News from Berlin

by Otto de Kat

  *

  “Dear friends.” Carl stood up, glass in hand. It took a while for the chatter to die down at the long table linking the front and back rooms. The twenty guests sitting shoulder to shoulder gave an impression of resoluteness. They rallied themselves.

  “Dear friends, welcome to this house of abundance. You have all contributed marvellously. I counted a dozen omelettes, five sandwiches, twenty plates of soup, seven heads of lettuce, one cucumber, two loaves of bread, and twenty napkins – take care, the latter are not edible.”

  Carl spoke as if it were peacetime. The late sun made the wine sparkle in the glasses raised to Emma.

  “My dearest Emma, here is to you, to another year with you. May the war be over by the end of it, may we all be gathered together again a year from now.”

  Glasses were clinked, smiles were beamed at Emma and Carl, it was like a wedding feast. In the middle of war, in the middle of Germany, could it be true that they were all there while pretending to be elsewhere? Emma felt for Carl’s hand and squeezed it under the table. Their lives had gone underground, their love was not intended for the eyes of others. Everything beyond this room and this company of friends had become suspect.

  Opposite Emma sat Adam Trott. All the guests knew each other well, there was not a shred of mistrust, a safer ambience was hard to imagine. He rose to his feet. Adam, the tireless mediator between the most miscellaneous opponents of the regime. A troupe of individuals scattered by the storm, keeping their heads down until further notice, biding their time with dreams of freedom.

  Adam was an optimist. Emma admired him for what Carl had told her about him, but more for him as a person. She heard him evoke the Germany of his youth, for which he was so intensely nostalgic. That Germany had been stolen from them, but it still existed, smouldering underground as a moorland fire. With a lover’s zeal, he entreated his audience not to forsake their country.

  She had not known him to make such an impassioned speech before. He was not addressing her in particular, although he had begun by putting his arm around her and offering his congratulations. A hush had fallen. Adam did not raise his voice, but each word was charged with electricity. He conjured an ideal vision which was common to them all, because they had forged it together; he lifted the curtain on their workaday hardship, revealing the pitiful circumstances in which they were forced to live: the lack of justice in the law courts, the overweening callousness, the snitching that had become the norm, the dearth of all hope and love. Sweeping statements, to be sure, but despite the pathos and the rhetoric, Adam spoke with such conviction that they had to believe him. Shoulder to shoulder, glasses aloft, that fourth day of June, 1941, had felt like a triumph of sorts, a foretaste of what was to come, what would ultimately be theirs.

  The evening was perfect, the best Emma had ever had in Germany. Adam was applauded, his eyes shone, he had the air of a soldier called up for service and eager for battle. And with reason: he felt himself a soldier, for all that his battles were fought without guns. The ministries in Berlin were caught up in a guerrilla war between administrators and clerks, divisions and subdivisions, spies and counter-spies. Adam found his arm being twisted by Himmler’s minions on a daily basis.

  But on the evening of Emma’s birthday, with the sun’s heat lingering in the gardens of Dahlem and not a single aircraft to be heard, all was clear and transparent. She felt reconciled with the way her life was going, with the empty days without Carl, the anguish of the war, the yearning for a normal existence, for children, for her father and mother. Carl was not aware of her moods of despair. She had never told him, nor had she told him about Watse’s warning. This was her party, her night of radiance, free of all grudge and fear. The radio was switched on and they danced; there was a gramophone, and records of banned singers. Were the windows closed tight, and the curtains? Dancing on a volcano, feet tripping lightly over a floor of flames. Ich bin von Kopf bis Fuss. Until the first rays of sunshine in the morning.

  Chapter 8

  Apart from Lara nobody knew he was going to London. He informed his office that he was spending a few days in the mountains. Swissair B 320 took about three hours to fly to Lisbon. Once there, he had to find some way of boarding a plane to England: quite a challenge, as there was only one flight a day and many prominent individuals seeking passage. Fortunately, the name Desmond Morton worked wonders. At Lisbon Airport he was promptly assigned to an extra flight scheduled for the following evening.

  Time was racing by, and Oscar’s desperation grew. It had taken a whole week to get in touch with Morton, precious days in which his information was going to waste. Just as well there had been only one day’s delay in Lisbon. Lisbon, a strange, forgotten city, and at the same time an international laboratory for espionage, and a small paradise for diplomats. Everyone was watching everybody else, in almost unbroken sunshine, in the Cidade da Luz, the City of Light. Should he pay a visit to his friend van Oldenborgh, who organised support for refugees? Another time perhaps, better not attract attention. He avoided the Dutch embassy for the same reason. The last time he called there he had been infuriated by the then envoy, the impossible, pedantic Sillem, the man who failed to lift a finger to help the motley crowd of stranded compatriots, simply abandoning them to their fate. Oscar couldn’t abide him, neither could van Oldenborgh.

