Dark Tunnel (4 page)

“All right.” I told him about Ruth Esch and the month I spent in Munich in 1937 and how it ended.

I was twenty-three that year, and still a student. I was travelling on a fellowship and gathering material for my doctoral dissertation. After a couple of months in London, where I wore out the seat of a pair of pants in the reading room of the British Museum, I went to Munich at the beginning of November to do a month’s work there. I didn’t get as much work done as I expected to. I found better things than libraries in Munich, and worse things.

My second day in Munich I was looking for the American Express Company to change some traveller’s marks into money, when I saw a huge crowd lined up on one of the main streets. I joined the crowd to see what was up, and heard people talking in tones of delighted awe about Der Führer. Great square banners of red silk marked with black swastikas hung high above the road on wires, and gasoline torches flared on square red pillars at every corner. Along the curbs like a human fence there were lines of black-helmeted elite guards standing at attention, each second guard facing the crowd.

It looked to me as if Adolf Hitler was going to come down that street shortly, and I stayed where I was. I filled and lit a briar pipe which I had bought in London, and waited for the circus to begin.

Sudden music blared from loudspeakers on the lampposts, and the crowd’s hum died into staring silence. The music sounded like an obsolete popular song to me, but the crowd liked it and the Germans are a music-loving people. I went on puffing at my pipe.

Before six bars of music had been played, something happened to my pipe. It was whisked from my mouth and shattered on the pavement at my feet. A fat man beside me shook his jowls and growled at me in low, intense German. I gathered that he objected to the aroma of tobacco. It seemed that a lot of other people did, too, because a little circle of my German neighbors were glaring at me as balefully as hell. I felt uncomfortable and started to move out of the circle.

The fat man gave me a petulant push and I pushed him and he sat down against a woman’s legs. The woman stepped around him and I saw that her legs were beautifully made.

A man’s voice said,
“Ruhe!”
in a rasping whisper, and I looked up and saw the nearest elite guard stalking me with his eyes. I wanted to get away but the crowd had closed around me and the fat man was getting up panting with rage. The woman he had fallen against stepped between us and said something to him about an
Auslander.
Red hair flared under her black lamb hat like gasoline fire, and even in German I liked the sound of her voice.

She turned to me and I liked her face: it was calm and beautiful, with no mob-hatred in it.

“Come with me,” she said in English, and put a black-gloved hand in the crook of my arm. She said,
“Bitte,”
and the crowd made way for us. At the risk of breaking up the party, I went with her.

When we reached the edge of the crowd, she turned to me. “Don’t you know the Horst Wessel song? You mustn’t smoke in the presence of sublime music.”

She didn’t smile. I looked for irony in her eyes, which were green and cool as the sea, and saw it flickering deep down near the sea-floor.

“I’m afraid I didn’t realize the seriousness of my offense,” I said, trying to match her irony. “Thank you for intervening.”

“Not at all.” She smiled, so that she suddenly looked like a young girl. “I’d be jolly sorry to see anybody torn limb from limb.”

“Are you English?” I asked. She spoke English with a slight German accent, but her tone and idiom sounded English to me. English people who have lived abroad for years sometimes acquire a foreign accent.

“No. I’m German. I had an English governess. You’re an American, aren’t you?”

“Yes. But I don’t even know how you knew I was an
Auslander.
I was so surprised when that fat fellow knocked my pipe out of my mouth I didn’t even think of trying to explain.”

“You look like an American, and you act like one.”

“How does an American look and act?” I said, for the sake of continuing the conversation.

“Well, tall and healthy and quite—neither beautiful nor ugly.” The color on her cheek-bones deepened faintly and she laughed with some embarrassment. “And you Americans have a certain blue-eyed look. It’s not immaturity, exactly. A kind of naïveté I suppose, as if the world weren’t such a bad place after all—”

“Is it?”

She stopped smiling and looked at me. “How long have you been in Germany?”

“One day,” I said, and changed the subject: “How does an American act?”

“As if the world weren’t such a bad place after all,” she retorted. “As if a single man could cope with any difficulty, and fists were effective weapons. If an Englishman were pushed and had his pipe broken, he’d appeal to the nearest bobbie.”

