Walter concluded with a reminder that I had promised to write, and I am glad my letter is already in the post. It is much less interesting than his, but then most of the things that fill up my days are things I can’t share. I told him everyone here was well and that the railway works have been incredibly busy, leaving Herr Ruchay with less time than usual to make a nuisance of himself.
The item of news hogging the headlines today concerned the street killing of a Sudeten German worker. Every paper but one blamed the Czechs, the Frankfurter Zeitung being the odd man out. According to what was once the country’s most respected newspaper, the man was killed in a fight between Sudeten German Nazis and Sudeten German Social Democrats. I suspect the editors will pay for this reckless brush with truth.
Tuesday, August 16
I think this has probably been the longest interval between entries since I started keeping this diary. The extra hours of work entailed by the Wehrmacht’s summer maneuvers over the last few days have left all but the youngest and fittest completely exhausted, and made sleep the sweetest of luxuries. Today was less onerous—the troops and their equipment have now been gathered from all over the Reich and transported to the relevant region south of Berlin. They’ll be there for several weeks, and then we must go through it all in reverse, assuming the Führer doesn’t decide to send them somewhere else. Into Czechoslovakia, for example.
The all-consuming works schedule has been good news for some. With Ruchay as red-eyed as the rest of us, Anna has had a few days of relative peace and has looked unusually relaxed. All good things come to an end, though, and tonight he insisted on taking her out to dinner. I hope the food was good.
At lunchtime I had a long conversation with Franke and Opatz about the festering mood in the yards, and neither man gave me cause to rethink the role I have planned for them. I have also talked with Schulte on several recent occasions and in any other circumstances would imagine a growing friendship. I won’t say I’m a hundred percent certain of any of them, but I think I’m as sure as I could be. Whether or not a committed three-man cell could beget others in the current conditions seems more doubtful, and I can’t see it having much of a future on its own. I shall pass on my recommendations at the next treff, and Moscow will have the final word.
In the paper this morning, there was a story about a haunted house in the Rhineland, near Koblenz if I remember correctly. For over a year anyone visiting this old, burnt-out house at midnight has been treated to ghostly sighing and creaking floorboards. Then, a few days ago, an intrepid gang of Hitler Youth sifted through blackened stones and found an old clock, still wearily winding itself up at the end of each day.
Just like me, I thought, still working away in the ruins, waiting for Hitler’s minions to dig me out.
Wednesday, August 17
I had a second letter from Walter this morning. He has now heard about the Focke-Wulf Condor flight and thought, correctly, that it should be back in Berlin by the time I read this. It actually landed yesterday in front of a huge cheering crowd, something I’ll doubtless be able to watch in next week’s cinema newsreel.
Walter has been to the seaside. It was “only forty kilometers away,” and on Sunday his Aunt Sofie drove him and his cousins there in the family automobile—“they don’t have a wireless but they have a car!” None of the family knew how to swim, so Walter had offered to teach them, but “Aunt Sofie was afraid that someone would be swept away and insisted that we only go in up to our knees.” With his usual geographic precision, he pointed out that they were actually paddling in the Vistula Lagoon and not the proper sea. “But at least the water tasted salty.”
He has read all the books he took with him and been forced to fall back on the Bible. He liked the book of Esther—“a good story”—but couldn’t see why God had needed Mary—“Why not have Jesus grow up in heaven and then send him down to earth?”
This evening’s Working Group was canceled, and I was up in my room rereading the letter when Anna knocked on the door. I asked her in and passed it over for her to read, thinking that was why she had come.
She skimmed through it with a distracted air, then handed it back. “God forbid he comes back religious,” she said.
I said I didn’t think that was likely, that Walter and skepticism were made for each other. I asked her where he’d learned to swim.
“Erich taught him. He learned in the Jungvolk, before he and his friends were expelled.” She looked up. “Can you spare a few minutes?”
“As many as you want.”
She sighed. “There’s something I need to talk about. With a man.”
I nodded.
She asked if I knew that Ruchay had taken her out to dinner the previous evening.
I said I did.
“I was running out of excuses, and I thought it would keep him quiet for a while.” She laughed, but not with amusement. “The bastard asked me to marry him.”
“Oh,” I said.
“Yes, oh,” she agreed. “And I don’t need advice about whether or not to say yes. What I want to ask you is—why? Why does he want me? I’m not that young, and I’m not that pretty. The only money I have is in this house, and that’s worth next to nothing. He surely can’t have missed the fact that both my sons loathe him, can he? My father loathes him too, but they’ve hardly ever spoken, so he probably doesn’t think him worth considering. He just seems fixated on me, and I can’t for the life of me work out why.”
I told her he wanted a woman. He wanted a wife because a wife was a conventional thing to want. He wanted admiration, and whether she knew it or not, people would admire him for winning her. And needless to say, he wanted sex.
“Conventionality, admiration, sex,” she repeated. “Three things he’ll never get from me, and he should damn well know it by now. Why can’t he pick on someone else? There must be women out there who’d think him a catch. He’s not that bad looking on the outside. All the women who swoon over Hitler—one of them would do. She’d hang on his every word. Or some of them at least.”
