Von Gottberg's life in Berlin was increasingly dangerous as he sought out others — there were many — who thought that Hitler was steering the beloved country to disaster. But he enjoyed the danger; he was a young man, plotting to save his country; he found the late-night discussions with like-minded colleagues in the Foreign Office and the Army and his meetings with Helmuth James von Moltke and his circle, his Krets, exhilarating. He was forming the idea of an alternative Germany of spiritually conscious people, enlightened Germany, which would inherit when Hitler was gone. His friends in England did not understand; they wished to crush Nazi Germany into the dust. But they didn't realise that by saying this they were offering the German people no option but to stick with Hitler. He couldn't tell his family the details, but he was travelling to Sweden and Switzerland to pass on to the governments of Britain and America the information that there was an opposition that should be encouraged. He also passed on plans of annexations and invasions. Meanwhile, more and more reports of brutal killings by Einsatzgruppen were coming out and these too were passed on. In the spring von Gottberg went again to Sweden to met an English bishop, with details of the opposition in the Army and the Foreign Office, for onward transmission to Churchill. Soon after he met a young officer called Claus von Stauffenberg and reported to Liselotte that he had at last found a true friend.
The two cities, London and Berlin, where the old friends now found themselves, were sexually charged by war. With death in the air, sex scuttles in to fill the vacuum. Women stopped wearing hats all of a sudden, as if hats were keeping them down. Hair and sex became synonymous. Von Gottberg believed that casual sex with other men's wives or with girls he picked up in nightclubs or with waitresses in Kurfürstendamm did not count as adultery. And in London, Mendel found that he could translate his charm and urbanity into sexual activity. Women were liberated by the sense that the old world, for better or for worse, was finished. Kaputt.
Von Gottberg was working under enormous danger right from the beginning. He was never able to write a letter or use the phone or tell the names of his closest friends to other friends, for fear that when the reckoning came they would tell all. It was quite different in Whitehall, where Mendel treated his fortnightly digest of Russian intelligence as an essay. Very soon colleagues were talking of the brilliance and wit of his observations about Russian intentions; without demonstrating too much learning -never a good idea - he was able to suggest from his deep knowledge of Russian literature and history how the Russians would react.
In the Kreisau Circle there were endless arguments on matters of principle about whether Hitler could legitimately be killed, and about the attitude of the members to the threat from the East and the composition of the new government. Von Gottberg warned of the dangers of trying to restore a monarchy, or of allowing the proposed putsch to be the property of the Alte Herren of the Army and the aristocracy. England would not be keen on such a thing, he said. He was probably remembering Mendel's warning about the high-handed member of the Prussian aristocracy who had visited Oxford and caused outrage. Von Gottberg tended to see England and Oxford as the same thing.
Conrad sits above the bakery waiting for Fritsch. If Fritsch has anything for him he will go immediately to Berlin. What happens next depends on Fritsch. This old man - he pictures Fritsch as a sickly, shabby figure, trying to make a few euros out of his sordid past - may have the film or may know where it is. If he has been harbouring it for all these years it is probably only because of a sense of shame that he has not tried to sell it before. After all, he saw men being hanged. Or perhaps Fritsch is finding that his old mind is like a shallow boat, mostly gliding undisturbed, but occasionally touching on something submerged. Germany is full of people who would rather not remember. But then, Conrad's father was one of those too. Forgetting the unpleasant is a natural defence, probably Darwinian, and the belief of Freud's bastard children in recovering memory is utterly contrary to nature.
For more than a week he has rushed down for the post, but still there is no word from Fritsch. Meanwhile a child is growing within Francine, and it may be his child. Von Gottberg had three very young children when he was hanged. They were three, two and nine months old. It must have occurred to Mendel when he knew all the facts and when he met Liselotte for the first time in the seventies that nobody sacrifices himself recklessly if he has children. And now Conrad tries to imagine himself as a father.
