Three years ago I would have had an emergency number to call, but after that practice cost us a couple of men, Moscow decided it was proving too expensive. If I’m unlucky and have to flee the country at short notice, I shall have to find my own way out.
Thursday, July 21
I’ve shared tables with the driver Artur Zerbe on several occasions during the last seven weeks and have found no reason to doubt his mental loyalty to the party. I have also contrived conversations with two male neighbors of his, neither of whom could contain their envy at the number of women he entertains. I have to admit I disliked the man from the start, but having been told on more than one occasion that I nurture a puritanical streak, I gave him the benefit of the doubt. Not anymore. In the canteen this lunchtime, everyone was talking about a bloody fight in the locomotive depot, and I soon discovered that Zerbe had been involved. Two other drivers had accused him of seducing their wives while they were away on night duties and had then waded in with their fists. Zerbe had been rescued by others, but not before needing hospital treatment. A liability if ever I saw one.
Which brings me down to three, as I’ve also decided not to involve Dariusz Müller. Despite the uncertainties surrounding his recent relations with the Nazi authorities, I instinctively trust the man, but it still seems wiser to err on the side of caution where he’s concerned, particularly as involving him would blur the line between my list of relative veterans and the younger Working Group, which I fear includes an informer.
So I have my cell: the Jewess’s widower Schulte, the disparate friends Franke and Opatz. They’re not aware of their membership yet, and perhaps they never will be. It’s for Moscow to set things in motion and then for each of the three to heed the call or betray the caller.
Friday, July 22
Walter sat his end-of-year examinations yesterday and today, and he doesn’t think he’s done too badly. Yesterday’s math exam resembled a Wehrmacht entrance exam, requiring the pupils to calculate shell trajectories and how many liters of fuel a plane would need to bomb a target so many kilometers away.
It was history and geography today, the subjects I’ve been helping with. They’re also the ones he likes best, despite the fact that Herr Skoumal teaches them. I was expecting an air of triumph, but what I got was uncertainty—he really wasn’t sure how he’d done. Putting dates to events and vice versa had been easy enough, explaining Horst Wessel boring but also straightforward. He had remembered Herr Skoumal’s five weaknesses of democracy, and answered that question rather than the alternatives, which were explaining either the Jewish threat to civilization or the socialist betrayal of the German Army in 1918. The final question had asked him to name the three greatest Germans in history and add a few explanatory words. He had chosen Frederick the Great, Bismarck, and Hitler, but had run out of time before he got to the Führer.
I winced.
“I know,” he said. But he thought he’d done better in geography. There’d been a mimeographed outline of Europe with the current borders drawn in, and they’d each had to identify all the countries “artificially created” in 1918. He’d known all of them—“even Memel”—and he thought he’d done well with the other map, which had featured all of Germany’s lost territories, and on which Herr Skoumal had wanted them to write the things that each had produced for the Second Reich’s economy. “Like Silesian coal,” Walter explained. There’d been capital cities to name and questions about the expeditions to Nanga Parbat, which they’d talked about in class. The final question had been about canals. They’d been asked to choose three, say where they were, and explain why each was important. “Which was easy.”
It sounded to me as if he’d done well, so why was he so unsure?
“You should have seen the look on Herr Skoumal’s face when he took my papers,” Walter said. “He wants me to fail. And if I’ve made mistakes, that’s what he’ll notice.”
I’m hoping he’s wrong about that, hoping that Skoumal has better things to do than pick on independent-minded twelve-year-olds.
Saturday, July 23
When Erich was arrested about two months back, Jakob and I hoped that Ruchay’s brain would finally succeed in convincing his heart and dick that harnessing the three of them to such a disreputable family was completely out of the question. Unfortunately, Erich’s arrest seems to have had the opposite effect, and Ruchay has mutated into a suitor. “He’s decided she’s more in need of saving than ever” was Andreas’s cynical reading, and I fear he may be right.
After Ruchay took Anna and Walter to that parade in town, all was smiles for several days. Then things soured again—at mealtimes Ruchay was sharp or sulking, and she was bending over backward, trying to appease him. Jakob and I surmised that she’d refused another invitation.
Early this week Ruchay asked her to be his “escort” at a management dinner in town. I know this because she came to me for advice. After confirming our suspicions that she’d refused an earlier date, she told me that fighting him off without earning his undying enmity was wearing her out.
“I can’t stand the man,” she whispered fiercely, glancing back over her shoulder as she did so, “but spending an evening with him won’t kill me. The trouble is, he’ll take my going as a hopeful sign, and who will he blame when he finds out the hope is false?”
“Why not just say no?” I asked. “What can he do to you?”
She gave me a look. She didn’t know, and she didn’t want to find out. He was, she thought, quite capable of turning really nasty.
I wondered out loud how we would tell, which at least raised a smile. The only stratagem I could suggest was the old one of letting him down gently, of blaming everything and everyone but him for the fact that it just wouldn’t work. “Make him feel good about being a gentleman,” I said. “For once in his life.”