I suggested that the thought of approaching a woman he didn’t know probably terrified Ruchay. “You’re the devil he does know,” I said, “and the fact that you’re also his housekeeper will make him feel that he’s the one with the upper hand. In his mind, he’s making a generous offer, a step-up in life in exchange for sex and what he’d consider an appropriate degree of deference. From his point of view, its hard to see why you’d refuse him,” I said.
“And because I’ve done it before, I’ll do it again with him,” she said, as much to herself as to me. “I actually liked Walter’s father,” she added.
“That won’t have occurred to him.”
She grimaced. “No, it won’t.”
“So what answer did you give him?” I asked.
“Oh, the coward’s one. That I had to think about it. It seemed better to let him down gently, but if you’re right about his reasons, he’s going to be furious whatever I say. Perhaps I should tell him the real reason, that I find him generally despicable and that the thought of him touching me makes me feel physically sick.”
I told her I didn’t think that would be prudent.
She laughed. “Oh God, what a mess.”
Friday, August 19
I don’t know how many of those who live and work here are aware of Ruchay’s offer, but it’s hard to believe that anyone could miss the highly charged atmosphere that now pervades the house. Ruchay himself seems both tense and expectant, like someone who thinks the prize is all but his. Sometimes I feel almost sorry for the man, but then I see the way he looks at Anna—covetous seems too clean a word—and the nascent sympathy is instantly stillborn.
Barufka and Gerritzen have gone away for the weekend, the former to his son in Hamburg, the latter to his family in Duisburg. Both trips were arranged some time ago, but each man had the look of an escapee as he le
ft for the station this evening. With Walter away and Verena gone home, only Andreas, Anna, Ruchay, and I are left in the house, which feels more and more like a stage set in waiting.
I thought about going down to the club on my own but decided against it. If the curtain goes up, I want to be here.
Saturday, August 20
I was sitting in the yard with Andreas, enjoying the sunshine and watching the chickens scouring their run for something to eat, when I heard the front door slam. Lifting my eyes above the fence, I saw a hatless Ruchay stalk off down the street and guessed that he’d had the bad news.
A few seconds later Anna came out to confirm it.
“Good,” her father said.
I asked how Ruchay had taken the no.
She shook her head. “I don’t think he did” was her answer. “He listened, then said he’d allow me a few days to reconsider. When I told him there wasn’t any point, that my mind was made up, he said he needed my final answer by Wednesday. And then he just walked out. It was bizarre.”
“It’ll sink in eventually,” Andreas said cheerfully. “And with any luck he’ll leave.”
I suggested that Ruchay would need a way to save face.
Anna agreed and said she had tried to give him one. She had offered him “all the usual sops”—that she was too set in her ways, that any woman would be lucky to have him, that he was still young and virile enough to have children of his own. “It all went in one ear and straight out the other.”
I said that when he cooled down, he might be more sensible. Convince himself that it’s her loss rather than his and then save face by withdrawing the offer.
“I hope so,” Anna said with feeling. “If he keeps this up, I will have to give him notice.”
“Something you should have done months ago,” her father muttered.
Sunday, August 21
A strange day. At breakfast, Ruchay was unusually polite to Anna as she served and to me once she had returned to the kitchen. He studied his newspaper, but forbore from reading aloud those items he found most inspiring. He looked like a man who’s expecting bad news and is not sure how he will deal with it. Maybe he just needs time to extricate himself. Maybe the threatened storm will not arrive.
The world outside shows little sign of coming to its senses. On the contrary, the news these days sounds like a surrealist manifesto. Some institute in Rome has discovered that Italians are getting taller, and the Duce’s government has claimed the credit—its racial improvement campaign must be working. Jews in Germany are now allowed to open their bank strongboxes only in the presence of a policeman, though what exactly the policeman is there for hasn’t been stated. And following the recent injunction on gentiles using traditional Jewish names, all Jews with “non-Jewish” names are now required to take either Israel or Sara as their second names. Why not take things to their logical conclusion and insist on “Jew” or “Jewess”?
Meanwhile, the Börse is slumping, reflecting the fact that the only way up for the German economy is a high-risk war. The regime is reaching for its usual scapegoats—according to Reich Minister Walther Funk, the slump is wholly down to Jews and foreigners. How this riffraff is proving so damningly effective in a country lit up by the Führer’s genius is yet to be explained.
And the Frankfurter Zeitung has received its punishment for confusing reportage with telling the truth. It was the last newspaper printing Jewish births, marriages, and deaths, and has now been forbidden from doing so. There’s no limit to the pettiness of the men who rule this country; nothing escapes their meanness or stands in the way of the pleasure they get from hurting others.
I tried to escape it all by taking a long walk beside the canal, but the sense of dejection stayed with me. Out in the country, the first signs of autumn are easy to spot, and perhaps we humans are emotionally tuned to lament the passing of summer. Or maybe it’s just that the winter ahead seems to belong to the Nazis.
