Good People (6 page)

‘You lot don't know,' Hermann said to his friends, who were all staring at him in boredom except for the policeman Höfgen, who was constantly fidgeting. ‘You're too young. But during the 1920s Herr Heiselberg's father was a devoted member of the National Socialist Party.'

‘Actually, until his death,' Thomas emphasised.

‘Until his death. And while we're talking about death, you must know about the horrible murder of poor Vom Rath.' His upper lip, which protruded slightly, like the remnant of a smile that reached the dimples on his cheeks, gave his face a kind of childish impishness. His skin was still smooth, mocking the passing years, and still tanned. The boys at school had thought of the tan as an ‘American' touch.

The familiar smile allayed Thomas's fears somewhat. ‘We were all shocked to hear the sad news,' he said, nodding once again to Höfgen, who stepped back and stood behind one of the youths.

‘The kike coward didn't dare take out the ambassador himself,' Hermann chuckled, ‘so he made do with a miserable clerk. It's a good thing he didn't shoot the doorman.'

‘Murderers like that are usually cowards,' Thomas said earnestly.
‘People who always dreamed of some glorious deed, with a narcissistic desire to be loved by the masses, whom they actually despise. But there is nothing heroic about them at all.'

‘Yes. I like that: people who desire heroism, but have none,' Hermann agreed. ‘You doubtless understand the reason for our interest in recent events. This is a difficult night for the German people, and we were asked to keep order in the streets. Would you believe that a Jewish criminal scratched Höfgen, our faithful policeman?'

Other memories of Hermann surfaced: had Thomas done him a great injustice? Hermann had suffered as a boy from his failure to behave well, and at a certain stage he began making out that Thomas was some serpent-like, seductive figure, dragging him into sin. But Hermann always acknowledged that Thomas had helped him in hard times. In short, they had had good and bad days. But for years they had had nothing to do with each other…Had he said anything against Hermann that might have reached his ears? It didn't seem so. Thomas seldom spoke ill of people. Gossip was an indulgent weakness. Slander wasn't useful; it was likely to give listeners the residual feeling that you were unworthy of their trust. In the final reckoning, the harm outweighed the benefit.

‘A nice place, isn't it?' Hermann pointed at the building where Erika Gelber used to treat Thomas. ‘Do you still go there regularly?'

‘Much less in the past two years. There's a lot of work in the office.' Thomas looked him in the eye. He didn't intend to show him that he had been surprised.

‘Does your friend, the Jewish psychoanalyst, help you?' Hermann asked.

‘Much less in the past two years,' Thomas repeated, beginning to wonder whether this might be the right time to tell Hermann that a senior official from the Foreign Office had just visited him.

‘Very nice, very nice,' Hermann laughed. ‘Baumann told me that his dad went a little crazy after the war, and that the Jews treated him…All kinds of things that you don't understand that you know, or you don't know that you understand. Something
like that. Quite a deceptive business, no?'

‘Yes, they helped a lot of soldiers,' Thomas said. ‘In fact I heard that they got a medal from the War Ministry.'

‘All this is very well, but we have a lot more to do,' a tall Brownshirt, behind whom Höfgen was hiding, said to Hermann irritably. ‘Maybe you could chat with your bourgeois faker some other day?' He stepped back, and now the policeman was in front of Thomas. Höfgen stared at him as if he were seeing him for the first time and was at his wit's end.

‘Speaking of Jews, I'm interested in hearing your opinion about the murder in Paris,' Hermann said calmly, raising his hand and poking his index finger right at the tall man's face. ‘Maybe it's time to react against the French, too?'

‘It's a terrible thing, a great shame to all the Jews,' Thomas answered. ‘And as for the French, those are matters that the Führer knows best how to handle.'

‘Believe me, tonight is the great shame of the Jews,' Hermann said quietly. His dimples deepened, but cold mockery flashed in his eyes.

An alarming certainty crept into Thomas's mind: it was no coincidence that Hermann was speaking to him now. He had ignored him for years, but tonight, the very night for which Hermann had been born, he was choosing to devote time to Thomas.

