Voices in Time

by Hugh Maclennan

  “I could have come home with a much better victory than von Spee’s,” he told the Grand Admiral. “In God’s will, why didn’t you let me fight?”

  He was ashamed to have to accept the medal and when he read about the affair in an English newspaper which had entered the country from Sweden he was so enraged he could hardly speak:

  “An enemy squadron centered on their newest and most powerful battle cruiser, supported by two of their most modern cruisers, met one of our convoys in the Atlantic. The convoy was escorted by a single battleship and a few destroyers. The moment the German admiral saw a puff of smoke from our battleship’s funnel, he turned tail and ran for home, just as the Germans always did in the last war.”

  This was the last time Gottfried Dehmel was allowed to go to sea. He was so angry that the Grand Admiral was afraid that if he let him out again he would disobey orders and fight against any combination of ships he encountered. Meanwhile, Conrad’s younger brother Siegfried had been at sea almost continuously as first officer in a submarine that destroyed more than forty thousand tons of shipping in a period of six months. Though he was still very young, he was soon given his own boat and during the next year and a half he became a national hero. His single boat did the British more harm than the whole of his father’s surface fleet put together.

  The war went on. Victory after victory for Hitler until Germany became master of the whole continent. Conrad felt he was living in a vacuum of total unreality, that the Institut had become a prison where the work he did was as meaningless as the work of convicts in jails.

  One morning when he was clearing his desk of the usual traffic in bumf the buzzer sounded and it was the porter calling from downstairs. Conrad had fired the Blockwart who had been there when he met Professor Rosenthal. This man was quiet, elderly, and courteous.

  “A lady is here who wishes to see you, Herr Doktor. She calls herself Fräulein Lindenau and she says she knows you.”

  Conrad knew nobody of that name, but he asked the porter to send the lady up. When he heard the knock and opened his door he turned pale. Hanna Erlich was standing there.

  She came in, he closed the door, and they searched each other’s eyes. Six years had passed since they had parted and now the world was worse than even Hanna had anticipated. They joined hands, kissed each other lightly, drew back, closed again in a fierce embrace. But there was no intimacy in it. An invisible line had been drawn between them. She sat down in an armchair and he behind his desk. He thought she looked at least ten years older since last he had seen her. Hanna wondered if she would ever know him again. He wondered the same of her.

  She said almost formally, “I hope you understand that it was for your own safety that I didn’t answer your letters.”

  He had a sick feeling as he realized he was resenting her. “Surely you could have written me something. You didn’t have to sign your name. I would have recognized your handwriting. Even after the war began, you could have got some message to me through your Uncle Karl in Zurich.” She said nothing and a new idea occurred to him. “Or was it for your own safety?”

  She said coldly, “If I was thinking of that, why am I here?”

  “You were right, of course – what you told me in London. I hadn’t been home two days before I understood how right you were. I thought I let you know that in the first letter I sent you.”

  “I understood. You wouldn’t have had to spell it out. You were never stupid, Conrad. Merely at times unobservant.”

  In an unnatural silence they continued to watch one another. Then he understood why she had come home.

  “Has it happened to your family?”

  “My father was arrested six weeks ago.”

  “How did you learn this?”

  “My Uncle Karl in Zurich. Uncle Helmuth kept in touch with Father, so he knew when the arrest was made. There was an agreement that if it happened he would telephone Uncle Karl and speak a sentence which would be a signal. Then Uncle Karl would let me know.”

  “What of your brother and sister?”

  “They went to America before the war began.”

  “So now there’s only your father and mother and uncle here? Where is your father?”

  “In Dachau.”

  “Oh, my God!”

  (This was one of the concentration camps I told André about, one of the worst.)

  “Did they send him to Dachau simply because his grandfather was a Jew?”

  “The actual charge was grand treason.”

  Conrad’s hands were shaking as he tried to light his pipe. “Was it real, or did they invent it?”

  “One of his patients turned out to be a police spy. He pretended to have a nervous breakdown because of what’s happening here. He was not the only patient who came to Father for that reason.”

  Conrad’s pipe was now drawing but the hand that held it still shook.

  “The police seized all of Father’s files. What this has led to in the case of other patients I don’t know. But I’m sure he would never have kept files on patients who were critical of the régime.”

  “Was there nothing your military uncle could do?”

  She was unnaturally calm; frozen calm as people can be when they have heard a death sentence.

  “Uncle Helmuth has not been arrested yet. But when Father was arrested my uncle was demoted to the rank of lieutenant-colonel in a line regiment.”

  “An invitation to take the old German choice and get himself killed on the battlefield?”

  “I suppose so.”

  There was a silence. Then she said, “I see you have learned, Conrad. But what have you learned?”

  He still did not understand the cause of her reticence. “Have you spoken with your Uncle Helmuth since you came home?”

  “Not yet. I must be very careful. I suppose I can see him somehow. Uncle Karl is my only real hope now. He has a strong position in Switzerland. Quite a few of your government people have secret accounts in his bank.”

