A novel
VIKING
an imprint of
PENGUIN BOOKS
VIKING
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Penguin Group (USA), Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA
Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3
(a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)
Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)
Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)
Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India
Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand
(a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)
Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
www.penguin.com
First published in Australia by Penguin 2011
First published in Great Britain by Viking 2011
Copyright © Anna Funder, 2011
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Cover photography © Ullstein Bild / Alinari Archives Friedrich Seidenstuec
All rights reserved
Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book
ISBN: 978-0-67-092041-9
PART I
Ruth
Toller
Ruth
Toller
Ruth
Toller
Ruth
Toller
Ruth
Toller
Ruth
Toller
Ruth
Toller
PART II
Ruth
Toller
Ruth
Toller
Ruth
Toller
Ruth
Toller
Ruth
Toller
Ruth
Toller
Ruth
Toller
Ruth
Toller
Ruth
PART III
Toller
Ruth
Toller
Ruth
Toller
Ruth
Acknowledgements
ALSO BY ANNA FUNDER
In memory of Ruth Blatt (née Koplowitz)
Dear Ernst, lie shadowless at last among
The other war-horses who existed till they’d done
Something that was an example to the young.
W. H. Auden, ‘In Memory of Ernst Toller’, May 1939
Outside my window the world has gone to war
Are you the one that I’ve been waiting for?
Nick Cave, ‘(Are You) the One That I’ve Been Waiting For?’
The most civilized nations are as close to barbarity as the most polished iron is close to rust. Nations, like metals, shine only on the surface.
Antoine de Rivarol
When Hitler came to power I was in the bath. Our apartment was on the Schiffbauerdamm near the river, right in the middle of Berlin. From its windows we could see the dome of the parliament building. The wireless in the living room was turned up loud so Hans could hear it in the kitchen, but all that drifted down to me were waves of happy cheering, like a football match. It was Monday afternoon.
Hans was juicing limes and making sugar syrup with the dedicated attention of a chemist, trying not to burn it to caramel. He’d bought a special Latin American cocktail pestle that morning from the KaDeWe department store. The shopgirl had lips pencilled into a purple bow. I’d laughed at us, embarrassed at buying such frippery, this wooden shaft with its rounded head that probably cost what the girl earnt in a day.
‘It’s crazy,’ I said, ‘to have an implement solely for mojitos!’
Hans put his arm around my shoulders and kissed me on the forehead. ‘It’s not crazy.’ He winked at the girl, who was folding the thing carefully into gold tissue, listening close. ‘It’s called ci-vi-li-sation.’
For an instant I saw him through her eyes: a magnificent man with hair slicked back off his forehead, Prussian-blue eyes and the straightest of straight noses. A man who had probably fought in the trenches for his country and who deserved, now, any small luxuries life might offer. The girl was breathing through her mouth. Such a man could make your life beautiful in every detail, right down to a Latin American lime pestle.
We’d gone to bed that afternoon and were getting up for the night when the broadcast began. Between the cheers, I could hear Hans pounding the lime skins, a rhythm like the beat of his blood. My body floated, loose from spent pleasure.
He appeared at the bathroom door, a lock of hair in his face and his hands wet by his sides. ‘Hindenburg’s done it. They’ve got a coalition together and sworn him in over the lot of them. Hitler’s Chancellor!’ He dashed back down the corridor to hear more.
It seemed so improbable. I grabbed my robe and trailed water into the living room. The announcer’s voice teetered with excitement. ‘We’re told the new Chancellor will be making an appearance this very afternoon, that he is inside the building as we speak! The crowd is waiting. It is beginning to snow lightly, but people here show no signs of leaving …’ I could hear the pulse of the chanting on the streets outside our building and the words of it from the wireless behind me. ‘We – want – the Chancellor! We – want – the Chancellor!’ The announcer went on: ‘… the door on the balcony is opening – no – it’s only an attendant – but yes! He’s bringing a microphone to the railing … just listen to that crowd …’
I moved to the windows. The whole south side of the apartment was a curved wall of double casements facing in the direction of the river. I opened a set of windows. Air rushed in – sharp with cold and full of roaring. I looked at the dome of the Reichstag. The din was coming from the Chancellery, behind it.
‘Ruth?’ Hans said from the middle of the room. ‘It is snowing.’
‘I want to hear this for myself.’
He moved in behind me and I drew his hands, clammy and acidic, across my stomach. An advance party of snowflakes whirled in front of us, revealing unseen eddies in the air. Searchlights stroked the underbelly of clouds. Footsteps, below us. Four men were racing down our street, holding high their torches and trailing fire. I smelt kerosene.
‘We – want – the Chancellor!’ The mass out there, chanting to be saved. Behind us on the sideboard the response echoed from the box, tinny and tamed and on a three-second delay.
Then a huge cheer. It was the voice of their leader, bellowing. ‘The task which faces us. Is the hardest which has fallen. To German statesmen within the memory of man. Every class and every individual must help us. To form. The new Reich. Germany must not, Germany will not, go under in the chaos of communism.’
‘No,’ I said, my cheek to Hans’s shoulder. ‘We’ll go under with a healthy folk mentality and in an orderly manner instead.’
‘We won’t go under, Ruthie,’ he said in my ear. ‘Hitler won’t be able to do a thing. The nationalists and the cabinet will keep a tight rein. They just want him as a figurehead.’
