Letters for a Spy

by Stephen Benatar

  But most of the other comments that immediately succeeded the story of our meeting weren’t quite so happily disposed of. I mean, those addressed to me, rather than Sybella.

  “What we just can’t understand, though—what we shall never understand—isn’t that right, Neville?—not even if we live to be a hundred—”

  “Which only gives us another twenty-five years, my pet, so how about our now tottering off to the kitchen to put our hoary old heads together over this all-important question of the supper…?” My grandfather was already on his feet and offering both hands to my grandmother (which she didn’t really need) to help her out of her chair.

  She demurred, however.

  “No, darling, you’re very sweet and we can all admire your motives—no matter how thoroughly misguided—but this is still something that needs to be addressed.”

  Her gaze returned to me.

  “What we can never understand, Eric, because in so many ways you once bade fair to be nearly as kind-hearted as your foolish old grandfather here … and although we haven’t seen you in the past four years, we’re sure you can’t altogether have changed…”

  But it seemed that even my normally outspoken grandmother might never get around to finishing her sentence. I myself had to help her out.

  “What we can never understand,” I said, “is how on earth you could ever be over here, in England, on a spying mission for Germany?”

  “Yes. And there’s no need to smile as you say it. It isn’t—it isn’t in the least bit—a smiling matter.”

  “But Grandma. I’m a German citizen. Germany is my country.”

  “And England is ours. It’s also Sybella’s. And it used to be your mother’s. And … well, shall I tell you something, my sweetheart? Something we thought we’d never have to tell you? Your mother didn’t even like Germany. Yes, that’s perfectly true. Over the years she came to feel less and less at home there. She’d never admit it until you were about five—before then had always claimed that it was only natural for a daughter to become a little tearful when saying goodbye to her parents—but every time she brought you here on holiday she found it harder to go back. Much! Towards the end she absolutely hated having to do so; it made her feel desperately miserable and, of course, it made your grandfather and me feel miserable as well.”

  I could remember some of the anguish of those departures: how my mother had hugged me extra tightly on the train; how she had kept telling me that it was only a naughty little piece of grit which had flown into her eye.

  I pursed my lips.

  “In that case,” I said, “why did she go back?”

  “She went back for your sake. Purely for your sake.”

  And once more I felt that old familiar mix. Guilt and longing. Guilt and longing.

  (I had asked my father: “Was it my fault that she died?” “No, of course not,” he had said. “If it was anybody’s fault it was mine.” Yet certainly as a ten-year-old I had never quite believed him.)

  Sybella squeezed my hand again—during the past few minutes she had been regularly showing her support in this manner.

  “But that’s ridiculous,” I said. “If she had decided to stay here, clearly I’d have stayed here, too.”

  “You mightn’t have been allowed to, Eric You were by far the most important thing in your mother’s life; if she was ever afraid of anything, that fear was of losing you. Yet the point is … although she no longer felt a lot for your father, your father wasn’t a bad man. A little cold, maybe, but that’s the worst she would ever say of him. And cold or not he undoubtedly loved you, loved you devotedly; and if she’d taken you away, she knew he’d have moved heaven and earth to get you back. What’s more, there isn’t a court in the world which wouldn’t have supported him. Your mother realized that; she couldn’t have lied about his being unfit. And so she had to remain with him. Purely for your sake. In a country that she hated.”

  “I had no idea,” I said, slowly. “I hadn’t the least idea.”

  “Well, how could you? A little boy of five or six or seven? And naturally—naturally—you weren’t in any way to blame. But this doesn’t alter the fact that England was your mother’s true home, or that she came to care for it more deeply with every year that passed, both for England and for all the values England stood for. She’d died, of course, long before that filthy little man became Chancellor but even in the twenties she could see the way that Germany was going.”

  I said: “Grandma, if you’re going to use expressions like that, Sybella and I will have to leave.”

