My grandmother Con considered herself an aristocrat. She never had money to spare, but that was how she saw herself. An aristocrat was a person who didn’t need care about ordinary things, like new clothes or paying bills or checking her bank balance. An aristocrat couldn’t be expected to make her own bed, do her own laundry, or clean her own bathroom. She might set her own peat fire very neatly and light it with a single match, but she couldn’t be expected to carry her own turves, nor should she be expected to wash up after dinner. An aristocrat cared for horses and books and dinner conversation with interesting people. An aristocrat paid attention to the sky and the weather and never listened to the wireless. An aristocrat might drive a car, but badly. Dogs and horses loved aristocrats. Aristocrats loved their children, who often misunderstood them.
On a fine soft day late in October, my mother, my aunt Kate, and I watched my grandmother gallop a point-to-point race in county Leitrim. Con rode a big stallion, Dan of the Mountains, which she’d been given to ride because no one else could manage him, and even the British Army horse purchasers didn’t want him.
Con had warned my mother to put every penny she could on Dan of the Mountains to win. Eilín was no gambler, nor was my father. They both faced enough uncertainty in their lives and didn’t wish to take more chances than absolutely required. But Eilín also believed my grandmother Con possessed a certain magic, a certain radiance. Call it luck. And she was a gallant rider of big, rough horses.
The Leitrim point-to-point was a small event, but in those days in that part of Ireland, people took seriously anything to do with horses. Bookmakers out from Sligo and Enniskillen stood on their boxes in a meadow, taking wagers. Eilín put eleven pounds and eleven shillings, our entire fortune, on Dan of the Mountains to win, and when the stallion galloped home first, we had the money we would need when the war ended a few days later and we had to rush back to London.
The guns stopped firing at eleven o’clock in the morning on November 11, 1918. Three days later Eilín and I were aboard the mail train for Dublin. If ever I said goodbye to my grandfather McDermott, I don’t remember it. He died in Londonderry a year later, knocked down by a lorry outside the RIC barracks in Leckey Road. They gave him a grand Republican funeral at Sligo cathedral. Grainne had left for Boston by then.
1938
When I informed Dr. Anton Best, my chief, that I intended to resign from IG Farben and emigrate to Canada, he sat back in his chair and gazed at me.
Signatory executives like Best—at IG Farben you never knew what they were thinking, unless they chose to tell you, and then you were never sure it was the whole truth.
Anton Best, as far as I knew, wasn’t a party member. When he’d learned of my connection to the Baron von Weinbrenner, whose Colora GmbH was one of the founding companies of the IG Farbenindustrie cartel, he’d spoken respectfully.
“The old fellow, he knew his stuff. Probably has fifty patents to his name. Some of the colors he came up with—they’ll never be topped. It’s disgraceful, actually, the way he’s been treated.”
I’d been an IG Farben man for eight years. They’d treated me decently, but our department, export sales, had become a backwater after management began aligning its business strategy with the Nazi instinct for autarky. The directors were investing millions in programs for developing synthetic rubber—buna—and synthetic fuel and seemed no longer much interested in selling pharmaceuticals and dyestuffs to the rest of the world.
What they were doing, of course, was preparing for war.
I’d always had an excellent salary. Promotions came on schedule. The truth was, if you survived your first couple of years at IG Farben, they believed they owned you for life, and sometimes it was tempting to believe they did, but after that letter from Günter Krebs I knew I needed to take my life back before it was tossed into the future’s bubbling black pot.
“If a war comes, holding a British passport, I should be in a very tough spot,” I said.
Dr. Best hadn’t invited me to sit down. IG executives at the signatory level never invited junior men to sit down.
“You needn’t explain,” he said.
“For a man in my position, it’s an awkward situation.”
“I understand perfectly. You needn’t say more. Shall I date your termination effective the end of this week? Is that suitable?”
“Perfectly.”
“You’ll want to see the bookkeepers as regards your Pensionskasse and sort through all that.”