Monday, August 22
Barufka and Gerritzen both arrived back late last night, so breakfast felt more or less normal. Ruchay was quiet, but for once Jakob was not—he’d had a better-than-expected two days with his son and proudly announced he would soon be a grandfather. Gerritzen slapped him jovially on the shoulder, and Ruchay lifted his gaze from the Beobachter to offer congratulations. He wasn’t, I realized after several minutes’ surreptitious observation, actually reading the paper, merely holding it up like a prop or a shield. And the worry in his eyes looked close to panic. I assume that Anna is waiting till Wednesday before she rejects him again, and I wonder if Ruchay will find some relief in the final crushing of his hopes. He isn’t enjoying the wait.
This evening the principal news on the wireless was of Admiral Horthy’s arrival. Hungary’s leader of almost twenty years—another Fascist in all but name—is here for a week and is currently heading to Kiel to watch the latest naval maneuvers on Hitler’s yacht. An admiral running a country without a coastline must surely deserve a place in my surrealist manifesto.
In 1928 I was almost an unwelcome guest of his regime. The Hungarian Communist party, the KMP, had been decimated in the White Terror that followed the short-lived Soviet Republic of 1919, with thousands killed and hundreds more decamping to the safety of Moscow. Those still at liberty in Hungary were mostly inexperienced cadres whose ambitions extended little further than mere survival. Through alternating periods of semilegal operation and a perilous underground existence, they followed the orders of the leadership headed by Béla Kun in Moscow, orders that were handed on by people like myself.
My cover on that trip was that of a German literary editor in Budapest to explore the cultural scene, so much of my time was spent in those cafés haunted by local writers, actors, and filmmakers. The fact that most of these establishments were also frequented by Communists was not lost on the authorities, and it was only a swift and somewhat unnerving departure across a succession of high roofs that saved me from one particular police raid.
An occupational hazard, of course, and once across the border, the closeness of the shave swiftly lost its sting. Which is more than I can say for the other abiding memory of that summer I spent in Budapest—the conversations I shared with a young poet named Attila Jószef.
He was in his early twenties and already famous in local circles for the brilliance of his verse. One short poem, which opened with a cheerful announcement that he considered himself fatherless, motherless, godless, and stateless, hadn’t gone down well with the authorities, and had led to his expulsion from university. But his reputation as a poet had kept on rising. He was as poor as famous poets often are and would sit for hours with the same cup of coffee in one of the cafés I frequented, the one most popular with my party contacts. This was not a coincidence—Jószef was also a Communist and enjoyed nothing more than arguing the finer points of theory with comrades like me. His own beliefs were hard to pin down, but he clearly felt closer to Trotsky’s notion of Bolshevism than Stalin’s, and in 1928, that was already a dangerous space to inhabit. More interestingly, he was fascinated by psychoanalysis and often spoke of synthesizing Marx and Freud. I had several friendly arguments with him and never came out on top.
I felt dim in his presence, and looking back now, I can see that I retreated into a sense of “correctness”; I told myself that while he talked and wrote poetry, I was actually getting things done.
But how he could talk, and how he could write.
We were on the same side, but the revolution he envisaged seemed cleaner and much more romantic than mine, and probably not attainable with the methods the Comintern favored at the time. Talking to him, I felt both inspired and depressed, and for months afterward my memories of that café—his face in that amber light, the food odors and the endless clatter—were profoundly bittersweet. And every time I told myself that I was the one doing the work that mattered, another voice within would raise a hollow laugh.
I remember talking to Esther Brennan about Attila one lovely summer evening on her Scranton porch. She told me that she had always believed that we all have our parts to play, that some must learn to be hard in order to force through change, and some must nurture their kindness so that when the change comes, there are people to lead who haven’t been hardened.
There’s a line in one of Brecht’s recent poems that says much the same thing, that “we who desired to prepare the soil for kindness could not ourselves be kind.” My life in a nutshell, at least until now.
In March this year, I learned from an exiled Hungarian comrade in a Greenwich Village bar that Attila had died a few months earlier. He had thrown himself under one of the freight trains he so often described in his verse.
Tuesday, August 23
It was unusually hot today, and we worked with both doors open and the fan at maximum speed. We were also extremely busy, and for a somewhat ominous reason—the Wehrmacht maneuvers are still underway, and new contingency plans have been requested for moving the troops involved south to the Czechoslovak border. Plans, it was stressed, that we must not discuss in public.
I didn’t get home until past eight and ate my reheated dinner alone. Afterward, as I headed for my room, I came across Ruchay in the hallway. He looked in all sorts of torment but just managed a curt “Good evening” in passing.
About fifteen minutes later Anna knocked on my door. “He told me couldn’t wait any longer,” she said, perching herself on the edge of the bed. “And I told him I was sorry, but I hadn’t changed my mind. I had no idea how he’d react, whether he’d rant and rave and hit me or even get down on his knees and beg, but what he actually did was nothing. He just stood there looking at me, as if he couldn’t quite take in what I’d said.” She smiled to herself. “So I raised the stakes. I told him he’d been a model lodger but that given the circumstances it was clearly impossible for the two of us to carry on living under the same roof. And he agreed! Just like that. He said he’d be gone as soon as he finds new accommodation, and then he just turned and walked away. What do you think of that?”
Diary of a Dead Man on Leave Page 16
