The Welsh Girl

by Peter Ho Davies

  “Ah,” the pinch-faced lieutenant who met him declared, “I see you’ve brought our feature presentation.”

  The lieutenant, a doctor in the RAMC who introduced himself only as Mills, showed him into the parlor, where a projector had been set up. “You’ve eaten already?” he asked brusquely, but Rotheram shook his head. There’d been only a meager ploughman’s at a sullen pub outside Cirencester. The doctor looked disconcerted. “Well, look, not to be inhospitable, but could you possibly wait? Unless you’re ravenous, I mean. Only, he’s an early riser, so if you want to show it this evening, best start soon.” He smiled apologetically. “Can’t promise he won’t nod off, otherwise.”

  “It’s fine.” Rotheram began loading the film. His fingers were so chilled they trembled, and it took him long minutes to thread the first reel through the sprockets.

  “Nervous?” Mills asked.

  “Cold,” Rotheram said, rubbing his fingers. “Those will have to be turned,” he added, indicating the neat row of chairs and making a circling gesture, “so we can watch him.”

  “Right you are,” the other replied agreeably enough, although Rotheram noticed he didn’t offer to light the fire in the grate.

  Finally the film was ready, and Rotheram ran it forward for a few seconds, watching the test numbers flicker and count down, and then the opening shots from a plane descending over the city, the image ghostly in the still-bright room.

  “Action,” Mills called jauntily.

  Rotheram snapped the machine into reverse and the camera lifted back through the wispy clouds, the medieval rooftops dwindling, the soundtrack discordant and garbled. He’d tracked down the print at the censor’s office—they’d impounded half a dozen copies at the start of the war—and he’d run it for himself the night before in his office, to make sure it was whole and to refamiliarize himself. He’d waited until everyone had left for the evening, afraid of being caught, as if it were pornography.

  “All right,” he said, and Mills opened the door.

  Someone must have been waiting for the signal, for less than a minute later there were footsteps in the passage outside.

  Rotheram expected a guard to come first, but it was Hess himself, stepping into the drawing room as if it were his home. He was greying and more drawn than Rotheram recalled from his pictures, his nose as sharp as a beak and his cheekbones swept up like wings under his skin, as if his face were about to take flight. Out of uniform, in a navy blue cardigan, darned at one elbow, he seemed stooped, retired, more a shy uncle than the fiery deputy führer. His shirt was pressed and buttoned to the throat, but he wore no tie, and Rotheram recalled he’d made two suicide attempts, according to the file: once opening his veins with a butter knife he had stolen and sharpened on an iron bedstead; a second time hurdling a third-story banister. He was limping from that fall still, as he approached and held out his hand. Rotheram stared at it, slowly held out his own, but to one side, gesturing to the armchair. Hess ignored the insult, taking his place with only a wry “Vielen Dank,” to which Rotheram found himself automatically mumbling, “Bitte.”

  Two burly MP corporals followed Hess into the room, one taking a seat flanking him, the other carrying a salver with decanter and glasses, which he set on the sideboard. Last through the door was a delicate-featured officer whom Mills ushered over and introduced as Major Redgrave.

  “Captain. I gather we have you to thank for the evening’s entertainment.”

  “I hope it’ll be more than that, sir.”

  “You’ve seen it already?”

  Rotheram nodded, though he didn’t say where.

  The corporal appeared at his elbow, proffering glasses.

  “Scotch, sirs?”

  “And how do you propose to manage this?” Redgrave asked softly when they all had drinks.

  “I’ll run the film, observe his reactions, debrief him afterwards.”

  “You think you’ll know if he’s lying?”

  Rotheram watched the corporal bend down beside Hess and offer him the last glass on the salver.

  “I hope so. There are signs to look for.”

  Redgrave exchanged a glance with Mills. “You know we’ve tried pretty much everything. Over the years.” He said it gently and without impatience, and it occurred to Rotheram that it was meant to comfort him, that they expected him to fail.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Very well, then. Can’t hurt to try. Whenever you’re ready.”

