Diary of a Dead Man on Leave

by David Downing

  Having no idea what he was talking about, I asked him to be more specific. And luckily for me, he had an obvious fondness for the sound of his own voice.

  It turned out that in mid-April—when I was in mid-ocean—twenty thousand Argentinian Nazis had assembled at a swastika-bedecked Luna Park arena in Buenos Aires to hear a series of like-minded speakers from the fatherland. Afterward, suitably fired up, they had fought pitched battles in the surrounding streets against local leftists. The resulting backlash against this brazen display of foreign flags and power had included government threats to close German community schools and hospitals. What, my questioner wanted to know, should our own government say to the one in Buenos Aires?

  “I don’t think our government should say anything,” I said. “South American governments admire strength, but they hate to be bullied. In many ways these governments are our natural allies, allies we may need in the struggles to come, and it makes no sense to antagonize them.”

  That didn’t shut him up. He asked if I was suggesting that we should just leave German communities outside the Reich to the mercy of their governments. “Surely,” he said, “Germany must put Germans first.”

  I said I agreed but that Germans who cared deeply about their German ancestry could always return to the fatherland, as I had. I realized I was sweating, and not just from the heat. The atmosphere in the hall had suddenly grown tense, and I wasn’t at all sure why.

  “Maybe the Sudeten Germans should just come home!” a voice shouted out, raising the stakes.

  “They’re at home where they are,” someone replied from the other side of the room.

  I ploughed on. The two situations were different, I said. While the Germans in Argentina were not being persecuted in any real sense, it seemed clear from reports in the press that the Sudeten Germans were. And they lived right next door—the international boundary could be moved to incorporate them in the Reich. The German community in Argentina had chosen to live in a faraway country that contained many other nationalities, and had to accept the consequences of such a choice. This did not mean us abandoning them: on the contrary, the importance of the German and Italian communities in Argentina should lead to a strengthening of the relationship between Argentina and Germany, which could only help everyone.

  That shut everyone up for a few seconds, during which I noticed Müller giving me a rather thoughtful-looking smile. I wondered whether I’d overdone it.

  The next question was about the wider gauge used by the Argentinian railways and prompted a discussion among the audience about some crackpot scheme of Hitler’s to build an even wider-gauge super-railway across the Reich. The arguments for and against were scrupulously technical, but put with a virulence that suggested more was at stake than at first seemed apparent.

  For my final question, I was asked whether I recommended emigration to Argentina. I hemmed and hawed, playing up the Argentinian outdoor life and wild scenery like a “Strength through Joy” brochure, but admitting that I probably hadn’t been back in Germany long enough to appreciate how much had changed. And it would be impossible, I said, to recommend leaving the fatherland at a time like this, when so much seemed possible.

  At which point the secretary thanked me for a fascinating talk and encouraged the audience to give me a round of applause. I left as soon as I could and walked back to my room alone, feeling utterly exhausted. I went to bed immediately and fell asleep still wondering whether I’d been a little too clever for some of my audience.

  It’s probably too early to tell, but nothing happened today to confirm my fears. Several people—including Müller—told me they’d enjoyed my talk, and as far as I could tell, they meant it. At any rate, I shall not volunteer to give another.

  Saturday, May 14

  I went for a haircut this morning, and the barber’s salon smelled just the way I remembered from my childhood. There were several of the same products on the display shelves, some with the same packaging after more than thirty years. The only big difference was the picture of Hitler that stared down from one wall, as if daring us to ask for the same ridiculous hairstyle and mustache. No one was tempted.

  A lively discussion was underway when I arrived, the main outlines of which only gradually became apparent. The subject was Baron von Cramm, who, I soon discovered, was a famous tennis player. Yesterday he was sentenced to a year in prison for having a five-year-long homosexual relationship with a Galician Jew, and this morning the whole story was spread across the papers. I could understand why Ruchay had not included this particular item in the digest he inflicts on us over breakfast each morning.

  The problem, according to a pock-faced man sitting opposite me, was the shortness of the sentence. Buggery was a bad enough crime in itself, and obviously buggering a Jew was a damn sight worse. A year was almost an insult, the man said, and several other heads—including, to the barber’s annoyance, the one in the chair—vigorously nodded their agreement.

  I asked what had happened to the Galician Jew and was told, with some relish, that he had first blackmailed 30,000 marks out of von Cramm, and then used the money to emigrate to Palestine. While I was absorbing this, the young man sitting next to me entered the fray. The judge had got it right, he said. “It was really the wife’s fault—the judge said so. Until von Cramm married her, and she fucked someone else on their wedding night, he was completely normal. That would send any man around the bend.”

  “Bah!” was the pock-faced man’s reply. He agreed that a shock like that might induce a man to bugger a Jew, but not to keep buggering him for five years! And in any case, that wasn’t the reason the judge had let von Cramm off so lightly. “He was from ‘an excellent family’—that’s what the judge said. And the bastards all stick up for each other, buggers or otherwise.” There were murmurs of agreement—clearly the Nazis haven’t been as good at eradicating class consciousness as they think they have.

