by Rosie Thomas
Of all of them in the room only the Führer seemed completely at his ease, watching them and smiling and listening to their banalities as if they were gems of wisdom.
Grace was sure that the gatherings of Hitler’s intimates could not always be so insipid. Then, with a sudden clarity that almost winded her, she realized why this one was so determinedly neutral. Of course, they were suspicious of her. She had not been given a privileged invitation into the inner circle at all, and it had been vain to imagine that she had. These people imagined that she was a spy or at the very least some kind of eavesdropper for the British Government, a subtle choice for the very reason of being a too-obvious choice.
Was that what it was?
Once they had occurred to her the possibilities of pretence and counter-pretence multiplied in her imagination until she felt dizzy. She also felt sick. The room with its draped curtains and spindly Empire furniture and gilt-framed mirrors reflecting their tense faces was overheated, and the chocolate cake much too sweet and rich.
She had let it be known that she would welcome an opportunity to meet the Führer out of admiration and friendship. Was this vicarage tea a rebuff, or merely a baffling ritual that she was too much of an outsider, or too stupid, or too British even to understand? She shook her head in a tiny gesture of bewilderment and at once Hitler leant forward in solicitous concern. His hand rested for an instant on her arm. He did not mistrust her, Grace was sure of that.
At the same moment one of his aides came forward and murmured to him. There was a general movement, and Grace looked at her wristwatch. The audience was clearly over.
Hitler escorted her to the door himself. In English, after he had bowed over her hand, he said, ‘We meet again, perhaps.’
‘I do hope so,’ Grace said. Her disappointment melted away at once, like spring snow in a west wind.
Then there was another escort, in the reverse direction, past the portraits and insignia and out into the cold courtyard. When they reached the gates and Unter den Linden Grace turned to the SS man who evidently intended to accompany her back to the doors of the Adlon.
‘Thank you so much,’ she said clearly. ‘I am going to walk a little way on my own.’
There was an immediate straightening, and then the Nazi salute. ‘Heil Hitler.’
‘Heil Hitler,’ Grace responded.
She turned right, out of the gates, and began to walk through the crowds towards Friedrichstrasse. The people flowed past her, no longer looking curiously at her once she had left the palace gates and the guards.
The feelings of confusion and faint nausea left her at once.
She was thinking, I have been there. I sat and talked about Wagner to Hitler himself.
She looked at the faces of the people as they passed by her. Their expressions were stolid or sour or satisfied or anxious, like a parade of human fallibility. It struck her that they were lucky to be here, now, of all times, even if they did not seem to know it.
And what would they think, she wondered, in her strange exhilaration, if they knew where I have been?
She came to the corner of Friedrichstrasse and stood under a lamppost to look through the stream of cars and lumbering cream buses across to the Café Kranzler and the Café Linden on their opposite sides of the street. There were balconies of iron lace at the first-floor windows, and yellow lights blossoming behind them. She thought of going to sit at one of the white-coloured tables to smoke a cigarette and stare out through fogged glass at Berlin going by. She felt an affection for it, this brown and pungent city as it went through the shuddering pangs of rebirth.
Grace had no doubt that it would be reborn. Not after this afternoon, after the cream and gold drawing room and the man sitting at the centre of it.
But in the end she did not cross over through the traffic. She could see that the café tables were crowded with afterwork Berliners, and she knew that the rooms would be hot, and ripe with smoke and the smell of packed bodies and damp clothes. She turned back instead and walked the way she had come, past the Reichskanzler-Palais to the Adlon Hotel. Grace walked quickly, no longer looking at the people who passed her, with her own face turned up to the cold air.
Clio and Rafael had left the Café Josef. There had been an afternoon of talk, and heads drawn close over the puddled tables. Clio had sat listening, only half understanding the rapid colloquial German, content that Rafael trusted her enough to bring her here again. The men had eyed her at first, but her association with Rafael had seemed to be enough of a testament to her trustworthiness. They had soon forgotten her presence.
At length, the gathering had broken up. The men left separately, slipping one by one into the gloom outside, until only Clio and Rafael were left. Clio understood that the Café Josef was the headquarters of some kind of communist cell, and that Rafael was tangentially involved in the movement. The muttered plans and the secrecy and the very shabbiness of the conspirators themselves seemed to Clio to offer a pathetically small opposition to the Nazi ostentation of the brown city beyond the café window.
When they were alone Josef brought them coffee, hot in an earthenware jug, and they drank it quickly.
‘Are you a communist?’ Clio had asked Rafael.
‘No.’
‘What, then?’
‘A Jew. A humanist, I suppose.’
She had smiled then. ‘Like my father.’
Their eyes met. ‘I would like to meet him.’
‘I am sure you will, some day,’ Clio said softly. There seemed to be no point in a modest pretence that she did not know what was happening to them. The thought of Miles swam into her head like a fish in cloudy water, but she dismissed it again.
When they left the café, Josef had come with them to the door, nodding and smiling like some benevolent Pandarus. They had started to walk, without any destination in mind beyond being alone in the anonymous streets. After a little way Rafael took Clio’s arm and held it against the warmth of his farmer’s coat.
