The Last Man in Europe

by Dennis Glover

  ‘The Soviet newsreels said they were shot by the Germans.’

  ‘Just as the German ones said they were shot by the Soviets.’

  The truth, it seemed, depended on whose newsreel cameras were passing over the mass graves at any given time.

  ‘They were shot in the back of the head,’ Czapski said, as if to settle the matter. ‘The Germans favour less personal methods.’

  He remembered what Arthur Koestler had told him: the NKVD always shot their victims in the back of the head. So it was true. They really did live in an age when such things were possible – the leadership of a whole nation exterminated in the name of human equality and brotherhood. ‘Do you have evidence?’

  ‘Evidence? That depends what you mean. You won’t find a single document in the whole of Poland or the Soviet Union to prove anything. It has all been destroyed or hidden or rewritten.’

  ‘A cover-up.’

  ‘There is a giant hole in the world where the Soviets bury the truth. One day it will be uncovered, but for now it is sufficient to know that the dead don’t speak.’

  ‘I was in Barcelona.’

  ‘Koestler told me. It’s one of the reasons I knew I could trust you with this.’ Czapski reached into his shabby briefcase. ‘You asked for evidence. Here it is.’ He handed over a book written in French. ‘Just small traces of the truth; scattered facts that have survived. I need you to help me get it published in England and America.’

  It was more a pamphlet than a book, thin and poorly printed. The glue holding the pages together had long ago dried up and crumbled away, though enough of the spine remained for him to see the book’s title: Souvenirs de Starobielsk. He scanned it while Czapski talked. Thumbing through dates, lists and eyewitness accounts of terrible atrocities, he recognised immediately its supreme importance. The survival of inconvenient facts meant everything.

  ‘I will do all I can.’

  They talked for another hour, then Czapski prepared to leave.

  ‘One more thing, Monsieur Czapski.’

  ‘Anything.’

  ‘You met officials in Moscow. Did you ever meet Stalin?’

  At the mention of the name, Czapski flinched.

  ‘No.’

  ‘A pity. Everyone else I know who has met him has turned out to be a fool.’

  ‘I will tell you, though, without him in 1941, the Germans would have taken Moscow. I’m certain of it.’

  ‘A generous admission.’

  ‘It is the truth. That is enough.’

  They shook hands and Czapski left. Orwell observed him as he walked out onto the street and merged into the crowd. It was a strange sensation, like watching a visitor from the grave, the bearer of a memory they had forgotten to destroy.

  *

  Hotel Scribe, Paris, 30 March. He was lying on his bed, smoking idly, trying to recall for his dispatches the events of the past week. He had pursued totalitarianism beyond the Rhine, into the lair of the fascist beast, where he had collapsed while artillery bombarded a village in which a detachment of the SS was making a suicidal stand. Feverish, sweating, gasping for breath, coughing blood, he had reached a makeshift military hospital in the rubble of Cologne – where the doctors once again diagnosed bronchitis – and then made his way back to Paris.

  The halting, uncomfortable journey had reminded him of something from his childhood, and now he remembered what: the rout of mankind from The War of the Worlds. From the window of the truck in which he had cadged a lift, he had seen millions of people on the move: ragged displaced persons seeking revenge on their tormentors; miserably dressed prisoners of war – dirty, bearded, exhausted, gathered into vast barbed-wire holding pens, from which, he presumed, many would eventually be chosen and submerged in the great slave labour camps in the east. Here and there he saw groupings of graves where Jews and Russian prisoners had dropped on their death marches. In villages the locals would turn away from the pitiful refugees; some would jeer and spit. Everywhere were roadblocks and traffic jams and rubble-strewn roads littered with burnt-out tanks and vehicles; he surmised there wasn’t a bridge left standing between the Rhine and the Marne, and hardly a town or city between Stalingrad and Brussels whose centre hadn’t been pounded into a pile of dust. London, he could now see, had got off lightly. It occurred to him that if he had predicted in 1925 that peaceful and civilised Europe would be laid to waste like this – to become a set of ruins governed by resentment, distrust and revenge – he would likely have been labelled a lunatic.

