One thing seems certain—the next European war will be very different from the last. It will be a war of planes and tanks, with ordinary soldiers asked to secure the territory that those machines have conquered. The government here seems to understand this—there’s a steady stream of items in the press about tank and aircraft technology—but I don’t think those in Moscow or Paris do. The party gives the impression it’s still fighting the civil war, and the Maginot Line isn’t much more than a fancy concrete trench.
I read the Canton accounts in several papers, and one of them mentioned the destruction of—my hand seems reluctant to even write out the words—the Shao-lin Hotel. That was the destination Chen and I set out for that night, half walking, half running, the occasional spasm of gunfire growing steadily louder as we crossed the Chinese part of the city. It was only about nine o’clock, but all the doors and shutters were closed, all the lights extinguished. I had no sense of people sleeping, though. On the contrary, it felt as if thousands of furtive eyes were mapping our journey through the darkened streets.
My fellow German Heinz Neumann and the Georgian Vissarion Lominadze were the Comintern chiefs in Canton, and when Chen and I reached the Shao-lin Hotel, we found the former nervously pacing the lobby. More than a little drunk and sweating profusely, Neumann looked less like a German Communist than a young colonial gone to seed. I remember thinking that the whole scene reeked of Hollywood: the palms in their pots, the lazily spinning fans, all the white men wiping their brows while the locals looked impassively on.
Moscow had ordered an insurrection, Neumann told me. Ignoring my protests, he said I’d been chosen to persuade Hai San, a warlord currently encamped with his twenty thousand men about fifteen miles outside the city, to throw his forces behind the newly proclaimed Canton Soviet. I could hardly believe my ears. I had met Hai San on several occasions and knew I had next to no chance of persuading him into such a suicidal course of action. The Kuomintang had two armies in the area larger than Hai San’s, and half the workers in Neumann’s mostly imaginary commune were Chiang Kai-shek supporters.
Neumann read it all in my face. “Ours not to reason why,” he said, and I still had enough residual faith in Comintern orders to assume that the leaders knew something I did not. As it happened, the Comintern had issued no such directive—Neumann and his friend Lominadze had decided on making this grab for glory all by themselves—but I didn’t find that out until several weeks later.
After a ridiculous argument over who should take the only available motor—Chen and I or those delivering leaflets announcing our commune—the two of us drove out of the city in search of Hai San and his army. Finding them both early next morning, we spent the next thirty-six hours trying and failing to persuade the general that he and his troops should board our sinking ship.
On the night of the fourteenth, a night of ferocious rainfall, we drove back into Canton. The rain had cleared the streets of the living, but the carpet of corpses forced us to abandon the car. At the Shao-lin Hotel, the surviving Chinese leaders of the commune seemed almost deranged by the calamity that had befallen them; Neumann and Lominadze, we discovered, had not been seen for twenty-four hours.
I tried to make my way home, but soon ran into a Kuomintang patrol. I ran and was shot in the side. They came after me, but I managed to lose them in the teeming rain, reach the canal, steal a boat, and make it across to the international settlement. The French soldiers who found me bleeding profusely on their doorstep were inclined to give a white man the benefit of the doubt and commandeered a rickshaw to take me to their hospital. Over the next few days, as I lay there in bed slowly regaining my strength, the terrible news filtered in. Thousands had been killed. Communists, friends of Communists, friends of their friends. Any enemy of China, as decreed by the Kuomintang and Chiang Kai-shek. Even Chinese women who wore their hair in European styles. Women like Lin.
It wasn’t safe for a European to leave the international settlement, but I managed to persuade one of the Chinese orderlies to cross the river and find out if Lin was all right. When he returned that evening, the look on his face said the answer was no. Finding the house empty, he had asked the neighbors and been told that the soldiers had come looking for me, and made up for their disappointment by killing her and the child. When I asked how, he just gave me a look, and I let him spare me the details. Later I would think I should have been stronger, but at the time I managed to convince myself that knowing would serve no useful purpose.
Wednesday, June 8
Walter came up to see me, as he does almost every evening. He doesn’t often ask for help with his homework these days, but he likes to talk about it and anything else that’s on his mind. I’ve gotten used to him sitting there in the upright chair by the window, to the range of facial expressions that are his and his alone, to the way he sits, half-slouched with his feet just about touching the ground. He sat there this evening, his knees dirty from an earlier game of football, his hair still sticking in all directions despite a weekend trip to the barber.
He brought a piece of homework to show me—a map of the proposed Rhine-Main-Danube Canal, which has been much in the news of late. The drawing was beautifully done, both accurate and easy on the eye. He smiled when I told him so. “I like geography,” he said. “It’s certain. No one can argue about where the Rhine is.”
“Like science,” I suggested.
He gave a Walter-like grimace. “We were learning about the atom in physics a few weeks ago, but Herr Borchers was scared to answer any questions about it. According to Fahrian—he’s a boy in my class—that whole area of physics is now called Jewish physics, just because the man who discovered it was a Jew.” He shook his head in bemusement. “What if the man who discovered the source of the Nile was Jewish—would that make it Jewish geography? It’s all so silly.”