He leaves the flat, hoping to avoid Tony, who has an unnatural interest in his new sex life. He can see him in his white coat, with his back turned, and tries stealthily opening the door to the street, which they share. The door has an electric buzzer attached, which makes secrecy impossible.
'You look a bit pale. Keeping your stremf up?'
'Tony, you have turned from the king of Camden's artisan bakers, maybe the only one, a legend in the field of farinaceous products, to a pervert. For Christ sakes keep out of it.'
'Orright, orright. Keep your 'air on, mate. I'm just joshing. You're a lucky bunny, that's all I'm saying, no more. That's it, bast a. No offence?'
'I didn't take offence, it's just that I am beginning to feel persecuted. I can't go out of my own fucking front door without you or your little pal leering at me.'
'We're just jealous. Good luck to yer. And if you need some more fuel when you come home, there's loads of olive bread left over.'
'Oh Jesus. Bye-bye, Tony. Don't wait up.'
He is off to meet Emily. But passing the decrepit church on the corner just past the minicab office and the shop selling rubber-foam shapes - do-it-yourself furniture - he turns into the overgrown churchyard and towards the Victorian church. It has a tall steeple, not soaring but workmanlike, the sort of job you got for limited money in 1862. The porch smells of urine. Inside it is vast and unseasonably cold. He kneels on the floor and folds his hands across his face, in case anybody should be watching. There is some movement over to the right beyond a pillar and he sees between his fingers a man sitting on a pew eating something quickly and surreptitiously, like a dog picking up rubbish in the park. He hasn't been in a church on his own for years, although of course he's been to a few weddings and christenings. Guiltily he remembers his two god-children, who he has neglected criminally. He has never sent either of them a single present.
Mendel, who was an atheist, believed that religion should stick to its guns: the precepts of religion could not be altered at will.
And me? What do I believe?
He closes his eyes and tries to re-create the feeling of his few religious years at boarding school in Cape Town. The feeling was genuine, but was it, in any meaningful way, real? And, to his surprise, he finds he can re-create the feeling in part, through the physical: the pew against his buttocks (which Emily described, gratifyingly, as 'lovely tight buns') and the feel of stone under his knees and the sense that above his head there is a lot of unused, significant space. Religious space. The essence of religion is thought to live up there somewhere, although it can be lured into the heart by the bait of good behaviour.
And he thinks of fucking Emily. He can't bring himself in the privacy of his own head to use any other word. He counts the number of times they have fucked and at the same time he keeps his head buried in his hands in deference to the location. Fourteen. He is now very familiar with the topography of her body. In restaurants she encourages him to put his hand under her skirt; she parts her thighs briefly. She is always smoking or drinking or licking the paper on a joint. She doesn't eat much although she always orders a large plate of fries. She needs to fiddle, to handle, to taste, to suck. She is thin, but - he remembers a phrase in a Hemingway novel — made for sex. Tony and his lightly powdered chum recognise it. But now he must break it off. He's not sure she will mind; she'll move on fast and probably without regret; after all he remembers how they met. But he can't be having sex with her and deal fairly and squarely with Francine at the same time.
He says the words of the Lord's Prayer to his atheist self and rem
embers just how beautiful they are. Most of the hanged in Plotzensee were able to have last messages smuggled out. All these messages had a religious tone. Von Gottberg's, if he wrote one, was lost, to his wife's great distress. This need to believe, this need to profess some faith in something - God or decency or asceticism or conscience or homeopathy or country or the special qualities of animals or the Prophet's Night Ride or the imminence of a new order — is a curse. As he kneels there he sees that to confess to believing in nothing ultimately is to accept mortality unreservedly, which very few people are really prepared to do, although they know that the tide of death can only rise.
