Good People (26 page)

When they gathered again in the conference room, von Weizsäcker apologised that he would have to leave to attend to other matters. The rest of the day passed in a calmer mood. Thomas met every question and objection with fluency and vigour. Late in the afternoon the representative of the Labour Front asked, ‘Herr Heiselberg, why do you call the Pole an “ideal type”? What is so ideal about those Poles?'

Everyone broke up with laughter. ‘Hey, where's your spade!' someone called out, and a wave of jeering rolled through the room.

The poor fellow, no doubt to fend off more jokes about the Labour Front's custom of regarding spades as weapons, buried his nose in his papers.

Thomas was struck with dizziness. Not now, he prayed, but curved shadows, like bows of dust, thickened before his eyes. Through them flashed a thick chin, perfectly shaved, a neck wounded with red gashes, a blue ribbon, shining golden epaulettes like a river glittering in the sun as if a net spread on its waters would catch gold bars. He gaped. The faces of the men sitting around him rose up and hovered like balloons.

None of the lessons he had learned at Milton would be of use against these people. There he had learned to sort people into categories. But there were too many people here, too many organisations. All he had now was his ability to improvise. He was in despair, like a boy alone in the middle of the autobahn who had been asked to identify the drivers of a hundred passing cars.

The arcs of dust began to disappear, and the space brightened. Thomas exchanged glances with Beger, whose eyes were sparkling with mischief. It would definitely be possible to make friends with a man like that. Then Beger scowled and reprimanded the unfortunate man from the Labour Front, threatening to tell his boss, Robert Ley, not to send junior officials, whose education was an embarrassment both to the Labour Front and to Germany, to such demanding discussions.

‘M-a-x W-e-b-er,' Weller also scolded. ‘Look that name up in the encyclopedia.'

At the end of the conference, Martin Luther, an associate of von Ribbentrop, put an arm on his shoulder and said, ‘Herr Heiselberg, your lecture was inspiring: we need new blood in the Foreign Office!'

Other officials were full of praise, both those loyal to von Ribbentrop and career bureaucrats like Weller, veterans of the ministry, who despised the former. But Thomas knew very well that even those whose noses were out of joint would get used to the new boss.

‘Your model has united the whole office behind you,' a young policy adviser commented, ‘but don't have any illusions. From tomorrow you'll start accumulating enemies.'

After the Wehrmacht conquered Poland, the flow of requests to ‘purchase' the model increased, and it became one of the most widely discussed documents in the Reich, although it had many opponents who called Thomas a charlatan, a vacuous self-promoter, a capitalist pig. Social scientists rejected some of its conclusions, even those that were similar to theirs; members of the North and East German Research Fellowship described the pamphlet as a disgrace to German science. But that was to be expected: it threatened their influence in the Foreign Office. Joseph Goebbels opposed all the scholarly commotion about the Slavs and said that the model expressed cowardice, and Alfred Rosenberg wrote to the Foreign Minister that the natural place of the author of the model was in the Ministry of Propaganda. But most who had
attended the conference praised the reach of the document into biology, art, archaeology, history and philosophy, and the force of its conclusions about the Poles and the measures necessary to rule their country.

In the Foreign Office they began to emphasise the seven years of research by dozens of bodies that had informed the model, the thousands of pages of data that were its raw material. This chatter amused Thomas—no one had ever seen the thousands of pages of data supplied by Milton's Warsaw office that had been used in composing the model. Then, towards the end of September, when the first rumours emerged of Soviet atrocities against the Poles, there was growing recognition of the predictive ability of the model. ‘Even when someone predicts the obvious,' Karl Schnurre said, ‘he deserves respect.'

A request also arrived from Göring's office to attach them to the Four Year Plan as senior advisers. Weller, drunk with success, responded to all these requests to ‘buy the model' with lordly disdain. In October, when the district governors and the new institutions in Poland were organising themselves feverishly, and competing for a share of influence, the Foreign Office decided that Weller and Thomas should move to Warsaw to advise organisations wanting to use the model. Von Ribbentrop briefed them in a letter: they were employees of the Foreign Office and their subordination to the governor of Warsaw was merely technical; the model was the property of the Foreign Office; any organisation that addressed them with an inappropriate proposal ‘undermines the efforts of the Foreign Office to uphold the status of Germany in the world'.

