Dark Back of Time

by Javier Marías

  The trial of Percy William Olaf de Wet [an unusual form of his name, perhaps because he was working as a spy, but then it wouldn’t make any sense to keep the family name] was held in camera. A representative of the ‘Vôlkischer Beobachter’ was permitted to be present during the trial. For obvious reasons of military security all participants at the trial were put under an oath of silence. Nothing of such a nature may therefore be reported … But quite apart from secret matters, the person of the accused is worthy of attention from the general human and political aspects.

  The circumstances under which the condemned man pursued his activities against the security of the Reich are characteristic of a certain international atmosphere in which the dividing line between politics and adventure vanishes and the Intelligence Service is indistinguishable from swindling. It can, however, be no chance that the enemy Intelligence Service prefer to draw their recruits from such elements. In reviewing this trial, what is most noteworthy is this: in this underground battle against the Reich use appears to be made only of those whose lack of principle and moral instability would seem to fit them for their work. [The edifying commentary is striking, coming as it does from a Nazi publication, but it’s even more remarkable in an account of the trial of a spy, as if moral condemnation were optional or subject to subtle distinctions in such a case.]

  Those who took part in the trial have had to weigh in their minds whether this de Wet, who stood before them twisting a thin Don Quixote beard [perhaps the comb had been confiscated when he was arrested] was an adventurous fool or a cunning, cold-blooded, calculating spy resolute in concealing his dangerous secrets. Both may be true. De Wet comes from English military stock. [A statement that puts the lie to the famous Boer grandfather.] His father was a naval officer, Commandant on one of the Channel Islands, now in German possession. The son was also destined for a military career and entered a cadet school, for whose examination, however, he did not sit. He says it was because it was not his intention to enter an infantry regiment. It is possible to believe this, for soon afterwards, having got round the examination for pilot, he entered the Royal Air Force. He left that service in a short time and the reasons are obscure. De Wet maintains that the many medical boards he had to attend on account of some motor accidents had been unpleasant, and he had on that account given up the service. [This is all so preposterous that we’d be justified in conjecturing that De Wet was mocking and pulling the legs of his judges and accusers throughout the trial; it’s impossible to know whether they were aware of this, though it certainly looks bad for the now defunct Third Reich if they weren’t; one person who definitely wasn’t aware was our reporter from the Vôlkischer Beobachter, who painstakingly records everything, word for word, and seems perfectly oblivious to the probable detachment or cynicism of the adventurous spy. That must have been it, I thought as I read this drivel.]

  Subsequently de Wet appeared in all the theatres of war. First he served nine months as a pilot and Intelligence officer in the army of the Negus. Forced to leave Abyssinia on account of a duel, he offered his services to General Franco. Not being accepted, he joined the Reds and for three months served as a fighter pilot. During this time he began his work for the Deuxième Bureau, the French equivalent of the British Intelligence Service. But not yet as a paid agent, only out of friendship with the officers of the Deuxième Bureau. Is it not possible that de Wet has been for long a member of the British Intelligence Service, entrusted with a mission involving him in the rôle of foreign mercenary? De Wet denies this and says he did once offer his services, which were refused. Is he telling the truth? And if it is the truth, why was he rejected? Did the British consider him vain and stupid and, on account of his drunken bouts, unsuitable for employment? It may be so, and it may be otherwise. In any case de Wet withdraws from his rôle as a Red Spanish pilot to act as arms dealer for a certain Zacharoff. Then he writes two books concerned with his experiences, entitled Cardboard Crucifix and The Patrol is Ended. [By this point it seems obvious that it was the reporter who was having his own bout of intoxication with adventure and didn’t know how to explain this jumble of facts but had fallen under the sway of the foolish or cunning figure of the prisoner, about whom he asks too many useless or overtly ridiculous questions, among which “Is he telling the truth?” takes the prize for mindlessness. Even so, the inference that vanity could be a serious impediment to espionage work isn’t bad. At certain moments, he gives the impression that his very fascination with De Wet irritates him and sets him against the former pilot in a way that’s quite instructive, but his weakness for the accused shimmers in the air for a second when he takes care to point out that initially the spy spied only out of friendship with the greatest figures in French espionage. Still and all, the most admirable sentence in the paragraph is the one that states with cautious equanimity, “It may be so, and it may be otherwise.”]

