The Song Before It Is Sung

by Justin Cartwright

  He goes down to the Common Room to eat something. The food is usually very bad. He takes a collection of Turgenev's short stories. Reading at table is supposed to indicate that you don't want to talk, but everyone knows he is unable to stay silent. John Plamenatz, a Montenegrin, who was elected at the same time as him, comes over.

  'I just have to sit with you, Elya, in case some Englishman wants to talk to me. Englishmen make me feel very alone.'

  'I am an Englishman.'

  'A sort of Englishman.'

  'You think I am trying, like all Jews, to make a good impression? An amateur gentile?'

  'No, you've done that long ago. You've become a necessary figure . . .'

  'A licensed fool.'

  'No, you are a public figure, but you haven't lost your insecurity. I hear Axel von Gottberg is in town?'

  'Yes, he's on an important mission.'

  'Do you believe him?'

  'I believe he believes he is on an important mission. This is a wonderful time for the world-historical figures to emerge.'

  'Is he a Nazi?'

  'I don't think he thinks he is a Nazi.'

  Axel returns at eleven. He is exhilarated. The Master of Balliol and the Warden of Rhodes House have been very helpful. The Prime Minister and the Foreign Secretary have both agreed to see him. He finds Elya in his rooms reading and listening to Beethoven. Elya lifts the spindle off the record and close the box.

  'Saved the world?'

  'I'm trying.'

  'Did you have a good dinner?'

  'Master's lodgings. Very good. The best wine, of course. And you?'

  'Brown Windsor soup, a cool lamb cutlet and spotted dick. It's the price you pay for the honour of a fellowship, you eat absolute muck. Sometimes I take the train up to London just to eat my mother's pirogi.'

  'Elya, after my meetings in London I am going to Washington.'

  'So you said. Are you doing it for the Auswartiges Amt or for your friends?'

  'Please trust me. There are certain compromises I have been obliged to make. For the greater good.'

  Elya looks at him through the round glasses. Axel knows that he is not so much thinking of what to say, as deciding what not to say.

  'Is Wilhelm Furtwangler a Nazi by conviction or out of expediency?'

  'That is a strange question. I think he is confused.'

  'Are you confused?'

  'No. I have had to make compromises, as I said, but I am not confused.'

  'What were you going to ask me?'

  'When you write to Michael, whatever your doubts, please remember what I asked, that you trust me. That's all I want. Nothing is as it seems to be.'

  'Of course not. Lionel's coming over to see you. Do you mind?'

  'No, not at all. I'm delighted. But don't tell him about Hamburger, please, or Balliol.'

  'No. But cloak and dagger is not really our crowd, as Lionel calls it.'

  'Our crowd. It's very strange how one short period in one place like this can have so much influence, don't you think? Our crowd. In three years here I felt we were at the centre of the world. More so than I do in Berlin. Berlin, the town, seems to be floating somewhere on the fringes of the world in a sea of unreality. Do you know the Nazis took over the department store where we have all shopped for more than a hundred years? They just told the Israel family to go. It brought home to my mother exactly how ruthless they are. You will say it's taken her a long time, but it's the crudeness of their thinking, their absolutely unnecessary cruelty, that has affected her so badly.'

  Axel is still buoyed up after his dinner; they talk excitedly in front of the fire, which Elya prods vigorously from time to time, as though it is a reluctant farm animal. Elya ranges from the recent elections, to Munich, to the Jewish refugees flooding to Hampstead. His voice is as seductive as ever, as liquid as the calling of doves in Jerusalem, and then dissolves unexpectedly into giggles. He recites one of Lionel's scabrous poems, which concerns Penelope Betjeman's love of horses. He quotes Turgenev saying that, though he is fascinated by radicals, he is quite unable to be one himself.

  'That's me, I'm afraid,' he says. 'I have no capacity for action. All I can do is talk.'

  Axel knows that behind his back people say that Elya lacks courage and is too eager to please, but Axel sees that Elya is a product of his history: he has been uprooted and is only shallowly planted in this soil.