“I shouldn’t have pushed him,” I said as I felt my ears turn red. “It was a childish thing to do.”

“I’m glad you pushed him,” she said, and her eyes danced like ripples in sunlight. “I felt like kicking him. He was very officious, a very kickable type.”

The music had stopped and her laughter tinkled in the silence like a bell. We were standing clear of the crowd against a building, but several people turned and frowned at us. I wondered if laughter was
verboten
in the Third Reich.

“We mustn’t talk,” she whispered.

Noise flooded from the loudspeakers as if somewhere a dam of sound had burst, and broke in waves over the street.

“Wagner,” the girl beside me whispered. “That means he’s coming.”

The waves of music swept the street bare of everything but sound and power, flattening the individual will like ocean combers rolling on the pavement. When the sound receded, it left a throbbing vacuum for Der Führer to fill with his presence.

A little man in a brown raincoat came down the center of the street with his peaked nose thrust out like a brown rat walking in a dry riverbed. At his right a fat stoat, bloated with the blood of stolen chickens, waddled in step with the leader, and at his left a rabbit with a twisted foot limped along. Hitler and Göring and Goebbels, triumvirate of the new order that was to be in Europe.

The crowd was humming like viols and low drums, like bees around the queen. I felt vaguely embarrassed as if I was witnessing a sexual act, and looked at the girl beside me to see how she was taking it.

She was standing on tiptoe with her chin raised to see, her breasts high and pointed under her taut black coat. Her upper lip was twitching as if there was a nerve of hate there that she couldn’t restrain, and I saw her take her lips between her teeth. Her face was pale and drawn tight over the delicate bones of her cheeks and jaw. There had been a gay and youthful beauty in her face, but now it was pinched by a bitter interior wind. Then and there I wanted to take her with me out of Germany.

After the strange triumvirate marched a little group of generals whom I did not recognize, and then a troop of SS guards like a mechanical black snake made of men. A brown caterpillar of storm troopers crawled behind them with breeches and leather leggings on its hundred legs. Then came a company of goose-stepping soldiers in army uniform, kicking out stiffly in unison as if they were all angry at the same thing and to the same degree. I had a grotesque vision of radio-controlled robots in field grey, marching across a battlefield towards smoking guns on pointed toes like ballet dancers and bleeding black oil when they fell down dead.

The girl beside me touched my arm and said in a low voice, “Let’s get out of here.”

I turned to her and she seemed smaller. Her mouth looked soft and defenseless, and was pale where she had bitten it. Her face was as white as a pearl and her black lashes shadowed her eyes. She looked very tired.

The circus was over and the crowd began to break up. We moved away with it, she leaning lightly on my arm.

“What’s your name?” I asked. “Mine is Robert Branch.”

“Ruth Esch.”

“Will you have tea with me? You look as if you could do with some tea.”

“I’ve never learned to like tea,” she said, “even when I was in England.”

“Have you been in England? I just came from there.”

“Did you? I have been there often with my mother. She had friends in England.”

“You speak English almost like an Englishwoman.”

“Thank you,” she said and smiled, more to herself than to me.

“If you won’t have tea, will you have coffee with me?”

She hesitated. “Well, I really have an engagement with Thomas, you know. He’ll be expecting me. On the other hand, he’s not likely to go away.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t know you had an engagement. Don’t stand anybody up for me.” I wondered who Thomas was and felt jealous of him already.

“Stand anybody up?” she said gravely like a child repeating a lesson, but there was laughter in her eyes.

“Break a date, call off an engagement,” I said. “Americanese.”

“Oh, Thomas wouldn’t really care so much. Even when you stand him up, his arms still reach to the floor.”

“What?”

She laughed at my surprise. “He lives in a cage at the Zoological Gardens. He’s a chimpanzee and I go to see him nearly every day.”

“Are you interested in animals?”

“I like Thomas,” she said. “He’s so very human. The Nazis haven’t thought it worthwhile to indoctrinate him.”

“Are you an anti-Nazi?” I asked. “You look like one.”

“Dankeschön.
We won’t speak of it, if you please. By the way, are you a scholar?”

“A sort of one. Why?”