  The conversation soon turned to football and this afternoon’s match against England in Berlin. The general opinion was that Germany would win, though the barber was doubtful. He turned out to be right.

  We listened to the game in the common room—Ruchay, Barufka, Walter, and I. Ruchay knows even less about football than Barufka and I do, but he cherished the idea of a victory over the English. Walter, of course, was highly excited, not least because two of his beloved Schalke players were in the national team. Ruchay mistook the boy’s enthusiasm for patriotic fervor, and for once did nothing to squelch it.

  There was no missing the political undertones. The radio commentator prattled on about trains pouring into Berlin full of excited fans and was beside himself with joy when the English team raised their arms in the Hitler salute. He ran through the German team somewhat perfunctorily, and then listed the occupants of the Führer Box—Göring, Goebbels, Hess, and Ribbentrop among others—with breathless awe. Hitler wasn’t there, however. He must know more about football than his disciples.

  It was obvious from the way the commentator’s voice slowly lost its jauntiness that the English were playing the better football. When they scored their first goal after fifteen minutes, you could hear the silence in the stadium, and imagine the gloomy faces in front of all the People’s Radios. But then, out of the blue, an equalizer. Walter hopped around with glee—his two Schalke heroes had made and scored the goal—and Ruchay smiled with relief.

  That was as good as it got. The English went on to score goal after goal, and the radio commentator’s voice grew more and more depressed. I had a mental picture of the men in the Führer Box, lips twitching like Ruchay’s in otherwise stony faces. Walter, by contrast, took defeat like a man, which impressed me enormously.

  This evening Barufka and I went to the Social Club as usual. There was no sign that Thursday’s talk had changed anyone’s attitude toward me, or made them any less willing to talk in my presence. This afternoon’s game was the main topic of conversation,
the general opinion being that when it came to football, the government and its press were all talk and no delivery. The feeling that this criticism could be applied to other aspects of national life was left unspoken but is, I am certain, shared by most of Hamm’s railway workers.

  Sunday, May 15

  I was going to say that I took Walter around the depot this afternoon, but really we took each other. He insisted on seeing absolutely everything, which turned us both into explorers. We walked the length of the freight yards, swapping the names of the far-flung outposts we found chalked or painted on rolling stock, from Cádiz to Danzig, Brindisi to Copenhagen. And in the process, my shrunken, claustrophobic Europe of Comintern defeats turned into Walter’s mysterious continent, full of romance, full of possibilities.

  I showed him my office—two-thirds empty on a Sunday—and took him up to one of the yard boxes, where we were lucky to find a friend of Barufka’s. He made Walter’s day by letting him set one of the signals. We then walked the aisles of the shed, clambering up onto several footplates. There were no shiny express locomotives, of course—Hamm is a freight depot—but Walter didn’t seem to mind; he strikes me as a boy with remarkably few preconceptions and a corresponding openness to just about everything.

  We watched as an engine was turned on the new vacuum turntable and then climbed up and over the coal stage and down the steps to the works, which seemed unusually busy for a Sunday. Between the workshop building and the canal, we found an engine graveyard—three lines of rust-eroded locomotives in various states of decomposition, all bearing the word “condemned” on some part of their anatomy. One locomotive at the end of a line—an Ellingen 4-4-2 that had been almost swallowed by the surrounding vegetation—somehow triggered a memory from my childhood. It was nothing special, just a vivid picture of my father in his best suit, arriving home one evening with a bunch of flowers for my mother. I must have been eight or nine years old, and I remembered feeling so happy for both of them.

  Some of this must have shown on my face, because Walter, with his usual disarming directness, asked me what I was thinking about. I told him.

  “Where was that?” he asked. “Where did you grow up?”

  “In Offenbach,” I said. “Near Frankfurt am Main.”

  Walter wanted to know if my parents were still alive.

  I told him they had both died in the flu epidemic of 1918. I didn’t say that I’d only found out three years later.

  As we walked back toward the works, Walter plied me with a string of questions. What had my father done? What was my mother like? Did I have any brothers or sisters?

  I couldn’t even remember the relevant details from my false identity, which made it easier to tell him the truth. I told Walter that my father had worked on the railway, that he had started off as a cleaner and ended up a shed foreman. That my mother had been a full-time nurse before she met him and a part-time one after that. That I’d had an elder brother named Jens who was killed in the war.

  “So you have no family at all,” Walter said.

  “No.”

  This obviously made him happy, but he did his best to disguise the fact. I felt flattered but also guilty, knowing full well that my time in Hamm would be limited.

  Since we got back from the depot, I’ve been unable to shake off the subject of parents. Over supper Gerritzen was full of his own and how they had promised to lend him the money for a luxurious honeymoon cruise the following spring. Ruchay, not to be outdone, launched into an account of how his mother had single-handedly purged her village library of degenerate literature and been personally congratulated by the local gauleiter. I went out for a walk along the canal, hoping for a cool evening breeze to blow away both heat and memories. There wasn’t one.