  They hear Lionel's booming voice some time before he appears.

  'I want to see my Junker friend,' he shouts. 'I want to see the duelling scars on his bottom. Let me in.'

  Lionel comes crashing in. He is large and roughly carved. Axel, who is himself quite tight, can smell alcohol on him as they embrace.

  'How is life in the Third Reich?' he asks, as Elya pours him a drink.

  'It's difficult.'

  'I hear you have a plan. Are we allowed to know what it is?'

  Axel knows that any talk of the real Germany will get him nowhere.

  'No plan. Just trying to help. Elya recited to me one of your latest poems.'

  'Filthy, I trust.'

  'Absolutely.'

  Lionel slumps in a chair. These chairs have been so battered over the years that they can be sat in from any direction. Lionel places his large head on the worn carpet.

  'Axel says, I believe, that the thing about Hitler is that he is playing on something real and that is the sense that most Germans have that they have been treated badly. The ordinary person remembers unemployment and chaos only too well. We - you and I - have to start from that position.'

  'Elya, can you start from that position?'

  'No, I've told Axel that it's not possible. I start from 1933.'

  'But let's accept, Axel, as a theory, that the German people are keen to have their amour-propre restored. Then what must we do?'

  Lionel is gazing at the roof as he speaks and now he raises his head to the horizontal in order to sip his drink.

  'Western Europe must acknowledge Germany's right to regain the lost lands. Then they will see that Hitler is not the only way.'

  Lionel stands up surprisingly nimbly and his drink falls to the floor.

  'Goodbye, Axel. You were once my friend. Did you miss Kristallnacht? Were you out duelling? Yes, you were my friend. I even imagined I could spend my life with you. Now it is my greatest wish that I never see you again. You may not be aware of it, but you are a Nazi.'

  He lurches towards the door and can be heard stumbling down the stairs. Elya and Axel are silent.

  'He's drunk,' says Elya finally.

  'But he meant it.'

  'I'm afraid he did.'

  They talk until about 3 a.m., when Axel, turning from the window, finds Elya asleep. At six, when Mendel wakes on the sofa, he sees that Axel has gone. At eight he returns, haggard, his skin pale, his eye sockets deep and dark.

  'Where have you been?'

  'I've been walking around Oxford.'

  'Are you all right? Lionel was drunk. He's often drunk and outrageous these days.'

  'I've tried to explain. But I see I have no reserves of trust left after all.'

  'You do.'

  'Goodbye, Elya. I am sure I will never see you again.'

  Later that morning Mendel writes to Michael Hamburger in Washington:

  Dear Michael

  Axel von Gottberg came to see me in Oxford. He is having meetings in London. He has asked me to put in a word for him. When he travels to America to address the Huntingford Institute he is hoping that you will be able to effect some high-level meetings for him. You can imagine particularly to whom I refer.

  His friends at Oxford, and I am one, believe that he is at heart — I mean ideologically — a Nazi, although he is far too intelligent and complex a person to accept that as a simple fact. For a start it would be beneath him socially. He has been obliged to join the Party, as of course he could not be in the Foreign Office without membership. But he seems to be licensed to travel and talk to whomsoever he likes. At best he is a Germ
an patriot of the old school, a fact that makes him antipathetic to Hitler, if not to all of the ideas behind Hitler. You will no doubt receive him with all the cordiality our friendship indicates, but I feel I must warn you that both Lionel and I - and others — believe that, for all his undeniable charm, he should be treated with caution. He has a great taste for high-level intrigue.

  Life in Oxford at the moment is nervous as if - as Somerset Maugham might say — a tropical storm can be felt in the air.

  Yours affectionately

  Elya

  Nine days later, Hitler invades Czechoslovakia and Elya Mendel's nagging guilt in writing to Michael Hamburger, the President's counsel and Supreme Court judge, warning against his friend Axel von Gottberg, is soon forgotten.

