Bolly couldn't find mushrooms, although I tried to teach him, but he loved our trips into the deepest, dampest thickets. Once he put up a huge wild boar, which apparently couldn't believe that this tiny dog was not intimidated by his uneven, yellowing tusks and turned, crashing into the undergrowth. The woods were full of boar and Rickert would set snares for them and shoot them when he could, to make up the supplies. Foxes were killed and fed to the dogs, but had to be skinned and cured before the dogs would touch them.
After all these years I see myself, just twelve years old, crawling through the undergrowth day after day, and coming back to the house with baskets full of mushrooms, my hair full of pine needles and holly and my apron scented and stained. In reality I probably went out to the woods ten or twelve times, but what I remember so well is the fervour I was in, with Bolly barking excitedly and the rising smell of damp leaf-mould and the mushroomy scent as I used a small knife to lift the mushrooms, their skins as strange and minutely pocked as human flesh, sometimes dry and sometimes moist. Mushrooms are of mysterious origin. I was slightly scared of them because of their brooding, furtive nature. Although I could recognise the amanites and the yellow stainers, all my mushrooms had to be inspected by cook who discarded any that were broken or dog-eared or excessively slimy. Every so often she would find a poisonous mushroom and show me the little sac around the base and ask me to smell it. Her rule was that if a mushroom smelled strongly of mushrooms, it was fine. But by the time I arrived, bedraggled at the wash-kitchen, I was so infused and stained and perfumed by fungus and resin and leaf mould that I could no longer distinguish the smells one from another.
Even now this strange mycological odour transports me back to my childhood in Mecklenburg, when the world still seemed innocent although on the Somme hundreds of thousands of soldiers were dying.
As a child you can't really comprehend the meaning of far-off events; you live more like an animal, in the present world of the senses and within the dimly perceived horizons set by the adults. We children created our own world. By and large we were still allowed to run free when, after the summer of 1916, we were not sent to school, but taught by Barty. My father decreed that we were not allowed to speak English, so Barty had to speak German. Her German was heavily accented and comical to us and sometimes we mocked her. I wondered how we were contributing to the war effort by giving up English, but I still read my English books when I was alone. My favourite was Wind in the Willows, and it seemed to me impossible to imagine that we were at war with Ratty and the industrious Mole: Mole had been working very hard all morning, spring-cleaning his little house. Just that line would set me off into a magical world.
Axel - a little Junker in the making - loved war games and he and Bolly would set out to ambush me as I crawled in the undergrowth. I usually knew when they were coming because Bolly would begin to yap furiously, although I always pretended I was taken by surprise. By the end of that year we were eating swedes at practically every meal. To this day I can't bear the sight or smell of them. The winter, the peasants said, was going to be a hard one and before the end of November ice had formed on the lake, at first tentatively producing a sparkling necklace around the shore and then, one morning, the whole lake was glazed over, the ice so clear that we could see the water-plants beneath. My mother went on a daily round to see the villagers, the bereaved mothers, the sick, the destitute. Nobody starved even when the chickens stopped laying because of the extreme cold, but we had to cut our supplies of sausage and ham so that my mother could distribute food to the worst affected. Strangely, in this deprivation I remember at Christmas that year the foresters cut Christmas trees for each of us, which corresponded in size to our age, and beneath the three trees, beside the Swedish stove, my mother had placed our presents, beautifully wrapped.
Your grandfather came in from the little station at Bobitz, driven by the coachman through the snow. He looked so extraordinarily handsome in the uniform of the 9th Infantry underneath a grey cloak with the gold chain fastening it that I couldn't believe that the country of Ratty and Mole stood a chance. Christmas was a splendid affair; the cellars were raided and a fat goose was served with potatoes roasted in goose fat. It's a strange thing, but at important moments all nations take comfort from their traditional food. Later that winter we were eating squirrels and crows. But what has remained with me is the beauty of the frozen lake, which was green, blue, turquoise and purple, stubbornly beautiful, the product of the deep, deep cold. Your grandfather told us that he had been promoted to the rank of Lieutenant General, on the General Staff. I'll never forget my mother saying, 'We are so proud of Papi, aren't we, children?' When Axel asked, 'Are you going to kill all the English, Papi?' and your grandfather replied, 'I have no quarrel with the English, Axel, I am just trying to save Germany,' Axel and the children did not understand, but I did: we were losing this war.