Young men were pooling in the streets below, many of them uniformed: brown for the party’s own troops, the SA, black for Hitler’s personal guard, the SS. Others were lay enthusiasts, in street clothes with black armbands. A couple of boys had homemade ones, with the swastika back to front. They were carrying flags, singing, ‘Deutschland, Deutschland über alles’. I heard the cry, ‘The Republic is shit,’ and made out from its intonation the old schoolyard taunt – ‘Rip the Jew’s skirt in two/the skirt is ripped/the Jew did a shit.’ Kerosene fumes buckled the air. Across the street they were setting up a stand where the young men could exchange their guttering torches for new-lit ones.
Hans returned to the kitchen, but I couldn’t tear myself away. After half an hour I saw the wonky homemade armbands back at the stand.
‘They’re sending them around in circles!’ I cried. ‘To make their number look bigger.’
‘Come inside,’ Hans called over his shoulder from the kitchen.
‘Can you believe that?’
‘Honestly, Ruthie.’ He leant on the doorjamb, smiling. ‘An audience only encourages them.’
‘In a minute.’ I went to the closet in the hall, which I’d converted into a darkroom. It still had some brooms and other long things – skis, a university banner – in one corner. I took out the red flag of the left movement and walked back.
‘You’re not serious?’ Hans put his hands to his face in mock horror as I unfurled it.
I hung it out the window. It was only a small one.
‘I’m afraid, Mrs Becker, the news is not altogether comforting.’
I am in a posh private clinic in Bondi Junction with harbour views. Professor Melnikoff has silver hair and half-glasses, a sky-blue silk tie, and long hands clasped together on his desk. His thumbs play drily with one another. I wonder whether this man has been trained to deal with the people around the body part of interest to him, in this case, my brain. Probably not. Melnikoff, in his quietness, has the manner of one who appreciates having a large white nuclear tomb between him and another person.
And he has seen inside my mind; he is preparing to tell me the shape and weight and creeping betrayals of it. Last week they loaded me into the MRI machine, horizontal in one of those verdammten gowns that do not close at the back: designed to remind one of the fragility of human dignity, to ensure obedience to instruction, and as a guarantee against last-minute flight. Loud ticking noises as the rays penetrated my skull. I left my wig on.
‘It’s Doctor Becker actually,’ I say. Outside of the school, I never used to insist on the title. But I have found, with increasing age, that humility suits me less. Ten years ago I decided I didn’t like being treated like an old woman, so I resumed full and fierce use of the honorific. And comfort, after all, is not what I’m here for. I want the news.
Melnikoff smiles and gets up and places the transparencies of my brain, black-and-white photo-slices of me, under clips on a lightboard. I notice a real Miró – not a print – on his wall. They socialised the health system here long ago, and he can still afford that? There was nothing to be afraid of, then, was there?
‘Well, Dr Becker,’ he says, ‘these bluish areas denote the beginnings of plaquing.’
‘I’m a doctor of letters,’ I say. ‘In English. If you don’t mind.’
‘You’re really not doing too badly. For your age.’
I make my face as blank as I can manage. A neurologist should know, at the very least, that age does not make one grateful for small mercies. I feel sane enough – young enough – to experience loss as loss. Then again, nothing and no one has been able to kill me yet.
Melnikoff returns my gaze mildly, his fingertips together. He has a soft unhurriedness in his dealings with me. Perhaps he likes me? The thought comes as a small shock.
‘It’s the beginning of deficit accumulation – aphasia, short-term memory loss, perhaps damage to some aspects of spatial awareness, to judge from the location of the plaquing.’ He points to soupy areas at the upper front part of my brain. ‘Possibly some effect on your sight, but let’s hope not at this stage.’
On his desk sits a wheel calendar, an object from an era in which the days flipped over one another without end. Behind him the harbour shifts and sparkles, the great green lung of this city.
‘Actually, Professor, I am remembering more, not less.’
He removes his half-glasses. His eyes are small and watery, the irises seeming not to sit flush with the whites. He is older than I thought. ‘You are?’
‘Things that happened. Clear as day.’
A whiff of kerosene, unmistakable. Though that can’t be right.
Melnikoff holds his chin between thumb and forefinger, examining me.
‘There may be a clinical explanation,’ he says. ‘Some research suggests that more vivid long-term recollections are thrown up as the short-term memory deteriorates. Occasionally, intense epiphenomena may be experienced by people who are in danger of losing their sight. These are hypotheses, no more.’
‘You can’t help me then.’
He smiles his mild smile. ‘You need help?’
I leave with an appointment in six months’ time, for February 2002. They don’t make them so close together as to be dispiriting for us old people, but they don’t make them too far apart, either.
Afterwards, I take the bus to hydrotherapy. It is a kneeling bus, one which tilts its forecorner to the ground for the lame, like me. I ride it from the pink medical towers of Bondi Junction along the ridge above the water into town. Out the window a rosella feasts from a flame tree, sneakers hang-dance on an electric wire. Behind them the earth folds into hills that slope down to kiss that harbour, lazy and alive.
In danger of losing their sight. I had very good eyes once. Though it’s another thing to say what I saw. In my experience, it is entirely possible to watch something happen and not to see it at all.
