How to Be a Refugee

by Simon May

  65.

  A London club

  Back in London, I am recounting the exchange in the Berlin cafe to someone whom my mother would have called ‘typically English’. He is a vivacious seventy-year-old economist, the epitome of old-school graceful manners, though I’d need a semiotic auto-translator to figure out what he really means.

  I begin to tell him the story as we’re having a pre-lunch drink at his club, where only fleeting eye contact seems permitted and the air is filled with a uniquely English complacency, neither strident nor gushingly self-congratulatory, but confident that nothing in life can be too bad to prevent England from continuing in more or less the way it always has done, with crises maybe, but not catastrophes, and in which the de rigeur demeanour is flippant unflappability.

  I’m deep into the Kirchner when he notices the time and interrupts to suggest that we proceed to lunch, which is awaiting us in the ornate dining room, with its chandeliers, red plush carpet, silver cutlery, and decanted Bordeaux at the ready. As we walk in, he a pace in front of me, I see that his right arm, held stiffly downwards, is twisting restlessly and his shoulder is jerking very slightly, as if he is agitated by the burden of some great responsibility, but is too discreet to reveal it. Perhaps, I muse to myself, this is how members of the ruling classes signal their status to one another; for the dining room is surely full of them.

  Winding our way between tables, my host becomes more remote. We sit down at the far end of the room, order, and then, perhaps having forgotten the interrupted Berlin tale or simply finding direct talk of Jews and racism too uncomfortable, he launches into a tirade against the policies of the European Central Bank and the US Fed. For a minute or two I hold on to the argument, but then the propositions, premises, inferences, statistics, ratios, and quotations from Keynes and economists unknown to me start slipping out of my control, and I am unable to decide what exactly follows from or entails what. I panic: we aren’t even on our first course yet.

  A few minutes into this disquisition, his eye fixed on the middle distance as if addressing Keynes’s ghost, there is a lull, presumably meant as an opening for me to comment. Since I have no idea what to say, or any firm purchase on what is at stake or why we are discussing international finance, and my silence as well as his relentlessness are making me nervous, I try to change the subject.

  ‘Does your club now admit women?’ I enquire.

  ‘Only in the evenings,’ comes the staccato reply.

  ‘Well,’ I continue, ‘if you want to preserve male-only lunches, you could use one room for them and another of these palatial rooms for women-only lunches.’

  My host remains impassive. At the next table, a well-heeled man is lunching with another well-heeled man. A signet ring glistens contentedly on his amply fed finger.

  I repeat the point, fearful that perhaps he hasn’t heard me. Fear is a dreadful thing: it can be parent to whole classes of stupidity.

  His stern demeanour swivels in my direction; it seems to say: ‘I did hear you the first time.’

  Instead of stopping, I persist. ‘Well, of course, Aristotle, the most influential philosopher of friendship in Western history, is adamant that the truest friendships can exist only between those who are ethically good as well as alike in their virtues. His conclusion that only men are capable of such friendship is repugnant, but do you think his ethical point could be extended to any same-gender intimacy?’

  ‘Yes,’ he says, ‘I understood your earlier point, but I disagree. I would find it rather more convenient if they would admit women for lunch in this room.’ And then: ‘But if you like my club so much I’d be happy to propose you as a member.’

  ‘Oh no,’ I say, panicked at the prospect of allegiance to such an utterly alien world, ‘I’ve always resisted joining any club. They’re not for me.’

  He then returns to the world economy and I to my silence. I don’t manage to finish my story. But I feel so out of place here and, by contrast, the promise of belonging that shines in distant Berlin beckons so potently that the poison seems to have drained from the woman and the dandy. Or, rather, the poison isn’t prevalent enough in today’s Germany to warrant any great alarm. Or, if it is prevalent, it still wouldn’t find its way to someone like me, who, with his abstruse interests in philosophy and music and German culture, and with his evident love of Germany, is too harmless, too respectable, and too inconspicuous to be its target.