When the pigs were slaughtered that winter I saw the blood on the snow as the blood of our soldiers at the front, but also the blood of the Tommies. It seemed that blood, snow, mud and the honour of Germany were inseparable.
12
THE PAIN OF PARTING is itself a pleasure. Mendel thinks that Axel courts the dramatic and the gefühlvoll. He requires the heroic and operatic idea of himself: leaving Oxford for the last time, leaving his friends, rejected by Elizabeth Partridge and now obliged to save Germany, secret sacred Germany. But is he a Nazi. Mendel believes that Axel can't tell the difference between the secret Germany which must rid itself of all alien influences and the Germany of Hitler. Hitler is personally loathsome to him but Hitler may be, in Hegelian fashion, the agent of necessary and inevitable change. Lionel believes he is a Nazi. Lionel has also written to Hamburger, advising caution.
Two weeks later he is having lunch with Elizabeth Partridge in London, and she tells him that Axel is playing a double game. In fact he cares deeply about the treatment of Jews. He took her one day to Sachsenhausen and they sat in his little DKW outside the camp for an hour. This is our shame that the German people will have to bear for ever. Kristallnacht was the turning point. Six thousand Jews are in there. Six thousand. Can you imagine? A group of SS guards came to see what they were doing out on the flat misty plain. Axel spoke to them sharply: I am a German. I am the Count Axel von Gottberg. I will leave when I am ready. The guards mumbled apologetically that it was a restricted area. Do you have something to hide? You must leave in five minutes, Herr Baron.
Mendel is struck by the mention of Kristallnacht, because it was only two weeks ago that Lionel, drunk, shouted at Axel, 'Did you miss Kristallnacht?
Oh God, how sheltered and self-important we are in Oxford. And he tells Elizabeth what Axel said about Israel's Department Store.
'Wilfred Israel was one of Axel's mentors,' she says. 'Axel helped him get people out with false papers from the Auswartiges Amt.'
Mendel is silent now. They are having lunch at Bianchi's in Soho, one of his favourite places. The curious thing is that nobody eats on the ground floor, yet the tables are laid every day. They are upstairs; there are some couples in uniform. The approach of war has produced a strange effect: people talk loudly, they are extravagant, they are excited. The feeling that the world may be at an end is stimulating. Also uniform seems to simplify matters: Look, it has come to this.
Elizabeth is troubled. She is torn by two completely irreconcilable desires, one to do something useful to try to stop what is coming and the other, to go to her little house in Kent and live a quiet life until it is over.
Elya tells her that Axel is in Washington trying to speak to important people. Always, important people.
'Elya, don't be harsh with Axel. He's not really an intellectual like you, but then you're not really a man of action like him.'
'Men of action have always caused trouble.'
'Honestly, Elya, that's unworthy of you. It's glib. I've been in Prague, I've been in Berlin. Terrible things are happening. Axel has seen the pogroms; he's seen the concentration camps and
all you've seen is buggering All Souls and a few buffoons like Lionel. Do you know what Axel said Hitler calls Chamberlain? Arschloch. Arsehole. He's taken England for a ride, he said. Axel wants to save Germany from disaster, it's true, and he may be naive, but at least he's doing something. I'm afraid I'm going to have to go, Elya. I'm in no fit state for gossip.'
'Don't go, Elizabeth. I apologise. It's possible I am jealous of Axel because of Rosamund and it's also true that that as a Jew I see things from a partial position.'
There are tears in his eyes. She places a hand over his.
'I'm sorry, Elya. I'm so sorry if I hurt you. We must stick together, come what may. Axel is a great believer in the idea that friendship transcends borders and difficulties and time.'
Mendel still cannot speak. Friendships cannot transcend borders just because Axel says so. As usual he takes refuge in high-minded banality.
