Yours Ever (40 page)

Those individual meetings are so few that the whole relationship becomes a sort of allegory, a massive psychological displacement in which the flesh is made word after word after word. Both lovers, to some extent, recognize this: Jock refers to a “grand game … playing the hide and seek of intention and expectation” from behind the “safety curtain of absence.” All the sailors and soldiers and airmen, those former civilians that Mirren knew, seem to have “disappeared,” their whereabouts just vaguely known, their persons “all so hopelessly unobtainable.” She conducts her correspondence in a sort of fitful afterlife, and Jock himself comes to regard “a letter that arrives as something that has always existed, like a fossil that I come on in the desert, a message from another world.”

Only the merest fragments of that other, real world—glimpses of Oxford, or of Mirren’s alcoholic mother, or even just her own messy room—manage to penetrate the letters’ separate realm. When Jock is sent with a commando unit to defend Tobruk in northern Africa, we do see him wearing khaki shorts and writing as he fights “a million flea bites;” but the military censors and his own taste for abstraction tend to dry up his chronicle. At the height of the Blitz, Mirren focuses for a moment on the real world’s smashed houses and mad scramble for survival—the telephone “is always engaged because the family spends its time ringing up different members to make quite sure that no one is dead”—but she soon shifts attention to the infrastructure of her letter: “I’m sorry about those smudgy marks but I spent an anxious minute or so changing the ribbon.”

By the middle of 1941, as Jock gets closer to the action—training parachutists for the desert winds by having them jump from the back of trucks—some of what he writes becomes more direct. There’s even one astonishing eruption about “fucking” (“I wonder if we’d do it well; not at first I think”), and some decidedly more-ardent-than-usual endearments:

One senses his new urgency in the frustration he expresses over the slow and erratic delivery of Mirren’s letters: “when you think how you can change in a week …”

Mirren tries to speed up their exchange by exercising a kind of telepathy: “John, how could I reach your mind across these leagues of sea and desert? Somehow you’ve got to know, now, at once, how important it is that you should send a cable.” The intensity of emotion seems to grow, and to the reader it begins at last to feel genuine. Mirren prepares herself for the worst (“If you die before we have had time to be together, at least I shall have the faith and love you have given me”), and Jock allows personal suffering to shatter his jutting, glass-jawed dutifulness:

The reader, knowing what’s coming as surely as they do, finally gives himself over to these two young people trying so hard to act grown-up in the catastrophic place and time they’ve been assigned. Their needs and affinities and bravery become real only pages before the telegram arrives. Jock Lewes is killed on December 30, 1941, after his commando unit makes a raid that succeeds in destroying two German planes.

Little more than a month later, Mirren writes to his brother, David, a new doctor, telling him how Jock “seemed to charm all the
shabbiness and mistrust” out of her. She reassures Dr. Lewes that she’ll “have dozens of children and you can be godfather or whoosh out their adenoids for them—or do both. Take this letter for what it is worth and remember I was writing it”—at a quarter to two in the morning—“to me as well as to you.”

Pain has awakened Mirren from her allegory; her writing seems suddenly straight ahead and clear-eyed, shocked into calmness and simplicity, like a person whose hair has gone white overnight. On March 4, 1943, she tells Jock’s parents that she is ready to “live whole-heartedly again” now that she has subdued their son’s memory and made it a “friend, philosopher, and guide.” She announces plans to wed an American named Dick Wise and pledges “to call our first son Christopher John—do you like that?”

She kept her promise, and she kept the letters, in the back of a drawer. Michael T. Wise, the younger brother of Jock’s namesake, published them three years after his mother Mirren’s death in 1992.

“THE ECONOMIC SITUATION
will hardly be improved by having a few million Poles for breakfast,” writes a quietly disgusted Helmuth James von Moltke to his wife Freya on August 23, 1939. Having been drafted into the German Intelligence Service, this pious, aristocratic lawyer (only six years older than Jock Lewes) will just have to cope with it. “At bottom,” he writes Freya seven months later, “my attitude to this war is that of an executor who is horrified to see heirs fighting over an inheritance that grows less and less because of the dispute.”

Raised on a thousand-acre Silesian estate, this fastidious son of a Prussian count keeps himself as distant as possible from Nazi colleagues in the Abwehr. Moltke’s collateral descent from Bismarck’s most famous field marshal helps make possible his refusal to wear the military uniform that his colleagues favor. He tries to prevent violations of an international law that the regime employing him regards as a joke, and he attempts to arrange that those being subjugated by German conquest come under the control of the more civilized Wehrmacht instead of the SS.

By 1939, Moltke and Freya Deichmann, a banker’s daughter, have been married for ten years. His letters home to her at Kreisau, the estate he’s inherited, have a kind of bizarre double-agentry. The reader moves from the heading “Berlin, 25 August 1941” to a sentence noting how “Churchill has made a really great speech.” The disjunction is reflected in Moltke himself and in the modern-day reader’s constantly conflicted reaction to what he’s reading: the letter writer seems both admirable and deluded, daring and craven, sometimes in the space of a paragraph. In July 1940, watching a “squabble of the various offices over the booty in the occupied territories,” he can convince himself that he is “personally uninvolved in it” and thereby able to “enjoy … this clash of the vultures.” Struggling, in the early days of the war, to limit pillage and deportation, he takes satisfaction in having “prevented so much evil and achieved so much good,” knowing that to his superiors each of those words now means the opposite and that his success depends on no one’s detecting what mercies he’s been able to effect.

