Gossip from the Forest (5 page)

Already it was a quarter to three.

Erzberger:
Do you think you can get me through to Garrison HQ? I must speak to the Chancellor.

Secretary:
Come in. I'll try.

The secretary let him into the office of Prince Max von Baden. The desk was clear of anything but a telephone—it looked as if even the blotting paper had been hidden away to save it from revolutionary hands. A photograph of an overly handsome Kaiser, dressed in the style of Lohengrin, was the only decoration to the walls.

The secretary picked up the telephone. Inanely scabbed with
fin-de-siècle
ornamentation, it served to augment Matthias Erzberger's secret frenzy.

Deep in the Chancellery a single telephonist was on duty.

The secretary gave Erzberger the telephone. He seemed to be saying I've done what I could. Now I don't want to hear the noise of chaos on the far end of the line.

Voice:
Hello. Major Heindorff, wine-procuring officer, Berlin Garrison.

Erzberger:
My God, you're still working?

Voice:
I've been at this work for eighteen years, sir.

Erzberger told him who he was, and that somewhere in the garrison buildings was the Chancellor, perhaps, sitting at a telephone. Matthias suggested that Heindorff should consider it his day for procuring chancellors.

Voice:
He'd be in the communications room, no doubt. Perhaps I can get you transferred. But the privates who run the switchboard have all gone socialist. They switched you through to me for a joke.

Erzberger:
Tell them it's a message for the Chancellor. About an armistice. They want an armistice, don't they?

Waiting. The secretary would not look at him other than sideways. I am the most inauspicious diplomat he's ever talked to. Yet, as if I were going to a wedding, I wish to catch that train.

And is the line dead or vacant? What tricks were the Spartacist privates playing down that vacant well the telephone imposed on his ear?

Voice:
Reichschancellor.

Erzberger:
Erzberger, sir. I'm calling from your office.

Voice:
Oh.

Erzberger:
I can't find my accreditation documents.

Voice
. Accreditation.

Erzberger:
For the armistice commission.

Voice:
Of course. You must forgive me, Matthias. You go to Spa and I'll send Brockdorff-Rantzau on after you with the accreditations.

Scapegoat, perhaps. But there are corners of the wilderness I will still not go to without proper papers.

Erzberger:
I'm afraid I can't go to Spa without the documents. I'd be defenseless before the Supreme Command, before the Kaiser. Also Brockdorff-Rantzau will take too long to catch me up. Can't you consider anyone else?

Voice:
Oh God, it's too much.

Erzberger:
For all of us, sir.

Voice:
Is Threme there?

Erzberger:
Yes.

Voice:
Put him on.

Erzberger pushed the receiver at the secretary. While Threme spoke … Yes, sir. Yes I have his home number … Matthias Erzberger watched substantial storm clouds circling at their ease in the east and below them the nameless government offices, hives of good clerks, the railings, the trees, the drifts of poplar and linden leaves, the newly insolent soldiers and lathe operators scuffing, kicking, rearranging them with their boots. It was so late in the autumn, someone should have by now swept up the dead leaves.

Secretary:
I'll tell him, sir.

He put the receiver down. Minister of State Erzberger, sniffing conspiracy, had even raised his walking stick a little.

Erzberger:
You hung up!

Secretary:
There was nothing more to discuss, sir.

Erzberger:
I'm the judge.

Secretary:
The Chancellor told me to request you to catch your train. He has decided to appoint Count Maiberling of this office to the commission.

Erzberger:
Count Maiberling is my friend.…

He remembered a pleasant diplomat in Sofia. Together they had talked to the Bulgarian foreign minister, eaten state dinners, afterward, drunk at their hotels, made private jokes about their hosts. For such purposes the count made a good companion.

Now in the hollow Chancellery, a flush of paranoid fear came over Staatsminister Erzberger. Someone has cleverly marked the count and his friend Matthias for the irksome journey. Some David was choosing appropriate Uriahs. Except that Maiberling and I … we never tasted any regal whore. Unless you considered a seat on the board of Thyssen's to be commerce with harlots. Or took note of the few milk-white Bulgar girls the count had thrown in my path.

