News From Berlin (16 page)

She faced Matteous, who noticed how pale she was.

“Shall I get you a glass of water?”

Kate shook her head, she did not need anything, all she wanted was to sit and wait for the reflux of the tide that had been washing over her for days: the hours with Roy and their great life together, which she had buried and banished, and which had started anew in the dark shape of Matteous.

Marina Piccola in May, which you could reach on foot over the newly constructed Via Krupp, a miraculous road with tier upon tier of hairpin bends seeming to spill from the cliffs. The Faraglioni rose high from the sea, three great spurs of black rock with seagulls wheeling above. Roy and she had
seen them at close quarters from a dinghy. “Kate-ate-ate!” Roy shouted upwards, outshouting the gulls. The sound came back again and again, louder each time.

Capri in early spring, almost empty of tourists. Roy supervised excavations, and she wandered around the island, or took a boat tour to the blue grotto. Roy needed only to thrust a stick in the soil to be transported to Antiquity. They had stayed for several weeks at a stretch. Kate knew the island like the back of her hand, from the Emperor Tiberius’s Villa Jovis up to Monte Barbarossa.

She told Matteous of her fears for the impending invasion. She hid nothing, relating all Oscar’s objections and describing his concerns over Emma’s safety. She explained her own reservations, and that she had overcome them, and that she had decided to go to the authorities before it was too late.

Matteous shook his head. “Don’t do it, Miss Kate, don’t do it.”

She had been so confident of his approval. He knew the meaning of war, he would tell her she should go, would accompany her even. But what he said was: “You must think of your daughter, Miss.”

Perhaps she had spoken too quickly for him to understand, she would explain all over again, and would continue explaining
until he finally said yes. But again he said no. No, no, she was not to go there, she was not to betray her daughter. They would find out, and there was nothing she or anybody else could do about the war, which was a massive force taking possession of the world, of limitless momentum and impossible to stop. Matteous expressed it otherwise, but that was what she understood him to say. He had seen the war and been unable to escape. There was no escape.

Of the funeral she had no memory, none at all but for one thing. Among the scores of mourners at the Cimitero degli Inglesi in Rome, she had seen her father holding hands with a little girl in a black hat. Who she was she did not know – a niece? the daughter of a friend? – yet it seemed to her that the child was leading him by the hand rather than the other way round. She saw herself standing at the graveside while the coffin was lowered, her eyes fixed on her mute father and the little girl in the hat. That was the only image that had stayed with her.

“Matteous, all those people will get shot and burned and blown to smithereens, they’ll crush everything in their path with their tanks. They have done it before and they will do it again. We must give all those innocent folk some warning.”

Matteous looked away, his hand on his heart. He was no
longer listening. She was afraid he would leave without a further word. But he moved his hand from his heart to her arm, touched her wrist, and slipped her a folded scrap of paper.

*

Darkness fell slowly, the street lamps of Barkston Gardens remaining unlit. Time for blackout, time to stand up and shut the windows and the doors to the balcony. It was as though she had fallen ill. Her head was ablaze, she could feel the fever rising, her feet were as cold as ice. Time for blackout.

The train to Fribourg departed on the dot. Oscar was often irritated by the never-ending quest for precision. The Swiss were maniacs, watchmakers, disciplinarians of strict regularity. Today he did not care one way or another, all he wished was for time to be abolished altogether, no clocks, no calendars, no appointments. It was Thursday, 19 June, and the train departing from Berne at 9.32 a.m. would arrive in Fribourg at 10.17. By 10.28 a.m. he would be with Lara.

Oscar had asked her not to pick him up at the station, preferring to find his own way to her house in the event of him being followed. On previous occasions he had known by the time he reached Ensingerstrasse whether this was the case, but apparently today it was not. The arbitrariness of whether or not one was targeted by those sorry types was confounding. A matter of nobody being available, most likely.

Once more he found himself in the company of sleeping soldiers. Wherever he went – Portugal, England, Switzerland – there were soldiers lounging in doorways or huddled in corners fast asleep. War was tiring.

