As for himself, he is happy spending most nights alone out here. But he doesn't lead a hermit's life. He finds that he has friends who have stayed on or come back to Oxford; and he has been invited to eat at high table in various colleges, a sort of sacrament. He sees himself being absorbed into the fabric of the old place, so that he is just one more hopeful and slightly seedy seeker after truth, bicycling in the gloom, walking by the river, breathing the damp air, longing in a subdued way for the peace of the mind.
It's spring now, and sometimes he takes a break from the library, and walks down the High to Magdalen, where the fritillaries are out in the meadow beside Addison's Walk. They are curious flowers, speckled and venomous. He sees, more faintly with every passing day, Axel von Gottberg and Elya Mendel striding along and now he hears only snatches of their conversation and their ill-matched laughter.
POSTSCRIPT
IT IS A HOT summer. The barley and wheat fields of Mecklenburg are strewn with poppies and cornflowers, though it is common knowledge that there were far more flowers along the roads and in the fields in the old days before fertilisers. Yet Mecklenburg has remained strangely untouched. It is not true calm, of course, but the narcolepsy of communism that has kept it this way. The only discordant notes are the brutal public buildings, barracks, schools and oddly non-specific factories - all moribund - set down according to some five-year or ten-year plan in the middle of a village or in a field. A woman is selling strawberries outside her small bungalow. Conrad pulls in. He asks for a large punnet. The strawberries are sandy and she offers to wash them. He accompanies her to the back of the house and he watches her as she rinses the pale sand — the sand of the Mecklenburg plain - from them. She is wearing a pinafore, with tabs at the side, in a blue-flowered pattern. She seems to be taking a long time deliberately, perhaps because she has nothing better to do. She tells him that there is no work in the area and that they are obliged to grow strawberries. She stands rather wistfully by the gate as he draws away, reaching occasionally across for a strawberry. They are the most richly flavoured strawberries he has ever eaten, also containing in some unexplained fashion the essence of the countryside. Erdbeeren, earthberries, after all.
He drives on through sleeping villages. He loves this unhurried process through an unknown country. He stops for a drink at a Café by a green river, which runs steadily — he imagines — towards the Baltic, through reeds and stands of birch. He is served by a woman who appears surprised to see a customer at all, let alone a foreigner. It is chicory coffee, Ersatzkaffee, which East Germans have learned to prefer to the real thing.
After an hour he is coming closer to Pleskow and he imagines he knows the landscape. It becomes more wooded and in the woods lakes gleam dully, pewter-hued. The road dips sharply to von Gottberg's ancestral villages, which cling to the estate. Here a village woman collected pig's blood for sausage and as a boy von Gottberg discovered that Frau Rickert always kept a piece of her famous cake for him. And it was from here that Liselotte and Aunt Adelheid and the fatherless children escaped the Russians, driven away long before dawn in a cart by the loyal Wicht, behind Donner and Blitz, to the safety of their second, smaller house across the Elbe in the British-occupied zone. It was an appalling journey of three days and nights. In the middle of the village, with its small baroque church and cottages and windmill, a concrete block of no obvious function stands without windows or doors.
The road now rises and at the top of the hill he catches sight of Pleskow, an Italianate palace standing on a lake, and he remembers Rosamund describing to her cousin Elizabeth how proud Axel had been to stop the car here to demonstrate mutely to her why his lands and forests and house were a part of his soul and spirit. Conrad, too, stops the car and stands by the road for a few minutes. The water of the lake below is briefly ruffled as a gust breathes on it. Out of the car it is very hot. He longs to dive into the cool, vegetable depths of the lake.
Now he turns through a housing estate, and sees the driveway down to the house, and the holm oaks that von Gottberg's greatgrandfather planted and the huge medieval barns that line the driveway. One half of the house is covered in scaffolding. There are a few cars parked under the trees and a band is unpacking its instruments from a van. The members of the band wear a green uniform with peaked caps. At the house itself he is greeted by Angela and Caroline, who take him to speak to Liselotte in the vast entrance hall, which looks out on to the lake. She is ninety-four years old now and her daughters have warned him that her blindness has become almost total since he first met her.
She shakes his hand and says in near-perfect English, 'I am so glad you could come for this great day.'
Off the main hall, with the Swedish stove, is the drawing room, which is decorated with a classical frieze, not yet fully restored, and there they offer him tea or coffee or a beer. The house, Pleskow, is in the hands of a trust after years of wrangling. Today the tea-house, where Axel von Gottberg and Claus von Stauffenberg met, is to be opened by the Mayor as a monument to the resistance. It is also the house where Axel and Elizabeth spent almost the whole night talking. The resistance has entered the historical record, even here. It is hoped that tourists will, in time, come to visit. Conrad walks down to the lake; the band is now setting up alongside the tea-house which is, he sees now, a small pavilion. The grass and the reeds have been roughly scythed down to the lake, giving a fair impression of the rolling lawn that was once there. He walks up to the family cemetery, on a hillock beneath some enormous Douglas firs. Like the Jewish cemetery in Prenzlauer Berg, it lies in ruins, as if standing stones are a reproach. He remembers a verse: The marks of pain trace countless lines through history. He can't remember where he read it. A tomb, half underground, has been prised open by the action of roots over the years, and this reminds him of how long ago everything happened here, everything that has so gripped and convulsed him.