I brought up something I’d been meaning to ask him for some time—how was Marco treated at school?
“All right, really. It’s weird. Some of the teachers are pretty rotten to him, but others are especially nice, as if they’re trying to make it up to him. Last year Herr Ehrmann told him he couldn’t wear a swastika badge, but Frau Hanssen went down to the school, and he carried on wearing it. The PE teacher’s always picking on him. Marco’s good at games and things like climbing ropes, but he’s always put with the boys who aren’t.”
“What about the other boys? How do they treat him?”
“All right. Even the boys you think wouldn’t. Stefan Wilden, he’s got blond hair and blue eyes and he’s tall, and he’s always being asked to stand at the front of the class as an example of the perfect Aryan, and he’s one of Marco’s best friends. It’s weird,” he said again.
I sat there wondering, not for the first time, where Walter gets it all from. I’ve never known a twelve-year-old so willing to question what he was being taught, but I suppose I haven’t known many twelve-year-olds, and much of what passes for sanity in Nazi Germany would strain anyone’s credibility. Maybe there are thousands of Walters out there, but I doubt it. He has a precocious commitment to logic that is all his own. There’s a famous English author—I can’t remember his name—who said that wisdom was all about making connections, and Walter makes them better than most of the adults I’ve known. But it’s more than that—it’s logic in the service of fairness. I guess this moral sense has to come from Anna, and perhaps Erich. And given how much Walter loves Tom Shark and how importantly Tom rates fairness—I read one of the books last week—he’s probably as influential as mother and brother combined. Or maybe it’s just who Walter is. Millions of German boys read Tom Shark, but I doubt many notice that their hero’s moral outlook is completely at odds with the country they’re living in. Walter does.
As usual he asked me a lot of questions about my opinions and my past. Sometimes I think he suspects that I’m not who I say I am but is either too polite to say so or scared of finding out that his suspic
ions are justified. But he picks away nevertheless and sometimes seems to be checking my answers for inconsistencies. This may just be paranoia on my part, but it’s a strange feeling being interrogated by a twelve-year-old.
Thursday, June 9
Asking Walter about Marco was probably a mistake. I expected the usual visit this evening, but it was Anna who knocked on my door and sat down in the seat by the window. “Walter said he’d talked to you about Marco,” she said. She was quick to add that she wasn’t accusing me of anything—she just wanted to know what had been said.
I told her he had seemed pleasantly surprised by how well most of the boys and teachers treat Marco. “Why? What’s happened?”
She sighed and pushed a stray wisp of hair back behind an ear. “One of the teachers let him down,” she said dryly, and told me the story. During PE an obstacle course had been set up to separate “the courageous” from “the cowardly,” and one of the obstacles had involved using a constantly moving rope to swing across a gap between two vaulting horses. According to Walter, when Marco reached this stage of the course, the PE master had deliberately held the rope out of his reach. Marco had hesitated, and the master, Herr Memering, had immediately branded him a coward. At which point Walter had been unable to restrain himself. “He told me it was just so obvious that he had to say something.”
“What did he say?” I asked.
“He said that Marco hadn’t been given a fair chance. Which, of course, was like showing a red rag to a bull. Walter was marched across to the headmaster’s office, where Memering explained what a troublemaker he is. Walter wasn’t allowed to say anything, just sent home with a letter for me. I’ve been warned that his conduct is ‘highly unsatisfactory’ and that I would be foolish to take his continued attendance at the school for granted. There’s even a reference to Erich—some rubbish about Walter needing to work twice as hard to overcome the stigma of his brother’s disgrace.” She hugged herself a little tighter, as if the air had suddenly turned cold. “But what can I do?” she went on. “I wrote a letter about how important it is that children learn to stand up for what they believe is right, read it through, and tore it up. It would only make things worse. I’m always telling Walter he has to accept their authority, even when he can’t respect it, but I used to say the same to Erich, and look how well that worked. I just can’t see an end to all this; I really can’t. And then I’ve got Herr Ruchay to deal with . . .” Her interlinked fingers completed the sentence, turning white as she tightened the knot.
“What’s Ruchay up to?” I asked.
“Oh, nothing new,” she said evasively, and then changed the subject so abruptly and aggressively that it almost took my breath away. “Why did you come back?” she asked. “You hate them as much as I do.”
There was no point denying it. “Because it’s home,” I said simply. It wasn’t true, but it could have been. Most people find it hard to abandon the country of their birth.
“For better or worse,” she murmured.
I nodded, and she took that as a signal to leave. As her footsteps faded on the stairs, I wondered about Ruchay. Why would a man like that want a woman like her? They’re roughly the same age but in all other respects seem about as incompatible as two people can be. Is it just that she’s the only woman he has any real contact with? A lonely obsession?
More to the point, why does she feel threatened by him? He must have some influence with the local authorities, but what could he actually threaten her with? Or is he just pestering her at a time when she has more than enough to cope with already?