  10

  ELIZABETH PARTRIDGE'S FUNERAL is to take place at Booby Bay, Cornwall, in a little church on the edge of the water near the house that she and her cousin, Rosamund, loved. She will lie next to Rosamund and their grandparents. The train down is whipped by rain as it crosses into Cornwall. Conrad can't imagine living down here. The landscape is grudging and windswept. He takes a taxi from Bodmin Parkway and is driven by some rural bore who thinks London - Lunnin - is Gomorrah.

  'I couldn't live in Lunnin with all them Pakistanis and such, what they call Muslims and mullahs. I don't know how you can do it. If they don't like it, they can always go back where they came from.'

  'I like them,' says Conrad.

  This is not strictly true. He only knows three, one who sells him his newspaper and two who run the local tandoori takeaway, a hatch in the wall, which he has used a lot recently.

  This shuts the driver up for a while.

  'Do you come down here often?'

  'First time.'

  'Boo-iful place, Cornwall.'

  'Compared to what?'

  'Well, you can just see.'

  He can see very little from the back seat as they head down a deep tree-shrouded valley where the new leaves are being thrashed by the wind. He is wearing a dark suit borrowed from Tony at the bakery, who goes to a lot of funerals. Tony says they are dropping like flies. Conrad is not sure who he means. Tony is sorry Conrad will be moving out. He sees Conrad as something of an exhibit, the man holed up with a thousand books and some fancy ideas, who doesn't know his arse from his elbow, despite all the books. The books are now mostly in storage, and the flat, newly sanitised, is comparatively austere.

  Francine has written him a curious letter. Her style is usually more direct, a phone call or a terse email. Now she is demanding a face-to-face meeting. He wonders what she wants.

  The other night he went out with his journalist friend Osric, who has just returned from Baghdad. Something has happened to him after three months there. Instead of coming back with his sympathies and human understanding deepened, he appears in the face of suffering to have decided that Western life has become over-analytical. Life, apparently, is a struggle for survival and we had better realise in the West that it always has been. We are in danger of disappearing up our own fundaments, he says. We think the soldiers, the grunts, the jarheads, the squaddies are morons, but actually they have seen life at the sharp end. He has left his girlfriend who also works for the Herald. 'You see what I mean? I come back from hell where nobody reads the fucking Herald, and I have been reporting on people so crazy, so fucked up, so deluded by religious manias of all sorts, that they want to kill all of us. I was at a protest with our boys one day and some kid there threw a bottle at the Land Rover. "Shoot the little cunt," I shouted. "Shoot him." You know what they said? They said, "Calm down, mate, you sound like the bloke we had in from the Sun." And they laughed. When I tell Sarah what happened, she is shocked and suggests I get counselling. She wants me to go to some therapist in Hammersmith. I have seen a man's legs blown fifty yards in different directions and I have seen a woman's head, still with the jihab on, lying in an ornamental fountain in the fucking lobby, and now I'm supposed to go and give face-time to some quack in a denim jacket, circa 1974, and listen to him talk about post-traumatic stress. This would be from a tosser whose knowledge of the world extends all the way to Barnes where on a bad day a duck can run out of the pond and give you a good nibble.'

  Conrad laughed.

  'It's not funny. I'm serious.'

  'You're not really, Osric. You just need a little counselling.'

  They were getting drunk in a bar in Shoreditch.

  Francine seems to be hinting in her letter that things are not going all that well with John. It's difficult, she writes, both working on his team and seeing him after hours. Conrad has heard from one of her loyal friends, Kelly-Ann - women wield the knife with great finesse — that John is finding it hard to ditch his wife because one of their children is suffering panic attacks before her GCSE exams, which are six months off. Kelly-Ann says that Francine understands this dilemma. It's a strange thing, this tendency to claim for oneself the higher moral ground. It's tactical rather than real and it's increasingly common, so that people routinely excuse themselves on the grounds of their higher feelings. They are cursed, as they gravely admit, with a more acute consciousness than other people.

