walked on. Then I knew. I’d heard rumours, after Hamburg. Rumours of mothers, husbands, wives, who hid in suitcases the bodies of those they loved, who had been shrunken to a mummified state. I looked at her, the shape of her. Elongated. It was over, her pregnancy. My father had told me deliberately late. And she had not told me at all. Eight months. She had not told me. ‘Give it to me,’ I said. She shook her head. ‘Give it to me!’ She nodded. Such unfamiliar acquiescence. ‘Wait,’ she said.
“‘You must wait, Thomas.’ And I did. For many hours. Finally she put the suitcase down on the ground. It was between us. I picked it up. It was very light. One hand was sufficient. Within my other hand I held hers. There was nothing haunting or romantic about it. Just a determination not to let her go. We said nothing. We made our way to the station and got off the train at the first stop, walked and walked in silence until finally she said ‘Here.’ We did not make any mark. It was unnecessary. We would remember. It was a common tale of the time in my country but not much told. Who would listen? No one. Why should they? But many of us did not know that at the time. I learned earlier than most. In the winter semester of 1945–46 I heard Karl Jaspers’ lecture,
‘Die Schuldfrage
,’ and I began to understand that it was not only the war that we had lost. We had lost our individual moral responsibility. Each and every one of us was now impure, each marked with national disgrace. We were now a tribe. We bore the yoke. This was our story now. Perhaps we would never have another. The irony! Jaspers was the first to address publicly the question of German guilt. Listening to him, I knew our private stories of grief and suffering would, and should, never be told. We would have to bury them. We would have to bury each and every individual story within the horror story of our time in history. Few accepted such a concept then. The other students were not disruptive that day, but they were angry as they listened to Jaspers, the first to tell us the truth and therefore condemned as brutal. It would be years before the Eichmann Trial, when the final uncovering and the unveiling of the nakedness of it all would roll out before our eyes and those of the world. We’d blinded ourselves before. Guilt blinds, which is why we will always understand Oedipus better than Medea. Maybe, deep down, Oedipus always knew. What do you think?”
I was exhausted. I thought nothing except, I am too tired for this. Where are you Dada? Help me, Dada. But there was no respite. He sat down opposite me. He had to continue, I could see that, and with a sigh I realised I was the designated listener. And one, it would seem, who had a duty.
“… She stole away from me within days. No address. Nothing. How did I find her? When she had remade herself. When she had made a new life and buried the old. So that she could be subsumed into something, anything, that was not what she’d been before. To build new memories. So Harriet, with her then adequate English, which quickly became perfect, her compelling presence and that emotional carelessness which men who wish to be hurt find essential, married an Englishman. She washed herself clean in the river of an infinitely more appealing history, that of Henry Calder and the country he came from. Henry Calder with whom she had two children, Barty and Hugh. I am surprised you have not heard of her. She moves in different circles, perhaps?”
I remain silent. I knew the circles, though I did not know her.
“She is well-known for her charity work and her many affairs, which though they cause me exquisite pain have been irrelevant to my obsession. I too married. Veronika, the daughter of my father’s oldest friend. And I too had a son, Frederick. Who also died. He was a delicate child, as you would call him here. He contracted meningitis quite suddenly, over less than forty-eight hours it stole him away. I told myself his immune system was low after flu. My father, however, did not allow me this defence: ‘Your son did not fight hard enough for life. He gave up. You harmed your son when you harmed his mother. You have brought catastrophe on your life. You have lost your son and you have destroyed Veronika.’ He was right. The damage one can cause to others in a single private lifetime. I could not stay away from Harriet, a woman who would not stay with me. Veronika made a number of hopeless suicide attempts. Hopeless because they were cries for help to a man who was deaf, who had no interest in the extreme devotion of a woman to whom he was not devoted. That is the horror of obsession. The heart, as your Mr. Yeats says, ‘enchanted to a stone.’”
And I thought, why does he keep misinterpreting that line? It’s about country, obsessive love of country. Or is he right?
“My father, who was not a puritan, nevertheless regarded marriage as a particular territory that must be guarded. I had failed. Failed in the subterfuge that would have created for my wife Veronika an acceptable illusion. ‘You are contemptible,’ he informed me. I had in a sense been asleep on duty. He convinced himself that watching his mother in her agony and her rage, her explosive hatred of Harriet, had made holding on to life not appealing to Frederick. Yes. Just that: not appealing. And life must be made to seem appealing to children.”
And I thought, he’s right. That’s the job. He sighed and leaned back in his armchair. And then he smiled and I almost smiled back in relief. It must nearly be over. I will be able to get away soon.