“Are you quite poor? Most scholars are.”

“Not particularly,” I said. “I’ve got a pretty good scholarship. In fact, I seem to be quite rich in German money.”

“Then you may give me coffee over here.” She pointed to the plate-glass front of a restaurant across the street.

I said, “Thank you very much,” and meant it. She spoke and moved with the independence and dignity of a woman who could not be easily picked up. I felt that my one-guinea pipe had been broken in a good cause.

We crossed the street and entered the restaurant. The air inside had a hothouse warmth and was laden with the scent of expensive perfumes and expensive cigars. The men and women at the tables looked well fed and well dressed. Most of the women wore Paris dresses and had the slightly unreal, glazed look of the too perfectly groomed, the look of orchids and rich men’s wives and daughters and top-flight politicians’ mistresses. The rich men were there in clothes cut in Savile Row and Bond Street, and the officers in black SS uniforms and brown shirts were the top-flight politicians. At the far end of the room, a string orchestra in Hungarian peasant costume whined and throbbed and lamented. A faint sweet odor of dead and rotting Babylons came up through the cracks in the wainscoting, but the expensive cigar-smoke covered it over.

A waiter led us to a table and we had thick Turkish coffee in tiny cups.

“Oriental splendor,” I said. “Are you by any chance a beautiful Armenian slave-girl?” Without her coat, Ruth Esch was more beautiful than before. She wore a high-necked, long-sleeved tunic of black wool above which her skin shone starkly. Her shoulders were wide for a woman but slender and delicately curved. Her bright hair burned steadily around her head like downward flames.

She said with a little laugh, “I’m not Armenian exactly. I’m a Troyan.”

“Troyan? Do you mean Trojan?”

“Shakespeare says Troyan. I’m playing Cressida this week.”

“Shakespeare’s Cressida? Really? Are you an actress?”

“A sort of one.” She was mimicking me. “The leading lady at the Repertory Theatre is under the weather this week, and they’ve given me her part. I was to play Cassandra.”

“I can’t see you as Cressida,” I said, and recognized the blunder as soon as I said it.

“Oh.
Warum denn nicht
?” She was enjoying my confusion.

I blundered on: “She’s a wanton, a light, giddy weathercock of a girl. You’re not, that’s all.”

“Must an actress commit murder to play Lady Macbeth? Anyway I’m much giddier than you think.”

“It was a silly thing to say. I take it back.”

“It
was
silly,” she said, “since a boy played Cressida in Shakespeare’s day. You might at least reserve your comment until you see me act.”

“Is there a performance to-night?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll come and see you to-night.”

I had never seen
Troilus and Cressida
acted on any stage. It is one of the least popular of Shakespeare’s plays because it handles love and honor with gloves off, and calls a spade a dung-fork. Achilles is a treacherous and perverted boar, Troilus a love-sick fool, Helen of Troy an international courtesan, Cressida a two-bit floozie. But Ruth played Cressida with an understanding that gave the play a quality I did not know it had. Her Cressida was a brainless, warm-blooded girl who could not resist the flattery of a handsome lover. She didn’t try to gloss over Cressida’s weakness with tragic effects, but gave her a certain pathos as a victim of environment and her own character. Moving about the stage in her tight bodice and flowing skirts, she was the image of feminine grace without dignity, and affection without consistency or restraint.

The image depressed me: with a girl who could act like that, you’d never know where you were at. But my depression didn’t prevent me from going to her dressing-room after the final curtain to ask her to have supper with me. I wasn’t the only one who went. The small bare room was full of people laughing and talking in German, and there were masses of flowers on both sides of the dressing-table where Ruth was wiping off her grease-paint.

I was a stranger and a foreigner and I felt like a fish out of water. But she greeted me gaily and familiarly as if I was an old friend, smiling at me in the mirror.

“Was I giddy enough, Mr. Branch?”

“You were wonderful,” I said. “You still are.”

“Even with grease on my face? Incredible.”

“You’re incredible, too. Will you have supper with me?”

“But I’ve just dined with you.”

“Will you?”

“Please go away, everybody,” she said in German. “I must change my clothes. Mr. Branch, you may wait for me in the hall if you wish.”