  On reaching the Hotel Scribe, he had taken out his typewriter to record his dispatch for Astor. ‘To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to feel an actual doubt about the continuity of civilisation,’ he typed. For the first time, he was no longer certain he would live to see the world rebuilt. And even if it was rebuilt, maybe it would all happen again, people’s memories being so short.

  He had stopped coughing blood, but the fever had not subsided. His illness, seemingly defeated four years earlier, was massing, once again, for an assault. He pulled from his rucksack the document he had prepared before leaving England, ‘Notes for My Literary Executor’, against the possibility that a fascist sniper wouldn’t miss him a second time. But now he knew the real enemy was somewhere inside himself. He made a handful of corrections, then threw the pages down. It was a poor list of books to be remembered by, especially as it wouldn’t be added to unless Warburg could find some paper for Animal Farm.

  Animal Farm! While in Europe, he’d almost forgotten about the little book, so long was it taking to get published. The thought of it bucked him up. After years of trying, he had finally found the style he wanted – for the first time he had managed to write about politics without sacrificing his artistic purpose. It was bound to succeed. He couldn’t allow himself to die now, with success so close.

  He forced himself over to the sink, counted out eight M&B tablets (he would blitz the bacteria into submission!) and washed them down with a glass of water, refusing to look in the mirror. As he stood, shakily, there was a knock on the door. He opened it, holding onto the lip of the sink to be safe, to find the bellboy, who passed over a tarnished plate containing a telegram. It was from the Observer – no doubt Ivor Brown, the editor, wondering what had become of his dispatches.

  He opened the telegram carefully, putting the envelope aside to reuse. It was from Brown, but not about work. In his feeble condition, he had to read it three times to be sure he comprehended its simple but terrible message: EILEEN IS DEAD.

  That night he drifted in and out of a feverish sleep. His mind worked its way through the single fact he had got from the short telegram: she had died on the operating table, probably of a heart attack in reaction to anaesthetic. She had been just thirty-nine. As he tossed and turned in the stuffy room, he saw Eileen, lying on a trolley bed, rolling down a hospital corridor a mile long, smiling peacefully at him. Then she was trapped in a sinking ship, slipping deeper under the green water, looking up at him, but he was doing nothing to help her. She had no reproach in her eyes, but they both knew she was down there because he was up here …

  *

  It took him two days to get to Newcastle and the funeral, and now, back in Islington, having dropped Ricky off to be looked after by the Kopps, he turned, finally, to the letters Gwen had collected from Eileen’s hospital room.

  ‘Dearest, your letter came this morning … I am typing in the garden. Isn’t that wonderful? Richard is sitting up in his new pram, naked from the nappy down, talking to a doll. I have bought him a playpen and a high chair and a truck too, the latter for an appalling amount of money. I had to forget the price quickly but I think it’s important he should have one …’

  He began to cry, but then steeled himself and read on. Facing the truth – one had to do it, always.

  ‘Gwen rang up the surgeon Harvey Evers and they want me to go in for this operation at once. You see, they’ve found a grwoth (no one could object to a “grwoth”, could they?). This is a bit difficult
. It’s going to cost a terrible lot of money. What worries me is that I really don’t think I’m worth the expense, but this thing will take a longish time to kill me if left alone, costing money all the time.’

  The only thought he could rouse to stop himself breaking down completely was that she had been oblivious to what lay ahead.

  ‘You may never get this letter, but there’s something I want to impress on you, which I have expressed to you before. Please stop living the “literary life” and become a writer once more. This will mean getting out of London. From my point of view, I would infinitely rather live in the country on £200 a year than in London on any money at all. Everything would be better for Richard too, so you need have no conflicts about it. To this end, I have been in contact with Astor’s man on Jura, about the empty farmhouse, Barnhill. He tells me it is quite grand, with five bedrooms and all else we need in order to live there twelve months of the year …’

  He finished the letter, but at the end of the packet found another, brief and handwritten.