  Or perhaps, like Ernst, that is just what I want to believe.

  CODA

  Dinner at the German Embassy

  The only day of the year on which I rigorously avoid going out is 22 February, the anniversary of my father’s death. Not out of sadness, but out of piety. That was the day he collapsed at the German Embassy in London, a day on which he usually hovers duskily about me, emerging into that painfully unreachable presence that the dead achieve when we dare to grasp their absence.

  But I didn’t have a moment of doubt about accepting an invitation to dinner for 22 February 2018.

  At the German Embassy in London.

  I couldn’t believe the coincidence. Was some puppeteer of destiny playing a morbid joke on me? It felt like I’d been belatedly asked to a seance.

  The dinner was in honour of Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, with whom I had visited Auschwitz ten months previously. It was to mark a speech that she had recently delivered, on Holocaust Remembrance Day, to a packed session of the German parliament. It was a speech of such unyielding magnanimity and composure, so unburdened by torment or anger, that it became hard to imagine – though I have known Anita all my life and first saw the number 69388 tattooed onto her forearm as a small boy, when our families used to go to a local swimming pool together at weekends – that she had endured the unimaginable hell of that ‘death factory’, as she calls it, for even a day, never mind for over a year.

  Anita knew both my parents before I was born. My uncle, Edward May, was one of the first people she met when she arrived in England after her liberation. Her husband, Peter Wallfisch, and my mother had a piano and violin duo for over fifteen years. She gave birth to her daughter, Maya, and my mother to my brother, Marius, within twenty-four hours of each other; and, as a child, Maya used to spend many Saturdays with us when her parents were away working. Among Anita’s numerous kindnesses to me, I particularly remember our trips to London’s Heathrow airport after my father died, when I’d make myself a cozy ‘bed’ in the back of her Mini Estate and she’d generously wait at the top of Terminal 2’s car park while I watched aeroplanes taking off and landing, often daydreaming about leaving England and becoming a refugee myself.

  And then the most obvious thought occurs to me last of all: Anita is the only family friend still alive who knew my father. She knew him far better than I ever did, and when she speaks of him it is as vivid as if she had seen him yesterday. That she should be here, in the German Embassy, on the anniversary of his death, fills me with gratitude.

  I am late – the last guest to arrive – and as I ascend the steps to the door of the ambassador’s residence on Belgrave Square, I am suffused by the nauseous thrill that, all these decades later, fate has decided that I am ready to stand, on this day of all days, on that sacred, terrible ground – ground that witnessed a series of events still opaque to me.

  I scan the cavernous entrance hall and the doors leading onto it. Might any of these conceal the meeting room where he and Ursel and Franziskus and the lawyer met?

  The doors are all shut. Only a small corridor-like space that now functions as a cloakroom is open. I leave my coat, scrutinize the space as fast as I can – it looks far too small to accommodate a meeting – and hasten up the sweeping staircase towards voices upstairs.

  A childlike thought thrills and embarrasses me: this is not just the German island in London on which my father died; it is also now my home – I am naturalized and this is the embassy of my nation. And there – I see her from the top of the staircase – radiating her usual vitality, is Anita, sitting
on a sofa, sipping champagne, holding court.

  I was expecting a large dinner, but it is like a family gathering, with only eight or nine guests, hosted by the chargé d’affaires, Tania Freiin von Uslar-Gleichen. As we sit down at the impeccably laid table, a split-screen film starts playing in my mind, against which I struggle in vain. On one half of the screen I see shouting guards, ferocious dogs tearing at the flesh of living humans, dying children, plumes of smoke, a lake on fire; the ground is vibrating as I remember it doing in Japan when seismic tremors strike. There is screaming everywhere – but nobody is being heard. And, on the other screen, courteous government officials are receiving visitors and an atmosphere of ‘solidity’ and peace reigns: the solidity of Blumeshof and the peace you might find in a cloister on a sunny day, or in the Swiss Alps with falling streams, still ferns, and majestic glaciers.