  Redgrave took a seat halfway between the screen and Hess, lowering himself stiffly, tugging up his trouser legs by the creases. Hess smiled at him questioningly, but the major just shrugged. Rotheram motioned Mills to draw the blackout curtain against the sunset, then threw the switch and took a seat across from the lieutenant and the major, studying the man in the armchair.

  Back in London, the CO had offered Rotheram this job as if it were a plum, but until this moment he had felt like little more than a glorified delivery boy. Now here was Hess, one of the leading men of the party, right in front of him. And it occurred to Rotheram, stealing a glance at the screen, that the last time Hess had been in prison was after the Munich Putsch. He’d been Hitler’s cellmate. He’d taken dictation of Mein Kampf.

  Initially, Hess seemed entertained, watching the stately procession of staff cars, the pageantry. It was a captivating film, Rotheram knew, queasily fascinating in the way it made the ugly beautiful. He could see the two corporals were rapt, one of them moving his mouth to read the subtitles, and Mills and Redgrave kept swiveling their heads back and forth between the screen and Hess as if at a tennis match. But it was no effort for Rotheram to keep his eyes on the prisoner. The whole scene, since Hess had entered the room, seemed unreal. He couldn’t quite believe he was in the man’s presence, like the night he thought he glimpsed Marlene Dietrich getting into a taxi in Leicester Square but afterwards could never be absolutely sure. If he took his eyes off Hess, he thought the man would disappear.

  Hess himself watched with interest, but without comment, sipping his whisky, his foot occasionally keeping time with the music. Only once did Rotheram notice the man’s gaze drifting towards him, then flicking away almost coyly. At the first reel change, he seemed inclined to talk, started to lean forward, but Rotheram, wanting to keep the film moving, busied himself with the projector. Hess accepted a cigarette from Mills, and the major asked him if he knew what he was watching, and he said yes, yes, of course. He recognized Herr Hitler; he understood that this was Germany before the war. He said he admired the marching. But when Redgrave asked if he remembered being there, Hess looked puzzled and shook his head.

  “Your English is good,” Rotheram called from where he was bent over the projector. He didn’t like the others asking too many questions.

  “Thank you,” Hess told him. “Und Ihr Deutsch.”

  Rotheram looked up and a loop of film slipped off the reel he was removing, swinging loose.

  “I only meant you do not seem to need the subtitles, Captain.”

  Rotheram recoiled the film tightly.

  “But perhaps I should be complimenting you on your English instead.”

  Mills barked out a little laugh and then looked puzzled. “I’m not sure I get it.”

  “It’s not a joke,” Hess said pleasantly. “I’m asking if Captain Roth-eram”—he drew the name out—“is a German Jew.”

  Rotheram felt the others turning to look at him, the major sitting up straighter. He kept his eyes on Hess but felt himself coloring in the gloom.

  “Well,” Mills said. “I’d never have guessed.”

  “You have to know what to look for,” Hess said nonchalantly, as if it were a parlor trick.

  “But Jews can’t be German, Deputy Reichsführer,” Rotheram told him flatly. “Or did you forget that also?”

  Hess’s lips twitched, a small moue.

  “Besides, you’re wrong.” But even as he said it, Rotheram was conscious of his accent asserting itself, as it did when he was tired or angry.<
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  “My mistake, I’m sure.”

  “Captain,” the major called wearily. “Let’s press on, shall we?”

  THE SECOND REEL moved to the evening events of the 1934 Reich Party Day, a grainy sea of flags waving in a torch-lit parade, and finally to footage of Hess himself, starkly pale under the floodlights, rallying the crowd, leading the ovation until his voice cracked with the effort. In the drawing room, Rotheram watched Hess closely, saw him flinch slightly, his nostrils flaring as his younger face stared down at him. His eyes, beneath his bushy brows, widened as he watched, and he seemed to clutch himself, his crossed arms drawing tighter, his leg hitched higher on his thigh. The tip of his cigarette glowed in the dark, and the smoke twisted up through the projector’s beam like a spirit. At the next break, he called for some light and said he needed to stretch his legs. He rose and walked twice around the room quickly, his limp jagged, his head bent.