  Over the last couple of hours, sitting on a bench in the spring twilight, I have been roaming the years like a masochist in H. G. Wells’s time machine. I have revisited the house I grew up in, seen my mother at the kitchen door, my father lighting the evening fire. I have relived those two trips home from the front, the one to help bury my brother, the other to tell my parents the party had taken their place. I have heard the anger in my father’s voice and tried not to see the terrible hurt in his eyes. I have listened as news of their deaths has appeared, like magic, in the middle of a conversation about printer’s ink on a wet autumn day in Kiev. And I have calmly shrugged them off, as if they were remnants of some other life, some other age.

  They have been dead for twenty years now. Their names were Matthias and Eva, and the longer I live the more I think I am deep in their debt.

  Monday, May 16

  Something distressing has happened. Or at least, that’s what it feels like.

  After supper this evening, Anna came up to my room. She didn’t raise her voice, but she didn’t need to—her anger was obvious enough. She told me that Walter had come home from school with a letter of reprimand from Herr Skoumal, and that he had been forced to stand in front of the class while the teacher poured scorn on his assertion that The Protocols of the Elders of the Zion were a forgery. “He can only have gotten that from you,” she said.

  I tried to explain, but she cut me off.

  This wasn’t Argentina, she said. “You know it’s a forgery, and I know it’s a forgery,” she almost whispered. “But this idiot of a teacher probably doesn’t. And even if he does, he won’t say so, or he’ll be out of a job. That’s the way things are now . . .”

  She stopped herself. Her anger had blown itself out, and fear was taking its place. She seemed suddenly aware that, like her son, she’d said too much. “I’m sorry,” she said stiffly. “I know you were just trying to help.”

  I told her it wouldn’t happen again. She looked at me for what seemed a long time, as if she wanted to say something else, but then simply spread her hands in a gesture of resigned acceptance, and left.

  That was more than an hour ago. Since then I have sat by the window listening to two discordant voices, both of which seem to be mine.

  One voice says I’m an agent of the Comintern, a small but vital cog in the worldwide struggle against Fascism. That I was sent here to do a political job, not to fill the place of one young German boy’s dead father.

  The other voice says that the boy needs me, that I don’t want his name added to the lengthening list of those I have failed to help because I was too busy helping everyman.

  The first voice is stronger, perhaps wiser. It has been my voice, for better and worse, for twenty years. But it is not as certain as it was. It occurs to me that Jesus was tempted in the desert and that these days Germany is a desert of the soul.

  Tuesday, May 17

  Over breakfast, Ruchay read out an obituary in the Völkischer Beobachter. It was a nauseating paean to an SS NCO killed during an escape from a Thuringian Forest concentration camp four days ago. Two Communists have been on the run ever since, and I spent much of the day imagining myself in their shoes.

  Wednesday, May 18

  I have finally met Walter’s grandfather. The sound of someone thundering up the stairs soon after supper gave me a momentary fright, but the knock on my door was reassuringly hesitant. I found an out-of-breath, worried-looking Erich on the other side. His grandfather had fallen out of bed and was unconscious. Could I help lift the old man back onto the bed and stick around while Erich went to fetch the doctor?

  As we hurried down the stairs, Erich explained that Anna and Walter were both out. He didn’t say why I was his chosen lodger, but I could guess. He hated Ruchay, and—according to Walter—was not overhappy about Barufka’s passive devotion to his mother. Gerritzen was doubtless out with the girlfriend. Which left only me.

  The old man was no longer unconscious. In fact, he was cursing his inability to turn himself over or lift himself up off the floor. His metal walking frame had ended up halfway across the room, and an overturned bedpan lay in a pool of spilt urine
only inches from his white-haired head.

  “We’re here, Pops,” Erich said, and there was a sigh of relief from the prone figure. We lifted him carefully onto the bed, but there were no cries of pain. He didn’t seem to have broken anything, but a cut on his forehead was bleeding profusely.

  Erich seemed uncertain what to do next, so I told him to go and get the doctor. When he’d gone, I got a washcloth from the bathroom next door and held it over the wound until the bleeding stopped. The old man had relapsed into either sleep or unconsciousness, but his pulse was regular enough. I fetched a bucket from the kitchen and mopped up the yellow puddle.

  I was examining the cut again when his eyes suddenly opened. They were as white as his hair. “Who’s that?” he asked.

  I told him my name and that I was a lodger.

  “You’re the idiot who came back from Argentina!” he croaked. “Walter likes you, though,” he added before I had time to respond. “And he’s a good boy,” he rambled on.

  I agreed that he was.

  “They both are,” he went on. “She’s raised them well, despite everything. She should never have married that boy. Not because he was a Communist, though. Because he was a shit.”

  “Walter’s father was a Communist?” I asked. I couldn’t help myself.

  “Ernst?!” He laughed so much that the blood started oozing from his forehead again. “No, no, no. That was just a bargain. Sex for security. Walter was the silver lining.”

  I pressed down on the cut and asked him how he was feeling. He shrugged, as if it hardly mattered and asked where I’d learned to take a pulse. In the war, I told him.

  “That’s when she met him,” he said. “The first one. Erich’s father. The shit.”