The man who was eating stops in front of the altar and crosses himself. Perhaps he was not eating but self-administering the host. He scowls competitively at Conrad as he passes. Conrad is now completely alone in this huge dark space. Water has seeped into the stone over the years, so that the pews and the hymnbooks feel musty. There is the whiff of mushrooms in the air. He stands up and walks towards the entrance. He sees a table with candles, none of them lit. You may light a candle to bear witness if you make a voluntary donation. He puts a pound in the box. It lands with a wooden noise that suggests that not many people have been bearing witness. Matches are provided, which could be seen as an invitation to an arsonist, although it would be hard to start a fire in this dampness. He lights a candle. The word witness, which the Church finds exciting, is puzzling. The way the Church intends it, it means to profess your faith openly. But it can mean to sacrifice yourself. His candle is in remembrance of his father. Love cools, friendship falls off, brothers divide: in cities mutinies; in countries discord, in palaces treason; and the bond cracked 'twixt son and father . . .
And he tells himself as he leaves the church that his cheap candle flickering in the dark is to restore the bond between son and father, even at this late hour.
When he meets Emily she is already drunk. She is with three friends, a young man and two girls, which makes him uneasy. She is sitting on a stool with a cigarette in one hand. Her denim skirt is halfway up her thighs. She introduces him to her friends and they pour him a glass of wine. The friends are like amiable Labradors. They are simply waiting to see where the drink and the dope and the night will take them. They make noises that he can't fully understand. They whoop and laugh. He can in fact get the words, but he finds it hard to discern any sentences. They talk about friends who got mashed or arrested or crashed their cars - whoop, whoop - but it is never clear where or in what order these things have happened. They are unnaturally loud. The two girls have flat, bare stomachs and their breasts demand attention, not by being buxom or womanly, but by having a kind of life of their own, small lascivious creatures, barely under control.
'Emily?'
'Yuh?'
'Can I talk to you for a moment?'
'Go ahead.'
'Just you and me. Outside.'
'OK.'
She places a hand on his shoulder and slides off the bar stool, unsure of the whereabouts of the floor. He can see that she is wearing red knickers. When they are standing outside she kisses him.
'I can't stay, Em. I've got a problem. I'm going now.'
She isn't taking it in.
'Give me a bell when you're free. I don't know where we will be.'
'OK.'
'Love you a bunch.'
She stands on the pavement unsteadily. She's like a mountaineer at very high altitude: the air outside is too thin to sustain her. There is a tragic lapse before she gathers herself and goes happily back into the pub.
He walks down to the river and phones Francine. It is just dark enough for the lights on the embankment to show on the water, which is running full and dark. Francine doesn't answer, but he leaves a message.
'Fran, I would like you to come back, if that's what you want. And I think we should have the baby. I've told Emily I am not seeing her again, whatever.'
Although, of course, Emily has no idea.
16
FRANCINE, HE HAS realised, doesn't fully believe him. She thinks that this is just another of the delusions he has lived by for so long. She thinks, despite everything, despite the scale of her betrayal, that he is the unreliable one. Let's take it one step at a time, she says. She will do locum work and stay where she is until she is sure he is sure. She would also like to know if there is going to be an end to his work on Mendel's papers.
'Do you mean you would like to see me employed?'
'If we have the baby, I won't be able to work for six months and when I do go back to work, you won't want to be sitting at home all day looking after a baby and working on your papers at the same time. So yes, it would be better if you had a job and we could afford a nanny.'
Over this conversation hangs a conditional, which he can't contemplate: the existence or non-existence of a baby.
'Fran, we are going to have the baby. As for Mendel and his papers, I am going to follow this right through. I'm waiting now for a man called Fritsch to contact me. He may have some vital information. I know what you are thinking. But I can't tell you the nature of the information, it's not secret or anything, but I just feel I have to explore it myself. And then I'll know where this is leading.'
'Conrad, you must do whatever it is you think you have to. I've learned that lesson. All I am concerned with is the practical arrangements.'
