Clear the streets for the brown battalions!
Clear the streets for the stormtrooper!
Millions are looking upon the swastika full of hope,
The day of freedom and of bread dawns!
At first I assumed they were singing in mockery, a well-fed businessmen’s joke—defiant, subversive, even dangerous if there happened to be any SD plainclothesmen or party fanatics aboard, because this was that awful NSDAP anthem, the “Horst Wessel Lied,” and SD men were known for helping themselves to seats in first-class express trains, whether or not they had paid the fare.
In another moment people at tables up and down the length of the dining car had joined in. Businessmen and well-dressed women, singing with full throats, earnestly, and actually more or less in harmony. A gangsters’ song sung by a chorus of diners on a first-class express. While white-jacketed waiters stood rigidly at attention.
After the last verse there was stillness within the dining car. The racketing of steel wheels, but human silence. The truck wheels groaning a bit as the carriage leaned through a curve. Cigarette smoke drifting, blue.
Then the waiters went back to work, and slowly the murmur of conversation resumed. And I drifted out of the scene because I was thinking about Karin and what waited for me in Berlin. I was nervous as hell. Would she be awake when I arrived, probably not before 2:00 a.m.? Had the Hausmeister been informed of my arrival? If not, who would let me into the building? Never had I spent the night with a woman.
In this type of situation, was it customary to wear pajamas to bed?
I thought not, but had packed mine. Just in case.
Karin Weinbrenner was shy in bed, as if needing detachment from what we were doing. I was not expected to speak. She preferred that I did not. I had to hold her. She seemed terrified, but at the same time wanting this act to be done. Maybe the violence of the breeding sheds at Walden had stayed with her—I don’t know. It’s not great fun to see a thoroughbred stallion being put to a mare.
No doubt Lady Maire’s stern manners and physical remoteness had something to do with Karin’s withholding of herself. Because I was the first and I believe the only man she ever slept with. The defiant daughter, the Berlin flapper, the bohemian—yet she told me she’d never been intimate with another man.
“What about Longo?”
“Certainly not!”
Had she slept with Anna? I never asked her. Possibly.
When we were in bed I was aware there was something off, only I did not want to put my finger on it because she was beautiful, her body delicate, her skin lustrous and heated. Intimacy was fascinating, though a part of me could sense something that was withheld. I expected sex with her to be like flame—burning, flickering, illuminating. For her, I’d say the sex was like dodging down a rabbit hole, or a fox going to earth. In bed with me, I think, became somewhere safe she could hide. Inexperienced as I was, jejeune, immature, and in many ways stupid—a hobbledehoy—I sensed that quite soon. For me sex was an alternate universe, where everything was turned on its head, sex was the opposite of everything I did at IG Farben. For her, sex was a ritual that allowed her to feel grounded, earthbound. Sex was refuge.
That first night in the Charlottenburg flat, I seemed to be operating from a different region of myself, as if my body were an airplane my mind was trying to fly and barely succeeding. About to crash-land at any moment. To delay climax I made myself think of those burning aviators popping like sparks in the black sky over north London. Afterward I slept hard, and in the dawn we made this wordless, strenuous love again, then Karin had a bath. When she came out of the bathroom, I went in and shaved, bathed, dressed. Returning to the bedroom I found her dressed in a summer frock, holding a black straw hat to match.
“I hope that was all right,” she said.
“The bath? Fine. Plenty of hot water.”
“The bed, I mean.”
“Oh.”
“Do you have much experience in that area?”
“No, not really.”
“But it was all right, yes?”
“Yes, of course. More than all right.”
She gave my cheek a peck. “Now what shall we do with our day, Billy? Would you like to go to the zoo?”
“As you like.”
“Oh no, we must go out, you’ll want to feel the city. There’s nowhere like Berlin.”
We rode the lift down and had breakfast at the café across the street, at a table shaded by plane trees. It was cool enough so early.
She said, “You mustn’t think whatever’s wrong with me is wrong with you. It’s just these damned Germans sometimes I can’t bear.”
