News From Berlin (7 page)

Somewhere in the neighbourhood a clock struck six. In
Berlin the day would also be beginning. Their clocks were an hour ahead, of course, so Carl would be on the train by now. Matteous would still be asleep, she imagined. And so would Oscar, almost certainly. She did not think about Oscar very much lately. She registered this as a curious state of affairs, not as a cause for concern. They lived their lives much as sparrows perching on the same clothes line: fairly content, fairly tame. Their embrace seemed to have lost its necessity, and the distance between Berne and London did not make them yearn for one another. This suited Kate quite well, it was just fine. Eros had never played a big part in their lives, which was probably true of a lot of people. The years before Oscar did not count, for they lay dormant in her core. Or as good as dormant. Sometimes, rarely, very rarely, they came back to her in a dream or in her fifteen-minute reverie upon waking.

There had been a change over the past months, since she had met Matteous. It happened several times that she was jolted awake by the crash, her heart thumping. The terrifying crash. After the fear came the memory, and with the memory the pain. She was eighteen again and just married. She was back in Rome, holding hands with him as they wandered through the old city. He was working on the Roman Forum excavations, his “never-ending dustpan-and-brush project”,
as he called it. One of the most talented archaeologists of his generation, older than her by ten years: Roy de Winther, Winther with an
h
. Countless times she had spelled it out – Winther with an
h
after the
t
– during their years of European travel. Four years to be precise. From Gibraltar to Oslo, from Budapest and Kiev to Rome and Sicily. There were always archaeological finds to be inspected, museums that were not to be missed, conferences and special seminars to be attended. Sometimes they rented a house where Roy could work on his lectures and write articles for international journals and newspapers. Once Schliemann had discovered Troy, archaeological excavations became newsworthy, and archaeologists were much in demand. Roy de Winther was among those in demand. Also from Kate, especially from her. Her wilfulness had taken him by storm, and within half a year they were married. The past was his concern, the future would be hers. Their immediate future consisted of travelling. Having a child did not enter her mind, she felt little more than a child herself. All those trains, cars, ships, all those hotels and pensions, rented accommodations, cultural institutes … It was the carefree time before the Great War, a period of vigour and ambition. They were part of it all, their energy was boundless, they were free spirits, they were mad about each other. The
world would never be the same again, no love, no death would ever be the same. No measure of devotion or happiness could compare with the experience they shared during those years.

Kate had covered it all up, stowed everything away in sealed packages wrapped around by the new life she found herself leading after the catastrophe. Four years of undivided devotion should be enough to keep the machines of memory in fuel forever. But the machines had let her down, the memories of those days began to fade, or were quickly pushed out of sight. She had proved able to make his body vanish, and forget his love. Concrete it over.

But nothing vanishes for good. Not the train journey, which was Roy’s last. From Milan to Rome and her. The crash had to have been horrific, the newspapers carried pictures of great mounds of twisted steel, of flames and chaos and passengers trapped in the wreckage. Sixty dead. Roy was mentioned by name in the reports. She still had the newspaper somewhere. Stored away, like all the rest.

Time to get up: she was due at the hospital, the boys would be waiting for her, including Matteous, perhaps. She had to move her arms and legs, get away from the old, dead, illusory world of her dreams. Roy’s world, her husband’s.

June 4: Emma’s twenty-ninth birthday. Kate wondered
briefly if her daughter would be celebrating it, and if so how. She opened the blackout curtains. The sun was rising, and soon the rumble of traffic would be heard on Earls Court Road, where the buses went past Matteous’s lodgings. Birds began to sing, a gardener began to rake the gravel in the square nearby. Without much thought, Kate reckoned with the possibility of an air raid, although it had been quiet for a fortnight now. She kept a bucket filled with water in the kitchen. Symbolic instance of preparedness: a midge’s tiny fist raised against a leviathan.