Fribourg. He had gone past it so often, without ever asking himself who lived in the medieval toy city. Now he had been there repeatedly, within a short space of time. Lara lived in the very centre, near the wall tied like a ribbon around the old streets. His wish for the abolition of time appeared to have been granted in Fribourg: there was hardly any town in Europe quite so redolent of the Middle Ages.

The muffled throbbing of the wheels over the track held the cadence of reunion. He longed to see her, touch her, brush the hair from her eyes, have her hand covering his. And yet, for the first time, he also felt uneasy. A vague sense of foreboding, a gathering apprehension. She would ask him why he had gone off to London so suddenly, and he would have to give her a straight answer. He had to be straight with her now.

Down the platform, across the hall to the exit, up the steep hill to the old city, it was a matter of ten minutes. Straining at a taut leash, animated by desire.

“Oscar!”

She stood in the open window of the first floor, the sun shining on her laughing face.

Under her spell again, yet conscious of that strange sliver of desolation. Lara opened the door, out of breath from running down the stairs.

“The chamois of Fribourg! How quick you are, Lara.”

He clasped her hand with both of his, and leaned over to lay his cheek against their hands in humble greeting, as though bowing before some fragile enigma. With equal solemnity, Lara placed her free hand on his nape. During the second that they stood thus, all was in dreamed-of balance. Their lives touched. It was a gesture of tranquil awaiting, the rapprochement of those who know not where they are going, what they are doing, or how to move ahead.

She led him up the stairs to her room, into her arms and into the sun streaming in through the open window; he heard the carefree sounds of the street and how they fell away, leaving only her arms and her mouth and their surrender.

Afterwards, having got up from the bed, Oscar found himself standing very still by the window, reflexively on the lookout for a spy. As though there were two of him, as though his soul were moving from the one to the other as a precautionary safe haven. A Thursday morning in Switzerland, a sun-drenched hour of innocence and peace. Nothing untoward, you would think. The river flowed past, clouds sailed across the sky. He wondered what the time was, and what the date.

“Why did you need to go to London at such short notice?”

Geneva, Lausanne, Berne, Lisbon, London, Fribourg – the trajectory of a single word, whispered in confidence, then the terrifying ramifications, the biting of the tongue. Never in his life had he felt so torn. He had the ability to juggle with veracity, to don disguise and shed it at will, to roam free without leaving traces, to be the player in a casino of his own devising, but for the past weeks it was the case that Oscar Verschuur harboured a secret that was too important to keep to himself, and yet impossible to share with anybody else. He knew that hundreds of thousands of people would be butchered three days hence, before daybreak even, and he also knew that his information was worthless. It would not be credited. There was a complete lack of trust on every side, so that Emma’s sacrifice would be pointless, supposing he were mad enough to say anything.

Both Lara’s hands rested gently on his wrist, as an intimate entreaty for an explanation, for the truth.

“It’s Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of Russia. June 22nd, three days from now. Emma told me, that time in Geneva. She knew from Carl.”

“So you relayed that to London. Thank goodness they’ll be prepared, to some extent at least.” Her tone was pragmatic, without a trace of naivety.

No, Lara, he had changed his mind, he had turned tail at the last moment. They would not have believed him for any number of reasons, such as that the intelligence came from a German source, which made it corrupt by definition. The exact date was meaningless, the attack would be launched anyway sooner or later. His version. His last resort, because of Emma. Everything else was ruled out by the unthinkable likelihood of Emma being charged with treason. Oscar could hear his own voice accounting for himself, using all the arguments and explanations he had learned by rote.

Lara’s silence was disturbing. She had let go of his wrist, and had put her hands in the pockets of her dressing gown. Hiding the hands in that way is to hide the mind. She wished he would stop talking, wished she had not heard right. She drew herself away from him and drifted, faster and faster, out of the room, out of her house, back into the snow, to the time when there was only a village, a breathtaking view, no future, no past, no time. Away from him as he held forth, piling one excuse on top of the other in his blinding fear for his daughter. Fear corrupts. No-one will know what I know, Lara, no-one sees what I see: my child at the hands of the Gestapo.

Lara’s shoulders said enough. The way she recoiled, between
despair and outrage, between anguish and resignation. She knew that talking was not going to help, he had it all worked out, he had the whole chess game in his head, there was no way of getting through to him, not even for her. Or was there?