They were given a floor in a small office building on Marszałkowska Street, and a pair of roomy apartments on Nowy Swiat. The district governor lent them two clerks to deal with requests according to the system that Thomas had used at Milton: starting with ‘extremely urgent'—requests from clients whom we want to oblige—and ending with ‘urgent to the fourth degree'—requests from clients we aren't interested in. For secretarial work they hired two
Volksdeutsche
women in their late twenties, who studied law at the University of Warsaw.

At least once a week they held work meetings in the parlour of the
Bristol Hotel, where senior Gestapo men were quartered. Thomas had stayed there on his two previous trips to Warsaw and had been excited by the lively hum, brimming with possibility, that filled the air: the sound of many different languages that he longed to master; guests from all over Europe trading ideas, people with whom he enjoyed discussing business initiatives. Now the hotel was swarming with Germans in uniform, the conversations were brusque and official. But he and Weller made it their duty to be there to meet people of high rank, to spin alliances, to hear and spread rumours, to keep track of changes in the organisations they dealt with, or, as Weller used to say, ‘To understand where we stand in this commotion.'

…

‘Every time you run into a bunch of kids galloping out of a schoolyard, you understand that you've died once.'

Thomas and Georg Weller were walking past a school. The cast-iron gate to the yard had been shoved onto the asphalt. The domed building had crimson windows striped with blue. Its vacant courtyard was surrounded by a brick wall against which dead leaves were heaped up.

Little Thomas skips down the busy street between the shop windows. Father shouts that he mustn't go too far. Lights shine from the windows and their wonders are reflected in the pedestrians' eyes: a model car, a jacket, an ornate sofa, a glass table with carved wooden legs. Between now and the day Thomas will own these things stretch the rituals of his childhood, then marriage and studies and hard work. Little Thomas imagines his future: fame, death or both. In the morning he meets his friends and goes to his Latin and mathematics and history classes. During recess they create clubs, decide fates. Bruno, the Italian, whines that they have left him out. They all admire an athlete who has sprinted a hundred metres in little more than ten seconds. Thomas feels like he doesn't fit in; their interests are irrelevant. He thinks of them with a kind of paternal irony. He doesn't understand how they
are happy to confine their lives to stupid amusements when two steps away true life roars in the grand and shining world. Boys, can't you see that we're stuck here? If we cross the yellowing grass with its swings, slide and marble plaque that says ‘Exercise Field in Memory of Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi 1746–1828', and leap the fence, we'll be in the centre of the world!

Father is waiting for him outside the school in the outfit of a badly paid worker whose wife has a small and dwindling estate, who buys suits for himself that won't embarrass her. Father peels the fresh putty from the windows of the first floor. The putty spots his hat, and they both know that Mother will grumble in the evening. They hurry off to Friedrichstrasse. Sometimes Father dreams like Thomas, but sometimes he builds fences around his dreams, counting everything that won't happen: dreams about sad Fredericus after whom the street is named, the conqueror with the bold gaze.

Later, America begins to charm Thomas. Hermann's father becomes one of the men he admires. The children and their parents ridicule him, but Thomas doesn't understand how it's possible to disdain a man who has obtained such marvellous merchandise from the Americans.

Thomas's father also despises America and all the countries that vowed to keep Germany weak, greased the palms of corrupt politicians, spread treasonous articles in the newspapers and encouraged the Communists to march against their own country. But most of all he hates the intellectuals, the degenerate artists from the Romanisches Café, who have corrupted German culture. ‘Germany didn't lose the war. Always remember that, son. We didn't lose. They sold us out.'

A freezing gust strikes the backs of their necks. Here's Mother. She always invades his memory and keeps her son and husband apart. Mother and Father stand next to him, it is Sunday noon. They stand close, but they can't protect him from the wind. Father says something that the wind whips away. Mother's hat also blows away. Her hair fluffs up, and she tries to hold it down but strands fly across her face. ‘What's happening, Dad?' The hat bounces onto the road, is
crushed by cars. Father looks at it. Mother looks at Father. Thomas looks at them both. Cars pass. How small they have become. That was their first loss.