They were in the oldest part of the city, Alt-Berlin, in a network of narrow side streets spreading away from the bank of the Spree. There were few people about, and the old houses had an old-fashioned provincial aspect that Clio found reassuring. The last light was fading out of the strip of sky overhead, and gas lamps flared at the corners with street signs lettered in Gothic script projecting from them like accusing fingers. They turned at random, left and then right, watching their own breath as it condensed in clouds ahead of them.
They began the talking.
It was as if they had been holding their breath until now. They used a mixture of German and English, a hybrid language whose absurdities they were too engrossed to notice. All that mattered was to find out about one another, and in their greed for discovery they forgot the cold and the thickening darkness. Clio felt warmth radiating from Rafael as they fitted their steps together, moving hip to hip.
Rafael told her about growing up in the village in Thuringia. He described his schoolfriends and his mother and his father’s business, and the village festivals and the rituals of the farmer’s year.
‘It sounds very happy,’ Clio said.
‘It was. Until our mother died, when Grete was twelve and I was fifteen.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘How do you think it sounds if I say I am glad, now, that she has gone? I would not want her to be here to see what is happening to Germany.’
‘I understand that.’
His hand gripped her arm more tightly. ‘Do you?’
‘A little, I think. My father’s family are Jews, from Czechoslovakia originally. My grandparents are both dead now. They were remarkable people. I loved them very much.’
‘Tell me about when you were small.’
Clio told him about the house in the Woodstock Road, and the influxes of eager undergraduates, and Eleanor’s housekeeping, and about her brothers and sisters.
‘It sounds very happy,’ he echoed her, smiling. ‘So many of you children.’
/> ‘I was always closest to Julius.’
‘And your cousin, the Member of Parliament? The twin who is not a twin?’
‘Grace. Grace and I are like … weight and counterweight. Equal but needing opposition to balance us. Or like the two people in those little weather houses, one in and the other out, fair moods or foul. Or just oil and water in a bottle, our faces forever reflecting one another but our souls immiscible.’
‘But Julius loves her.’ It was a statement, not a question.
‘Yes. He always has done, ever since we were children.’
‘And you are jealous of that.’ Again, there was no questioning inflection. Clio considered a denial, and then she made herself tell the truth.
‘Yes.’
Rafael stopped walking. They were in the angle of two houses, where the street turned a sharp corner and one frontage projected beyond the other. The building nearest to them housed a little shop; Clio could see the wooden shutters over the window and faint gilt-coloured lettering on the fascia over the door. Behind Rafael’s head there was the spire of a church, a slender point of thicker blackness against the evening sky.
‘I was jealous of Grete when I first met you both,’ she said helplessly. ‘It is my failing.’
‘Don’t be jealous,’ Rafael whispered.
He leant forward, until his mouth touched hers. His hands came up and rested on her shoulders, and then he took her face and held it so that he could look down into her eyes. When he kissed her again his cheeks were cold, but his mouth and tongue seemed to burn.
Clio closed her eyes, and when she opened them the rooftops behind him and the church spire and the weight of the black clouded sky seemed to recede, shrinking away from them until they seemed to float together in some empty space. She was giddy, and clung to him because she was afraid that she might fall. But still she could feel reality in the cold of the stone paving striking up through the soles of her thin shoes, and she knew that a wind had begun to blow, bringing a spattering of rain with it.
‘You are shivering,’ Rafael said. He wrapped his arms around her, pulling her closer to him inside the sheepskin until she felt the contours of his body. He was much taller than Miles, and thin, without the soft pouches of flesh that Miles’s body had put on in the years of their marriage.
‘I’m not cold.’ She wanted to cling to this moment, without anything changing, for as long as she could. ‘Let’s walk some more. What happened when you grew up, when you left the village?’
‘I went to university, in Jena, to study law, and then to Dresden. Grete went to music college. The good children of bourgeois parents that we were. Then I practised for a time near Dresden, and Grete came to Berlin. I followed her here about eight years ago.’ He shrugged, and for the first time Clio sensed some bitterness in him. ‘There were good times. But I am a Jew, of course. Since the Nazis came to power we can only do what little we can. I have to learn now to help people in other ways, instead of through the law.’
Clio remembered again how fragile the resistance had seemed, in the Café Josef, against the machine of the Reich. She had no sympathy with the Bolsheviks, any more than with the Nazis. It was the brutality of the division itself that seemed too sad to contemplate.
She stumbled out with some words. ‘Why did you never marry?’
Rafael thought, and then he answered, ‘I don’t believe I ever gave myself the time. And then, afterwards, when there was time, it seemed that it was already too late. I was used to being alone. Is that a reason?’
‘I think so.’
The cold fish swam more insistently now, until she could no longer ignore it. The threat of it glittered at her. She was afraid that what she must say was going to alter everything, but she knew that she must say it. Clio looked ahead along the empty, murky street. She had the feeling that she was submerged, deep under water.