“Well, you’re German.”
“Light me a cigarette, would you? Let’s go to the zoo.”
Headed for Kurfürstendamm we passed a greengrocer’s shop. I saw the delivery bicycle bedecked with swastika flags and a young man in a grocer’s smock setting out pears on a table who smiled and wished us a friendly Guten Morgen. Karin returned the greeting and squeezed my arm.
“It’s hard when they pretend to be such decent chaps,” she said.
By then she was working at the Zionist Federation, but she was not happy there.
“The Zions consider they have made a deal, a bargain, with the Finanzamt, who says, Ja, we are all in favor of Jews for Palestine, good riddance, so long as they hand over money, property. It’s like the mouse bargains with the cat, Billy, where does it end? Badly for the mouses, I think.”
She said the Zionists hoped for support from her rich father but doubted they’d get any. “He hates to hear of people leaving Germany. Anyway he’s not so rich anymore.”
On the Kurfürstendamm a weekend mob, carrying rolled-up towels, knapsacks, picnic baskets, was headed for the parks and lakes that surround Berlin. She suddenly seemed in a brighter mood.
“Everybody in Berlin wishes to be out on the lakes,” she said. “Everyone wants a little boat to sail, shiny green with a black transom and white sails.”
“We could hire a boat.”
“Are you a sailor, Billy?”
“Not so you’d notice.”
“And your father was born a thousand miles from anywhere.” She slipped her arm through mine. “No, I don’t think sailing is quite the ticket. Some other time, perhaps. Today, the zoo. Listen to the monkey chatter. Perhaps take a nap. Things are always happy at the Tiergarten. Unless you’re an inmate, I suppose.”
I began hearing loud electric squawking. A loudspeaker truck. Looking over my shoulder I saw the ponderous gray beast slowly grinding down the boulevard. It was packed with drunken SA men. They were out hunting—I’d heard of them doing it in Frankfurt, though I’d not experienced it. The truck geared down and slowed to a crawl as it came up behind us. A schoolmasterly voice crackled from the loudspeaker.
“Nicht korrekt!”
Her arm was linked through mine. Without looking I could hear hoots and jeers from men standing in the back of the truck. I resisted an impulse to walk faster.
“Not correct to wear Frenchy clothes!” the loudspeaker railed. “Röter Lippenstift! Frenchy lipstick! It is not in keeping with the German Frau of today! Es is nicht richtig für deutsche Mädchen wie französisch Prostituierte aususehen! Nicht korrekt! Offensive!”
I turned us both about. She hung on to my arm. We started walking quickly in the opposite direction. The loudspeaker truck rumbled on, searching out fresh targets. A flow of faces streamed past us, normal faces of people hurrying, shopping, strolling on the K’damm.
That was always disorienting, the normalcy of the world. Berlin faces preoccupied with the business of living, shopping, eating.
The electric snarl broke out again; they’d found another target.
At the zoo we looked at the gorillas, the swimming hippos, the brooding yellow lions, then established ourselves on a bench in a corner shaded by plane trees, where she removed her shoes, lay down, put her head in my lap, and fell asleep.
Of all our weekends in Berlin
—really not so many—a good deal of our time we spent in bed. Sleeping, yes; lovemaking, yes; but also hours of reading or talking. Often we wouldn’t go to sleep until dawn. We’d sleep through the morning, awaken early in the afternoon. I usually was out of bed first, made coffee, brought it in to her. She’d be scribbling in her Kinds of Light notebook or reading poetry, always German, or a novel, often American, or working on office files, calculating the Reichsfluchtsteuer her clients would have to pay before they’d be allowed to escape.
I sometimes brought office work to Berlin, which I did in bed, feeling quite important. She didn’t mind; she had her own work. She quit the Zionists for the small agency Stefan Koplin started. I was sending German dyestuffs around the world. She and Kop were sending German Jews.