Secretary:
The accreditations will be made out and handed to you at the train. There won't be another Spa special tomorrow evening, you see. You will have to travel with some of General Groener's staff officers who are returning to OHL. The Chancellor is sure you won't mind that, Herr Erzberger. You always got on well with officers.

Erzberger:
In the early days. Not for the past few years.

Secretary:
Quite … I'll telephone Count Maiberling.

Downstairs the two soldiers were still waiting by the sedan. This was strange constancy by the standards of the day. Why were they so attentive? Assassins! his guts told him. Assassins are always attentive.

Erzberger told them he wanted to go to Schöneberg. He said he'd show them the way.

All the way southwest he watched the driver's luminously pink and junked ear. It shone like a rose in the half-light, like the vulva of a woman.

Erzberger tapped on the glass to break up this too clear and, for the moment, too threatening image.

Erzberger:
Off the Bayerischer Platz!

The house stood behind a modest stucco wall. Unhappily there was no one in it. Paula, with Maria the spiritual adolescent and infant Gabrielle, was staying with friends in a bungalow in the woods on Grosser Wansee, where the pleasure boats used to sail all summer. November, and such a November as this, had turned it into a muted, private place. This bereaved November his own house seemed dead. It gave off cold of its own.

Old Dieter answered the door.

Erzberger:
Aren't you cold, Dieter?

Dieter had once done military service and lost his left eye in Tanga. He let one believe the eye had been poked out by some tribesman. But, knowing that Herr Erzberger was an expert on German Africa, never offered too much vivid testimony about the supposed battle in which it had been lost. He wore an exquisite glass eye from Bohemia, piercing and young in the old face and beside the bloodshot other eye.

Dieter:
I've got a fire in the back room, sir.

Erzberger:
Good. I've to pack my bag, Dieter. I'm making a journey. While I'm upstairs don't let anyone in.

It wasn't like packing for a routine journey. He handled with some hunger his toiletries, his clean linen, the celluloid collars, the neckties, the better overcoat (fur-trimmed neck). He packed them with some tenderness. The fashionable might laugh at me for my country clothes but, my God, garments—plentiful and of thick weave—reassure me.

He didn't call Dieter to carry the case: he wanted to be out of the house. When he got downstairs both the soldiers were in the hall and the front door stood ajar.

Erzberger:
Dieter, I said …

Dieter:
But, sir, they were soldiers. I thought soldiers …

Erzberger couldn't explain to the old man how soldiers had suddenly turned assertive, grown ironic about the eyes. These two seemed to be on the lookout for things to pocket. The limpy one stopped in front of a hanging photograph of Oskar.

He turned to Erzberger with authority.

Soldier:
Your boy?

Erzberger:
He died in training. Three weeks back.

He felt that he betrayed Oskar in being afraid to say
officer school
.

The soldier shook his head with a sort of schoolmasterly annoyance, as if he were saying, of course, of course, tell me something fresh.

Erzberger:
I have to catch the five o'clock from Lehrter.

It seemed to him he'd been repeating that formula all afternoon.

The soldiers eyed each other. They appeared to be holding a secret vote between themselves. The one with the smashed ear suddenly opened the door for him.

Erzberger:
Dieter, these are bad times. Lock the main gate after I've gone and answer it only to people you know. Trot down to the police station and tell Inspector Martensen that I'm away on government business.

Dieter carried the bag. In the autumn garden the pruned roses stuck up as awkwardly as the improvised grave markers he had seen so much of. Before he lost the confidence of the officer corps and was no longer invited to the front.

The second he saw Count Maiberling pushing schnapps down in the saloon, he understood
this isn't the man I knew at Sofia
. This is too pale, too slumped in a corner chair. The long neck at full stretch; Maiberling keeping a weather eye on the staff officers quietly drinking coffee at a table close by.