That was on Monday. Yesterday evening she went to the dinner, much to Walter’s disgust. She looked wonderful—too much so, I thought, observing them leave—and Ruchay looked depressingly happy over breakfast this morning. When I got the chance to ask her how the evening had gone, she told me the meal had been excellent, the conversation disgusting. “But I’ve won myself a few weeks’ reprieve,” she added ironically. “When I told him I was too busy bringing up a child to consider a close relationship with any man, he said he was looking forward to Walter’s being away in August.”
If I were Anna, I think I’d put poison in the bastard’s cocoa.
Monday, July 25
I thought about “Elise” today. She should be back in Moscow by now and facing whatever fate the NKVD have in mind for her. I feel less pessimistic than I did—the purge was already wearing itself out when I left in April, and even at its height, a recall often involved punishments some way short of a death sentence. Some of us have to survive, if only to fill the jobs of those who don’t.
Tuesday, July 26
Verena and I had a long chat this evening, sitting out in the sunlit yard while Andreas snored and snuffled in his makeshift wheelchair. She wanted my advice, which seems to be much in demand these days. I’d like to think that a life spent gathering wisdom has turned me into the perfect Kummerkastentante, but I think it’s more a case of limited choice. Women have a hard time getting the authorities to take them seriously almost everywhere, and particularly here in Hitler’s version of my homeland. Which leaves the men. No woman would want to put herself in debt to Ruchay, or expect Gerritzen to see beyond his own concerns. And Jakob, though kindness personified, is no one’s idea of a forceful personality. Which left me.
It was of course about Marco. She asked me if I knew what they called “children like him” and supplied the answer before I had time to. “The ‘Rhineland bastards,’” she said bitterly. “And do you know why?”
I said that I did.
A lot of women and girls had been raped by the French African soldiers, Verena said, but she had not been
one of them. She’d been only eighteen when she’d met this young soldier from Côte d’Ivoire at a dance. His name was Jean, and he hadn’t been sure of his age, but he couldn’t have been much older than she was. “He was a wonderful dancer and a lovely boy, and I fell in love with him. And I think he fell in love with me.”
They would meet in the park after dark and once managed a walk in the nearby countryside. He had talked a lot about Africa, about how much poorer it was in some things and how much richer it seemed to be in other ways. And then, just like that, his unit was on the move, leaving them only minutes to say their goodbyes. He’d promised to write and had kept his word—for almost a year, the letters had arrived, but all without the return address he’d failed to give her before he left. She had written care of the French Colonial Office, the French embassy in Berlin, even the mayor—if there was one—of the biggest town in Côte d’Ivoire, Abidjan. But all to no effect. And then he had stopped writing to her. “I only found I was pregnant after he left, so he never knew about Marco.”
A sad story, I thought, wondering where the need for advice came in.
She intuited the question. She was telling me all this because of something she’d overheard in a shop a few days earlier and how that related to something she already knew. Over the last twelve months, some four hundred “Rhineland bastards” living in the Bonn and Cologne areas had been taken from their mothers and sterilized. Verena had known two of the women involved when she lived in Essen, and had kept in touch with them over the years. Both had told her they’d been given no real choice: the authorities had threatened to take their boys away if they refused to sign the permission forms.
Verena paused for a moment, and I could see she was close to tears. She rubbed her eyes, ran both hands through her hair, and shook her head, as if to clear it. Last Friday, she said, she and Marco had been in the grocery store on Ritterstrasse, and two women there had obviously noticed Marco, because a few minutes later she had found herself behind them on the street and heard one say that “they’d better get around to him before he gets much older.”
Marco did look old for his age, I thought.
“And of course I don’t know whether they were just being, you know, the way some people are or whether they actually know something. I started thinking there might have been something in the papers that I missed, an announcement that the program they ran in Bonn and Cologne was about to be introduced here.”
“I haven’t seen anything,” I said. There might have been something in the Nazi rag that Ruchay reads, but if so, he kept it under his hat.
“And you read the papers, don’t you?”
“Not all of them,” I had to admit.
She sighed. What she needed, she said, was to find out if there were such plans without bringing herself and Marco to the authorities’ attention, and she wondered if I could help. Because if she found out they were coming for Marco, she would have to do something. Move far away; she didn’t know what. “Marco may never want a family, but no one should take that choice away from him.”
I agreed—what sort of person wouldn’t?—and told her I’d see what I could do. As yet I don’t know what that might be. If I pay the Gestapo a visit, and ask why nothing is being done to remove this dreadful stain on German honor, it might just give the local swine ideas. Something more subtle is needed, and soon. Verena seems close to the end of her tether.
Wednesday, July 27
There was a new face at the Working Group this evening. The woman arrived with a man named Risse whom I remembered from the last meeting and introduced herself as Ottilie. She said she’d been working in our admin office since leaving a similar post in Hannover a few weeks ago and had always been interested in “workplace issues.” She didn’t spell out her political creed, but in that regard her attendance was almost self-explanatory. Müller had clearly known she was coming, so some sort of basic checking has presumably been done.