‘And maybe for their friends too,' Hermann added. ‘There are Germans for whom the laws of the Reich are merely recommendations.' The arrogant smile, ostensibly polite, vanished, and his flaming eyes scrutinised Thomas with hatred. ‘Didn't you say you were hurrying home?'

Thomas looked past Hermann and focused on Höfgen, who was in distress. There was no doubt about it. The policeman's gaze roamed over the group, as though trying to explain to Thomas that he had no other choice.

Thomas now knew that Hermann and his gang were planning to harm him, or, even worse, had already harmed him.

Far behind them they heard a powerful explosion. Bluish-orange flames burst out of a row of buildings. A pillar of smoke rose and was swallowed in the darkness. Everyone gaped at it as though hypnotised. Little fires burned in the whites of their eyes.

‘Yes, run along now, Thomas,' Hermann said. ‘On a night like this, you really shouldn't leave your mother all alone.'

Now he understood.

LENINGRAD

AUTUMN 1938

One by one the guests fell onto the red Turkish sofa, eyeing each other in a way that reflected years of friendship tinged with suspicion. With a thunderous greeting the massively built Vladimir Morozovsky, reputed to be one of the largest men in the city, approached the sofa, upon which the poets Konstantin Varlamov and Emma Feodorovna Rykova had already settled, while between them, hunched over and shrinking into himself, sat the literary critic Brodsky. Varlamov placed his hands over his ears, and Emma waved to Morozovsky to show there was no more room. He retreated, leaned against the faded wallpaper and looked out at the murky evening sky.

Even before greeting each other, they had ticked off the names of those who had been invited but had not come. It was well known that, at such gatherings, the absentees were the most important people—their timidness endowed those who did come with an aura of courage and gave them the right to condemn those absent as disgraceful cowards. Nevertheless, the more absentees there were, the more intrusive the
doubts of those present. Do they know something we don't? they asked themselves in panic. What do they know? If someone warned them, why didn't they tell us? But if someone wanted to uncover any plots being hatched at the meeting, then he needed an informer to be here. So those who hadn't come were harmless cowards, while the really dangerous person, the traitor, is actually here among us!

The hidden recesses of the informer's heart cannot be laid bare—better to hope that there was no person in the world so base as to betray his friends. Still, rumours circulated every day about people who turned in those closest to them. ‘In 1938 a wise person reveals nothing to anyone,' Brodsky had declared, ‘except his name and place of work.'

‘Where is Osip Borisovich?' complained Varlamov. ‘Ever since they arrested Nadyezhda Petrovna he's vanished.' With his fingers he smoothed the white locks that fell rakishly over his dark, wrinkled brow, while darting looks of satisfaction at the men around him, as though to ask: and you, young fellows, do you have such a splendid head of hair?

Indeed, the absence of Osip Borisovich Levayev made the people sitting in the living room uncomfortable. He was an enthusiastic admirer of Nadyezhda Petrovna, and in the past he had even obtained handwritten permission from Sergei Kirov, when he was the most powerful and admired man in Leningrad, to print a book of her poems. And then there was the scandal when he headbutted the author Alexei Tolstoy, after the latter labelled Nadyezhda Petrovna's first book ‘decadent cosmopolitanism'.

‘His wife would rather he was dead,' announced Emma Feodorovna. She took off her broad-brimmed hat, fluffed her hair up and lit a cigarette, blowing the smoke straight at Brodsky's spectacles. Her greenish eyes glowed with the argumentative light that tormented the offended faces of her friends, but Alexandra, whom everybody called Sasha, always saw in that light the lovely lament of a dissatisfied soul. ‘So long as he isn't arrested,' Emma went on, ‘because then she'd have to run around for him instead of lying in bed all day with that stammering sister of hers, slandering the whole world.'

Sasha was standing against the wall in her darkened room. A mocking twitch fluttered over her lips. When she was little, Emma used to pick her up, cover her face with kisses smelling of cigarettes, and tell bad stories about everyone, even about Sasha's own parents. Now Sasha nudged the door so she could see the whole living room, including the eastern side where her parents were. This was the second time in a month that this weary bunch had met to make a plan about Nadyezhda Petrovna's arrest, but in fact to ward off the danger to themselves. Once again they would probably adopt ‘urgent action points' that no one would dare implement.