  I hear the words ‘And the vegan option is for madam?’ as a meal that looks identical to mine, minus the salmon and with fluffy potatoes made with nut oil rather than butter, is placed respectfully in front of the guest opposite me, Anita’s daughter Maya. And I marvel that such care is possible.

  Then I again hear the sound of my father collapsing backwards with an awful thud. And a long-forgotten memory comes to my aid: how, after he died, it was Ursel alone who brought some levity into our home. Not for her the solemnity of a wake, which can make bereavement all the harder to bear. The next day, she was boogying alone to ‘Chattanooga Choo-Choo’ in the corridor outside my bedroom, still in her nightdress, a blaring radio in her hand. She had set up a camp bed next to my parents’ bed – I remember her and my mother talking all night, a confiding and consoling babble of German in the next room. The simple cart that had carried the coffin to its grave and the way it bumped along the gravel path had seemed bizarre to her, she told me many years later; but she had never been to a Jewish funeral until then. Her humour deflected us, magically, from the defiant presence of the freshly dead, and I loved her for it.

  I turn to the kindly embassy official sitting next to me and ask whether the building we are in was always reserved for the ambassador’s residence.

  ‘No,’ she says, ‘there was a time when we just had this building.’

  ‘So it housed all the offices too? The whole embassy was squeezed in here?’

  ‘Yes – it must have been a squeeze!’

  ‘When was the newer building – the one with the offices and large white external staircase – constructed?’

  ‘In the late 1970s, I think.’

  ‘So, before that, in the 1960s, the offices were definitely here, where we are now?’

  ‘Yes,’ she confirms.

  At that moment, Anita says with a broad smile to the chargé d’affaires across the table, ‘This man has just become a German citizen. He’s a German now. Or again.’

  ‘Oh, so you’re one of my flock,’ the chargé d’affaires shoots back.

  ‘Delighted to be!’ I answer, relieved to be distracted.

  ‘Wasn’t that a very hard decision?’ the official sitting next to me enquires gravely.

  ‘Not at all,’ I hear myself say. ‘Nothing could be more natural. After all, I am a German. It’s the right thing to do.’ I feel tears rushing at my eyes, threatening to unmask the emotion I am really feeling. Tears of relief at some sort of resolved identity – not just my identity: my father’s too. He was a German. As well as a Jew. In my father’s house there were two homes, and he left a place for my life in both. I remember my scorn for Ursel’s denial of his Germanness at dinner in the Swiss chalet, when I was eleven. Now, to keep those tears at bay, I force myself to think as vividly as I can of his grave – as, oddly perhaps, I often do when trying to distract myself from present pain, such as when the dentist is delivering an anaesthetic to the back of my mouth and they almost touch a nerve.

  The official looks surprised by my answer.

  But distraction is impossible, least of all by thinking of his grave. I’m closer to his last moments than I’ve ever been; and I hear my mother recounting for the hundredth time, on a loop of bewilderment, that telephone call from this very place – from some room just yards from where I am now sitting eating salmon with fluffy potatoes topped with melting butter. I hear her say it yet again. Like her own father’s death, she never got over it: never freed her mind of the scene. I wish she could have. I used to beg her to try. She referred to these two men as ‘die beiden Väter’ – the two fathers. In her later years, she had photos of them next to each other on a shelf in her bedroom, and would look at them again and again for reassurance.

  ‘Is that Mrs May?’ the voice at the other end of the phone enquires. ‘This is the German . . .’

  From the tone of grave finality, my mother knows at once that something catastrophic has happened – so she tells me when she thinks I’m old enough to hear about it.

  ‘I am so sorry to have to inform you . . .’

  ‘Where is he now?’ she asks, trying to forestall the cold politeness of a death announcement.

  ‘I am awfully sorry to have to tell you that your husband collapsed during . . .’

  ‘Is there a doctor at the embassy?’

  ‘No, but we are very near St George’s Hospital, and we’ve called for an emergency . . .’