Constantly overrun by events, he continues at his post, stiff but moderately subversive, trying to convince himself that his conscience remains intact:

If this takes the idea of “working within the system” to a sleepwalking extreme, Moltke’s occasional encounters with like-minded officials help to keep the bubble of denial from bursting within him. In August 1940, he finds himself in just-conquered Paris with General Alexander von Falkenhausen, the military commander for northern France and Belgium:

Moltke himself decides not to shop in the occupied city.

By the following summer, the Final Solution begins to be discernible. “Again and again one hears reports that in transports of prisoners or Jews only 20% arrive.” Moltke tells Freya that a whirlwind of “blood-guilt” is on its way to the German nation, but his moral response can only struggle to grow beyond the small, impotent gesture. On November 5, 1941, he takes a food parcel to “the last Jew I know” and declares that mankind’s only chance lies in “maintaining the fundamental moral laws laid down in the 10 commandments.” Still, the only specific prescription with which he can conclude this letter to Freya is that their sons begin saying grace at meals: “I think it would also improve table manners.”

He expects the worst, for himself included. Noticing the deportation of ten thousand more Jews, he remarks that the “bearing of these people was good to see, and I can only hope that ours will be no worse when our turn comes.” Yet he seems to stand still, like an animal caught in a blizzard. He fantasizes about a “secure peace” based on the rule of law, but must sometimes mock his own futile efforts during the catastrophe that is preceding it:

As the years pass, ever more horrifyingly, his bureaucratic detachment seems only to grow. He pays neurotic attention to the state of his desktop, passively fascinated by its orderly burden: “my production of paper in the last few weeks, since my return from Norway, has been gigantic. I wonder how it will all read in 10 years’
time. Will I still like it?” Conceding his own rigidity, and the limits of his moral imagination, he suffers in Berlin from a terrible sort of claustrophobia, and yearns to be back at Kreisau with his family, “the apples & sheep … and the work in the fields.”

Geographical displacement completes an unreality where he comes to “excel in the role of a spectator at my own funeral.” Picking small battles—against the Nazification of a local kindergarten—he can fool himself about “astonishing progress” in his bigger, furtive ones on behalf of Jews and Russians. Still hanging on to his “honor,” he seeks a reason or justification for everything, even his insomnia. Rationalization spins a dizzy sort of comfort: “that what I do is senseless does not stop my doing it, because I am much more firmly convinced than before that only what is done in the full recognition of the senselessness of all action makes any sense at all.”

Moltke’s letters to Freya carry a steady stream of cautionary advice—and warnings that things will soon be getting worse. Instructions about how to care for the lilacs and beehives at the family estate flesh out a more general request to “Stay with the work at Kreisau and look the other way.” When a levy of “nonferrous metals,” a birthday tribute for the Führer, is about to be imposed, Moltke reminds Freya not to part with any relics of his ancestor, the field marshal.

The often robotic tone of these words from husband to wife reflects not only the author’s natural formality but also an attempt to convey the illusion that they can both somehow bear what is clearly insupportable. The letters often sound like memoranda, or chapters of a philosophy paper, as Moltke works up new reasons to continue his course of conduct; to distinguish between personal survival and complicity; to ward off the feeling “that I have let myself be corrupted.” What sounds like the worst sort of pomposity (“it gives me great satisfaction to think that many non-German women have your husband to thank for the continued existence of theirs”) is more the desperate effort to give himself credit against an obligation that he knows—in his deeper, more honest being—can only be discharged by active resistance and, finally, his life.

Moltke acknowledges his tendency to write letters when he’s
worn out. He recognizes the “schoolmasterish” quality of what he produces, as well as the one-track nature of his mind. The usual rhetorical compulsion to apologize for the inadequacy of one’s letters seems, for once, right to the point here. Even so, some measure of intimacy weathers the storm of brutality and danger through which he must communicate. “My love, I’ll stop,” Moltke writes on May 26, 1940. “It is so nice to talk with you.”

His secret talks with other often religious-minded dissenters—the “Kreisauers,” as they would come to be known—are not the immediate cause of his arrest on January 19, 1944, but they will figure in his trial and execution. The group had concerned itself not with active resistance or plans for a coup but with its hopes for Germany’s military defeat and subsequent inclusion in a united Europe. These abstract speculations manage to get Moltke killed, an irony that can’t be lost on anyone who reads his tormented ruminations on the limits of active resistance. Only at his trial does Moltke seem to realize how, in a state so totalitarian as Nazi Germany, he has been guilty of resistance, however futile, all along:

Some of his punctilio survives even in letters from prison—“My love, I really still owe you a report on the summer”—but there are signs, too, of a new, full-throated vitality, a vibrating doubleness that’s more like the opposite of ambivalence: a simultaneous determination to resist and willingness to die.

Freya has always secreted Moltke’s letters inside the well-maintained beehives at Kreisau. But her husband hopes that these last ones, recounting his show trial in January 1945, may gain the attention of the Reich’s opponents and survivors. His final public letters are curiously more intimate—or at least naturally emotional—than many of the private, tortuously reasoned ones that preceded the author’s arrest. Freed from the neurotic clutter that was for so
long his mental hallmark, he writes of the trial with a straight-on narrative drive. The fearful, scrupulous official has achieved a sort of peaceful ecstasy: “I wonder if I am a bit high, for I can’t deny that my mood is positively elated. I only beg the Lord in Heaven that he will keep me in it, for it is surely easier for the flesh to die like that. How merciful the Lord has been to me! … Your husband, your weak, cowardly, ‘complicated,’ very average husband, was allowed to experience all this.”