  For a short time de Wet led a quiet life exercising his gifts as a painter. [Here again we catch sight of the mask maker.] When the conflict between Germany and Czechoslovakia broke out, then in his twenty-fifth year, he put aside his palette and hastened to Prague, where he offered his services as pilot to the Benes government. Here he renewed a friendship of Paris—the friendship with a dancer of southeast Europe, a woman who has left several shattered hearts behind her and of whom little can be discovered. It is not known for certain whether she was an erotic or herself a political adventuress. In any case, when de Wet was arrested she was not only his confidante but also his collaborator. During the course of interrogation she committed suicide, and de Wet, who until the death of his accomplice had confessed to his full responsibility, began to try to defend himself. [Clearly our reporter wasn’t entirely indifferent to literary ornament, and while his training in the composition of narrative prose must have been shoddy and generally furnishes him with tired expressions and desiccated lies, the enigmatic felicity of expression he occasionally achieves with his unique euphemisms and unstable syntax must be acknowledged: “It is not known whether she was an erotic or herself a political adventuress.” That’s hard to match.]

  It is firmly established that during his stay in Prague de Wet became closely associated with a certain Czech officer who, when the Protectorate was set up in Bohemia, fled to Alsace and there became a liaison officer of the Deuxième Bureau. De Wet visited this man several times from Prague, smuggling to him gold and information, and it was these and other activities for the Deuxième Bureau that finally landed him in the hands of the German authorities.

  At the conclusion of the trial de Wet thanked the President of the High Treason Senate for the correctness of the proceedings, and further for the right of complete freedom to defend himself. He heard the sentence of death with indifference, and with a polite bow left the court, whose tribunal included as lay judges three officers of high military and party rank. [We can imagine that the Gestapo wasn’t taking any chances, and sent over three bigwigs to guarantee and underscore the sentence.]

  Everything possible has been done to elucidate the actions and character of the accused. His crime is evident. His character, however, still remains enveloped in mystery. Brought up in two cultures (de Wet attended a French school and speaks French in preference to his own mother-tongue), this descendant of an interesting family—he is related to the Boer General de Wet—is now destined to be a wanderer into nothingness. [And here, giving rise to the frivolous and accusatory adjective “interesting,” appears the Boer grandfather who may not have been all a lie after all. I’ve also found a portrait of him and a book he wrote, but we’d best conclude first with the tale of the Berlin death sentence, the ending of which strays very far from what a journalist’s account of a trial should be, to venture unequivocally onto the terrain of meditation and lament.]

  He is intelligent and gifted with several talents, he is fearless and capable of noble feelings, yet he ends his life in a chaos of uncertainty and in the society of dubious men and woman, who all, though patriotic phrases
are upon their lips, are themselves without a country and live on foreign money. The ideal of this society is the legendary Colonel Lawrence, but none of them achieves his ideal. Life does not want them and spews them forth [as if they were a costly and superfluous luxury that life expels at once like a breath]: uprooted limbs of a tree that once flourished fruitfully; scattered members of a race whose way of life has become infamous.

  Up to this point the speaker has been the journalist from the Vôlkischer Beobachter, who, curiously enough, mentions Lawrence of Arabia as the unattainable ideal of the disastrous De Wet and others of his ilk, though Lawrence himself had died in 1935 in an obscure motorcycle accident or suicide, at the age of 46, my present age.