“Remember the Norwegian house at the Hunnenfluh?”

A voice from the light, an angel from the Berner Oberland. It sounded more like a statement than a question. What was that about, why did she mention that house? They had seen it and talked about it, a dream house, an unattainable Viking fantasy with small dragons guarding the drainpipes and brightly coloured ornaments on turrets and balconies, a work of art for the benefit of lone mountaineers, who would watch in wonder as the elfin occupants flitted from one window to the next. Imagine living there, Lara, with no-one to disturb us – he had said something like that to her once.

“I would have loved to go there every winter of our lives.”

He had heard what she said; I
would have
loved. No anger, no stridency, no hostility there, only finality. Lara had nothing more to say. He could see their Norwegian house sliding down the hillside. The rapid ebbing of a love that was hardly underway.

Emma pressed Wapenaar’s doorbell a second time. In her impatience at finding every available wall covered with roses, she had dropped her bicycle on the ground. The wheel was still spinning when Wapenaar opened the door. They recognised each other immediately. He was delighted to see her, an opportunity at last to have a chat with the daughter of his good friend Verschuur. Was there anything he could do for her? Please come in, he would begin by making them a cup of coffee.

She was struck by the silence in the house. Where was his wife? The room he showed her into was a riot of cosiness, with lace doilies on the tables, an upright piano, walls covered in framed watercolours and photographs of gentlefolk in nineteenth-century poses. There were lamps with pastel-coloured shades, flower-filled vases, a fireplace with neatly stacked logs alongside, all of which she remarked without taking it in. She had no time to waste. She was afraid she was too late.

The days had passed in unbearable suspense and vacillation.
She had not said anything to Carl. He had likewise avoided the subject. How odd not to breathe a word about what was going through your mind all day and all night. Carl Regendorf, on secondment to an organisation involved in Radio Free India: broadcasts of freedom fighters in folk costumes seeking to undermine the British Raj. Their leader, a dark-skinned Indian who had shaken hands with Ribbentrop during a press conference, was in good cheer and excellent health, loudspeaker at the ready for the rant against the British oppressor. Carl had been present, fascinated by the zealotry, but above all disillusioned by the banal distortions of the truth. Over at the ministry, secret meetings were being held all the time to discuss the impending massacre and how to inveigle a way into international acquiescence. Encroaching on the edges of a redrawn map of Europe was the dawn of a new, everlasting empire. Russia, Africa, India, it would not be long now.

As long as Trott stayed put, so would he, but he was finding it increasingly difficult to stick by his resolve. The hypocrisy had assumed such proportions that he took to dropping in at Trott’s office from time to time, to regale him with a mime show. Using a range of crazed grimaces and gesticulations, he imitated the antics of the regime’s top dogs and ridiculed the
insanity of everyday reality. Trott was highly amused by this, and communicated his responses in basic sign language, mindful of any microphones that might be concealed in lamps or ceilings. It was resistance in miniature, a scuffle in a soap bubble. But it allowed them to breathe.

*

In the early morning of that Thursday, as every Thursday, the bells of the nearby church rang out. Practice runs by the carilloneur, who favoured a slow, penetrating rhythm. Emma loved hearing the peals that reminded her so strongly of her schooldays in Leeuwarden.

She had seen the sun slanting into her garden, she had wished her neighbour good morning when he put his hand up over the hedge, she had refreshed the date on Carl’s desk calendar: June 19. Another three days to go. Then she had shaken herself awake, wheeled out her bicycle. Carl had left for work long since. She would tell Wapenaar, the secret had become too heavy to bear. It seemed less and less likely that her father had done anything, because if he had he would have found some way of letting her know. No, something must have happened to make him decide against passing on the information. Could it be something to do with that girlfriend of his? Emma’s revulsion at her father’s infidelity had barely
abated. And it had reopened an old issue. The unforeseen separation from her father and mother, the way she had been left behind at her grandparents’ home. Her father had promised that they would take her with them wherever they went, but it was a lie, he had broken his promise, and the hurt had not healed well. She was the offspring of diplomats, which made her homeless. That was how she was feeling these past days.