“How strange, Olivia, Henry will look after her. In the last months. He’ll have her in the end. At the end.”
“Henry?”
“Her husband, Henry.”
“Ah, yes.”
What else could I say? Though for a second I wondered, had Harriet just given him a story? The one he needed for survival. Did he ever think there might be another version? Maybe Henry’s? But he wasn’t interested in Henry’s story. He’d got the story of his own life. It was probably too late to change it now.
“She is leaving. She is leaving both of us.”
Which was a way of putting it. He downed his whiskey quickly and looked at me as though he hoped I would do the same. Yes, it was over. The confession, for that’s what it had been, was over. I had no power to dispense penance or grant absolution. And suddenly, instead of relief, I felt sad. He had let me know him, which is rare in life.
“I am in a state of shock, Olivia. Forgive me. Please. I thought I would never feel such shock again.”
“I’m in a state of shock myself. And I must now get back to my mother.”
He stood up.
“I realise that I have behaved terribly. I am so sorry. My father would tell you my moral nature has been exposed again and is again less than impressive. You are in mourning also. Again, I am sorry.”
I touched his hand in sympathy and we walked towards the front door. He was a cultivated man with impeccable manners, and he walked me to my car. As he opened the car door for me he said, “Your mother reminds me of Harriet.” I was furious. How could he say that? How could he insult me like that? My mother bore no resemblance to that tall, sophisticated, probably vicious woman who was now dying.
“Yes. Yes,” he continued, as though the thought had just occurred to him and he was anxious to communicate it to me. “To me she resembles Harriet. Your father, of course, was a man capable of the outer reaches of another kind of love. Where the self dies.”
How dare he! My father, my mother. Do not appropriate them. Not to your version of what? Love? Yes. But twisted. Theirs had been what is truest, what is best. It seemed demeaning to their story that he would try to trace within it the pattern of his own suffering. I must get away from him. And get away, back to my real home which was no longer in this country. Let him stay here. This stranger. “The German” as we used to call him. How quickly it comes back when one is wounded. Prejudice! I must have looked angry or cold or something because as he made to close the door he said softly, as though it were a peace offering, “I will send you a copy of my new book. It’s a collection of essays. It will be published shortly.”
“Thank you,” I said. Though I didn’t mean it. I left him. I went back to her, to my mother. To beg her to come back with me. “And leave them?” she said. “Living close, Olivia. He was right.” I nodded. But I tried again. And again. Nothing worked.
She stayed with them.
EIGHTEEN
Thomas Middlehoff was the kind of man who, if he said he would do something, did it. Not always reassuring. A month or so later it arrived,
Connections
. It wove a theme, I suppose: the power of poets, playwrights, literary polemicists in the creation of the concept of nationality. Not exactly bestseller material. There was an essay that quoted Pearse’s Christmas Day letter from St. Enda’s College 1915, which was destined to be his last Christmas:
Here be ghosts that I have raised this Christmastide, ghosts of dead men that have bequeathed to us living men. Ghosts are troublesome things in a house or in a family, as we knew even before Ibsen taught us. There is only one way to appease a ghost. You must do the thing it asks you. The ghosts of a nation sometimes ask very big things; and they must be appeased, whatever the cost.
Of the shade of the Norwegian dramatist I beg forgiveness for a plagiaristic, but inevitable title.
Pearse could write. No doubt about that. Then an entire essay on Ibsen—the “smallness” of his characters as Yeats saw it. Well, Cathleen Ní Houlihan is a presence that takes some beating on the stage, or in life. The piece on Shelley’s “Address to the Irish People” which advocated “habits of Sobriety, Regularity and Thought” seemed a bit perverse considering Shelley ran off with two sixteen-year-olds. Not our kind of hero. The best of the eight essays was the one on Gottfried Benn, the older Benn as he’d dealt with the younger one before—twice. It was titled “Memory: A Moral Arena.” He quoted Benn’s introduction to
World of Expression:
… As an example of this generation I mention my family: three of my brothers died in battle; a fourth was wounded twice; the remainder, totally bombed out, lost everything. A first cousin died at the Somme, his only son in the recent war; of that branch of the family nothing is left. I myself went to war as a doctor, 1914–18 and 1939–45. My wife died in 1945 in direct consequence of military operations. This brief summary should be about average for a fairly large German family’s lot in the first half of the twentieth century.