From the tea-house he hears the band now starting to play what his parents would have called oompah-music A few people are milling around. A microphone is being set up on the balcony of the tea-house. The lake below the house is, as Adelheid wrote, violet and shimmering like the wings of a dragonfly.
The ceremony to open the tea-house is under way. The Mayor talks of the heroism of the resisters. He praises particularly the self-sacrifice of Axel, Count von Gottberg, a noble son of Mecklenburg and a true patriot. When he has finished, the microphone is passed to Liselotte, who says how delighted she is that her husband should be honoured in this way; then she declares the tea-house open. A plaque is unveiled, which reads:
In this small house, Axel, Count von Gottberg of Pleskow met with others in an attempt to save Germany from the Nazi tyranny. In August 1944 he was executed with friends in Berlin-Plotzensee. It is our sacred duty to heed their example.
There is ragged applause. Now Conrad is summoned so speak. In carefully prepared German he reads:
When I was a student at Oxford University, at the same college as Axel von Gottberg, although nearly sixty years later, my teacher was Professor E.A. Mendel, who had been a close friend of Axel von Gottberg before the war.
Professor M endel gave me all the papers in his possession relating to that period, and particularly to Count Axel von Gottberg. I have been working on a book, soon to be published in Germany, called A Tragic Friendship. The tragedy lay in the fact that the war caused a great rift between them. Professor Mendel believed that the events of the past century, which hang over us still and cast a deeper shadow in Germany than anywhere else, arose from the mistaken idea common to both fascism and communism that it is possible to build a terrestrial paradise, where all conflicts will be resolved and all values will be harmonised. I think we know now, after the heavy price paid in my country and yours, that this will never happen, but that we must instead accept things as they are and refuse to be deceived.
He has gone too far. He has lost them, or annoyed them. He sees the Mayor's wife fanning herself with the programme. They want to hear — and why no
t? — something uplifting. Professor Mendel was very fond of a quote from Alexander Herzen, who asked, Where is the song before it is sung? To which Mendel replied, Where indeed? Nowhere is the answer. One creates a song by singing it, by composing it. So, too, life is created by those who live it step by step.'
I believe it is true to say that Axel von Gottberg lived his life according to his principles and beliefs, step by step. As Major-General Henning von Tresckow, one of the brave resisters, said, Not one of us can complain about his death. The real worth of a human being begins only when he is ready to lay down his own life for his convictions. Iam honoured to have been invited to say a few words on this great day, in the presence of Axel von Gottberg's wife, two daughters and family. Thank you.
The audience claps warmly.
Now they file into the tea-house for cakes and beer and tea. Conrad stands next to Liselotte with the two sisters and a great-granddaughter, to greet the guests as if he is part of the family. He is introduced to local dignitaries and outlying members of the family.
Later, when they have all gone, he asks Liselotte if she minds if he goes for a swim in the lake.
'No, of course not,' she says. 'I wish I could see you swimming. Axel and I loved to swim.'
'I know.'
He undresses in the bathing hut, which appears to have been used for many years to store odd bits of machinery and implements, so that in the gloom he sees a toothless rake of an old-fashioned design, a few shovels with broken handles and some pieces of what may have been an outboard motor, including a propellor, oil filters and fly-wheels. Over the lake there is now a dove-grey haze, which hangs more thickly in the small bays. The sky above is gauzy and pale, the blue of the egg of a wild bird, not true but lightly stippled.
The remains of a jetty stretch out from the bathing hut, but the few whole planks are broken or rotted. He lowers himself into the water. It is warm. He wades out a few yards, clear of the reeds and the weed, and then ducks his head under; the water has a distinct taste, of grass and freshwater fish and gentle decomposition. He is swimming in Axel von Gottberg's lake. He sets off strongly in the direction of the church in the village, whose baroque tower is poking above the haze on the far side of the lake.
This was von Gottberg's terrestrial paradise, his own lake, his own landscape, his own history. Conrad had not mentioned, of course, that it was Mendel's chief complaint against his old friend that he believed all values would inevitably be harmonised in some mystical synthesis. And as he swims steadily onwards, he thinks that — intended or not - this is Mendel's legacy to him, that he should understand — actually there is no other choice — that a life is made, day by day, as best you can.
After that awful day when he looked at the film, it took him six months to recover. He suffered from terrible headaches, so bad that he thought he was about to have a stroke as his father had. At times he thought he was going mad. He could not complete simple tasks. He would start on something, perhaps turning on the kettle, and forget what he was doing. Compulsively he would shift Mendel's papers, all seventeen boxes of them, emptying each one on the floor, but before he could begin to sort them he would lose heart, change his clothes or shower or toast a piece of bread. His meals bore no relation to the time of day and he slept or woke without pattern, so that sometimes if he found the television on he would watch a programme about alligators in the Everglades or fusion cookery for five minutes and then he would go to his computer to try to write. But every time he wrote a word, he thought of von Gottberg's death and he was paralysed. It was as though there was a direct connection between his writing, the act of writing, and the event he had witnessed, although he couldn't see why that should be.