Her bedroom in Charlottenburg with afternoon light slanting through the French doors and the subtle rumble of the afternoon city was a wonderful place for us: safe, quiet, cool. She owned sets of beautiful sheets, Irish linen from flax fields and mills Lady Maire’s family owned in Belfast and Derry.
We were in bed when she told me it was Anna Rabou who had delivered the news she was fired from UFA.
“Poor Anna, it was her job to inform us. Such a difficult assignment! She expects us to feel sorry for her! Of course we all knew it must go that way. Only the famous, the bountiful Anna Rabou had been disguising reality to fool herself. She’d inhaled Nazi mist in her lungs. ‘One day you’ll be invited back’—that’s what she told me.”
“She’s a rat,” I said.
We both relished the fast, hard lingo of pictures like Public Enemy, Scarface. In gangster films, turncoats and informers were rats. By then we knew we were living in a gangster world.
“Well, the rats run the UFA now. I ought to have said, ‘Why then, my dear bloody woman, if this policy is disgusting, then resign! The rodent Dr. Goebbels is going to be running the shop any day!’ But, you know, I didn’t say a thing. They’d summoned a herd of taxis. Cars lined up to take Jews away so Germans could get on with the business of making pictures. I ought to have told Anna what’s what, in front of everyone. But I did not. I just got into my taxi. Such was the last scene, dénouement, of my career at UFA. Not very effective dramatically, I agree.”
During those months while Lady Maire was dying, soft-spoken people from the Städel Museum crept around Haus-Walden preparing an inventory of her art collection for the tax authorities.
Eilín loathed the assistant curator, Herr Speck, in his brown suit and gray shoes, tiptoeing about with a notebook and magnifying glass while the baroness lay upstairs, bedsores rupturing and leaking blood, ruining featherbeds and mattresses. When he dared poke his nose into Lady Maire’s bedroom, my mother hurled a silver hairbrush at him, and he scurried away. That evening at Newport Eilín told us the story, trying to make it sound funny, but ending up in tears.
Had I seen her cry before? I can’t remember.
My mother and the baron took turns reading Somerville and Ross stories aloud to the dying woman. Herta and my mother bathed her with soft sponges and rubbed ointments into her yellow skin, and all the while meticulous preparations for the looting of the Walden estate went forward.
Karin made a few quick visits home in those months, never staying more than a night or two. I might catch a glimpse of her, but she came and went very quietly, like a leaf on the wind. My mother told us Lady Maire had asked Karin to fetch clothes from her dressing room, and Karin collected armfuls of gowns and laid them on the bed where her mother could touch them, handle them.
Whenever I was up in Berlin we generally avoided any mention of Walden. I felt guilty about lying to my parents. I think Karin felt frustrated, helpless, and angry about the fact her mother was dying, knowing now they would never enjoy a closer, sweeter relationship.
Berlin, even after three years of the regime, still had the flash that sleepy old Frankfurt lacked. Berlin still was a neon town.
A Saturday afternoon. April 1936.
I came in on the train, met Karin at her dingy office, and took her to lunch at a café on Unter den Linden. We had just finished lunch when Anna von Rabou came onto the terrace. I recognized her at once from all the stories in the illustrated papers. She was tall, powerful—stately, I would say. Handsome, not pretty. A bit horse-faced but distinguished looking. In age, halfway between Karin and her mother. She was still publishing books and writing films while other writers were being cut off or forced into exile. Her husband, Fred Scheps, had fled to Hollywood and wasn’t coming back.
Anna was with a group of people, very fashionably dressed and jolly. They were just sitting down when she caught sight of Karin and immediately left her friends to approach our table.
I rose to meet her; Karin sank lower in her chair. Anna shook my hand, then bent over to brush Karin’s cheek with her lips. Karin sat slumped, staring straight ahead, like a sculpture made of wax.
Anna had a lot of self-assurance. She could put on a pretty good show. She sat down. Taking a pack of English cigarettes from her purse, she offered them to us, and I accepted one to be polite. Karin shook her head.