After lunch Mendel walks down to Whitehall to be interviewed for a job in intelligence. It is believed on the network that his knowledge of Russian and German will be useful in what is to come. The interview is conducted in the country-house-mated-with-boarding-school fashion that high civil servants favour. Elya agrees, in the event of war, to read and analyse Russian intelligence on Hitler and to write reports for the Foreign Secretary.
On the way back to Oxford he thinks of Axel and Elizabeth outside Sachsenhausen, a few yards from evil, while he is safe in buggering All Souls. Meanwhile Axel is on a steamer heading for New York, leaving his fiancee in Germany, on his mission -from whom? — to talk to FDR, to save Germany from its appalling lapse of taste. Back in Oxford Mendel goes straight from the station to see Lionel in his grand lodging, the Warden's House, and tells him what Elizabeth has said about Axel.
'You're a sentimental chap, Elya. And that is one of the many reasons we love you.'
Lionel offers him a cocktail. He has taken to the whole rigmarole surrounding cocktails. His young men like them and it amuses Lionel that he is the only head of a college who serves them rather than the dreary sherry.
'I'm mixing a Manhattan. Would you like one, Elya?'
'All right.'
'I have to concentrate; you combine the Bourbon, vermouth and Angostura bitters with a few ice cubes. You stir gently. You put a cherry - as pink and round as a choirboy's bottom - like this, into the glass - plop - which of course is chilled, and pour the whisky over it, commega. Rub the rim of the glass with orange peel, that's it. But you must never, never, dear Elya, drop it into the glass. Do you promise me?'
'I promise.'
'Cheers. Or should we say prosit so that we can welcome our new masters when they arrive?'
'Lionel, Axel took Elizabeth to Sachsenhausen. Six thousand Jews are in there.'
'Why did they go to Sachsenhausen? They went because Axel wants to convince Elizabeth that he is not a Nazi. And because he knows that Elizabeth will tell you, and not even God knows how many important people you will tell. I can just imagine him, his beautiful features screwed up with concern for the human spirit, demonstrating to earnest young Elizabeth that he is a sensitive soul in a troubled world.'
'There is another possibility, of course. In logic'
'And that would be?'
'And that would be that he isn't a Nazi and is deeply disturbed by what is happening to the Jews.'
'All those upper-class Germans want a pure, Germanic Germany. Axel may be having trouble now with the reality of achieving this, but that is not the point. They all created the Third Reich with their fucking forests and Wagner and their silly green clothes and their hunting horns and their Teutonic knights and their turgid poets like Stefan George.'
'Are we so different?'
'Are you speaking as an Englishman or as a Jew, Elya?'
'As an English Jew.'
'I believe we are different. Although, of course, when you are led by an ass like Chamberlain, you do find yourself wondering. Do you know why I have taken to mixing cocktails?'
'Tired of buggery, perhaps?'
'No, Elya, I want to be usefully employed when we all run for America.'
13
THERE IS NO word in German for pantomime. A pantomime is peculiarly English. Axel remembers that as children they used to perform fairy stories. Marchenspielen, written at Christmas time by Adelheid, his oldest sister, in the music room on the first floor. This room looked out to the lake from the front, and from the other side out over the tea-house and Grosspapa's arboretum, which merges with the thick forest just beyond the family graveyard. Adelheid also made the sets for which the foresters supplied small Christmas trees. The house was infiltrated by the smell of resin.
Europe is a pantomime. Ridiculous leaders strut about in costumes they have designed. Goering clutches a jewelled baton. In England the absurd old gentlemen who run the country are more interested in shooting grouse than in facing the problem, and everything is on the scale and in the style of Adi's sets, fantastical and irrational.
After a week in New York he see Europe through different eyes: it is a poisonous, superstitious, deluded landscape inhabited by the blind. Here in New York, which is enormous, vibrant and hopeful, it all seems so simple. He is consumed by a sense of shame that his country could have thrown up Adolf Hitler and made him its leader with barely a second thought. He is desperate to demonstrate that this is not the real Germany, but nobody is listening.