  The translation of the German article complete, De Wet himself begins to speak, as he prepares to embark on his tale:

  Thus ran their story of “a wanderer into nothingness.” Though founded on fact, in various respects it was slightly inaccurate, and some of their deductions were wide of the mark. And, obscure though these errors may have been, they still offended the truth; they offended something else, something deeper and more enduring than that—something for which I did not then propose to find a name—could not, perhaps.

  The following is my version of the story of myself—and of one other, she who bore me company “on the shores of Avernus” for a little while.…

  With the passage or loss of time, old books are no longer text and binding alone but also what their former readers have left in them over the years, marks, comments, exclamations, profanities, photographs, dedications or ex libris, a letter, sheet of paper or signature, a waterspot, burn or stain or simply their names, as the books’ owners. Just as the books by Ewart and Graham and Gawsworth spoke of their own short history, one of the two copies of Cardboard Crucifix that were obtained had something between its pages, two or three old newspaper clippings. It must have been Benet’s copy, since I have only photocopies and not the yellow and crumbling newsprint itself. So not only did I conduct myself honorably in the grave matter of the intercepted comb, but I also resisted the understandable temptation to keep what belonged to the second copy which was intended for him, and was not found in my own, more silent copy. I almost always behave well and sometimes I’m even taken advantage of, it can happen. But I’m no saint.

  Someone had kept the clippings since 1941—the advertisement even before that—though none of them includes a date or the name of the publication it appeared in. But the size of the largest of them indicates that the De Wet case was in its day and its protagonist’s country as widely known and written about as Wilfrid Ewart’s famous novel had been twenty years earlier. And likewise forgotten shortly thereafter, even more quickly, I imagine, if that’s possible: De Wet was sentenced to death in the middle of a World War, when any news had to be ephemeral, one moment’s news drowned out by the next moment’s, that from one part of the globe by that from another, the same thing happens in our own day, lived as fleetingly as if each second were wartime, I don’t know if this book has a place in its time, it may require patience and slowness; or perhaps it does have a place and belongs to its time alone, for everything in it also passes fleetingly by as it’s told, and if the reader should wonder what on earth is being recounted here or where this text is heading, the only proper answer, I fear, would be that it is simply running its course and heading toward its ending, just like anything else that passes through or happens in the world. But I don’t believe anyone who has reached this point would still ask such a question.

  The first and principal clipping was less a news article than a profile signed by one Graham Stanford who, to judge from his comments, had known De Wet personally, though he doesn’t seem any too pained or enraged by his impending appointment with the guillotine. The two headlines are: “MAD DEVIL DE WET” and “Gestapo Thought He Was ‘Crazy’.” And the rest of the evocation or portrait goes on to say:

  They called Percy William Olaf de Wet [again the new name, or perhaps it was the name he was using at that time] a brave and curious man before they sentenced him to death in the German People’s Court for spying for the French Secret Service.

  Percy de Wet would enjoy that description. I can imagine his lips curling sardonically as he heard the words. For no soldier of fortune that ever left England lived a more lurid, fantastic life than this tall, handsome devil-may-care.

  He was known in the hotels and bars of every capital in Europe. He was known in the world’s strange places and among the world’s strange people. He sought adventure and he always found it.

  Now his latest and greatest adventure has ended in disaster. But I doubt whether De Wet cares much, for he had the fatalism of all soldiers of fortune. It is reported that he accepted the verdict calmly, and De Wet’s strange friends will be glad of that.

  I do not know much about the boyhood of De Wet. His mother, Mrs. P.W. de Wet, who lives in St. Albans, would not talk about it when I spoke to her last night.

  This restlessness sent him chasing across the European and Eastern stage in later years—Abyssinia, Spain and Europe when it became the seething melting-pot for the present war.

  Where all the trouble was, there was De Wet—a rather swaggering figure with a flowing moustache and a black shade over one eye. No one ever knew quite what he was doing. But he always lived well, was always giving parties, and telling the most extraordinary stories of his adventures.