Revisionist? Maybe. But he was right about what he’d said that day about guilt, when it had all poured out of him, the flood of words released by the shock of Harriet Calder’s illness. However, sympathy for individual human suffering depends on where you came from, what the narrative is, the language you use, and, if you’re German, “I wouldn’t start from here,” as the Irish say. Though no guidance is provided as to an ideal starting point: “that’d be telling.” Besides, victimhood was becoming a much fought-over territory and Germany had zero chance of carving out a single inch of it. Now I realise Thomas Middlehoff was ahead of his time. Ahead of his countryman Günter Grass, Nobel Prize—winner, who did try much later, with
Crabwalk
, to claim rather more than an inch of victimhood for his nation, yet ruined it all with his late acknowledgement (very late, on the edge of eternity really) that, as a teenager, he’d been in the SS. And admitted he’d lied about it for decades. Done more than lied. Made an issue of his contempt for others who’d joined up. Front-page news. He’d been “in denial,” as we say. A old man does not have the years to make up for sin.
Peeling the Onion
is as tearful an exercise at eighty as at eight. Though they say onions clean the blood and clear the head.
I wrote to Thomas Middlehoff, the kind of letter that says everything a writer wants to hear and never believes. He wrote back to say he’d be in London a month or so later. I wondered if he was going to see Harriet Calder, maybe for the last time. And then I thought probably not. She would not be a woman for a long drawn-out goodbye. He was addressing a German Cultural Society at the Embassy. Would I like to attend? I said yes. Immediately. It was an impressive event. You could feel the wealth of knowledge and the weight of money, much of it old, which, whatever they say, is different. Old money. You can tell, always, as the scent of old money drifts, even in private houses, above the hum of conversation in the high-ceilinged rooms as the curtains almost whisper-kiss the floor. That night in the Embassy the muted glories of the tapestries showed war and death in softest blues and fading greens and seemed the perfect backdrop to this cast, cultured, rich and still quite careful. They would not say much out of place. His speech, hesitantly spoken, developed his essay “The Morality of Memory,” an elucidation of its weight, both personal and national. It was his theme. Few of us have more than one. The speech was structured; he posed the questions, gave the answers. Not as reliable a method as one might think.
“Memory, ladies and gentlemen. Do we live with it? Exploit it? Or kill it? Do we do this individually or collectively? In post-war Europe the choice for Germany was made for us. Germany did not choose to remember. It was forced not to forget. The phrase ‘Inner Emigration’ I owe to Mr. Buchholz—it allowed us to individually retreat from knowledge during the War. However we have now for many decades bowed our heads collectively. The Japanese, also defeated, occupy morally an altogether different position in world infamy, at least in the West where there seems to be a form of acceptance of the concept of cruelty with honour. It is clear that the Japanese believed, indeed to some extent still believe, that fierce concepts of honour bestow moral absolution without the need for confession. It is interesting to note that trials for atrocities in war were never held in Japanese courts. We, on the other hand, were condemned at home.
Heimat
and horror. With which we live. We are right. Other societies in Europe were allowed a choice. Suppression takes many forms: it is a question of cultural consciousness. The French chose suppression of their modern memory of the last war lest it sully their brave and glorious earlier past. Reluctantly they allow a few irrefutable facts to filter through. The Italians embroider so beautifully that only with difficulty can one discern the original pattern. Collusion is required to maintain this position. It is a very short time ago indeed in these societies that even a small acknowledgement of past sins has been made. It was not welcome. It never will be. The weapon of memory, turned on the self, is an apocalyptic sword.
“The weapon of memory turned on one’s enemies through the power of language, however, gleams like a sword of honour. No country has wielded it with more skill than my elective home country, my Irish
Heimat
. Each home has woven into a word-tapestry of dead heroes and their wounds a perpetual stigmata.
“The glory of the ghost is little understood and its power continually misunderstood. Not here. Hamlet gave his father’s ghost what he asked for. Was his father’s ghost appeased? The lives of all who had survived him, who had loved him joined him in the grave. This is the victory of ghosts.”
There was polite applause. We, a small gathering, dispersed. I went up to congratulate him.
“Olivia! Olivia O’Hara. My dear.” He kissed me formally, on both cheeks. As he bent towards me I lowered my eyes, embarrassed almost by the deterioration, the strange falling in of his face that age had wrought. Or was Harriet Calder’s foreshadowed death draining life from him? And then I thought, when she dies he will most likely give up on life. She will be a powerful, seductive ghost. He might be closer to eternity than I’d imagined. Then another thought possessed me: what if I never talked to him again? Ever.
“Thomas?”
“Yes, my dear friend?”
Was I a dear friend? Who knows? Then I blurted it out.