  “Come on, Carrie, my dearest. You’ve made your point. That’s fine! But now let’s go and think about the supper. We haven’t seen this lad of ours for such an age and whatever the circumstances it’s just like you yourself were claiming earlier—a lovely, shining miracle! So is there any miracle which we can now accomplish in the hope of doing it honour?”

  “And may I help?” Sybella gave my hand a final squeeze and sprang up from the sofa. “Peel potatoes or something? Bring in some vegetables? I’d love to take a closer look at your garden.”

  “Thank you, Sybella.” My grandfather had been standing by the hearth ever since trying to coax his wife out of her chair. “By the way, my dear, I expect you know that Eric’s mother was very nearly a Sybil. Just before the christening, Carrie and I still hadn’t decided between that and Penelope. Even in the trap on our way to the church! I fear we were almost thinking of divorce by the time we got there—glowering at one another across the font!”

  “Which of you wanted which?”

  “Oh, you’d have known the answer to that by the sheer sulkiness of my expression!”

  “But I’m sure that by the time she’d been Penelope for just a week you must have wondered how any other name could possibly have suited her.”

  “A week? More like a day. An hour!”

  “And to tell the truth I’m actually a Sybil. But when I decided I wanted to act … well, comparisons are odious, aren’t they? … and then too, to my mind, it seemed practically presumptuous.” For some reason, this hadn’t yet come up between us, and she glanced at me with a smile that bordered on apology. “Also, as a girl, I had always wanted people to call me Sybella. It was the name of the heroine in one of my favourite stories and I found it dashing and romantic.”

  Yet it was no good. None of it was any good. My grandmother’s attention was still rigidly focused on myself and although she prefaced her next question with a soft endearment it wasn’t at all a question likely to improve matters. She gave a long, regretful sigh.

  “But, darling, you can’t refuse to recognize the fitness of that adjective—after all, filthy is as filthy does—surely your eyes have been opened a smidgen since 1939? We vividly recall your ostrich-like behaviour then, when at last we prevailed on you to read about the wholesale slaughter of the Jews! But for a sensitive and intelligent young man still to be trying to bury his head so deep … no, I simply can’t accept it, not of any grandson of mine nor of any child a loving mother once saw as being the very raison d’être of her whole tragically cut-short and disappointing existence—”

  But, in fact, just at this moment it was my grandmother herself who was cut short.

  “Carrie! Shut up! For God’s sake, woman, for the sweet love of heaven itself, won’t you just put an end to all of this, right now!”

  I had never heard my grandfather speak to her like that. Shout at her like that.

  And during the stunned silence which ensued, reminiscent of the sudden hush that had yesterday succeeded the hurling of a whisky tumbler to the floor, Sybella turned to me awkwardly.

  “Oh, please, darling,” she said, “I should so much like to see the garden—won’t you take me out on a short tour, before the light goes, or the rain starts?”

  And, during that same stunned silence Toby pulled himself to his feet and slunk behind the sofa, whining.

  I said a short prayer; abandoned the retort I had been intending to come out w
ith: “It wasn’t the wholesale slaughter of the Jews!”

  Instead I asked—though not very graciously:

  “Have you still got that file of newspaper cuttings? The one you collected back in ’39?”

  It was not only ungracious. It was unpremeditated—possibly almost in the same category as my grandfather’s outburst. But, in some strange way, it may have been this second instance of complete unexpectedness which threw us both a lifeline: my grandmother and me.

  “I certainly haven’t kept it up to date,” she answered, coldly. “After your reaction to it that last time, there didn’t seem much point.”

  “Yet you’ve still got it?”

  “I really couldn’t say. Who knows? Perhaps.”

  “But where?”

  “If anywhere—on top of that cupboard in your room.”

  I stood up. Now, out of the four of us, only my grandmother remained seated. She looked small.

  “Well, if it’s there, I’ll read it … so that we can afterwards talk a little more intelligently, maybe, about ostriches and biased journalism and other such related issues. Speaking of which, Kristallnacht was immensely horrible, yes—but it was not the wholesale slaughter of the Jews. If the report made out that it was … well, there you are then, I think I’ve proved my case.”