The meeting was less interesting than its predecessor had been. As if keen to avoid a risky clash of ideas, we set ourselves back on the firmer ground of practicalities and discussed how we should counter the ever more frequently floated suggestion that Germany’s national interest required our acceptance of lower wages and longer hours. Given that either or both will prove almost universally unpopular, their introduction will be an opportunity for the regime’s opponents, but should we try to exploit it from inside or outside the official Labor Front? We argued the matter for almost two hours without reaching a definite conclusion.
As always, Giesemann favored the most confrontational tactics, daring the rest of us to share his contempt for the party in power. When he wasn’t waxing indignant, he had trouble taking his eyes off Ottilie. He may have been sizing her up as a possible gift to secret masters, but it was probably only simple desire—she’s certainly young and pretty enough.
He wasn’t the only one to find her more interesting than the topic at hand. For heirs of Rosa Luxemburg, my comrades seemed absurdly flummoxed by a female presence, trying too hard and not hard enough, often in the same breath. For her part, Ottilie was obviously feeling us out and careful not to say anything too self-revealing.
I have met a lot of women comrades over the years and observed a common pattern: that after years of encountering unspoken expectations and prejudices, they develop a tendency to promote the mind above the heart, at least in their political lives. Ottilie is no exception, but she radiates unused energy, and there’s a definite spark in her eyes. She may be another name for my list.
Thursday, July 28
Herr Skoumal has not exceeded my expectations. Soon after supper I heard feet on the stairs and the usual rap on my door, but it was Anna rather than Walter who accepted my invitation to enter. “Where is he?” I asked, surprised into impoliteness.
“Out playing football,” she said, not in the least put out. “He’s so angry that he’ll probably injure someone. Can I come in?”
She had a sheaf of papers in one hand. “His history and geography exam papers,” she explained, handing them over and taking the seat by the window.
“He did badly?” I asked incredulously.
“Take a look,” she suggested.
I went through the history paper first, noting the ticks and Skoumal’s neatly written comments. Walter had matched every date and event correctly but had “grossly understated Horst Wessel’s heroism, almost to the point of belittling it.” Reading through what Walter had written, all I saw was a failure to exaggerate it.
When it came to the question on democracy’s weakness, Skoumal had made no comment on what Walter had actually written, but was highly critical of what he hadn’t done, which was laud the “enduring strength of the Führerprinzip.” Skoumal also noted that he would have preferred to see Walter tackle the question concerning the Jews, as “his attitude in racial matters has often left much to be desired.”
“This is outrageous,” I murmured.
“Isn’t it just?” Anna agreed.
Skoumal’s final comment on the history paper concerned Walter’s “unwillingness” to explain the Führer’s greatness as “simply unforgivable.”
“He ran out of time,” I told Anna.
“I know.”
The geography paper was more of the same. According to Skoumal, Walter had forgotten to include the Saarland in his list of the new “artificial states,” but even I knew that the Saarland was already back in the Reich. The teacher could find no obvious fault—though not, I suspect, for lack of trying—in Walter’s next few answers, but expressed his disappointment that Walter showed so little appreciation of the Nanga Parbat climbers’ heroism—“He seems loath to recognize German achievement.”
The worst was kept for last. In his account of the Panama Canal, Walter had pointed out the “surprising fact” that the western end was the Atlantic end.
“Is it?” I asked Anna. “The Atlan
tic end?”
“It is. I went around the corner and asked Herr Hanreiter if I could look at his atlas. The isthmus runs east—west, the canal north—south, and the Atlantic end at the top is slightly west of the Pacific end at the bottom.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“Neither did I. More to the point, neither did Herr Skoumal. And he still doesn’t. He humiliated Walter in front of the whole class. He said that only the most conceited of boys could make up something like that.” She shook her head. “Part of me wants to walk in there tomorrow morning and slam Herr Hanreiter’s atlas down in front of him and insist that he apologize to Walter in front of the whole damned school.”
“But you won’t.”
“No, I won’t. It would make Walter’s school life impossible.”
I said that Walter just had to know that Skoumal’s the fool, not him.
“I think he does,” she said. “But today was a bit of a shock. Anyway,” she said, getting to her feet, “I thought you should see the papers, and I was afraid Walter would feel too ashamed to bring them up.”
I doubted that, and when Walter came up later, I was pleased to see he was much more angry than he was ashamed. “I thought perhaps I’d gotten it wrong,” was the first thing he said. “I mean, I knew I hadn’t, but . . . And then I thought it might be like Jewish physics. You know, that it wasn’t true because a Jew had said it was. So I checked the atlas at school, and the man who drew the maps was Erich Hummel, which isn’t a Jewish name.”
I told him I doubted there was such a thing as Jewish geography.
He smiled for the first time. “But there is such a thing as Skoumal geography.”
“Idiot geography is a better description,” I said. I told him I knew it must be difficult, that teachers are not supposed to be idiots, and they’re supposed to know more than you do. “But there are always exceptions.”
Diary of a Dead Man on Leave Page 14