‘Warsaw is so shabby. No wonder the Slavs still ride horses into battle.'

Thomas came to his senses, and gave Weller a friendly look. Had he managed to banish the gloom from his eyes? You could stifle laughter or tears, change your expression—those were minor matters—but it wasn't easy to control your gaze.

‘Listen to this,' Weller added in a dreamy tone. ‘Last August, when I was in Moscow with the Foreign Minister and Dr Schnurre, the night sky was clear, clustered everywhere with stars. Their sky aroused feelings of reverence in me. I understood how vast that country is.'

Weller liked to talk about that trip to Moscow when the Foreign Minister had signed the treaty with the Communists. He apparently didn't realise that everyone in the Foreign Office was gossiping about how he had been humiliated there: he wasn't included in the first, restricted meeting, or in the expanded evening meeting, and he had not been invited at all to the second conference at the end of September. ‘Most of the time they left him in the embassy to take messages from Berlin,' Martin Luther laughed and told Thomas how the Minister of Foreign Affairs had sworn that Stalin was the most impressive man he had ever met, except the Führer, of course. Weller was too prudent, Thomas thought. A man shackled by caution won't go far, won't be invited to the really interesting meetings. It was not wise to bet on him as his only patron. He should get closer to Karl Schnurre and Martin Luther.

‘Oh, if we weren't friends, I would envy you madly,' he said to Weller. ‘How many nights like that has the world seen?'

Weller adjusted his spectacles, a familiar gesture that gave him a moment to restrain his rage. He tugged his sleeves and smoothed his trouser creases. ‘Ribbentrop is certainly a source of pride to all the wine merchants,' he said softly.

Weller spoke the language of the government, but occasionally
couldn't repress his contempt for senior members of the party. His conservative attitudes, his education, his roots, extending deep into the Prussian bureaucracy (his great-grandfather had been a political adviser to the Kaiser), and the feeling of people of his kind that the state belonged to them—all of these things made it hard for him to be reconciled to the fact that a gang of men from remote villages—or, worse, from places like Riga, Rewahl and even Chile—had become the rulers of Germany.

They were walking down Marszałkowska Street. Scraps of newspaper fluttered in the wind. Through smashed doors and windows they could see destroyed apartments that had been abandoned. People were removing stones from some of the ruined buildings. A group of young men, working in a row, levelled out the sand around the broken cobbles. Three Wehrmacht soldiers, idly smoking, were supervising them. Polish children pushed wheelbarrows full of sand, manoeuvring through the passersby. The trucks, the motorcycles, the hammers and wheelbarrows, the broken stones—all of these gave the street the daily life of a city, but as if swallowed up by the soft Polish language, the cautious clearing of throats, the silent children, the suppressed tension and the trembling expectation of a new decree. The brazen chaos of Jerozolimskie had been reduced to a mournful whimper. Warsaw looked feeble and helpless. At the end of their first week in the city Weller dragged Thomas to the bright and cosmopolitan intersection of Zgoda and Szpitalna streets, where on his first visit to Warsaw Thomas had found an office for the Polish branch of Milton. Now the building was abandoned. Large companies and newspaper offices were no longer there. Only the Chevrolet sign still hung beneath the roof. Scenery for a play that had closed.

At once Thomas grasped the opportunity this city offered him: here was a foundation of wet cement waiting for someone to shape it with laws, regulations, logic, all the hollow spaces in the city, where nothing was really comprehensible either to the Poles or to the Germans. And if he strode onto centre stage as the man with the answers and proved to everyone that only his model could allow this city to fulfil
its potential—he would be the most influential German in Poland.

Three young woman stepped towards them. They looked extraordinarily alike—were they sisters?—and were all dressed in black woollen coats, silk stockings and high-heeled shoes. The only difference was in their hats. One wore a round hat that covered her hair, another a high blue hat beneath which her curls flounced and the third a green hat like a military beret.