One day as he tried fitfully to read a book by W.G. Sebald, he came across a striking passage:
It does not seem to me that we understand the laws governing the return of the past, but I feel more and more as if time did not exist at all, only various spaces between which the living can move back and forth as they like, and the longer I think about it the more it seems to me that we who are still alive are unreal in the eyes of the dead, and that only occasionally, in certain lights and atmospheric conditions, do we appear in their field of vision.
He was not sure of Sebald's exact meaning, but he realised that he had been expecting something from the indifferent dead that they were unwilling to offer him. He was expecting some answers. Gradually, over months, order was restored to his thoughts and he began to write his account of the friendship of Axel von Gottberg and Elya Mendel, organising the hundreds of letters, the recorded conversations and the memories of friends, as well as archive material. He did not mention the cursed film that he dropped into the river. Gradually his account took shape and at the same time he saw himself slipping back into his own life, as if he had been away, inhabiting the life of another.
He swims on. Here in von Gottberg's lake he feels closer to him now than he has ever been. It seems a minor thing, a trivial thing, but this warm, vegetable-scented water affects him deeply, in just the way that scents linger in a room after someone has left it or as a forgotten childhood can be summoned by the smell of food or plants. He is finally freed of the horror of von Gottberg's last moments, which once he foolishly and recklessly imagined would increase his understanding.
From across the still lake-water he hears the band playing on. The sound reaches him in snatches each time he surfaces.
No, the dead do not speak in clear sentences, nor do they give advice.
AFTERWORD
THIS STORY IS based in part on the friendship between Adam von Trott and Isaiah Berlin.
For some time I had known that von Trott, a Rhodes Scholar, had been hanged for his part in the bomb plot of July, 1944. I was in the early stages of researching a book on Oxford, when I was looking at some footage of von Trott's show trial and I was struck by his apparent calm, almost serenity, facing the prosecutor, Roland Freisler, although the outcome had already been announced and the defendants had been tortured. It seemed to me that von Trott was aware that he was sacrificing himself for some greater good.
Seeing that astonishing film in the Imperial War Museum in London, and knowing that von Trott had been repudiated by his Oxford friend, Isaiah Berlin, I was gripped by the desire to write the story of their friendship as a novel, particularly as Isaiah Berlin has long been a hero of mine.
A novelist's job is to imagine conversations, motives and states of mind which is, of course, what I have tried to do. But I have also been very conscious of the obligation to the known facts of these terrible events - and an obligation to those who have helped me - to be true at the very least to the spirit of what I have discovered in London, Oxford and Berlin. The events of that day, 20 July 1944, and Colonel Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg's heroic attempt to rid the world of Hitler, I have reproduced as faithfully as I was able. But for me the most interesting part of the whole enterprise has been to try to understand how it happened, firstly that the German people and their traditional leaders were unable to rid themselves of Hitler even as he was leading them to their ruin, and secondly how Nazism could have taken hold and then subverted so quickly all Germany's institutions in the process, in what is routinely described as one of the most civilised countries in the world.
I imagined that there was something in the estrangement of Isaiah Berlin and von Trott that would give some clues, but of course a novel is an act of the imagination and I am not claiming - if there is such a thing - any incorrigible historical truth.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I HAVE RECEIVED generous help with this book from people whose families are intimately acquainted with the facts. First among these have been various members of the von der Schu-lenburg family, both in London and Berlin. I have had from them extraordinary insights into the events of those days and their consequences. I have also visited their estates in Mecklenburg, lost as the Russians advanced, and I have been pointed by them to some of the key sites of the resistance. I have disc
overed that there is a great loyalty among the families of the German resistance, and so I wish to make it clear here that nothing I have written about my fictional characters is in any way the responsibility of any of those who have helped me.
In Berlin, Bengt von zür Muehlen has given me films, booklets and advice: nobody knows more than he does about the films of the Third Reich. He has filmed and documented the families of the resisters, and I have found these films both moving and enormously instructive.
In Oxford, Henry Hardy of Wolfson College, Isaiah Berlin's editor, has pointed me in the right direction and often corrected my mistakes. The Bodleian Library has been more than helpful.
My agent, James Gill, has gone far beyond the call of duty, and has helped me enormously, both with his warm and sensitive suggestions and much more.
At Bloomsbury I must thank Michael Fishwick, my editor, who was extraordinarily perceptive, Mary Tomlinson, copy editor, who spotted many mistakes and tactfully corrected them, and all those, including Rosemary Davidson, Tram-Anh Doan, Arzu Tahsin, Colin Midson, Katie Bond, Liz Calder, Nigel Newton, Minna Fry, Will Webb and David Ward, to whom I am indebted in many ways.
A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR
Justin Cartwright's novels include the Booker-shortlisted In Every Face I Meet, the Whitbread Novel Award-winner Leading the Cheers and the acclaimed White Lightning, shortlisted for the 2002 Whitbread Novel Award. His previous novel, The Promise of Happiness, won the 2005 Hawthornden Prize.
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