It's not true of course. She's concerned with far more; even now, chastened, almost embarrassingly humbled, she is weighing up his reliability. She has had her hair cut, as if to suggest that she is shriven; although he said how much he liked it and how young it made her look, he was shocked. In fact she looks older and gaunt, even slightly potty. He remembers her walking hand in hand with John near the hospital, her hair incandescent - her hair was in love — and he sees this act of contrition as a realisation that she has to accept her lot: he is part of her climb-down. She must accept the unreliable, useless husband, indulging himself as usual. He sees the simulacrum of their relationship increasingly often amongst friends and acquaintances: the wife whose success and determination license the husband for a life of futility. It is a phenomenon of the new century. And often these house husbands drink or say they are writing a novel or profess to love children or they make furniture or sleep with the nanny. Has Mendel given me these papers to unman me? But then he thinks of Mendel in old age, with those small dark eyes, which appeared to consist only of irises, sitting in his collapsed chair, dressed in a three-piece suit, talking about Conrad's thesis and gently suggesting books he should read and opening his mind — how banal but how literal a phrase — to something extraordinary, a very personal but also wide-ranging understanding of human aspirations and longings. He remembers, as if it were spoken five minutes before, Mendel telling him that mankind's greatest delusion is the belief that one day the world will arrive at an ideal state of affairs, a heaven on earth where all values will be in harmony and all problems will be solved. Not only does he remember the words, he hears the way Mendel spoke them, with just a trace of his immigrant origins - a sort of East European warble in the vowels lingered in the oddly patrician English.
He had told Mendel that day that he had learned about his father taking money from the National Party to print stories about Mandela and the ANC that were untrue.
Conrad, in times of great stress, of historic upheaval, people react in unpredictable ways. All I can say to you is that, in my experience, people under these circumstances are desperate to share the possibility of intimate communications. From what you have told me about your father, I would guess that he was expressing his understanding of the nature of truth. However personally disadvantageous, he seems to have decided that he could not subscribe to the idea that a heaven on earth was about to be ushered in.
Conrad did not ask him to be more precise. He took this to mean that Mendel was suggesting that his father wanted to be true to something irreducible. He couldn't embrace another myth, another set of lies. And that was more or less exactly what his father,
mad-eyed in the empty cottage, told Conrad a few years later. He sitting alone beneath his blue-and-red Balliol blade, Bumped Ch Ch, Trinity, Pembroke, Wadham, 1959. Conrad noted the names and weights of the crew, all recorded reverentially on the blade. His father asked Conrad not to contact him again under any circumstances. Conrad boarded the small train at Clovelly Station, the first step on his journey back to England, his heart broken.
No, Mendel wanted to draw him fully into the understanding of how things really work in history, among humans: what it means to be one of these creatures in a time of confusion and moral turmoil. And Mendel wanted him to try to understand what von Gottberg had done, which perhaps he hadn't fully understood himself. He wasn't expecting an answer, of course, only requiring that Conrad never cease from exploring this and other mysteries.
Shelley wrote in his Defence of Poetry that poets are hierophants — he had to look the word up — priests who carry the sacred knowledge from one generation to another. If he told Francine that he was carrying some sacred spark, she might have him sectioned. Doctors are entitled to do this.
He's waiting for Fritsch. In the meanwhile on a large chart attached to a wall with Blu-tack, he is filling in von Gottberg's known movements. He sees patterns: he is in Berlin, meeting friends at the Romanisches Café, the Adlon and the Foreign Press Association, as he establishes himself in the Auswartiges Amt at 137 Kurfürstendamm, which is the information and research department, as an expert on England. There he finds many like-minded people, who believe that Germany is being led to disaster. Increasingly often he has meetings with Helmuth James von Moltke; there are reports that they argue fiercely. He also finds that the generals, who have it in their power to end this madness, are unable to act decisively, although after the Russian campaign and more than a million German deaths they all see that the writing is on the wall. All except for the C-in-C, the Führer. He is living in a Wagnerian world.
The Song Before It Is Sung Page 16