When she rang at his bedsit there was no answer. No footfalls, no throat-clearing, not even a whisper. Not a sound. She rang again, longer and more insistently. Again silence; the door remained closed. She took a few steps back to the edge of the pavement and looked up. He was standing in the shadows, as far away from the window as possible, almost like a statue, with a streak of sunlight falling across his dark head. That was how she had seen him when she came to collect him from the hospital ward. He appeared not to notice her, he was not at home, the bell had not rung, the unmistakable, alarming shrill had gone unheard. Kate wanted to call out to him and wave, but then thought better of it. She regretted having disturbed him by coming to his door. He was practising not
being there, adopting the stance of a soldier who has been killed, but doesn’t know it yet. The final seconds before falling, the bullets lodged already in the body. Nonsense of course, she was just imagining things, going over the top, like a bad film. What she was seeing was impossible. He just stood there. Standing had become second nature to him. Standing ready, standing on guard, standing in the never-ending drill of the platoon, forever in formation. That was all it was, she was not to jump to any conclusions. She would not disturb him.

Kate began to walk away, in the direction of the bus stop for Richmond Royal Hospital, when a shout from above reached her ears.

“Miss!”

The urgency was unmistakable. She stopped, spun round and waved at Matteous, who was leaning out of the window, beckoning her.

Inside, the wicker suitcase was still in exactly the same place. Nothing in the room had changed since she had left him there the day before. As if that day had not passed into night and then day again, as if he had not moved from where he stood. No need for blackout if you don’t switch the light on. All safe, all right and proper, the room in complete darkness and invisible to the enemy. Kate asked no questions. She sat
down on the only chair. Matteous remained standing. His eyes were darker than ever, the whites almost grey. Inclining his head, he struggled to frame a sentence. And another. His English sounded as if he were groping his way across a rope bridge. His hands supported his words, his shoulders leaned from side to side. Did Miss think he would be going home to the Congo? They had obviously forgotten about him in the army, and the Belgian government-in-exile couldn’t care less about an injured Congolese stranded in London. He wanted to find his mother. His mother. The big word his life had orbited around for months, for years. His mother, who had been captured and who might not be dead. The mother he had been forced to leave behind when his father told him to run for his life. Quick as a flash he had run, as fast as an antelope.

Kate put her hand on his sleeve, saying, “Of course,” although she had no idea if such a thing was possible. A soldier being discharged from hospital to free up much-needed space – would that mean he was discharged from the army, too? Probably not, but she didn’t even want to consider the question. Matteous’s enemy was completely different from everybody else’s. He had fought without any idea of who he was fighting against. Caught up in a war of strangers against strangers, in a conflict whose causes and aims were beyond
his ken. He had drifted into the army because he had lost his family, because he had to go somewhere, anywhere, to avoid dying of heartache. And he had rescued that officer to avoid having to flee into the jungle all over again. Strong enough at last to hoist a man on his shoulders, away from the frontline and the bloodshed, without fear. In the jumble of French, English and Swahili, Kate could hear his grief about his mother. She took his hand, enclosed it in both of hers, and lifted the three hands to her chest for a moment, the way he always did in greeting. The dark hand, the dark face so close to hers.

Carl sang her a sweet birthday ditty in German and gave her a hug, then pulled back the curtains and opened the window. The birds would do the rest of the singing, he said. The weather was warm, perfect for a birthday celebration. Friends would be arriving later that evening, as many as twenty. They would all be bringing some food. Drink, too.

Carl left for work later than usual. The previous evening they had stayed up late, going over and over what the Gestapo might and might not know. Emma was sick with worry about her father, while Carl was becoming increasingly nervous on her account. He tried not to show it, but he was besieged by a constant, light form of panic. They had a file on her, they were watching her. Which meant that he too was being watched, as well as Trott. They had fallen asleep holding hands, worn out from all their speculations.