  I didn’t think any such thing, of course, but whilst delivering this line I had managed to get as far as the door.

  I shouted back: “And for heaven’s sake, Sybella, won’t somebody please do something about that poor frightened little dog!”

  Though that, as a secondary exit line, was both unnecessary and deplorable and one for which I later on—but not a minute too soon—wholeheartedly apologized.

  38

  That dismally contentious report retained its pride of place: still the top one in the folder. But otherwise the clippings were in strictly chronological order.

  The first lot related to the Jewish question.

  For instance:

  Dec 16, 1937.

  A full-scale attack on modern art—‘a decadent by-product of Bolshevik Jewish corruption’—was launched by Hitler when he opened a new art gallery, the Haus der Kunst, in Munich. A crowd of 30,000 heard him blame the decadence of German art, before the Nazis, on Jewish art dealers and critics, who promoted ‘something new at any price’.

  He added: “We had Futurism, Expressionism, Realism, Cubism, even Dadaism. Could insanity go further? There were pictures with green skies and purple seas. There were paintings which could only be due to abnormal eyesight.”

  Herr Hitler, himself a one-time painter of conventional street scenes, went on to threaten that people who see things in such ways should be dealt with under the programme for sterilizing the insane.

  March 18, 1938.

  A pogrom, called ‘the great spring cleaning’ by the Nazi newspapers, is being carried out at great speed in Austria. Jews are being excluded from their professions, Jewish judges have been dismissed, shops have been forced to put up placards saying ‘Jewish concern’. Theatres and music halls have been ‘spring cleaned’ and among the artists Vienna will know no more are Richard Tauber and Max Reinhardt.

  June 19, 1938.

  German children have been recruited for the Nazis’ anti-Jewish campaign. Boys of 13 and younger, armed with brushes and buckets of white paint, marched along the Frankfurterallee in a Jewish neighbourhood of east Berlin today and daubed the Star of David on shops pointed out to them by adults.

  In schools, children are asked where their parents buy school clothing, and those who admit that it comes from a Jewish shop are made to stand in a corner. Playing with or even speaking to Jewish children is forbidden.

  Dec 12, 1938.

  Walther Funk, a one-time financial journalist and now Economics Minister, has found a way to ban Jews from any kind of business activity (while avoiding, he claims, disruption of the German economy). Jews are forbidden to deal in property, jewellery or precious metals, or freely operate bank accounts. Any securities they own will be disposed of as the Minister judges to be in the national interest. Jewish businesses will be closed down by specially appointed executors.

  January 17, 1939.

  Jews are banned from being dentists, vets, and pharmacists, also banned from driving, going to cinemas, theatres, or concerts.

  But the second lot of cuttings—under a different paperclip—was concerned with resistance to the Nazis.

  Non-Jewish resistance.

  For instance:

  Feb 10, 1938.

  Adolf Hitler has crushed opposition among the officer corps of the German army by sacking two leading generals and appointing himself Supreme Commander of the armed forces. The two army chiefs have each been smeared by sexual innuendoes. It is said that the Field Marshal Werner von Blomberg married a former prostitute and that General Werner von Fritsch is a homosexual.

  March 4, 1938.

  Pastor Niemoeller, the German Confessional Church leader, was today sent to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp for ‘re-education’. There he will join 3,000 inmates under the ‘Death’s Head’ battalion of the SS (Schutzstaffel, protection squad). The pastor, a former U-boat commander, has become a focus of resistance to Nazi ideas.

  The Nazi regime has been using concentration camps during the last five years for the confinement in primitive conditions of Jews, Communists and other political suspects.

  Each of these camps is under the control of Heinrich Himmler, Reichsführer of the SS and chief of German police, and every camp is guarded by 1,500 troopers, serving in the elite SS security force.