The hydrotherapy class is at the fancy new swimming pool in town. Like most things, hydrotherapy only works if you believe in it.
The water is warm, the temperature finely gauged so as not to upset the diabetics and heart fibrillators among us. I have a patch I stick on my chest each day. It sends an electrical current to my heart to spur it on if it flags. From previous, quietly death-defying experiments, I know it stays on underwater.
We are seven in the pool today, four women and three men. Two of the men are brought down the ramp into the water on wheelchairs, like the launching of ships. Their attendants hover around them, the wheels of the things ungainly in the water. I am at the back, behind a woman in an ancient yellow bathing cap with astonishing rubber flowers sprouting off it. We raise our hands obediently. I watch our swinging arm-flesh. The aging body seems to me to get a head start on decomposition, melting quietly inside its own casing.
‘Arms over heads – breathing in – now bringing them down – breathing out – pushing till they’re straight behind you – breathe IN!’
We need, apparently, to be reminded to inhale.
The young instructor on the pool edge has a crescent of spiky white hair around her head and a microphone coming down in front of her mouth. We look up to her as to someone saved. She is pleasant and respectful, but she is clearly an emissary bearing tidings – rather belatedly for us – that physical wellbeing may lead to eternal life.
I am trying to believe in hydrotherapy, though Lord knows I failed at believing in God. When I was young, during the First World War, my brother Oskar would hide a novel – The Idiot or Buddenbrooks – under the prayer book at synagogue so Father would not notice. Eventually I declared, with embarrassing thirteen-year-old certainty, ‘Forced love hurts God,’ and refused to go. Looking back on it I was, even then, arguing on His terms; how can you hurt something that doesn’t exist?
And now, eons later, if I am not careful I find myself thinking, Why did God save me and not all those other people? The believers? Deep down, my strength and luck only make sense if I am one of the Chosen People. Undeserving, but Chosen still; I am long-living proof of His irrationality. Neither God nor I, when you think about it, deserve to exist.
‘Now we’re concentrating on legs, so just use your arms as you like, for balance,’ the girl says. Jody? Mandy? My hearing aid is in the change rooms. I wonder if it is picking all this up, broadcasting it to the mothers wrestling their children out of wet costumes, to the mould and pubic hair and mysterious sods of unused toilet paper on the floor.
‘We’re putting the left one out, and turning circles from the knee.’
A siren sounds, bleating on and off. Over at the big pool, the waves are going to start. Children walk-run through the water with their hands up, keen to be at the front where the waves will be biggest. Teen girls subtly check that their bikini tops will hold; mothers hip their babies and walk in too, for the fun. A little boy with red goggles darts in up to his chin. Behind him a slight young woman with hair falling in a soft bob on her cheeks walks calmly forward, shoulderblades moving under her skin like intimations of wings. My heart lurches: Dora!
It is not her, of course – my cousin would be even older than me – but no matter. Almost every day, my mind finds some way to bring her to me. What would Professor Melnikoff have to say about that, I wonder?
The wave comes and goggle-boy slides up its side, tilting his mouth to the ceiling for air, but it swallows him entire. After it passes he’s nowhere. Then, further down the pool, he surfaces, gulping and ecstatic.
‘Dr Becker?’ The girl’s voice from above. ‘It’s time to leave.’
The others are already over near the steps, waiting for the wheelchair men to be positioned on the ramp. I look up at her and see she’s smiling. Perhaps that microphone gives her a direct line to God.
‘There’s ten minutes till the next class but,’ she says. ‘So no hurry.’
Someone is meting out time in unequal allotments. Why not choose a white-haired messenger, lisping and benign?
Bev has left me a small pot of shepherd’s pie in the fridge, covered tight in plastic wrap. It has a sprinkling of pepper on the mashed-potato topping, and it also has, in its perfectly measured single-serve isolation, a compulsory look about it. So I thaw a piece of frozen cheesecake for dinner – one of the advantages of living alone – then fizz a Berocca in a tall glass to make up for it. I’ll have to explain myself to Bev when she comes tomorrow.
In bed the cicadas outside keep me company – it’s still early. Their chorus coaxes the night into coming, as if without their encouragement it would not venture into this bright place. What a ni-ight! they seem to chirrup, what a ni-ight! And then we are quiet together.
Two quick knocks at the door – Clara and I maintain formalities because formalities are required between a man and a woman who work alone in a hotel room, as between a doctor and a patient in the most personal procedure. Our formalities transform this place of rumpled dreams – the sod-green curtains, the breakfast tray uncleared, the bed I hastily made – into a place of work.
‘Good morning.’ An open smile on her red-painted lips, lips that look suddenly intimate. It is the smile of a young woman whose flame is undiminished by racial exile; who has possibly been loved this morning.
‘Good morning, Clara.’
Today she wears an apricot faux-silk shirt with lavish sleeves and three-button cuffs – a cheap copy of luxury that lasts but a season and may just be the essence of democracy. ‘Peachy’, as they’d say here in America, although in English I can’t tell poetry from a pun. She brings with her morning air, new-minted for this day, the 16th of May 1939.
Clara looks around the room, assessing the damage of the night. She knows I do not sleep. Her gaze comes to rest on me, in the armchair. I’m fiddling with a tasselled cord. Its green and gold threads catch the light.