He seemed to maintain awareness of them over his lowered right shoulder even after he sighted Erzberger and smiled, and offered him the flask, holding it high as a person does for an athlete who has just broken the tape.

Erzberger:
I'm sorry.

He meant, for landing you here.

Maiberling:
I can understand them picking you. A cabinet minister. But me? I'm no potentate.

Erzberger:
Are you frightened?

Maiberling:
Are you?

Erzberger:
I don't think we have much to fear.

Maiberling:
Bloody liar!

Receiving back the flask, Maiberling topped it and put it in his coat pocket.

Maiberling:
Me? I feel imposed on. As if they skimmed off four layers of dignitaries to unearth me. Maybe a little excited as well.

He hit the pillow behind his head. It was embroidered with a Hohenzollern eagle.

Maiberling:
I like train travel.

At five to five no documents had come from the Chancellery. Erzberger went to see the young general who was traveling with them.

The general regretted the train had to go on the second. He was under orders in that matter. General Groener, the new Quartermaster General, was an expert on railway systems and had decided that in view of the chaos the best hope was to be obedient to timetables.

Erzberger decided the railway people themselves would be easier to sway. He thought he might begin with the engineer.

As he dismounted from the saloon he saw a middle-aged man in a shiny civil-service suit and wing collar crossing the tracks at a half-run toward the Spa special.

The civil servant had an envelope in the hand he extended to Erzberger. The envelope carried a red Chancellery seal and a thick official nap in which the man's sweaty finger-marks were visible.

Breaking the seal, Erzberger's hand scrabbled inside the envelope for the documents. Expecting they might become butterflies and decamp across the shafts of lamplight from platform three.

Official:
His Excellency says the last two named will be waiting for you at Spa.

The document read:

1. Full Power.

The undersigned, Chancellor of the German Empire, Max, Prince von Baden, hereby gives full power:

To Imperial Secretary of State, Matthias Erzberger (as president of the delegation) …

Erzberger sought the railing by the carriage door. The word “president” scorpioned up his arm and bit him on the underside of his brain.

Erzberger: You
go!

Official:
I beg your pardon, sir.

Erzberger: You
go! Anyone will do as president of the commission, it seems. So
you
go!

Official:
I think you're making a joke, sir.

Erzberger:
My God, I am.

He climbed aboard and waved the documents toward Maiberling, who now had definitely taken on the air of a man off on holidays. All he lacked was a lumpy wife and brats.

Erzberger:
They've arrived, Alfred.

Maiberling:
Well. We're away then.

Erzberger:
Yes.

He thought: Matthias Erzberger, reliable stall-holder in the Reichstag cow market, sometimes known to have given inside advice to the barons of coal and steel and chemicals if they were decent barons and his workaday conscience was not defiled. But in questions of Paula and children, in questions of war and brotherhood of nations, he presumed to strain toward idealism and vision, and even wrote books that resembled the American President's books. For though he might be a fat-assed Württemberger, his spirit was as trim as President Wilson's. And it was exactly the gap between his knockabout commercial morals and his high conscience of the home and printing press that would not be forgiven. And for which he was put on a train and sent to be punished.

Maiberling:
Sit down then. A brown study, you.

Erzberger:
I was having indecent thoughts.

Maiberling:
You bloody peasants. Cocks like fire hoses!

It was not a subject Erzberger wanted to spend time on. He excused himself and moved back into the anteroom at the end of the carriage.

The whole train spat steam, steam whirled past the saloon door as a porter slammed it shut. The man from the Chancellery still stood on the platform wiping his face. Like the last wellwisher on earth. Erzberger continued to read

… as president of the delegation;

To Imperial Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary, Count Alfred Maiberling, and

To Major-General Detlev von Winterfeldt, Royal Prussian Army, to conduct in the name of the German Government with the plenipotentiaries of the Powers allied against Germany, negotiations for an armistice and to conclude an agreement to that effect, provided the same be approved by the German Government.