  She arrives at the German Embassy, a coat draped over her nightdress, just as a man and a woman in green overalls leap out of the back of an ambulance and vanish into the mansion, while a paramedic sits in the back preparing for an imminent arrival.

  My mother peers inside.

  ‘Yes, madam?’

  ‘Is this for Walter May?’ my mother enquires meekly.

  ‘And who are you?’ the voice says.

  At that moment, a stretcher appears at the door of the embassy, and in the group behind it are Ursel and Franziskus.

  The corpse, wrapped in a blanket, is rushed into the ambulance, its complexion, my mother tells me, a grey-blue, its eyes impassively ignoring her confused attempts to make contact with them and to understand what he has been through.

  Riding with my father to the nearby hospital – located in a handsome building that, in the 1990s, became a luxury hotel and celebrity haunt – she holds his cold, shockingly limp hand, unsure if he is dying or already dead, staring at his ashen face, which seems frozen in an expression of pain and confusion, neither evincing life nor resolved into the gruesomely unburdened calmness of the freshly dead.

  ‘Would you like to see him once more?’ the pathologist asks Mother after they reach the hospital and he has been taken away.

  She declines.

  As we make our way from the dining room back to the grand staircase after dinner, I see more closed doors on that upper floor. I slip into a bathroom – perhaps one he used? It certainly looks unmodernized. I don’t know if it is intended for visitors, but its door is open. As I’m washing my hands, I catch sight of my face in the mirror and wonder if my father ever imagined his six-year-old son as a middle-aged man in a suit and necktie – with, like him, a passion for fine food and wine. And my reflection, staring back knowingly, seems to say: ‘You were right, long ago in the park when Sally told you he’d died, that your father would never again witness your life. But you were also right about the freedom that you were certain he’d bequeathed you at that moment – when your world became flooded not only by emptiness and doom, but also by reality and light. You’ve been harbouring his two homes all this time – and the freedom to build a future with that inheritance.’

  I step out of the bathroom, back onto the upper floor, where we’d had dinner. It is now abandoned, and I relish lingering for another minute in its vastness, cocking my ear for any voices that might speak to me from its silence.

  Downstairs is also deserted, except for a young member of staff and the attendant peering patiently out of the cloakroom. The front door is wide open and through it the dark of the night and a hubbub of voices nudge their way in. The trust, perhaps the naivety, of that unguarded door makes me feel
exhilaratingly free and safe. The attendant asks for my ticket, though there is only one coat left, and as she takes it off its hanger my eye gets dragged beyond the coat rail to a large room beyond that I hadn’t noticed earlier. Was that where he met his end? It seems to be the right location for a meeting room, near the entrance and away from the diplomats’ offices.

  I’m embarrassed to linger – the cloakroom attendant must be eager to go home, and the others are waiting outside – but I can’t help probing. ‘Is that spacious room for meetings?’ I ask her. ‘For visitors? It must be perfect for people who you don’t want crawling all over your embassy; it’s right by the front door!’

  ‘No, it’s for staff,’ she replies, unfazed by my gawping at the room, where I’m imagining my father listening attentively to the other three, or perhaps in the middle of interjecting something – then the instant he falls back gasping for breath, his mouth jacked open. I want to ask her if she knows what the room was used for back in the 1960s, to play for time so that I can go on imbibing its atmosphere.

  But there are no answers. And everyone is waiting outside.

  I make for the front door just as Anita and a clutch of guests are disappearing into a taxi.

  Watching her speed off, I realize how intensely comforting her presence has been: as a witness whose memory blesses his life with reality – so that, this evening, he could fill me with so much more than his fearful absence dotted with a few vignettes of kindness. With Anita, in this house, on this day of the year, I feel closer to my lost father and my lost country than ever before. Though I am still far from their shores, I know that I will not cease searching for them both. Earning the past – discovering it, harvesting it, and transforming it into a future – is indeed a life’s work.