‘I’ll do it,’ she says, springing forward. She takes the cord and ties back the drapes.
But the cord is not from the drapes. It is from my wife Christiane’s dressing gown. When she left me, six weeks ago, I took it as a keepsake. Or an act of sabotage.
‘No mail?’
Clara collects it each day from the postbox on her way in.
‘No,’ she says, her face averted at the window. She takes a deep breath, turns, and walks purposefully to the table. Then she rummages in her bag, still standing, for her steno pad. ‘Shall we finish the letter to Mrs Roosevelt?’ she asks.
‘Not now. Maybe later.’
Today I have other plans. I reach over and pick up my autobiography from the table. My American publisher wants to bring it out in English. He thinks that after the success of my plays in Britain, and my American lecture tour, it should sell. He is trying, God love him, to help me, since I gave away all my money to the starving children of Spain.
I don’t need money any more, but I do need to set the record straight. As sure as I sit here today, Hitler will soon have his war. (Not that anyone in this country seems to care – his opening salvo, the invasion of Czechoslovakia just weeks ago, has slid down to page thirteen in the New York Times.) But what people don’t realise is that his war has been on against us for years. There have been casualties already. Someone needs to write their names.
Clara is staring out the window at Central Park, waiting for me to gather my thoughts. While her back is still turned I ask, ‘Have you read I Was a German?’
‘No. No, I haven’t.’ She swivels, placing a stray curl of dark hair behind her ear.
‘Good. Good, good.’
She laughs – Clara has a PhD from Frankfurt and a fine mind and can afford lavish self-deprecation. ‘It’s not good!’
‘No, it is.’
She tilts her face to me, the freckles strewn across it as random and perfect as a constellation.
‘Because I’m going to be making some changes.’
She waits.
‘It’s incomplete.’
‘I should hope so.’
‘No. Not updates. Someone I left out.’
My memoir is subtly, shamefully self-aggrandising. I put myself at the centre of everything; I never admitted any doubts or fear. (I was cunning, though, telling of isolated childhood cruelties and adult rashness, to give the illusion – not least to myself – of full disclosure.) I left my love out, and now she is nowhere. I want to see whether, at this late stage of the game, honesty is possible for me.
When I open the book in my lap its pages stand up like a fan, held tight to a midpoint. The National Socialists took my diaries – probably burnt them on their pyres as well. I must work from memory.
The girl sits down at the table, side-on to me. Clara Bergdorf has been working with me for five weeks. She is a rare soul, with whom silences of whole minutes are calm. The time is neither empty, nor full of anticipatory pressure. It expands. It makes room for things to return, to fill my empty heart.
I light a cigar and leave it smoking in the ashtray. ‘We’ll start with the introduction. Add this dedication at the end.’ I clear my throat. ‘I call to mind a woman, to whose courageous act I owe the saving of these manuscripts.’ I breathe deeply and look out at the sky, today a soft, undecided colour.
‘When in January, 1933, the Dictator of Braunau was given power against the German People, Dora Fabian, whose life has ended—’
And then I break off. Clara thinks I am paralysed by grief, but it is not so. I simply do not know how to describe that ending. In the park the wind toys with the trees, shifting leaves and branches a fraction every which way – as if the music has stopped but they cannot, for the sheer life of them, keep absolutely still. Clara risks a glance in my direction. She is relieved to see I am not weeping. (I have form in that department.)
‘Sorry.’ I turn back to her. ‘Where was I?’
‘ “Dora Fabian,” ’ she reads back, ‘ “whose life has ended.” ’
‘Thank you.’ I look out again and find my word. ‘Sorrowfully,’ I say, which is the plainest truth there is. ‘Whose life has ended sorrowfully in exile, went to my flat and brought away to safety two trunk-loads of manuscripts.’
Clara doesn’t look up. Her hand moves steadily across the page, coming to rest only moments after I stop speaking.
‘The police got to know of what she had done and sent her to prison. She said that the papers had been destroyed. After she was released from prison she fled from Germany, and, shortly before her death, she got the papers out of Germany with the assistance of a disillusioned Nazi. Full stop.’
Clara puts down her pencil.
That is all? I close my eyes.
Dora’s editorial trace is all over my book: the sharp focus, the humour. At the end of our lives it is our loves we remember most, because they are what shaped us. We have grown to be who we are around them, as around a stake.
And when the stake is gone?
‘All right, then?’ Clara asks softly after a few minutes. She thinks I’ve drifted off, taken advantage of her sweet presence and gone to sleep. She touches the edges of the pad in front of her.
‘Yes, yes.’ I sit up properly again.
I will tell it all. I will bring Dora back, and I will make her live in this room.
The doorbell is ringing.
I ignore it. Without opening my eyes, I can tell it’s morning.
Ring ring ring ring ring ring ring …
Verdammtes bell. Fuh-ken bell, as they say here. The thing has aged along with me and it sticks. I move my bad leg with the other one over the side of the bed, and slide my feet, gnarled as mallee roots, into the sheepskin shoes – one built up, the other plastic-soled. I leave my wig on the dresser.
Ring ring …
I open the door. The van speeds off – I can just make out, in purple writing on its side, ‘The World on Time’. It’s seven o’clock in the morning! A tad early, if you ask me.