  ‘Dearest, I’m just going to have the operation, already enema’d, injected (with morphia in the right arm which is a nuisance), cleaned & packed up like a precious image in cotton wool and bandages. When it’s over I’ll add a note to this and get it off quickly. This is a nice room – ground floor so one can see the garden. Not much in it except daffodils & I think arabis, but a nice little lawn. My bed isn’t next to the window, but it faces the right way. I can also see the fire and the clock …’

  He turned over the page, looking for more. Two tears trickled down the sides of his nose. He remembered what they had said to each other in Barcelona: to remain true to each other, to stay human in spite of everything, that was all that mattered.

  Stop living the literary life and become a writer once more. He wiped his tears on a handkerchief, folded her letters and placed them back into the envelope.

  He opened the bottom drawer of his desk, pushing aside a mass of typed notes to find the old chocolate box. Inside it, beneath the glass paperweight, were the yellowed clippings from the late 1930s, and underneath them, two hardback notebooks. The first was the old keepsake book he had used as a diary; he set it aside. The second, with its maroon cover – the one he had purchased two years ago, just before he’d had the idea for Animal Farm – was the one he was after. He flicked through the pages until he came to the title The Last Man in Europe.

  8

  London, January 1946. The island farmhouse wasn’t yet ready, so he filled part of his days searching the now familiar junk shops and black market haunts for various hard-to-find items he knew he would need there. Wandering through Islington, he found himself drawn into a bookshop. Animal Farm had sold out its first edition within weeks, and Warburg assured him a second printing was now on sale. He entered and looked around. He pawed through the ‘new arrivals’, then the literature section, but without result. The sight of Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited gave him a pang of envy. His book was nowhere to be seen. Surely it hadn’t already begun its gravitational journey from the eye-level shelves to the shoe-level ones, or from there to the remainders pile?

  ‘Can I help you with anything?’ It was the shop attendant, a schoolmistress type, whose tone suggested she was onto a likely book-pincher.

  ‘Animal Farm?’

  ‘Children’s section, just behind you. I’ve heard the kiddies love it.’

  She remained between him and the door, monitoring, and he had no alternative but to go to the rear of the shop and pretend to look through his book. He examined its cover: Animal Farm: A Fairy Story. Hard to blame her. He flicked it open to the first page, only to be reminded that Warburg had pulled the preface, with its attack on the self-censorship that intellectuals reflexively practised towards anything Soviet. Typically, Warburg had done it at the last minute, so that he couldn’t object. ‘No point in narrowing the sales to political types,’ he had said. ‘Let the readers see in it what they want.’ Maybe Warburg had been right, but the fact it was in the children’s section told him he might not have been.

  The manager became distracted by another customer and walked to another room in the shop. He picked up the two shallow piles of Animal Farm, placing one on the table in front of the section labelled ‘Literature’, and the other beneath the label ‘Politics’, having pushed aside Wells’ latest appalling effort, which he had recently reviewed as gently as he could; the man was dying, after all. With a glance back, he opened the door and left.

  *

  That evening, Susan – the young nanny he had found to move in and look after Ricky – was awakened by cries for help. She discovered him lying on his back in the corridor. The only evidence that he was still alive were the bubbles forming in the blood coming from his mouth, which trickled slowly down a trench-like groove in his chin, spilling onto his ragged pyjamas.

  ‘What can I do?’

  ‘Get a block of ice and a jug of cold water,’ he gasped.

  Despite her lame leg – the result of cerebral palsy in childhood – she managed somehow to get him back to bed, then she wrapped the ice in a threadbare towel and applied it to his forehead. He had a roaring fever. ‘I don’t expect to live much longer,’ he told her, breathing heavily as he waited for the bleeding to stop. Eventually he fell asleep while she held his hand.

  When he awoke next morning, she forbade him to get out of bed. She made him stay there for a fortnight, and sent delaying telegrams to all the editors who were harassing him for reviews and essays. He had suddenly become one of the most in-demand writers in the world; Animal Farm was a bestseller. After a week, she called a doctor – on the pretext that Ricky was sick. The doctor proved dim, believing his usual palaver, and diagnosed pleurisy.