He was a brilliant chemist, Dr. Best. Before joining IG Farben he’d been a professor at Marburg University. He held a number of patents himself.
In 1944 he was assigned to the IG plant at Auschwitz-Monowitz—I read this in a book after looking up his name in the index. I’ve often thumbed through indexes looking for names. For six months in 1944, Dr. A. Best oversaw methanol production at the Monowitz plant, which operated with slave labor. Then he became ill—the illness unspecified—and was sent back to Frankfurt.
“I’m actually surprised you have delayed until now,” he said.
“Well, my parents are here. Rather difficult to leave them.”
“Your parents are English aren’t they? They ought to leave this country whilst they can. It won’t get any easier for them here. Well, Godspeed, and viel Glück.”
After work I went immediately to the travel bureau on the Zeil to confirm our passage on the Dutch liner.
“Well, my friend, you are lucky to have reserved two tickets, I’ll tell you,” the agent remarked. “I might have sold those three times over.”
“Is that so?”
He was a young fellow, blond hair slicked down, wearing a sharply cut gray suit with a tiny party membership badge—red ring around crooked cross—pinned to his lapel.
“There’s nothing left at the price you’re paying! Every sailing from Le Havre, Rotterdam, Antwerp, Belgian—for New York, Montreal, Halifax, New Orleans—ausverkauft.” Sold out. “I have Jews pleading for those ships. Paying through the nose, they are.”
I asked to look at a railway timetable and checked train connections Frankfurt to Rotterdam while he dealt with a family of Jews whose house in Giessen had burned down. They were going for Madagascar via Lisbon, I overheard.
Probably their home had been torched by a gang of miscreants. That sort of thing was happening to Jews in rural districts of Hesse.
That railway timetable Reichsbahn Kursbuch—Westdeutschland handled like a pocket Bible, thick and soft, dense with small print, and stoked with information, all of it in some sort of code.
I was half listening to the agent scolding the Giessen Jews. “Once again, I must repeat: they will ask to see all documents before you are permitted to board!”
They looked to me like country people. The father and older son could have been livestock dealers or sold farm equipment. Maybe they’d owned a shoe shop or a grocery store.
I focused on the timetable. Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof to Mainz to Köln, across the Dutch frontier, change at Utrecht for Rotterdam.
It was time to get out.
Rotterdam–New York–Texas–Hollywood–Vancouver.
We’d be free, at last. Or safe, at least.
That was the plan.
THE DEPORTEES
Holograph letter. Signed M v. Weinbrenner, addressed Mrs. H. Lange, Villa Moselle, 9 Dukes Avenue, London N10, postmarked Frankfurt am Main 28.12.1918. Lange Family Archive, 12 C-12-1918. Special Collections, McGill Library, McGill University, Montreal.
HAUS WALDEN
Frankfurt am Main
Xmas Day 1918
My dear Eileen,
We were relieved to hear from you and pray Captain Lange will soon be released. The baron says—you must come out to Germany as soon as able to travel, there is the guest cottage—‘Newport’—with plenty of room for you. This house has been a Home for wounded Officers since 1915, but we will have it back in our hands before long, and then you will come out here. People are starving in Germany. This m
orning our Cook reported seeing Crows hung in the butcher’s window and a queue waiting to buy it. The baron had a slight wound two years ago otherwise we are well. More than I can say in this note, my dear girl—only you must come to Germany my dear we shall have a home ready for you all.
Affectionately,
M. v. Weinbrenner
Holograph letter. Eilín McDermott Lange[?] to Heinrich Lange[?], undated, no envelope, no postmark. Lange Family Archive. 12 C-01-1919 Special Collections, McGill Library, McGill University, Montreal.