“What about the gate?”
And I realised in that moment that I had not been aware of how troubled I had been. Lost in other longings, I suppose.
“Ah, the gate.”
“Yes, Thomas, I must know.” Ruthless.
“Must, Olivia? Why? So long ago, Olivia. Such a relatively minor matter.”
“Why did you give it to my father?”
“He needed it.”
“And my mother sent it back.”
“Eventually.”
“The gate, Thomas? Where did it come from?”
We looked at each other; each of us was sad. In the end there would always be a question. Which was just sad. He bowed his head.
“Dear Olivia, must every German gate have opened on to horror?”
“I don’t know. And that’s the truth. For a number of years it opened on to the place …”
“Your father wished for the gate because your brother loved it.”
I wanted to say, that is not an answer. But I just said “And?” Which again was brutal, I suppose.
“We do a lot for those who are dead and whom we loved. To appease a ghost, Olivia. Remember?”
Then someone came up to talk to him, a woman. She said she was a friend of Harriet Calder. At the mention of her name, or was it just out of good manners, he bowed and said how much he wished to speak to her—Ilsa, I think I heard that right—but would she excuse him for one moment as he needed to arrange something with me, and he took me a little to one side and held his hand out to me.
“Not here, Olivia. I must now talk to those who so kindly came to listen to me. Shall we meet tomorrow?”
“Yes.”
“Your house? My hotel?”
And I didn’t want to let him into my life. It was too beautiful. Which was ungenerous of me.
“Your hotel. We’re in the midst of reconstruction,” I lied.
He smiled at the word.
“Reconstruction takes much time. It is exhausting.”
“Yes,” I said. “It is.”
“I’m going to Sotheby’s tomorrow. There is an Irish sale there. I am particularly interested in a painting by Jack Yeats.”
I’d forgotten that he was so rich. Old money.
“Perhaps we could have lunch afterwards?”
He rang the next morning and cancelled.
“I’m not very well, Olivia. I return to Ireland. I will write. Goodbye.”
A few days later the letter arrived.
Dearest Olivia,
It is clear to me that through a small act of kindness a very long time ago a troubling question remains over a place of veneration for you, the entrance to the ground on which the central tragic event of your life took place. A strange description but one that sounds correct to me. Did the history of this gate desecrate the place? Were the shadows that it cast in summer or winter unworthy of the landscape? Was a memory so precious to you defiled during the years your mother allowed it to stay there? You must judge. You must make the decision.
The gate opened onto a house outside Munich which swung closed on our family for a time during the war. It was used for the purpose of
Lebensborn. Lebensborn
means “fount of life”—some translate it as “source of life”—and was ironically a child welfare programme initiated by Himmler to aid the racial heredity of the Third Reich. Pregnant wives of SS officers and unmarried pregnant young women were cared for there, prior to and after birth. Much controversy surrounds this enterprise, including the idea, which was subsequently found to be false, that perfect specimens of the perfect race were specifically brought to these homes for the purposes of procreation. Though this, as I said, has been proved untrue, love, as we both know, defies exact definition. The love-act, as it is often referred to in an ambiguous use of words, is a complicated matter. We absorb what we can handle and no more. If we go too far the system breaks down. It is the belief of Klaus Mann, son of Thomas Mann, that their home was so used. That too is disputed.
After the war my father refused to live in that house again. Heinrich and his wife Carlotta, however, felt differently and spent summers there. Carlotta wished for a system of greater security and decided to replace the gate. My brother’s wife is immensely wealthy; security therefore is an obsession. I took the gate. I had it shipped here to open and close on to another landscape. Why? It seemed a symbolic gesture to me and quickly it seemed to me to be part of the new landscape of my life, Lake House. Which is strange because I took a number of other items also, which did not, it seemed to me, fit in. Perhaps we do not fully trust our memory, we need mementoes, and I was finished with that old house. And that is all. Your brother saw a gate that he associated with the heroic; your father saw a gift to make up for gifts he had not given; your mother saw that the gate was inappropriate, symbolic of what she did not wish to consider.
I suggest that you do not impart this information to your mother. It is unnecessary. I see her sometimes in the town. She is serene, I think. My remark that she resembled Harriet Calder, which I was aware at the time distressed you, was, forgive me, inaccurate. Again, my apologies.
Perhaps we will see each other when you next return.
With affection,
Your friend,
Thomas
And I didn’t tell her. I regretted asking him, really. Berated myself for asking for answers to long-ago questions, the answers to which would never provide balm for my wounds. In the end one must heal one’s own. It’s solitary work.