A FedEx package on the mat. I stoop to get it with my stiff leg sticking out – I am a bald giraffe in an unreliable dressing gown and I feel sorry for any passers-by who might see me, mangy-minged and inglorious. This gives me a wicked thrill, till I imagine they might include children, whom I have, in general, no desire to horrify.
I move into the front room, my favourite room. It smells of furniture wax – Bev must have done it while I was out yesterday. She uses the wax – along with her Vicks VapoRub and her copper bracelets – as part of an arsenal against decay and time, suffocating the world with a layer of polyvinyls to make it shiny and preserve it forever like the plastic food in Japanese restaurant windows. She sprays the glass-fronted bookcases, the wooden arms of the chairs, even – I have witnessed this – the leaves of the rubber plant. One day I will sit too long and she will spray me as well, preserving me for all time as an exhibit: ‘European Refugee from Mid-Twentieth Century’. Not that I need preserving. Unkraut vergeht nicht, my mother used to say: you can’t kill a weed.
The other side of the package reads ‘Columbia University New York, Department of Germanic Languages’. Here in Sydney, the events of the world wash up later as story, smoothed and blurred as fragments of glass on the sand. And now?
Dear Dr Becker,
We refer to previous correspondence in this matter. As you are aware, the Mayflower Hotel is to be demolished at the end of 2001. The building is being emptied in preparation for this.
Um Gottes willen! How would I be aware? Sitting here in Bondi? And what ‘previous correspondence’? Then again, it might have slipped my mind.
The enclosed documents, belonging to Mr Ernst Toller, were found in a safe in the basement. The material consists of a first edition of Mr Toller’s autobiography, I Was a German, together with sheets of typed amendments to it. A handwritten note with the words ‘For Ruth Wesemann’ was found on top of them. The German Restitutions Authority has confirmed that you were formerly known as Ruth Wesemann.
Should you so decide, the Butler Library of our university would be honoured to house this material for future generations. We already hold first editions of all Toller’s plays, and his correspondence from his time in the United States. We have taken the liberty of making copies for safekeeping.
If I or any member of the university faculty can be of assistance to you, we would welcome the opportunity.
Yours sincerely,
Mary E. Cunniliffe
Brooke Russell Astor Director for Special Collections
Toller!
His book is brittle as old skin, or a pile of leaves. The spine is broken, sprung loose from the cloth cover because of the sheets of paper thrust between its pages. Something from him to me: it can only be about her.
I reach to put it for a moment on the coffee table but my hands are shaking and some of the papers fall out onto the glass, then slip off to the floor. Inside me a sharpness – my hand moves to check the patch over my heart.
In his presence, and hers, I am returned to my core self. All my wry defences, my hard-won caustic shell, are as nothing. I was once so open to the world it hurts. The room blurs.
When I pick the book up again, it falls open at the first, typed insertion:
I call to mind a woman, to whose courageous act I owe the saving of these manuscripts. When in January, 1933, the Dictator of Braunau was given power against the German People, Dora Fabian, whose life has ended sorrowfully in exile, went to my flat and brought away to safety two trunk-loads of manuscripts. The police got to know of what she had done and sent her to prison. She said that the papers had been destroyed. After she was released from prison she fled from Germany, and, shortly before her death, she got the papers out of Germany with the assistance of a disillusioned Nazi.
Ernst Toller
New York, May 1939
Toller was always a master of compression.
I pull a rug over my knees. I’d like to crawl back inside the night, perhaps to dream of her. But one can control dreams less than anything in life, which is to say, not at all.
I am so settled here I might never leave this room. The Mayflower Hotel, Central Park West, is quite a good hotel – not the best, by any means. Still, if I am honest, better than I can afford. But honesty is so hard. If I look too closely at the truth I might be unhinged by regret and lose hope in the world.
Then again, I may be well and truly unhinged already. Last week on the subway, a man hanging absent-mindedly onto the leather hand-strap stared at me a little long. Without thinking I flashed him what Dora called my ‘famous person’s smile’. The poor fellow turned away as if ignoring a tic.
I fled Europe for the land of the free, but I didn’t quite count on invisibility. In Berlin or Paris, in London or Moscow or Dubrovnik, I couldn’t take two steps without wading into autograph hunters. Once in a tender moment, Dora said it was good for me to know my work was appreciated. But I had been famous a long time; I was on first-name terms with the phantom-Toller the press had made. Though I needed applause like oxygen, I never believed the love and plaudits were for the real me, who, because of my black times, I kept well hidden.
Clara has gone to get coffee. We are in a hiatus; the hotel knows I can’t pay the bill but is not throwing me out. Out of gratitude, we don’t push the limits by using room service.
I love Central Park. There’s a man out there now on a soapbox gesturing to passers-by, trying to attract and keep them like papers in the wind. I know that feeling: eyes screaming that the world belongs to you and you can reveal it all, if people will only stop, and listen. It is this prospect, of something freshly imagined, some new possibility of belief, that America holds out to all comers.
The book is in my lap. What chutzpah, to write my life story at forty! Or a bad omen. Perhaps, having written it down, I now feel the life is done. Dora would have made me snap out of it. There are some people just the thought of whom makes us behave better.