  *

  He spent the rest of the winter indoors, venturing out only to purchase equipment for Jura. With his coal supply almost out and the gas pressure so low the heater would hardly light, it seemed the miseries of that dreadful season would never end. He achieved nothing; the book had not advanced a word.

  Then, at the start of April, the miracle of spring. A mass of warm air hit London, along with what seemed a brighter sun. He threw open the partly boarded windows and surveyed the square below. The sooty privets had turned bright green, the leaves were thickening in the chestnut trees, and the daffodils in the neighbouring window boxes were out. Even the patrolling bobbies’ tunics looked a deeper shade of blue. A sparrow ducked in a terracotta pot of recently melted ice, having its first bath since September. They had yet to finish packing for Jura, where they were headed in just a few days’ time, but as he drank in the crisp, warm air, he decided to take Ricky and Susan out for lunch.

  The pram was stored in the entry hall at the bottom of the rear stairs. He’d wanted Eileen and the baby to have something grand – the sort of mini-carriage that nannies to titled families had pushed around Hyde Park back in the ’twenties – but all he’d been able to find was this strange contraption, which looked like a cross between a bath chair and an office trolley. They went through the back gate and crossed Alwyne Villas to Canonbury Tower, then cut through the adjoining garden. He stopped the pram to show Susan and Richard the tree supposedly planted by Sir Thomas Cromwell or Sir Francis Bacon, he couldn’t remember which. From a rain-filled bomb crater came the croaking of a toad. He listened hard and combed through the grass to find the creature sitting on a clump of soil beneath a crocus, its shrunken body supporting a pair of enormous eyes like the gold-coloured semi-precious stones you sometimes saw in signet rings. It had an almost spiritual air about it, reminding him somewhat of a strict Anglo-Catholic towards the end of Lent. A part of nature Hitler and Stalin and the managers had failed to eradicate.

  They walked another hundred yards to his favourite pub, the Canonbury. It was just minutes from Upper Street, yet always free of drunks or rowdies, and with all the solid comfortable ugliness of the nineteenth century – no glass-topped tables, sham roof beams or plastic masquerading as oak. They entered the saloo
n bar and ordered.

  ‘Hello, dear,’ said the barmaid. ‘What will you be wanting?’

  All the barmaids, who were middle-aged and unflashy apart from occasionally lurid hair colouring and strong scent, knew him as Mr Blair, the widower with the posh voice, who wrote books and was some sort of famous socialist. He and Susan chose roast beef with potatoes and peas and a boiled jam roll, which he decided to leave for Ricky; not bad for six shillings in total. There being none of his favourite draught stout, he asked for a pint of dark brown ale, getting Susan a half of the milder wallop.

  Despite the warm weather, a fire burned reassuringly in the grate, and they chose a table near it and talked of their move to their Scottish island. Susan would look after Ricky while he wrote; his younger sister Avril would look after the household. ‘We’ll be safe from the inevitable atom bombs,’ he said cheerily. ‘Everyone these days dreams of escape from atomic war, but we will actually do it. Up there, a bomb could drop on London, or even Glasgow, and we’d be none the wiser.’

  As they ate they heard snatches of the conversations going on among the regulars – the football pools, grandchildren, aching joints, incontinence. Not once since the end of the war could he recall hearing anyone in a pub talking about politics. Not since the ’thirties had he heard any member of the working class call another ‘comrade’, or indeed say much of anything that would be considered ‘ideologically sound’. Bevan’s fight to create a socialist medical system, the Attlee government’s plans to nationalise coal and steel and the railways, the return of servicemen to full employment – none of it seemed to matter to the people in whose name it was all being done, and in whom the socialist movement had invested so much hope. And yet it was they who had won the war. And it was only they who could stop the intellectuals making the peace inhuman and unbearable. Without them as ballast, the struggles and sacrifices of the war would be wasted – they’d be organised and modernised into something cold and intolerable.