  Just after the Munich Agreement in 1938 De Wet was in Prague. Those were feverish days in Central Europe. Spies clustered around every bar, and no one knew whether to trust his neighbour. [This paragraph seems to imply that perhaps De Wet’s much-rebuked “bouts of drunkenness” merely resulted from the uncompromising fulfilment of certain indispensable prerequisites of his profession as a spy, since his profiler Stanford could have said “around every hotel” or “every café” or “every nightclub” or even “every brothel,” but he says clearly “around every bar.”]

  Prague quickly learned of De Wet’s presence. He took a suite of rooms and gave champagne parties which were attended by beautiful women and a strange group of men.

  Some say that the Gestapo investigated the activities of De Wet, but came to the conclusion that he was just another “crazy Englishman.”

  He got to know a beautiful Russian woman. It is reported that he married her, and that she was arrested as his accomplice when the Gestapo got on his trail. It is also reported that she afterwards committed suicide. [Here we have a Russian woman with whom he may have contracted matrimony; this may have been the legitimate proprietress of the Hotel Metropol in Moscow, but if she “committed suicide” during the Gestapo’s interrogation, then there are two possibilities: either she didn’t commit suicide and hadn’t died and was still alive in 1951, or else De Wet was married twice, both times to Russian women. Neither of these two things seems at all likely, and still less likely is the possibility that he aspired to possess and preside over the Moscow Metropol in his capacity as bona fide heir and widower.]

  He was familiar to newspaper men. To some of us he offered information—“inside information.”

  He was proud to say that he was “on the inside.” But you could not always take this man too seriously.

  He had a fine time in Abyssinia.

  He went to Addis to fly for the Emperor—he and that world-famous figure Herbert Fauntleroy Julian (“The Black Eagle of Harlem”) who was a strapping African Negro who enjoyed putting seven sorts of fear into the hearts of the natives. [To tell the truth, the absurdities assembled by the German reporter from the Vôlkischer Beobachter seem like the height of good sense next to this English portrayal, especially after the stellar and aerial appearance of the Black Eagle of Harlem, whose true name could not possibly sound any more false or novelistic, so much so that it was undoubtedly authentic; keep in mind that in 1941 there weren’t yet many movies about the war to cause dementia in tabloid newsmen. But Herbert Fauntleroy Julian: who could dream that up?]

  My coll
eague Noel Monks met him at the Hotel Imperial—surely the most cosmopolitan war hotel of all time. Then De Wet and “The Black Eagle of Harlem” were apparently rivals for the favours of the Emperor. Both of them had gone there to fly. But apparently the Emperor had only one communicating plane and most of their time was spent on the ground.

  Yes—De Wet enjoyed the Abyssinian scene. It had all the things he loved—colour, adventure, uncertainty.

  The Germans say that he had to leave Abyssinia because he fought a duel. I cannot substantiate that story, but I can well imagine that it is true, for De Wet ran into “scrapes” wherever he went.

  He was in Spain, too, along with the rest of that brave and laughing crowd of men who will follow a fight to the ends of the earth. He flew against Franco. He used to say that he lost an eye in an air fight.

  Later he wrote a book about his adventures, called Cardboard Crucifix.

  But … no one quite knew De Wet. Perhaps no one will ever know until this war is over and the full story comes to be written. Some thought him a pleasure-seeking fool. He certainly played the part.

  It is possible that this was merely a mask, that behind that swaggering demeanour was a keen, agile brain working for the cause that he thought right.

  The Germans described de Wet as “intelligent, unafraid, and talented.”

  He was all of those things. He was, in fact, one of the old-time soldiers of fortune who, throughout history, have left Britain to seek adventure.

  That was Graham Stanford, writing in his unknown newspaper. As for the other two clippings, the shorter one is curious, and it is also curious that anyone would have kept it:

  NO KNOWLEDGE OF SPY

  LONDON, Feb. 7 (AP)—British officials asserted tonight they had no knowledge of the activities of Percy Williams Olaf De Wet, 28-year-old Englishman sentenced to death in Germany as a spy.