Frieda wanted to reply but no words came. What could she possibly say? That was the dreadful thing about these incredible lies that were now spouted daily in the national press. Even to deny them gave them credence. To
deny
to this woman, who had known her for
ten years
and whom she had seen through six pregnancies, that she was somehow part of a global conspiracy to destroy Frau Schmidt’s ‘race’ and rule the world? What was there to say?
What would there ever again be to say?
Frau Schmidt took up her bag, red faced and unhappy but determined none the less.
‘
Herr Doktor
Meyer,’ she said, ‘I shall be pleased to be seen by another doctor on my next appointment. As regrettably
Frau Doktor
Stengel is no longer allowed to treat me.’
Meyer took the newspaper from the woman and pointed to a paragraph buried deep in the article.
‘In fact, Frau Schmidt,’ he said, ‘as you can see, for the time being this boycott is voluntary. It is true that the government has made it clear that it will shortly introduce a law banning Doctor Stengel from practising, but for the time being it remains
your
decision if she treats you.’
Frieda almost smiled. Funny old Meyer, still the pedantic committee room politician debating subclauses. As if ‘voluntary’ meant anything any more.
It was clear from Frau Schmidt’s face that it did not mean anything to her. She took her leave and waddled from the room as quickly as she could.
After she had left Frieda slumped further into the chair behind the desk that she no longer had any right to use.
‘So it’s really true? I’m to be banned from practising?’ she said.
‘Yes,’ Meyer said, his lip quivering with anger. ‘In fact it seems you’re not to be allowed to do anything at all. From tomorrow there is to be a boycott of
all
Jewish businesses.’
Frieda looked once more at the paper: ‘massed popular demonstrations announced’.
She almost laughed. ‘Funny, eh? How can you announce a popular demonstration? They have to order their protestors to demonstrate spontaneously.’
‘Well, Dr Stengel,’ Meyer began, unable even now to resist the temptation to score a political point, ‘perhaps now you can see why we Communists have always—’
‘You Communists!’ Frieda interrupted furiously. ‘Yes, what about you Communists! Where are you now? A month ago you had
millions
of members. A hundred deputies in the Reichstag. You had a bloody thug army just like they do. You weren’t much smaller than they are. What happened? Where are they? Where are
you
? Isn’t anybody going to fight?’
Meyer looked at her coldly. ‘Our leaders have—’ he began.
‘Your leaders have run away to Moscow, looking after themselves while their followers are murdered! Why don’t
they
“announce” a “popular” demonstration? Why don’t the Social Democrats? The Church? The Army? Why doesn’t
anybody
! Those fucking Nazi bastards don’t even have a majority.’
Frieda
never
swore. And even on this desperate morning she felt wrong in doing so. After all, the one thing Hitler should not be able to take away from her was her own personal standards. Only she could give those up.
And in any case her passion served no point. Battering as it did at the deaf ears of a closed mind.
‘I cannot speak for the Capitalist lackeys of the so-called Democratic Socialists,
Frau Doktor
,’ Meyer replied primly, ‘however, in the case of the KPD, the theoretical position of the Soviet International proscribes that …’
But for once Frieda was to be spared the endless, dry, dialectical parroting of her earnest colleague. The pompous excuses for the Communist Party’s craven inactivity and its blind commitment to the whims of Stalin.
For just then there was a commotion in the outer office.
There were bangs, angry voices. A guttural cry of fear. Then the door burst open and quite suddenly they were there. The unthinkable, the unimaginable. In
her
surgery.
That sanctuary of care in which Frieda had toiled daily for ten years was in a single moment corrupted and polluted.
Invaded. Violated.
Three men stood before her. Three men in black boots and brown uniforms.
The SA.
Frieda had seen them so many times on street corners, rattling their collection tins. Snarling at those who did not give. Their faces angry, bullying and stupid, playing the poor victim and the superman all at once. She had long since learnt to avoid their gaze and scurry past.
Now the impossible had happened.
They were
in her surgery
, standing before her desk, faces flushed and triumphant, thumbs stuck in leather belts. Boots spread far apart on the carpet, bellies pushed out in a manner so strutting and so brutish as to be almost a pantomime.
And yet, curiously, for all their swagger, for a moment at least they seemed hesitant, as if they too were aware of the newness of the situation. Aware of how incongruous their huge and brutal presence was in the small room with its various delicate scales and instruments, its anatomical wall charts and posters encouraging women to consider condoms for birth control and also as a barrier to disease. A small, female doctor sitting behind a desk, an open file before her, a pen still in her hand.
They were so terribly out of place. Like a tank in a small garden.
‘This is a doctors’ surgery,’ Dr Meyer protested. ‘A place of healing!’
Frieda admired him for finding his voice although it was clear to her that he was trying to keep from it the terror he felt.
‘The boycott doesn’t commence till tomorrow. What’s more, it’s voluntary. You have no business here. I shall call the police.’ He had broken the spell, but not in the manner in which he would have liked. The SA men openly laughed, it was just what they needed, a good joke to overcome their embarrassment.
‘
Herr Doktor
,’ the leading trooper said, ‘we
are
the police.’ Frieda got to her feet. ‘What are you going to do with me?’ she enquired. ‘Am I to be killed?’
‘We aren’t going to do anything with you
at the moment
,’ the lead man said. ‘You have permission to leave.’