Anna turned her attention to me. She seemed to know all about my family, our relationship with the Weinbrenners.
“Such an interesting background you have, Herr Lange. Lange is a good German name, but then you are not really a German are you? And not really an Englishman, either. Is this what it means to be Irish, so will-o’-the-wisp?”
“Ich bin ich.” I am who I am.
“Well!” She smiled. “That means nothing whatsoever, does it? A man these days ought to be able to state exactly who he is and what he’s about.”
“What are you about, Frau von Rabou?”
I’d had a couple of aperitifs, and her challenging manner provoked me. She was like a battleship sailing into our quiet harbor and leveling her guns.
“Very simply, Herr Lange, I’m a storyteller. I am working to make sense of this country of ours in its difficult time. I am part of a machine. I struggle; I do my bit; I hold out for the same values I’ve always held dear.”
It was startling how much she resembled Karin’s mother—same height, same calm, same severity. They were both from old-fashioned military families, so perhaps the resemblance wasn’t so surprising.
“Our Karin, I know—I feel—she still burns with anger that I chose to keep on with work at the studio. The unjustice of it, pogroms against innocent Jews, betrayal of artistic values, etcetera. She thinks it is a pack of ruffians I’m thrown in with, I have traded virtue for a little tag of fame.
“I wish, Herr Lange, you would explain to the child, since she won’t listen to me, and has returned all letters I’ve written over the past two years, that her Anna doesn’t know where fame lies. Doesn’t know or care where the riches are to be found, or praise—doesn’t have a clue about any of that. Her Anna remains the same person she was, an artist who does her work and hopes to contribute something to the nation.
“Do assure our little friend, Herr Lange, that her Anna disapproves of treatment the Jews have received. On this subject my position is crystal clear. Foreigners are one thing, but Jews who are good Germans, it’s shameful. There are many who share my feelings.
“But perhaps the will of the Volk has displaced the Jews for just a little while so that new hands might steer the ship. Once these hands are more confident, things will relax, and the chosen people will be welcomed back. The best Jews are good Germans.”
Karin stood up without a word and disappeared inside the café.
“Ah so,” said Anna. “She’s not doing herself any good by the high-handed way she’s behaving.”
She put out her cigarette and stood up. She never showed the slightest discomfort or unease. I stood, and she offered me her hand.
“Give her my most sincere love. Tell her no matter how she behaves, her Anna holds her dear.”
We shook hands. I watched her rejoin her friends. She spoke, and they all started putting on hats and coats, though the
ir drinks hadn’t arrived yet. Anna Rabou put some money on the table and they left. She didn’t look back.
Karin must have been watching from inside. As soon as Anna was gone, she came back out on the terrace.
“All right?” I asked.
“Billy, I was in love with this woman. Like a mother she was. Much more, actually.”
I didn’t know what to say.
“It’s finished, however. She’s spoiled it. Even the memory. Don’t you ever do anything to spoil it, Billy. Don’t you dare.”
Later that Olympic summer, 1936.
Lady Maire was close to death. A telegram was sent to Charlottenburg, summoning Karin, and I was dispatched to meet her train. By then I was the owner of a small secondhand car, a model called a Wanderer. Not much of a car, really, but sturdy, cheap, and practical.
I drove out through the iron gates and across the river. Cold breezy night for summer. It was late, but the Hauptbahnhof was busy: serious trains had just arrived; others were just pulling out. The Hauptbahnhof aroma of steel, of cinders, electric brakes. Dust and rubbish and old newspaper pages swirled along the platforms.
The express from Berlin slid in on schedule. Stepping from a second-class carriage, she saw me and waved.
We greeted each other on the platform with our customary awkwardness and hesitation. It was always there, at first, whatever it was. Wariness. Being in Frankfurt made things even more awkward, somehow, and we kissed clumsily, like dutiful second cousins. I took her suitcase and we walked out to my old car.
I started driving for the bridge, and she took a cigarette from her purse.
“Do you want to go somewhere and have a drink?” I asked.
Carry Me Page 32