Emma saw him to the garden gate, and watched as he walked down the road, their rural byroad on the outskirts of the violence. His train would take him to the unimaginable amphitheatre of crime: a free performance, all day long. She
would not focus on that, it was too overwhelming. The events were beyond her. She inhaled the fragrance of the June gardens all around, and tried to follow Carl in her mind once he was out of sight, boarding the train, leaving Dahlem towards the city centre. She wanted to hang on to his physical presence, the body in which she had nestled herself. But that was a dream, wishful thinking. There he was, walking away from her, without her, thinking ahead to what might await him at his office. He might spare a thought for her now and then, recalling how she had returned his embrace. And had sighed about getting old: “Twenty-nine, Carl, I’m twenty-nine now, don’t you think I’m old?” He had said it was the world that was old, not her.

She had a busy day ahead: tidy up the house, unpack those bags that had been blocking the hall for the past two days, go to the few shops that still had anything left to sell, lay the table for twenty people. As if nothing was the matter, as if it was the most normal thing in the world to celebrate one’s birthday. Come what may. Well, twenty people were coming. Their friends from Dahlem, a few from Zehlendorf, a few from the city centre, and even somebody from Potsdam, who would be staying the night – they might all end up staying the night, if there was an air-raid warning. She had seen the
devastation from the car window on the way to Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse. Entire streets lay in ruins. After a while she had lost her bearings, in spite of being quite familiar with the city. She had lived there as a student for close on four years, from August 1931 till 12 June, 1933, the day of her finals, after which she had left immediately. A few weeks before that she had been in the Opernplatz together with some friends, watching transfixed as books were being burned. The S.A. men were in a frenzy, leaping and shouting as they set upon the piles of books and hurled them onto the bonfire. It had felt like a rehearsal for mass murder. Where they burn books, they will end in burning human beings: the lesson of Heinrich Heine, whose work had gone up in smoke with all the rest that evening. Her studies at the university had not posed any problems. “If you want to study history in the making, go to Berlin,” she had been told in Holland. A sound piece of advice. The windows of the lecture halls on Unter den Linden rattled to the noise of demonstrations and parades and police charges and countercharges going on outside. She needed only to glance out of the window to see history unfold. If the professors were to be believed, you could hear the groundwork being laid for a thousand-year empire.

The ride in the car, she had relived it dozens of times. Not
a long ride, half an hour at the most, but enough for night after night without sleep. The two Gestapo men, no more than boys really, had sat one in the front and one in the back with her. They paid no attention to her, asked no questions. They looked as if they had just stepped out of a shop selling Gestapo uniforms: shiny coats, shiny shoes, shiny pistols. But the car was old and battered, and reeked of stale cigarette smoke. The driver clearly enjoyed taking corners at speed. Emma kept having to reach out for support, and several times her hand had brushed against the arm of the boy beside her. The roads of Dahlem were excellent for tearing round corners. Falkenried, then left, In der Halde, turn right, Am Hirschsprung, right again up the Dohnenstieg. Had they taken the Dohnenstieg for a particular reason? Did they know Himmler lived there? A spot of racing past the boss’s house? They knew the way by heart; one more short cut and they came to the Lenzeallee. Full speed ahead to their robbers’ den.

Emma felt treated like a criminal, though she acted as if she were being driven to an appointment. These boys were not going to detect the slightest nervousness on her part. She peered out of the window with interest, twisted round for a backward glance, turned her head from side to side, opened her handbag with a casual air. The relaxed gestures of a day
out sightseeing. It was imperative that she keep her rising panic under control. How extraordinary that the city was functioning again after the heavy bombardments, as if they had never happened. Traffic was as hectic as ever, with buses, trams, carts, motor cars, pavements milling with people. She saw a clock on the Potsdamer Platz, which was quite near where she used to live. It was still intact, hands pointing to a quarter past eleven. A telling detail. The clocks were right, it was business as usual, trains and trams on time, arrests made on schedule. Gestapo at the ready, motor running. It was clear the orders were for her to be picked up at eleven and brought in at half past.

“Emma Regendorf-Verschuur, where were you yesterday?”

The sombre man questioning her tried his best to be civil. A form of civility that could turn nasty in an instant. He resembled a boxer in a jacket, sleeves bulging with muscles, ready to let fly at any moment.