  Mills tried to join him. “Are you cold?” But Hess waved him away, and the doctor approached Rotheram instead.

  “How much longer?”

  One more reel.

  “Good. I don’t want him too agitated.”

  Rotheram looked up. “Isn’t that the point?”

  “It’s your point, my friend. My job’s to keep him healthy. I don’t want him stressed or overtired.”

  “I understood—”

  “You understood wrong,” Mills hissed. “And don’t be thinking you can go around my back to the old man. He and I have an understanding.”

  Rotheram looked up and saw the major watching.

  “Do you mind?” he asked Mills steadily. “I’d like to start this.”

  Mills turned and motioned curtly for one of the corporals to light a fire. There was a clatter of coal from the scuttle, and for a few seconds they all watched as the flame caught.

  The final reel showed Hitler addressing the crowd, and Hess sank against the seat cushions as if he were trying to smother himself in the chair. Rotheram, glancing round, noticed Redgrave and Mills thoroughly engrossed in the film, intent on the younger Hess, the one formed from shadow and light. Turning back, he found Hess studying him. Their eyes met for a moment—Hess’s dark, but shining—before Rotheram had to look away, his heart racing, as if the figure on the screen had met his gaze.

  Afterwards, pacing the room once more, Hess repeated that yes, of course he recognized himself in the film, so he must accept that he had been there. Yet he had no memory of the events depicted. He touched the side of his head with his fingertips as if it were tender. “All that is black to me.”

  “No memory?” Rotheram asked. “None at all? And yet you seem agitated. Disturbed.” The room was very still now without the tick and whir of the projector.

  “I wouldn’t say so. Troubled, perhaps.”

  “Troubled, very well. Why?”

  “Troubled that I can’t remember, of course. How would you feel if you were shown and told things you had done that you had no memory of? It is as if my life has been taken from me. That man was me, but also like an actor playing me.”

  Hess sniffed. The chimney was drawing poorly. Mills raked through the coals with the poker, making them spit.

  “Do you even want to remember?” Rotheram asked.

  “Natürlich. A man is his memories, no? Besides, I’m told the tide has turned. Paris fallen? Germany facing defeat? I should like such memories of happier times.”

  “The film made you happy, then? You enjoyed it?”

  “Not happy!” Hess cried. He raised his hands in frustration, let them drop with a sigh. “But you are trying to provoke me.”

  There was a moment’s silence, and then Mills said, “You must be tired.”

  “Yes,” Redgrave added. “Perhaps it would be best if we conclude this evening, turn in.”

  “Major,” Rotheram began, but when he looked at Redgrave’s hangdog face, he stopped. He had been about to say that this was his interrogation, but it occurred to him suddenly that Mills was right. As far as he and the major were concerned, it was no interrogation at all. It wasn’t that they thought Rotheram couldn’t determine whether Hess was mad or not; they thought it was irrelevant. That unless Hess was raving or foaming at the mouth, he’d be put on trial. They believed the decision had already been taken. That was why they couldn’t see any point in this. It was a sham in their eyes and, worse, to continue it a cruelty.

  They expect me to find him fit, Rotheram thought, because they believe I’m a Jew.

  He became aware that Redgrave and Mills were staring at him, waiting.

  “I suppose I am finished,” he muttered.

  Only Hess was not. He was standing at the pier glass scrutinizing his own reflection. Turning his head from side to side to study his face.

  He ran a hand through his lank hair, held it off his brow. “Another thing I don’t remember: growing old.” He smiled bleakly at them in the narrow mirror.

  ROTHERAM SPENT a restless night in his bare cell of a room—the former servants’ quarters, he guessed, up a narrow flight of stairs at the back of the house.