  “My government people! Did I actually hear you say that?”

  She ignored his shock and continued in an expressionless voice. She told him that on her Uncle Karl’s advice she had obtained a Swiss citizenship a few months before the war broke out. Otherwise the English would have interned her as an enemy alien. Quite a few of her old friends – and of Conrad’s also – had been shipped out to Canada.

  “I don’t blame the English,” she said. “Their backs were against the wall and they had no time to sort out the good from the bad. There were probably no bad ones. So the first of all the anti-Nazis were arrested by the only country that’s fighting Hitler.”

  He was silent for nearly a minute. Then he said, “Why did you change your name, Hanna?”

  “I didn’t change it when I first took out Swiss citizenship. But now with my real name I might not have been admitted to Germany and would certainly have been suspect if I did. Uncle Karl made the arrangements. In matters like these the Swiss are very good, especially if they’re bankers, as Uncle Karl is.”

  “How did you go from England to Switzerland?”

  “The way many do these days. I took a ship to Lisbon. Then by train to Switzerland.”

  She told him she had a new life story and a new profession. She was attached to the Swiss Red Cross.

  Conrad shook his head. “They’d never let anyone in the Red Cross visit one of their camps.”

  “Naturally, but it’s a cover.”

  A thin one, he thought, if the police began to sniff. He rose and looked out the window at the bare branches of the lindens. A thin drizzle of cold rain was falling and the sidewalks and pavements glistened. He came back to his chair.

  “Have you any hope of seeing your father?”

  “At least I know he’s alive.”

  “You know this through your Uncle Helmuth?”

  “Uncle Helmuth can tell me nothing now. I know it through a man much more important.”

  Conrad, who had been slumped in his chair, jerked
upright. “Is this man Admiral Canaris?”

  It was her turn to start. “What made you mention that name?” “I happen to have met him. My father introduced me. The Admiral told me he knows you and that he’s a friend of your father’s. He admires you very much, Hanna.”

  When he said this her entire manner changed and in a flash he understood why. He became bitterly hard-angry.

  “So all along you’ve been wondering where I stand – is that it? You know, because I told you in a letter, that Professor Rosenthal had been dismissed just as you assured me he would be. Didn’t you understand that in a letter that would be opened and read, I could say no more than that I had been made Director in his place? Didn’t you realize I had no choice?”

  Her face had softened and there were tears in her eyes. “It’s been horrible. I’ve been horrible.”

  He said nothing and waited.

  “You say you had no choice,” she said. “Isn’t that what they’ve all said? Yes, indeed I asked myself how you could have taken Rosenthal’s place. I’d never met anyone who’d so set his heart on a position as you’d set yours on this Institut. In London you met many of our friends who were refugees. After you left it was dreadful for me. Apparently two people can love each other as beautifully as we did and still remain strangers. I didn’t know what to think. So I wondered if you’d been hypnotized by him just as your father was. For that matter as a lot of Englishmen and Frenchmen were.”

  He felt that a great weight had been lifted off him. He spoke very quietly.

  “It was Germany that hypnotized my father, Hanna. Germany and the defeat in the last war. I wasn’t hypnotized at all. I was merely blinded because I’d buried myself in books. In two days – in less time than that – I knew I’d made a terrible mistake in coming home. But it was too late. I did everything I could to avoid the directorship. Professor Rosenthal told me I had no choice. Admiral Canaris said the same. It’s no more my fault that I was born pure German than it’s your merit that your grandfather was a Jew. I never forgot you for a single day all these years. You may think of me what you like.”

  She lowered her eyes but she did not weep. She was too strong and too sad and determined for that.

  She said very simply, “Let’s try to forgive each other. We’ve never been married, but that’s what married people have to do with each other again and again – so I’m told.”

  He became businesslike. He asked where she was staying and she gave him the name of a small hotel he knew.

  “It would have been safer if you’d registered in the Adlon. A Blockwart in one of those little hotels is more dangerous than a dozen policemen in a large one.”

  “I’ve seen him. He’s a stupid brute.”

  “All the more dangerous to someone like you.”

  He rose, went around the corner of his desk, put both hands into hers and drew her to her feet.

  “Eva divorced me a year ago,” he said. “Will you marry me, Hanna?”

  Her large eyes opened and so did her full lips. She put her arms about his neck and he felt her breasts against his chest. Then she drew away and sat down again.

  “I didn’t come home to get married, Conrad.”

  He returned to his desk. His pipe had gone out and he lit a match and puffed it alight and became businesslike again.

  “Have you any plans about your father?”

  “Not yet.”

  “I suppose you realize that by yourself you can do nothing? If you make enquiries about him you’ll either blow your cover and be arrested as a spy or be told to mind your own business and take the next train back to Switzerland. There’s only one thing I can think of. I must tell Admiral Canaris you’ve come home and see what he can do.”