My dearest
I can’t see it. The W’s are grand people the bolsheviks must go after them and then what will happen with us…you ask for more than I can give, be calm you say but you’ve been asleep 4 years I have nothing more of calmness…this cold river this Germany is an iron trap, they hate us here, I feel it, B. has a horrid cough
I hear guns
I know Lady M will do her best I know but what is possible? I am [in?] despair this wet morn I confess
Your
E
Holograph letter. Heinrich Lange to Eilín McDermott Lange. Lange Family Archive. 12 C-01-1919 Special Collections, McGill Library, McGill University, Montreal.
ABOARD BARGE ‘ST ANTONIUS’
on R. Rhine
Approaching Sankt Goar,
42 hrs 19 min out from R’dam
8:31 January 7th 1919
My dear wife,
Don’t despair. Don’t. Lady M is loyal to offer refuge at Walden. As to how I shall put bread in our mouths, all will become clear. A skipper once more—a groom or stableboy—I don’t care. What matters is we three together & safe. I believe the boy will be all right, he is a strong fellow, so you are not to worry as you are doing. Right now I see him taking cocoa from kind Vrouw van Plaas and he really seems in excellent spirits, I think you will tear yourself to pieces if you worry over each cough. All right?
I understand worry. He needs warmer clothes for Germany. Yes. We will manage this—
Well we are nearing the end of our tiresome journey. I raise my eyes and look at you across the deck how wonderful you seem. Brave and true. I hope to be worthy of you.
I wish to know you better than I know how.
Good day to you, my brave, my lovely wife,
Your,
BUCK
They are not conversing, only sharing a park bench, but they are obviously a couple, though my mother wears no wedding band. A bitter north London day. My father breathes steam in thin white puffs. He doesn’t look strong, but he is very well turned out, in his cashmere overcoat, silk scarf, and gray homburg.
Buck had lost so much weight that none of his prewar clothes fit. A couple of days before his release my mother had brought his best suit to an internee tailor at Ally Pally, who made the necessary alterations.
In his pocket there is a letter from the Home Secretary ordering him to leave the United Kingdom. We are being deported to Germany.
My father hopes we may be allowed to go to Australia instead. He has made an application at Australia House on the Strand.
My mother’s gray-gloved hand rests on my father’s knee, and his hand covers hers. With his other hand he grips the silver knob of his walking stick, her wedding present to him. Where had it spent the war?
Their bodies are close but not touching.
The scene handles like a photograph in my mind. Does its stillness suggest domestic tranquillity, poise, companionship?
Unease, wariness, fear?
I’m not in the photograph; I hover just outside the frame, watching them, trying to decide where I fit in. Is there room for me on the park bench between my parents?
Should I move in a bit closer? He will look up and smile at me in a friendly way, but each smile costs him something, and I want him to save his strength. He is thirty-four.
Sitting on a park bench in London’s gathering dark, my parents must have been wondering—What next?
Their son—believing himself their sentry, scout, guardian—wants them intact, safe. The night is damp, cold. Eilín dreads bringing Buck to our lodgings, on Dukes Avenue once more, where the corridors still stink of old soup and dirty carpets, and the lodgers might raise a fuss. Before Ally Pally he didn’t have a German accent, but now he does. He’s ever so much more German than he was in 1914.
Her feelings must be as tangled as those reels of barbed wire on Ally Pally hill. She doesn’t know what to expect from her husband or what she has to give him.
They finally get up from the bench, it’s just too cold to stay any longer, and she calls for the boy, who drifts nearer, and the three of them start walking out through the park’s damp darkness. At the bus stop they wait in silence. When the bus arrives they climb aboard, she pays the conductor, and they find seats. She takes a packet of biscuits from her handbag and offers them to her husband and son. They each accept a biscuit, and then it seems they are all a bit happy; they have pulled something, a little pleasure, from the blackness and fog as the bus, lit up inside, trundles its route through north London.