  By the end of the evening with Osric, Conrad had convinced him that his new aggressiveness is a product of the deep sensitivity that drew him to journalism in the first place.

  'Do you think so, mate?'

  'I do, Osric'

  'I'm not a psychopath?'

  'No, it's just exactly people like you with deeply sensitive natures who react in this way to the problem of evil, when they see it close up. It's known as Fellgiebel syndrome.'

  Osric spent the night on the sofa in the flat above the bakery and woke in the morning hung-over but calmer.

  'What was that syndrome you mentioned?'

  'Fellgiebel syndrome.'

  'You're not bullshitting?'

  'No, of course I'm not. Google it. You're one of my oldest mates.'

  'The Editor offered me a three-month sabbatical.'

  'Take it.'

  'It may be too late. I told him to stuff it.'

  'I doubt if it's too late.'

  'What are you doing today?'

  'I'm going to a funeral.'

  'Sounds like fun. So fun.'

  The taxi pulls up at a bed and breakfast outside Padstow. The rain comes down solidly: there is absolutely no hint that it might ever stop, not in this winter nor in this century. You don't get rain like this in London. Yet no sooner has he been shown to his room by a small, taciturn man with heavy Celtic eyebrows than through the window he sees that the rain has stopped and Elizabeth's beloved bay has become a flow of molten pewter, wrinkled and creased, moving determinedly and rhythmically out to sea. Von Gottberg wrote to Elizabeth about landscapes that became precious because you were happy there. We long for our lost innocence, first love, for instance, so that we come to believe that there is a causal connection between the landscape and our innocence. This is why the seaside has so powerful a hold, and why Rosamund and Elizabeth brought their friends here. And why Elizabeth wanted to be buried here. Von Gottberg sometimes spoke of the island of Poel as a landscape of childhood, his mother's family's summer home, where they spent happy holidays.

  Conrad shares von Gottberg's sense that seawater and fresh air are almost spiritual. His own father, before his downfall, had been a cheerful man who preached the virtues of seawater: it worked both on the temperament and the sinuses. The last funeral Conrad went to was his father's, six years ago. Two years after Mandela's release from jail, it was shown that his father had been accepting money from the government to back the opposition to the ANC. Some of the stories were planted by the security services. When he last saw his father alive, he was living in a small grim house near the sea, right on the railway line before it reaches Simons Town. When he asked his father why he had done it, he said: 'I've never believed in saints. Or arse-licking.'

  'But, Dad, some of the stories you printed were untrue.'

  'Do you think that th
e true stories were true? The outgoing government were bastards. The new ones are no better. You'll see. Just different forms of dishonesty.'

  'They say you took money.'

  'The newspaper took money for our educational foundation. We used it for scholarships for journalists to study in England and America. I saw it as a form of redistribution. My theory was that the lies on each side were about equal. You know that history is always written by the victors. It was true, by the way, that certain of our new rulers were in the pay of the government or the KGB when they were in exile. God help anyone who says it now that his son is living among us.'

  The whole world revered Mandela. But his father had gone defiantly mad. A train thundered by the house. Sea spray had crusted over the windows, so that the light that found its way in appeared to be dense, like the light in the bottom of a wine glass. Two years later he died after a stroke, but in that period his dementia became worse. He was buried quietly in a small churchyard on the edge of the great central plateau where his family — Conrad's family — had settled a hundred and fifty years before to found a Moravian mission.

  Conrad remembers that his father's only decoration in the little, damp bladderwrack of a house was a blue-and-red blade from his old college, Balliol, where he had been a Rhodes Scholar in 1958. It was crudely attached to the wall, as if it were the fetish object of a cargo cult, dropped from the sky. On it was written: Bumped Ch Ch, Trinity, Pembroke, Wadham, 1959. It was all he chose to remember of his past life. His books he had given or thrown away and there was not a single picture in the house, not even of his son Conrad, Rhodes Scholar, Balliol, 1991.