It is six years ago now, that we worked on this book. In Berlin, in my narrow little study on Wilmersdorfer Strasse. Dora’s desk was behind the door, practically obscured if anyone opened it. She would sit there in the shadow, stockinged feet resting on two dictionaries stacked on the floor. My desk was bigger, under the window. She took down my words, pulling me up and putting me to rights if I veered off course. Dora thought I left the bitterest and most basic emotions out of the book, in favour of, as she put it, ‘all that derring-do’. I didn’t want to write about what went on inside me.
Our worst fight happened when I was writing about my – how should I say? – my collapse, after I was discharged from the front. When Dora wanted to interrupt me she used to put the steno pad down in her lap. When she had something serious to say, she’d swivel around to the desk, place pad and pencil down carefully there, and turn to me empty-handed. This was an empty-handed time.
She clasped her palms together between her thighs. ‘I think …’ she said, and stopped. She ran both hands through her dark, bobbed hair, which fell straight back into her face. She started again. ‘You’ve just written here so powerfully about the horrors of the trenches. And trying to save your men.’ Her voice, airy and deep, got deeper. ‘We need to see what that courage cost you.’
My heart beat slower. ‘Read it back?’
She took the pad from the desk and read: ‘ “I fell ill. Heart and stomach both broke down, and I was sent back to a hospital in Strasbourg. In a quiet Franciscan monastery kind and silent monks looked after me. After many weeks I was discharged – unfit for further service.” And that’s it.’ She held out one blunt-bitten hand. ‘That’s all.’
I crossed my arms. ‘I had thirteen months on the Western Front,’ I said. ‘And all of six weeks in the sanatorium. It was a black time. There’s nothing to say about it.’
She rubbed her hands over her face. ‘Let’s leave it for now, then.’ She turned back to the desk.
If I could see her now, even just to fight with me, to swivel her bony back away from me, I would give it all.
‘So.’ Clara’s voice breaks the air. She places two cardboard cups down on the table in front of me, smiling as if to signal a new, better beginning to whatever is going on in this room. ‘Guess what’s so special about this?’
It takes me a moment to register her question. ‘The magic of putting liquid into paper?’ I have loved this kind of discovery since I got here, the sheer, left-field, practical ingeniousness of America.
‘No.’ She shakes her head. ‘These cups are endless.’ She uses the English word. ‘Infinite cups! We can go back and they will refill them, forever.’
I must seem unconvinced, or not quite adequately enthralled.
‘Or maybe not.’ She shrugs and laughs a little, sits down. ‘I’ll have to find out how that works.’
Clara flicks through her steno pad, happier now after her contact with the outside world, her discovery of the bottomless cup. Clara is not even my secretary, but Sidney Kaufman’s, from MGM’s New York office. Sid felt sorry for me after my scripts went nowhere (not enough ‘happy ends’, said Hollywood), so he’s lent her to me.
She finds her place.
But I am frozen. Caricatures I can do. Types in a play – the Widow, the Veteran, the Industrialist – but not someone so huge to me. What if my only talent is for reduction?
‘To understand her,’ I say, ‘you have to understand what she was trying to do. Dora was … a verb.’
Clara smiles.
‘It all came out of the war. Our pacifist party, the Independents. And, I am sorry to say, Hitler and this war he is now making.’
I look through the book in my lap to find the passage about my breakdown. It is extraordinary to me now, the deceit of words, how in saying everything one can reveal nothing at all. I will start by doing as Dora said.
‘Ready?’
‘Yep.’ Clara picks up her pencil.
‘Okay. The heading is “Sanatorium”.’ And then I continue, at dictation pace.
It is practically a boy who stands to sing. Blond down on his cheeks, and some thicker, unruly hairs on his chin. Seeing him in this state of transformation – neither boy nor man – feels an act of intimacy that should not be allowed. Outside of here he would have started to shave. With a movement of his shoulders he pulls his wrists into his cassock, as if they’re too tender to be seen. But he cannot stop his hands from gesturing with the notes, which move out from him to fill the room and soar inside us.
There was a boy his age at Bois-le-Prêtre, sitting in the ditch with tears and snot running down his face. His uniform didn’t fit and he failed to salute me.
‘What is it, Private?’
‘My friend,’ he blubbered. Behind him lay a boy in the grass, also sixteen or seventeen. His eyes were still open. The back of his skull and left ear were blown off. The flies had started to come for the meat.
‘What are you doing here alone?’ I asked the boy. I knew the cruelty of my question: until the shelling twenty minutes ago he was not alone. Now he was trying not to leave his friend. He was trying not to be left.
‘I … I …’
‘Get back to camp.’
The boy got up and started to move down the unsealed road, between two rows of thin poplars.
‘Private!’
‘Sir?’ He turned around.
‘You forgot to take his boots.’
He gave me a look of hatred so pure I knew he could keep fighting.
Such brutality we had taken inside of us.
In the sanatorium we sit at a long table, the monks in brown robes at the head of it, soldiers down the end. We patients wear remnants of uniforms – the greatcoats are especially prized – or a mishmash of civilian clothes if relatives have managed to send some. The only sound is the leather of the novitiates’ sandals slapping the stone as they bring in the meal. All is calm, apart from the Christ hanging at the end of the room, naked and dying. He looks familiar – like a relative? So far as I can tell, he and I are the only Jews here. A row of high windows lets in light that striates the room, illuminating the air in all its minute, flying particles.