  I sat on the bed I had slept in each time I came to Acton Burnell; at least, the one I had used after outgrowing the crib which Gramps, some fifty years ago, had made for my mother, the first of his and Grandma’s children.

  And I considered those reports.

  Most of them were both short on detail and unsupported by a photo. Even with a photo the text was often unconvincing. For example, one purported to show two Nazi bureaucrats measuring a man’s nose; they suspected him of being a Jew. If the photograph were genuine then perhaps its most disturbing feature was the sheer ordinariness of those three individuals. They all looked perfectly pleasant, like people you might happily have chatted to on the train—the alleged persecutors as much as the alleged suspect. ‘Alleged’ being once again the operative word here, since there was obviously a much surer way of discovering whether any man were Jewish. For the purposes of this photograph, indeed, I wondered why they hadn’t chosen a female.

  In any case, who were ‘they’? German propagandists? Non-German propagandists?

  And why weren’t there any pictures of Pastor Niemoeller or of those two sacked army officers? I either hadn’t known about this latter pair or else had totally forgotten. Which I imagined was possible—having been only twenty at the time. And not a particularly mature twenty at that.

  (I had known about Niemoeller, of course; had regarded him merely as a crank.)

  But if I was making excuses for myself—‘only twenty’—did this mean I was now partly accepting what I read? (More than partly, perhaps; I supposed that if in fact I had read those extracts back in 1939, I might partly have accepted them even then.) Therefore—possibly a better way of expressing it—could this mean I was now a little less obdurate than before, a little less hostile, a little less in denial of a steadily encroaching idea? That the education to which I had been insidiously exposed, especially throughout my adolescent years, might always have been slightly slanted?

  I wasn’t sure about ‘insidiously’.

  Nor about ‘slightly’.

  (And I wondered suddenly if such a belated discovery as this—or acknowledgment or whatever one might choose to call it—could actually have been crystallized in some strange fashion by Buchholz’s telling me about the admiral.)

  There were other clippings in the file. A score of them.

  And while I retained my concentration I read about German parents who risked ha
ving their children taken away from them if they weren’t sufficiently rigorous about instilling the precepts of Nazism.

  Then I read about Hitler’s bombing of Guernica in 1937.

  Guernica had been a communications centre. In addition, it had possessed an important munitions factory. But the report claimed the complete avoidance of military targets; claimed the bombs had been unloaded instead over the town’s main square and the streets surrounding this. And since it was market day, the square had been packed with country people, mostly women and children. (‘In the city, soldiers were collecting charred bodies. They were sobbing like infants. There were flames and smoke and grit, and the smell of burning human flesh was nauseating. Houses were collapsing into the inferno. Debris was piled high. The shocked survivors all had the same story to tell: Heinkels, Junkers, incendiary bombs, machine-gun fire. “Aviones … bombas … mucho, mucho.”’)

  After Guernica I read again about Kristallnacht. Perhaps the elapse of four years had altered me more than I knew. I had been equally appalled—at least equally appalled—in 1939; but in 1939 I had not felt satiated. I had still been moved by rhetoric. Had still been moved (and I realized that this was vile, I realized that this was totally contemptible) by the prospect of adventure. In 1939 I had been far readier to rationalize. (Except when I’d been arguing with my father!) And since then, too, I had actually come across people who had boasted of taking part in the debased proceedings of that night. No women as it happened; but I supposed it could be true that women had been caught up in the hysteria. Even their infants. Even their babies. I closed the file and flung it to the bottom of the bed.

  But I mustn’t get depressed, I told myself. Absolutely must not! This present time was much too precious, much too precious.

  And I had only twenty hours left. Less! In twenty hours from now I’d be far away from Acton Burnell; far away from Sybella. I would be standing on a beach in Anglesey … on Amlwch beach in Anglesey. Last night—while she and I had still been laughing at Sid Field and feeling integrated, insulated, safe—Heinrich’s letter had been left for me at Abbey Road. Tomorrow, at fifteen hundred hours, I had an appointment with a rowing boat.