‘Rafael … I was, I am married. I married the wrong man at the wrong time, everything about our partnership was wrong, but I am still his wife.’
Rafael went on walking. The rhythm of his steps continued and his hold on her arm did not loosen. ‘Why are you here in Berlin?’
‘I … ran away. I can’t go back. I came here with Grace because she was planning the trip anyway and I so much wanted to see Julius. I thought it would be far enough away, and strange enough, for me to be able to submerge myself …’
‘Why can’t you go back?’ His voice sounded even, the essence of reason and logic.
‘Because I came home early one afternoon and found my husband in our bed with a man.’
He did stop then. They faced each other, and Clio made a small gesture of resignation. ‘I should have known all along what he was, but I managed to convince myself otherwise. I remember my cousin Grace asking at the pre-wedding party, “You’re not going to marry that little queer, are you?” I can’t recall what I said to her. It doesn’t matter now.’
Rafael took her hands. He rubbed them between his own to coax some warmth back into them. She loved him because he didn’t try to offer her any misplaced sympathy, or any retrospective wisdom. His silence left her free of obligation to describe any more of the mess of her life that she had left behind in London.
‘Clio.’ She also loved the way that he said her name, separating and drawing out the syllables as if he was unwilling to let them go. ‘Where do you want to go now?’
He was inviting her to look forwards, instead of into the past.
‘I want to go with you.’
‘Not back to the Adlon Hotel?’
‘No, not back there.’
‘If you do come with me, can you accept the other things that I am, also?’
Clio knew that he meant not only his race, but his political work, whatever that might really be, and his precarious foothold amongst the unmapped sands of Nazi Berlin. She felt no doubt, only a swift contraction of fear for him.
‘Yes,’ she said.
Rafael’s laugh startled her. He put his head back and laughed in pleasure like a noisy boy. ‘Come on, then,’ he ordered her, and she followed him.
There was a busier street running at right angles to theirs. They rounded the corner into it and Clio saw a U-bahn station ahead. Rafael drew her on and they descended into the turquoise-tiled depths that to Clio’s heightened senses echoed like a swimming bath.
The train when it came was crowded, and they stood close together in a press of people. Rafael put his arm around her shoulders to shield her. It could have been London in the rush hour, but for the Berlin smell and the faces surrounding them. Close up against Clio there was an old woman with a black scarf covering her head, and a man with seamed, brown skin who might have been a Turk or an island Greek, and a pale, exhausted boy who stared down at his own soaking shoes. Clio remembered each of them for a long time afterwards, as if they had been old friends.
At the end of the journey they emerged in Wilmersdorf, on the west side of the city. The seemingly identical residential streets were lined with rows of apartment houses, many of them with Nazi flags at the windows. Rafael lived in one of the blank-faced buildings. He led her up the shallow stairs to the first floor, and unlocked the door.
‘Do you really live here?’ she asked.
‘What did you expect?’ He smiled at her. ‘Something a little more bohemian? I am a respectable Jewish lawyer, not a person like your friend the painter.’
Clio thought for a moment of the old studio in Charlotte Street, and the mess of paint and empty bottles and dirty clothes; the divan where they had posed for The Janus Face, and of Pilgrim and Grace.
‘I am very glad that you are a respectable Jewish lawyer,’ she said primly.
He closed the door behind them.
There was a large room, the walls lined with books, and between the columns of books there were primitive paintings of mountains and forests that made splashes of intense green and blue amongst the brown leather bindings.
‘The paintings are Grete’s,’ Rafael said. ‘They
are of our home. I will take you there, some day.’
‘I would like that,’ Clio said.
‘And now.’ He took her coat and hat and put them neatly to one side. She saw that the room was full of papers and journals as well as books, but that everything was tidily arranged. The careful order of it all reminded her of Julius, except that wherever Julius lived was always barer than this, as if he wanted to be ready to move on at a moment’s notice.
‘Would you like some tea?’ he asked her. ‘Or something to drink?’
‘Nothing. Thank you.’
Now that they were here she felt suddenly awkward, and unsure even of how to hold herself, like some gauche schoolgirl. The years with Miles had made her feel that her body was in some way objectionable, a mildly embarrassing mistake to be overlooked wherever possible. She had to resist an impulse to cross her arms over her chest as Rafael looked at her.
‘Well, then,’ he said gently. With one hand he reached out and undid the buttons at the neck of her blouse. Clio almost sprang backwards away from him.
‘Come here,’ he said in the same mild voice.
She stood still now, and he undid more buttons to leave her shoulder exposed. He touched the skin with his mouth and she shivered.
‘Are you afraid?’ he asked, lifting his head again to look at her.
‘Not of you.’ It was so inconceivable that she smiled, and she saw the taut lines in his face relax at once. ‘Only of what happened before.’
‘Before is not now. Now is where we begin. You must forget before.’
His certainty was so simple that it disarmed her. She took a breath, and then she undid the last button herself. Her blouse fell in a heap at her feet, and as he watched her she stepped out of her skirt, and then discarded the crêpe-de-Chine folds of her underclothes.