  It was all so unreasonable, he thought. He’d been brought up, nominally at least, Lutheran, his mother’s faith; knew next to nothing about Judaism. In truth, he’d always resented his grandparents, refusing to write the thank-you letters his mother asked him to send in reply to their begrudging gifts, and he’d been secretly pleased when they’d fled to Paris, as if this proved something. Even when, two months after they’d left, his father’s pension had been stopped, Rotheram had been convinced it was simply a mistake. The Nazi bureaucrats were just fools, too dense to understand a subtle distinction like matrilineal descent, something his mother had explained to him in childhood. He was in his second year of law at the university, but when he tried to register for classes the following term, he was told he wasn’t eligible to matriculate and realized he was the fool. It made him think of an occasion years before, when, as a boy of thirteen or fourteen, he’d asked his mother yet again why he wasn’t Jewish if his father was. Because the Jewish line runs through the mother, she’d told him. Yes, but why? he pressed, and she explained, a little exasperated, that she supposed it was because you could only be absolutely sure who your mother was, not your father. He went away and thought about that—deeply and narrowly, as a child will—and finally came back to her and asked if she was sure his father was his father. She’d stared at him for a long moment, then slapped him hard across the mouth. “That sure,” she said.

  Just before her death, she told him how she’d been spat on in the streets of Berlin in 1919. “After Versailles,” she said. “Because I was Canadian. That’s what your grandparents could never forgive. I was a reminder of the enemy who’d killed their son. I wasn’t German enough for them, you see?”

  Among her possessions, after her funeral, he’d found a photograph of his father he’d never seen before. It must have been taken on that last leave because he looked gaunt, his tunic loose on his frame, his features sharpened almost to caricature, no longer the smiling, slightly plump figure in a close-fitting uniform that Rotheram had seen in earlier poses. This was his father, he thought, and the figure had seemed to rebuke him.

  And yet the following week he’d gone ahead and Anglicized his name.

  HE LOOKED AT his watch—not quite one A.M.—and decided to try the CO. Hawkins was an insomniac—his own sleep ruined by so many round-the-clock interrogations—and often spent nights at his desk catching up on paperwork. Sure enough, he picked up on the second ring, sounding more alert than the sleepy operator who put Rotheram’s call through.

  Barefoot, greatcoat over his pajamas, Rotheram huddled over the phone in the drafty hall and said he was ready to head back to London.

  “You’ve made up your mind about Hess? That was quick.”

  Rotheram hesitated, stared at some movement down the hall, realized it was his own reflection in a mirror.

  “Not really.”

  “What? Speak up.”

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p; “No, sir,” Rotheram enunciated. He cupped his hand around the mouthpiece, conscious of the stillness of the house around him. “I’m just not sure I’ll be able to, under the circumstances.”

  “So spend some more time. Take another run at him.”

  “I don’t think that’ll do any good,” Rotheram offered.

  “But why, for heaven’s sake?” Hawkins seemed to be shouting in the quiet of the hallway.

  And Rotheram was forced to admit that he was reluctant to find Hess sane because the thought of confirming Redgrave and Mills’s assumptions rankled.

  “Let me get this straight,” the CO said. “You believe you can judge Hess fairly, but you’re concerned that others won’t see that judgment as impartial because they think you’re Jewish. Those are the horns of your dilemma?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Well, but do you ever think you might not be so impartial after all?”

  “I’m sorry, sir,” Rotheram said tightly. “Even if I were Jewish, I’m not sure why it should make me any less impartial than a Frenchman or a Russian.”

  He heard Hawkins take a sip of something, and then another. Finally he asked, “Tell me, my boy, honestly now, don’t you ever think about your family? Your grandparents made for Paris, you say. Don’t you wonder where they are, what’s become of them?”

  Rotheram was momentarily taken aback. He began to say no and stopped, unsure. Hawkins had taught him to recognize the pause before answering as a lie. It came to Rotheram that whatever he said now would seem false. So he was silent, which as Hawkins had taught him might mean a man was holding something back, or simply that he didn’t know.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” he whispered now. “You’ll have my report Monday morning.”