‘
Permission
to leave my own office?’
‘That’s right, you can get yourself home. It’s him we want.’
The three men turned suddenly towards Meyer.
His face an instant mask of abject terror. He had been so certain they’d come for Frieda.
‘You are the Communist Party Member Meyer.’
‘No! I mean, well yes, I
was
…’ Meyer stuttered, ‘but the party is banned, therefore of course I am no longer a—’
He got no further. The truncheon smashed across his face and he fell unconscious to the floor.
‘Stick him in the truck,’ the lead SA man ordered.
The other two men each took an arm of the unconscious ex-Communist and began dragging him from the room, leaving a long smear of blood on the floor as they did so.
‘
Heil Hitler
,’ said the lead trooper, clicking his heels and giving the German salute.
Then they were gone.
Frieda sank back into her seat. Gulping, fearful that she would be sick. Trying to comprehend what had just happened.
Adolf Hitler, the subject of that ridiculous, ubiquitous salute, had been in power for sixty days.
And during that time it had become possible for an entirely innocent and defenceless man to be clubbed unconscious in a doctor’s surgery and then abducted. Not just with impunity but as a matter of state policy.
In sixty days.
And Hitler intended his Reich to last for a
thousand years
.
Tears began to fall on the notes Frieda had been making. Blue ink dissolving in the splashes, mixing up the sentences concerning Frau Schmidt’s pregnancy. Tiny, salty tributaries to an ocean of sorrow that awaited the world.
Hope Lost
London, 1956
DAGMAR WAS DEAD.
As Stone lit a second cigarette at the blue flame beneath the screeching kettle he felt sure of it.
The brief idyll during which he had imagined his life might be about to begin again had been a cruel illusion. Long grey nothingness stretched out before him once more.
The story he wanted so desperately to believe was simply not credible. Escape from Birkenau? A soldier with the Partisans? Enslavement in a gulag? These things were possible.
Just
. But that they had led eventually to a post with the East German secret police, as MI6 insisted they had, that was
not
possible.
But at least now he would know. Whoever had written that letter knew a great deal about Dagmar. He would go to Berlin and find out the truth about what had happened to her.
In that there was some grim comfort.
What had happened during those terrible years after the perfume-scented kiss they had shared standing by the café table at the Lehrter Bahnhof in 1939? How long had she survived? The Jews had not been finally cleared out of Berlin until 1943. Had she lasted that long?
And what had happened then? To which charnel house did they send her? How did she die? Dagmar Fischer, loveliest girl in all of Germany.
By starvation? Disease? Gas? Was her body burned in an oven? Or did she nearly survive the camps only to fall, exhausted beyond endurance, into a ditch as the SS force-marched their victims towards Germany ahead of the oncoming Red Army? Did she die a slave in an underground factory? One of those hundreds of thousands of human beasts of whom Speer had apparently known nothing? Was her naked, skeletal cadaver heaped high amongst a thousand others, pushed into the pile by an American bulldozer with a weeping GI at the wheel? Were the local German population of Dachau or Bergen the last to lay eyes on her fly-blown remains having been forced there to bear witness by the horrified American troops? Did those German villagers stand staring with sullen stupefaction on that flesh for which every day he had longed and of which every night he had dreamt since he was a boy of twelve?
There was someone working for the Stasi in Berlin who knew the answer. Someone who knew enough about Stone and his love for Dagmar to forge the letter that had purported to be from her.
As Stone studied the glowing end of his cigarette throbbing in the darkness he struggled against the obvious conclusion as to who that person must be.
Trying somehow to avoid the dawning certainty that the dark and solemn oaths which once had bound the brave young members of the Saturday Club together had been broken in the most cruel and terrible manner.
Opening up Shop
Berlin, 1 April 1933
DAGMAR FISCHER STARED at her face in the mirror. Normally she rather enjoyed looking at herself. She was beautiful and she knew it, so why shouldn’t she appreciate her own reflection? What was it Otto Stengel had said in that silly note he wrote? Her eyes were like dark and sparkling pools? Or had it been Paulus? They both said such sweet things. But Paulus’s notes were usually in French.
And her eyes
were
rather lovely, it would be foolish to deny it. Rather like Norma Shearer’s, Dagmar thought, or perhaps Dietrich’s, or the English star Mary Astor. They slanted slightly downwards at the edges which gave them, she fancied, an expression of great mystery with perhaps a touch of melancholy too. The eyebrows were all wrong of course, thick schoolgirl eyebrows which she hated but was absolutely forbidden to pluck. She had tried to do it by stealth, taking exactly three a day from above each eye, but it had seemed to make no difference at all, and when out of impatience she upped her daily quota to ten her father was on to it immediately and harangued her over breakfast. He had told the maid to remove the honey from the table and not to return it for a week, which had been mortifying. Not the loss of the honey but the shame of being scolded publicly. In front of the maid.
She turned away from the mirror and considered the dress that had been laid out for her. It was
awful
of course, almost as bad as school uniform, which was the only other option her parents had been prepared to consider.
A sailor dress for heaven’s sake! She wasn’t a child.
Her figure was developing. She had a bosom.
You couldn’t wear a sailor dress with a bosom, it looked ridiculous. And socks! White socks, as if she were starting kindergarten. Dagmar considered a rebellion. After all, this was Father’s plan, not hers. She could hold on to the banister and refuse to cooperate.