I have not spoken for seven and a half weeks. In the military hospital at Verdun they put electrodes on my tongue to spark it, as though the failure were mechanical. When I cried out they determined there was nothing wrong with my body, so they sent me here, where time, shunted only by slow bells, stretches out to heal.
The silence was a relief.
Lipp nods as he sits down next to me, tucking a napkin into his collar and spreading it out wide over his chest. He is a medical doctor in fancy clothes, but also a socialist – he insists on living in a stone cell just like everyone else here. Lipp is chatty, assiduous in his care of us. Nothing shocks him. During the day, I watch him move among the men as though doing the rounds of a normal hospital, speaking quietly, pulling on his goatee. He addresses me without waiting for an answer, as if to be mute were an entirely appropriate reaction to this world.
In the summer of 1914 everyone had wanted war, me included. We were told there had been French attacks already, that the Russians were massing on our border. The Kaiser called on us all to defend the nation, whatever our politics or religion. He said, ‘I know no parties, only Germans …’ And then he said, ‘My dear Jews …’ My dear Jews! We were bowled over by our personal invitation to war. War seemed holy and heroic, just as they had taught us at school – something to give our lives meaning and make us pure.
What could we have done, ever, to need such purification as that?
Dr Lipp bows his head and closes his eyes, then crosses himself and addresses his attention to his bowl, where barley and pieces of carrot float in a pale broth. Unusually for a socialist, he is also a fervent Catholic. He is convinced all things are part of a plan, even if we mortals cannot know it.
Some of the veterans have horrendous wounds, mended as best as possible at field hospitals before the men came here to be tended for other, unseen damage. Four are missing legs, or parts of them. Each is entitled to two prosthetic legs from the War Ministry in Berlin, but they have not come. The fellow opposite us has lost both arms, one from the shoulder, the other from the elbow. His prostheses have arrived. They are made of metal and attach around his chest on the side where there is no arm, and to the remnants of the other arm by leather straps with metal buckles, the same as on a school satchel. He must need help to put them on in the mornings. As he sat down, I noticed his fly buttons were left open – is this an oversight, or a necessity? In a world without arms, dignity is hard to maintain. Can he handle his prick with the hook?
His neighbour reaches across for the man’s spoon and without asking starts to feed him. Before, when I passed returned men on the streets of Munich or Berlin, the legless wheeling themselves along on boards, their cloth-bound hands pushing the ground, or sitting on their stumps on grey army-issue blankets selling matches, or the hundreds and hundreds of ‘storkmen’ on crutches, I thought them adept. I permitted myself the fantasy that, because of the cripple’s skill with the board or crutch or cane, he had come to terms with his situation. Here, we fall off crutches and out of chairs, soiling ourselves and weeping with rage. This, too, is a transition stage that should be hidden. And it is being hidden, here.
It’s a good broth today – chicken. The monks raise their own, and are not required to send them in for the war effort, just the bones afterwards for stock-meal, like everyone else. Theo on my left used to be an apprentice waiter at Aschinger’s restaurant in Berlin. His nose and top jaw have been knocked out by a grenade; he wears a dark cloth patch that covers the centre of his face. Beneath it is a reddish hole his breath goes in and out of. The patch has no practical value; he wears it to spare others the sight of him. His eyes are pale blue above it, and hard to look at too.
Theo starts to feed himself, putting the spoon to the back of his throat and swallowing as best he can. The noise is disgusting. He will never kiss a girl. He will never work. He cannot speak. Outside, the dead are honoured as heroes, but in here the maimed are ashamed.
Lipp turns to him and nods his approval. ‘Good man,’ he says, ‘that’s the way.’
The next course is matjes and potatoes. Theo mashes the oily fish into pieces of potato and does his best.
At the end of lunch, they ring another bell. We set down our spoons, traces of apricot syrup a bright filigree in the bowls. Talk resumes on the way out. Men light cigarettes. I walk behind Lipp, who is telling Theo of a metal prosthetic jaw, ‘ingeniously screwed into the remaining bone’. They have taken Theo’s sheets away.
When Lipp moves on to another inmate, Theo falls in with me. He raises his eyebrows and the little cloth puffs out a snort. He’s brave, but he has the look, like many of us here: This cannot possibly be my life; there must be some mistake.
I think Theo likes our mutual silence. He knows as well as I do that the government doctors are not coming to give him a mechanical jaw – or if so, only in passing. They are coming to assess whether he, Theo Poepke, can return to civilian life, or whether he will be sent for the foreseeable future to one of the secret military hospitals. This is not a health issue. It is one of morale: the authorities do not want the horrifically wounded to sabotage support for the war, to frighten women on trams.
Just as Theo has settled into my cell to read, Dr Lipp runs in brandishing the newspaper.
‘The tide is turning!’ he shouts, then louder: ‘The end is near!’
Theo raises his eyebrows at me good-naturedly. We are mute, not deaf.
White bubbles of spittle have collected in the corners of Lipp’s mouth and the pale pink lining of his trouser pocket hangs loose from his hip.
‘The Social Democrats have split! A group of them are voting to end the war! Block the funding! They’re founding a new anti-war party, the …’ He squints his left eye for better grip on his monocle. ‘ “Independent Social Democratic Party”. This is it, boys—’ He slaps the paper loudly with the back of his hand.
‘Show me that,’ I say.