In the club car on the train to Washington, a cheerful Negro attendant brings him a Bloody Mary and a club sandwich. This is a place that seems to live life without a need for that stultifying European introspection and snobbery and all those backward glances. Seen from New York, Europe is exactly a pantomime: a mishmash of styles, costume and sentimentality, a farrago of nonsensical and comic dialogue, yet full of menace. Half an hour or so before the train arrives in Union Station, another Negro shines his shoes; he kneels in front of Axel to apply some polish and to brush the shoes, which he buffs with a soft leather. As he works he glances up from time to time, smiling broadly. Axel gives him a big tip.
'Yessuh, thank - you - suh. I hope you have a fine stay in our great capital city, suh.'
The train pulls into Union Station. The attendant helps him with his baggage and summons a red cap.
'This boy is going to find you a cab, suh.'
'Yes, I am, suh.'
If Europe is a pantomime, this is an episode of Amos 'n' Andy. In New York there are plenty of refugees from Europe, but here he seems to have arrived in a plantation where Europe is not just distant but almost unimaginable. The station, however, is a grand place, a temple suggesting that Washington is closely connected to Athens and Rome. As he emerges, he sees the Capitol just a few blocks away. The cab takes him to Dupont Circle past an enormous marble fountain, decorated with classical figures. He tries to imagine Adolf Hitler here in his pantomime costume. Or Hermann Goering, like a gilded barrage balloon, and his imagination fails him. The one good that can come out of this war is the renewal of the old world after it has destroyed itself. The miasma of superstition and hatred and distrust will lift. This sleeping city, stippled with the buds of cherry blossom, is the only real hope Europe has against the threat from the East. His lecture tomorrow night is on Europe and the East, and he wants to alert America to the danger.
He is staying at a club to avoid the embassy, although he will have to pay his respects. The club, on New Hampshire Avenue, has brass spittoons in the lobby, large fans turning slowly on the ceilings, and Negro servants in livery. How they smile, how they make themselves agreeable. The club was once a mansion built for the owner of a brewery. In his room Axel lies down on an enormous bed under a slowly rotating fan. He is soon asleep. In the morning he takes a cab to Michael Hamburger's house near Georgetown University, where he was a professor of law before going back to Harvard in the late twenties. Later he was a visiting professor at Oxford. Now he is back as a Supreme Court judge.
Hamburger is wearing a print shirt and capacious trousers. His house is small, red-bric
k and clapboard, with dark-green shutters.
'Axel, my boy, how are you? Long time no see.'
He looks like his patron FDR, with his rimless glasses and abundant grey hair. His English is more accented than Axel's although he left Austria when he was ten years old.
'I am very well, sir. I haven't congratulated you on your appointment to the Court, sir.'
'Thank you. And now, how is Elya? I believe you saw him recently?'
'He's very well. He sends you his warmest regards. But he may be a little restless.'
'Aren't we all? Come in, come in.'
His wife, Frieda, comes to greet Axel. She has her hair tied back quite severely, but her face is extraordinarily serene, like a nun's, as if she has had secret revelations.
'We have cake and coffee in our garden room. Come through.'
After coffee she stands up.
'I know you boys have a great deal to discuss and Michael has to get down to the Court by noon.'
Hamburger looks at Axel and shrugs.
'Strange town this, don't you think?'
'I like it. It seems so open.'
'It's just a southern town with some oversized monuments.
Now, Axel, I would like to ask you about how you found Oxford, but perhaps we should get straight to business. You wanted to see me?'
'Sir, I wanted to explain to you firstly how I see the situation in my country and then, secondly, what steps I think the world should take to contain Hitler.'
'Are you not working in the Auswartiges Amt, my boy?'
'I am, sir, but I want to help my country and Europe avoid a disaster.'
'Is it coming?'
'I think it is. Unless Germany is contained.'
'How can that be done?'
Hamburger settles himself into a judicial pose.
'Sir, I think Germany must be hemmed in. At the same time the German people must be given some recognition, some form of recompense for the humiliation of Versailles, but also they must know the limits that the world will impose on any aggression.'
The Song Before It Is Sung Page 13