Why do I care? Because I like her and care what happens to her and Walter. I was lying when I said I’d come back to Germany because it was home, but this house of theirs feels increasingly like one. I’ve lived in many places over the years, and some of them—the Hotel Lux in Moscow; sundry lodgings in Canton, Sofia, and Rio—have come to feel like somewhere I belonged. We all used to say that the party was our real home, but it isn’t. Those who work in the Comintern’s external sections spend most of their time as cuckoos in others’ nests.
I’m a cuckoo in this house, of course. One who feels more and more at home in his foreign nest. Maybe all cuckoos are prone to this delusion, but I should know better.
Friday, June 10
The other Communist who escaped from the Thuringian Forest KZ has been captured in the Sudetenland, and the Nazi government is applying for his extradition. Since a refusal would be interpreted as a deliberate provocation, I suppose the Czech government will send the man back to his death.
I have decided that the chances of any significant political action at the yards, in either peace or war, are practically nonexistent. The best we can hope for is an underground sabotage unit, and the chances of that surviving for more than a couple of operations are not good. Those operations might be worth the cost in lives. An efficient disabling of the locomotive turntable, works traverser, and yard brake retarders could shut the place down for several days, delaying the transport of troops and armor to the front. Such actions—like any number of parallel operations elsewhere—could make the difference between success and failure on some far-off battlefield. Of course, I cannot know for certain that they would, and neither can the people I report to. They can only play the odds, and if that involves sacrifice on a grand scale, then so be it. “It’s just mathematics,” as a NKVD colonel told me several years ago, and at one level he was absolutely correct. If Moscow prevails over Berlin, the survivors won’t be questioning Stalin’s methods.
As for those sacrificed—well, they at least got to feel better about themselves. Losing one’s life in the war against Fascism is a lot more appealing than a bullet in the neck from one of Yezhov’s thugs.
Or maybe that’s just the beer talking—Jakob and I each had an extra glass tonight to celebrate the opening of Göring’s new Master School of Painting. According to the Völkischer Beobachter, “Art shall bloom again and again be strong and German.” We laughed so hard we almost cried. I hope none of my fellow drinkers were offended, or my own war against Fascism will end rather sooner than expected.
Saturday, June 11
Painfully aware that I’d had too much to drink last night, I left the Social Club earlier than usual tonight, hoping for an enjoyable hour or two of reading. I’m halfway through a biography of Frederick the Great that I found in the club library. The Führer would be proud of me.
But I got to the book later than I expected. I was happily nearing home when Gerritzen’s voice leapt out of the darkness. He was sitting on one of the canal-side benches, and considerably drunker than I had been the previous evening. He insisted I join him. “Please, please, please,” he went on, in the manner of a spoiled child. “I really need someone to talk to.”
Curiosity triumphed over contempt. I’d been wondering for a week what had gotten into him and was apparently about to find out. I sat down, accepted one of his cigarettes, and let him talk.
Liselotte was the problem. Had he got her pregnant? No, it was much worse than that. His father had employed a private detective agency to investigate her ancestry and discovered that she was one-eighth Jewish. “Her great-grandmother Eva,” Gerritzen lamented. “From Silesia,” he added mournfully, as if that clinched matters.
I knew that you needed at least two Jewish grandparents to be defined as a Jew, and that only one qualified you for the higher status of a Mischling. Surely one great-grandparent wasn’t anything to worry about?
It was. “My father will have nothing to do with her,” Gerritzen said. “He says an infection is an infection—it doesn’t matter how many germs there are.”
“That’s not what the law says,” I told him.
“Maybe not now,” Gerritzen lamented, “but who knows in a year’s time, or two years? I love her; I really do, but what sort of life would we have? I have to break it off. For her sake as much as mine.”
I felt like hitting him, but I didn’t. I felt like telling him to act like a mensch, but that seemed inappropriate.
Sunday, June 12
Anna caught me on my way out this morning and asked if I could spare a few minutes. When I said yes, she led me through to her small living room at the back of the house. Walter was nowhere to be seen.
I’d had a glimpse of the room on the night her father had his fall but had never been in it. A small settee and armchair sat on either side of a fireplace, a table and two upright chairs under the window in the opposite wall. A somber landscape painting of birds flying over a marsh at dusk or dawn hung above the settee. A small and well-stocked bookcase stood against the wall behind the door.
She gestured me to the settee and sat in the armchair, leaning forward with her hands on her knees. “I need your help,” she said.
“Of course,” I said.
She said she’d been thinking about Walter and how to keep him “safe” since the headmaster’s letter and that she’d come to the conclusion that they could no longer go on the way they were, keeping their distance from the new Germany and hoping that no one would notice or be offended by their lack of enthusiasm. They had to make more of an effort to fit in, had to put up a better pretense. “For one thing,” she said, “Walter will have to join the Jungvolk.”
“The Hitler Youth?” I asked.
“The junior section—boys between ten and fourteen. All boys are expected to join, but it’s not compulsory, not yet. And Walter has always refused. Mostly because Marco can’t join. I think he’ll actually enjoy a lot of the activities, but he’ll see it as a betrayal.”
“Ah,” I said, finally understanding her need for help.
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