She couldn't restrain herself and poked her head out to peek at her father, Andrei, in the mirror between the bookshelves. He was in his rocking chair, gazing at the fine glass frame that hung on the wall opposite him: a map of ‘The Great Factories of the Soviet Union', a gift from the head of the Physical-Technical Institute to the physicist, Comrade Andrei Weissberg. From time to time he looked at her mother, Valeria, who was leaning over the kerosene stove and pouring tea for the guests while asking after their health and that of their families. Sasha despised this ceremony: every time her father looked at his wife, his gaze would cloud with helplessness. In her presence he behaved like a man stunned by the vagaries of the world, who needed Valeria to speak for him.

For example, last summer the head informed Andrei that he would have the honour of representing the institute in Moscow at a meeting of the People's Commissariat for Heavy Industry, where the plans for 1939 would be discussed. It was widely known that anyone who went to Moscow would be arrested as soon as they came back, because they had met too many people, and had been asked too many questions, whose answers aroused someone's suspicion. And, in general, a visit to Moscow attracted unnecessary attention to a person's existence, which was why the head preferred to send a worker whom he hoped would say the right thing when asked about him.

Her father didn't dare reject the unwelcome honour, but as soon as he got home from work he went to bed and refused to get up. The
next morning Valeria visited the head and explained that her Andreyusha was prone to nightmares in unfamiliar environments, and would spout nonsense in his sleep that a stranger might misinterpret. The next day the head announced that Weissberg wouldn't be going to Moscow.

Now her mother sat down on the chair next to Andrei and placed his hand on her slim hips. She sat straight, taller than her husband; her chin seemed to hover over her long neck, and her presence bespoke chilly pride. It was clear that she wanted everyone to know that she had no truck with petty personal calculations, and would rise above her husband's weakness.

Sasha scorned her. Only someone abandoned to her own illusions could think that any of the guests might be taken in by this performance. True, unlike Sasha, none of them had seen Valeria sitting on her bed night after night, pretending to be lost in a book, waiting for her husband to come home—but even if someone decided to believe in the impression she was trying so hard to make, the inevitable moment would come when the spell wore off, and only the hard evidence remained. All the strategies of a betrayed woman cannot negate the fact that she is betrayed.

A soft knock on the door.

Brodsky hid his face in his plate, Emma Feodorovna stubbed her cigarette out in the ashtray and stirred the butts in it, Varlamov's head sank back into the sofa. How easily they scared, Sasha raged. A gentle knock like that didn't sound dangerous.

Her mother hurried to the door. ‘Osip Borisovich,' her voice rang out from the hall. ‘How good to see you.'

‘My wife is sick,' Levayev's proud voice bellowed. ‘I just popped over for a moment.'

Meanwhile, in the living room, the guests started up again. ‘Strange, Nadya's arrest, very strange. If she was involved in something improper…' Varlamov repeated exactly what he had said at the earlier meeting. Had age impaired his memory, Sasha wondered, or does he not want to say anything else?

‘If they arrested Nadka, they must have had a good reason,' mumbled Brodsky. Crumbled egg yolk clung to his red beard. He sliced his second egg into thin strips and arranged them on his plate. Nadya once told Sasha that it was enough to see how Brodsky handled an egg to know he had never slept with a woman.

Her mother took the arm of the strapping young man, who was as usual impeccably dressed, and sat him down at her side. Emma Feodorovna lit another cigarette, aimed the smoke at his handsome face and made fun of his new hairdo: short at the back with a wild black curl at the front. ‘Osip Borisovich, is that a gesture to your boyhood in the Ukraine, that thing on your head?'

Konstantin Varlamov hid his face in his cup of tea and slurped. He was primed to explain, as usual, why any appeal to his highly placed friends on behalf of Nadyezhda Petrovna would be futile. If they arrested people like Radek and Pyatakov, Rykov and Yezhov, Garniko and Petrovsky, not to mention Bukharin and Zinoviev, how could his friends do anything for an unknown woman poet? Varlamov recited this litany each time he thought he might be asked to help someone who had been arrested. Everyone was impressed: ‘The old man's a genius! After the last litany—it went for twenty-seven minutes, including memory lapses—no one will dare to ask for his help ever again.'