  “He knows that already.”

  Her face, he was thinking, now looks more Jewish than it ever did before. Why not? She was relearning what dozens of generations of Jews had learned for centuries from the savagery of Christians.

  “It’s strange, unnatural, and terrible here,” she said. “The people go about the streets and look normal. Everything that’s real is hidden and is never mentioned. Do they know it’s there – all those people on the streets, do they know it?”

  “How are you taking me, Hanna? I have the right to ask that. How are you taking me?”

  She said nothing.

  “All right, then, you won’t answer. So listen. I’ve learned more about what goes on in this country than you could possibly have learned in England. For one thing, there’s a silent civil war between the regular armed forces and the Nazi party’s army.” He made a violent gesture as though he were throwing away something slimy and loathsome. “My father won’t discuss it, but in his job he must be going through hell. As for my title as Director here, it means nothing. I hate it. I guessed that sooner or later you’d come home. That may be why I’ve stayed here.”

  She looked at him with clear eyes. “Conrad dear, I said let’s forgive each other. But I think I should never have come to see you.”

  “Thank God you did.”

  “When I decided to return I swore I’d never put you into danger. But I longed to see you and here I am.”

  “Thank God you are.”

  They both rose and embraced and his hand traced the curve of her hip. He led her to the window and they looked out at the lindens in the rain.

  “It looks so normal, doesn’t it?” he said. “So normal those people think it will always be like this. But the time will come, and sooner than you may think, when those buildings and those trees will be blasted and burned to cinders.”

  He went back to his chair and she to hers.

  “Listen carefully, Hanna dear. A few days after I returned, my father introduced me to Admiral Canaris. It was at Canaris’s request because he was an old friend of Professor Rosenthal. I was vain enough to believe what he told me – that it was because he was interested in my work. Tell me, how well did he know your father? How well did he know you?”

  “They were close friends for many years. There was a great affection between them. They both knew so many secrets and it made them lonely with ordinary people. He was always charming and delightful with me. I often played chamber music with him.”

  “Do you know anything of Canaris’s politics now? Anything definite?”

  She put the tip of her index finger to her lips. “My Uncle Karl told me – no, I can’t say to anyone what he told me. Not even to you can I say it.”

  He looked back at her steadily. “You don’t have to. He has told me nothing definite, but I can guess. The stakes he is playing for are terrifyingly high and he can’t jeopardize them even for his dearest friends. So let’s let it go at that.”

  Conrad smiled with some bitterness. Now he knew definitely that it had been solely on Hanna’s account that the Admiral had protected him. This also explained the charade about Genghis Khan and that Scheissfresser, Professor Heidkamp.

  He said quietly to Hanna, “However, quite apart from Canaris, there’s also my family. As you know, my father is a rear-admiral. My young brother Siegfried, whom I hardly know at all, is fanatically Führertreu and has become a national hero. So I can assume that at the moment I’m not suspected. At least I can try to do something for your people, Hanna. And first, I beg you to leave that hotel at once. If the Blockwart sees you there a few times more he’ll be certain to ferret around. He’s probably searched your drawers and luggage already. Do your clothes all have Swiss labels?”

  “Most of them.”

  “I suppose no English labels?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Then please go back, pay your bill, collect your baggage, and take a taxi to my apartment. Do you need money?”

  “No, thanks. I’ve just come from Uncle Karl.”

  “I’ll give you my address.”

  He wrote it down on a card, phoned the porter to order a taxi for her, and waited until she left. Then he went into one of his biweekly meetings with his staff that never accomplished anythi
ng important but had to be held. Three-quarters of his colleagues now detested him because Professor Heidkamp approved of him.

  That night after they had eaten, the invisible wall between Hanna and himself seemed to have disappeared, but they soon found that something more subtle than a wall had taken its place. When they went to bed to make love, Conrad was devastated to find himself impotent. She was gentle with him and told him not to let it trouble him.

  After a time he said, “I’m trying to understand this. It’s been such a long time and I’ve dreamed of this every night before I fell asleep. Every nuance of your face and eyes and body I know better now than when we were together in England. The memory crystallizes everything. Now all I can see is how you are more beautiful than I’d even been able to guess before. God damn it, you’ve got into my mind and I seem to have lost you in my senses. I can’t understand it, Hanna. I don’t know what’s happened to me.”

  Naturally I wonder if there had been other women in his life during those years of separation. To me it would seem abnormal if there were none. And if Hanna had been like the women I knew in my own young days – but I don’t suppose she was.

  Hanna said, “It will come back. I know how it is with you. It’s with me, too. I gave you no help at all.”

  Toward midnight he had relaxed enough to recover and they made love with a fierce desperation, but there was no gentle peace in the aftermath. It would have been astonishing if there had been. When things are terrible and uncertain, what’s the use of sex except as an escape? In such a time, what is a deep love but a commitment that can numb the senses? Hanna must have understood this before he did, for Conrad records that she actually said it.