My parents needed to live again as husband and wife: one bedroom, one bed. At our lodgings on Dukes Avenue, I was dispatched to an attic room that had belonged to a scullery maid who went home to Ireland after her brother was killed in France on the last day of the war. Everything—iron bed, walls, floor, ceiling—was painted white. A rosary composed of white glass beads sat in a glinting huddle on the bureau. The atmosphere retained the musty scent of another person. I named the ghost Lily and brought offerings pilfered from the kitchen or from the other lodgers’ rooms, which I left on the bureau: a piece of chocolate, an orange, an apple I cut into sections with a penknife I stole.
Of course I ended up eating the stuff myself. I relished the solitude at the top of the house. The only other person I ever saw up there was the new Irish kitchen maid who had the other attic bedroom and paid no attention to me. I liked to imagine my room was a forgotten place no one knew of, no one remembered, and no one would discover. My whole existence was secret—that was why I had to pilfer food from downstairs. In fact I barely existed—no one else could see me at all. I was the only one who knew there was a me. Mice scratched the walls and scampered across my blankets at night—I didn’t care. My whole body resonated with a tight sense of well-being. Concealment was security.
Sliding out drawers of the bureau and using them for a ladder I could reach my one narrow window. The frame was sticky, but with the penknife I could pry it open, then crawl out onto the steep pitch of blue-black slates.
North London’s night air was a stew of coal smoke and fog. Perched on the roof of the Villa Moselle, No. 9 Dukes Avenue, Muswell Hill, looking out across the glower of the city, I lit a cigarette from the flat tin of Sweet Aftons Mick had given me just before we left Sligo. I was nine years old, but in Ireland boys even younger smoked cigarettes whenever they could get them, or pipes made of clay.
I was glad my father was occupying what had been my half of my mother’s bed; I did not begrudge him the warmth. I was relieved to have two parents again. Perhaps I would have resented him more had there not been those episodes when I’d sensed her pulling away from me, preparing to plunge. When, by emotional telepathy, I had just managed to pull her back.
I knew she needed my father. We both did.
Australia turned us down, so it would have to be Germany, though my mother spoke only a bit of German and I none at all.
There were rich Lange cousins in Hamburg, but they had never forgiven Captain Jack for the disastrous gamble on the California grain trade, which had bankrupted the family firm. Buck insisted it was out of the question to expect help from them. He thought we must settle in a seaport—Bremerhafen, Kiel, even Hamburg—and he would try to find a position in the merchant marine.
He must have known he’d be competing with thousands of unemployed officers from the kaiser’s beloved Imperial German Navy who had scuttled their ships at Scapa Flow rather than hand them over to the Royal Navy.
B
uck’s German accent came out when he was tired, which he often seemed to be, and it irritated my mother. So did certain sly habits he’d picked up at Ally Pally, such as carrying away food from the dinner table—crusts of bread, even scraps of meat—hidden in his pockets. And he never got out of bed before ten o’clock and took protracted afternoon naps. I think sleep had been his fortress in Ally Pally; he had trained himself to hide there from the killing boredom. But now my mother and I were his world, and he seemed to be hiding from us.
One morning he appeared at the breakfast table meticulously dressed but with silver stubble on his cheeks. At Ally Pally the prisoners didn’t shave every day; they couldn’t afford to wear out their precious razor blades.
My mother shot him a look of such cold fury. She hated seeing any traces of prisonerhood on him.
Waiting for his temporary passport to arrive, Buck spent afternoons sitting on benches in the London parks. Coal smoke and light rain. I can see him on a green bench on Hampstead Heath, wrapped in his overcoat, clutching his stick, and staring at…at what? Ducks in the pond? Green of wet grass blades? The freedom of hungry brown birds? He is too well dressed to be mistaken for a tramp or a shipwrecked sailor.
Eilín had gone back to the pawnshop where she’d left her wedding band. The old Jewish pawnbroker had scrupulously held on to it, so she was able to redeem the ring, and I watched her push it onto her finger. We rode the bus back to Muswell Hill to find an elegant linen envelope engraved with the Walden crest—shamrock and cornflowers entwined—in the letter basket.
Carry Me Page 11