‘—and they’re not locking them up this time!’ Lipp finishes. Then stops, a wet grin splitting his face. ‘He speaks,’ he says.
Theo looks at me, his eyes going up at the corners. It could be a smile.
Once I started talking, they soon let me out. At first I was aimless. It was 1917, and although the end of the war might have been nearer than the beginning, it was still too far off. I went to Munich and enrolled at the university; I had a love affair with a girl whose sweetheart was at the front. When he was killed she lost interest in me.
My friends kept dying, throughout that year and the next. I had been saved but I did not feel worthy of it. Then I joined the new party – the Independents – and we campaigned for peace. My strength started to return. The authorities called us traitors, saboteurs of the war effort. They broke up our meetings and took us into custody. But we were as prepared to die for our country as they were; some of us already had. We just wanted to save it first.
In the monastery I thought the atoms had realigned to form me again, moved into place by notes of song and invisible grace. But now I see that the solid thing was outside of me; I had hitched my hopes to history.
The revolution came in Russia, and we waited for our own.
Clara moves her shoulders, her neck from side to side. It is as if we have both been back in the monastery with the wounded and the monks.
‘Are you all right?’ she asks.
‘I haven’t thought of those people for a long time.’ My voice is hoarse.
There’s a line between her brows and her eyes are searching. It is a face ravaged with puzzlement, sympathy brimming close to the surface. She blinks it away. ‘How about I go get us some sandwiches?’
‘Thank you.’
She puts her hands into the small of her back and arches, catlike, then pushes out her chair. She moves to the door for her jacket, but turns to face me before she gets there.
‘After lunch, I thought, we could work in the park for a bit.’ She opens her arms, gesturing at the abandoned world. ‘I mean, for some air. See what’s left of the cherry bl—’
I shake my head. I will stay in this room. I have always worked best in captivity.
She slips on her jacket.
‘Why don’t you have yours in the park?’
She is uncertain, then relieved. ‘Okay …’ She shoulders her bag.
‘Actually, take the afternoon off. We’ve done enough for one day.’
She looks at me sceptically. It is inconceivable to her that someone would voluntarily stay in a room day and night when right outside this grand city shimmers and beckons like an amusement park, a lucky dip for grown-ups. Also, she suspects I’ll not eat.
‘I’ll bring you a sandwich first.’
‘No need.’
‘The usual?’ Clara has a way of ignoring me that is tender, not brusque. She is a ringmaster in a room with a tired old lion. She needs no chair or whip, the tone of voice will do.
‘Thank you.’
‘Capers?’
‘Please.’ I smile up at her. ‘And thank you, Clara.’
I take the milk out of the fridge and sniff it. It’s okay. I boil the kettle and take care to pour the water into the cup, not the tin of International Roast. Last week, in a minuscule moment of steaming absent-mindedness, I ended up with an overflowing coffee tin. I wedge a packet of Scotch Finger biscuits under my armpit and take the cup down the hall to the front room. Most old people, I am convinced, live on Scotch Finger biscuits.
When I sit back down in front of Toller I spray crumbs everywhere – it’s the Big Bang of biscuits! There are more crumbs than there ever was biscuit, and the thing will remain forever inexplicable. Bev is coming later on to clean. Of course she is cross when the place is not already clean. Long ago I decided to treat her huffing and puffing, her toxic, airborne reproaches as a game, as something that bonded us. She can sneer at my slovenliness (but I gave up the cigarillos!) while I feign gratitude for her ministrations. By this ritual we silently acknowledge that her virtue is superior to mine, though I, by happenstance and in no way that speaks to my merit, am superior in money.
So Toller had been in a sanatorium. I find it hard to think of such a firebrand mute. Dora never mentioned it – maybe she didn’t know much about it. Though she did tell me other things about his war, things he would not speak about publicly. He’d volunteered, she said, because he’d wanted to ‘prove with his life’ his love of Germany. His physical courage had frightened those around him. Once, when a soldier lay wounded in no man’s land, Toller ran out to pull him in but was forced back into the trench by a hail of artillery fire. For three days and nights the boy called them by name, at first loud and desperate, and then weaker and sadder. By the time he died Toller’s enthusiasm for the war had curdled into a suicidal recklessness in the protection of his men. Dora said he felt responsible for the mess they were in, as if it were, somehow, all his fault.
Dearest Toller. Why is it famous people are so much shorter in real life? The first time Dora brought him to my studio in Berlin – I was at Nollendorf Platz, so that makes it 1926 or ’7 – I opened the door and looked down and saw only two huge-horned gramophones, a pair of legs under each. Dora’s voice came from behind one.
‘He bought six of them, would you believe. For friends. One for you.’
‘But we’ve never met!’ I was embarrassed as soon as the words left my mouth, as if I’d said them in front of royalty. But I was shocked at the extravagance.
‘Don’t be so literal, Ruthie,’ Dora’s voice said. ‘You going to let us in?’
They put them down on a table. Toller turned to me, smiling. For an instant I was in the presence of a piece of fiction, someone come to life from the pages of the Munich Revolution, from a WANTED poster, from theatre playbills. And then he was just there: a youngish man in a rumpled silk shirt, with wild, grey-streaked hair streaming off his forehead, pumping my hand. He held my eyes with his.
Toller had no small talk, no register for Bekannten