  Oscar took the tram uphill to Alfama, the old fishermen’s quarter in the middle of the city. From there he looked out over the River Tagus and listened to the sing-song tones of Portuguese spoken around him. A scattering of palm trees put him in mind of Africa; there was a Moorish feel to the place. But he paid little attention to his surroundings, all he wanted was to find some peaceful spot to escape the oppressive heat of the downtown area. The outdoor café he stopped at was almost empty. The sun shone on the Tagus, with its wide mouth leading out to the ocean. Cargo boats chugged upriver, fishing craft moored at the quays, pilot boats sent up curves of spray as they raced to their clients, yachts sailed leisurely to sea. It left him cold, all of it. It was as if a huge screen had been unrolled upon which the scene on the river was projected: unreal, obscure, a magic-lantern performance that had nothing to do with the real world. He heard seagulls, church bells, children playing in the alleys, the sounds of a lost age. It felt unseemly to be sitting there, as if he were shirking his duty. Which was what he had done, of course. He had tried his utmost to push Emma’s news to the back of his mind, pretend she had never told him. Only when that didn’t work, and the realisation hit him that he had no choice but to warn Morton, had he set about booking a flight. It had all taken days and days. Morton’s arm was long, but even for him Switzerland was a difficult nut to crack. In Portugal apparently he had more influence.

  *

  For the past three months Lara had occupied him without pause. Occupied was not the right word: too matter-of-fact. She held sway over him without touching, infusing every chamber of his soul with warmth. Even that was a poor description, like some old-fashioned fairytale romance; no, it would not do. Try as he might, he was unable to put his dreamed life with Lara into words. How she looked, moved, spoke, kept silent, asked a question. He felt himself the keeper of a warehouse of gestures and words, he was a repository of feelings both processed and raw. She took him back to the days before the death of his father, to an age of innocence. She was a wondrous, distant echo of the girl who had kissed him on the mouth in a fathomless past, and breathed life into him.

  His memories of their first days together were all tangled up. His confusion had not abated since that day in Café Eiger and their walk the next morning – not before ten, she had said, and he had been there at ten.

  “Hello, Oscar, quite a change from yesterday, isn’t it?” The sun had not yet risen above the Jungfrau, which stood out against the deep blue sky in almost lurid contrast. Waiters were shovelling the snow off the terrace into banks along the edges. There was one couple having breakfast with their overcoats on, waiting for the sun to burst upon them.

>   “Germans,” Lara muttered. “Complete fanatics.” Oscar, ever on his guard, peered at them. But they seemed harmless: the man and the woman were far too showily dressed, and besides, he had only decided to go skiing on the spur of the moment two days earlier. But should he not, for his part, have made some enquiries about Lara? He dismissed the idea at once, feeling almost ashamed.

  “Shall we walk to Kleine Scheidegg?” He had made the suggestion casually, as if that was what they had already agreed to do. Going to sit with her at a table again seemed a little daunting. The previous day had been the longest café-table session of his life: an avalanche of impressions as he came under the spell of the woman he was with, who had dropped from the snowy sky like a falcon on a field mouse.

  Lara van Oosten, forty-one years old, whose life, according to her, seemed to be over. No children, and a boyfriend she had once loved, but whose whereabouts now were unknown. He might be dead, in fact that was quite likely. In any case, he had vanished. The story of her life. She evoked in him a sharp ache of yearning which he had not known since boyhood, when books and poems were opening up a dizzying range of possibilities, when he met the girl who whisked him away from an existence flowing calmly along its steady course. Now, aged fifty-six, he found himself well and truly at sea.

  He had held her hand for the last hundred metres back to her hotel, because it was slippery underfoot, and she might fall. Her hand in his for a hundred metres. That was what it all came down to: her hand had never let go. He had left her on the terrace of Hotel Jungfrau. At the very last, he had pulled her glove off her hand and held her warm palm against his cheek. A minor embrace with major consequences. Naked, the intimacy could not have been greater.

  The walk from Hotel Jungfrau to Kleine Scheidegg was not steep, a mere stroll to a mountaineer, but Lara and Oscar had made their way carefully, slowly, as if they were waiting for something to happen. They had paused often. A rumbling noise coming from the side of the mountain was the echo of a small avalanche, they saw it rolling towards them in slow motion, innocently far off, in a landscape sculpted by avalanches.

  Excitedly, she pointed to a group of chamois high on the flank of the Jungfrau.

  “Were those goats what you were looking at with your binoculars?”

  She smiled and laid her hand on his sleeve.

  “Such curiosity! No, that was not what I was looking at, because they weren’t there. I was trying to spot a party of mountain climbers I had talked to in the village. One of them reminded me of Harold.”

  She had told him about Harold, the man she had lost, to what or to whom she was not sure. The years with him had been wonderful and exciting. And they had ended as abruptly as they had begun. Three years ago she received a letter from him saying that he would not be returning to Switzerland. They had both been working in Basel when he was suddenly called away. He was a petrochemical engineer, she had a job at the university, they lived quite near each other and they had never married. Still, he had been her anchor among all those Swiss. In his last letter he said he had joined the army, special branch, he did not go into any detail. As an Englishman he could not refuse the call of duty. He had asked her to give notice to his landlord and to sell off his furniture; the proceeds were hers to keep.

  “I dream about him quite regularly, always the same dream. That he’s right there all of a sudden, and I want to scream at him, but no sound comes out of my mouth.”

  Oscar was put in mind of Kate, who had used the same terms to describe her years with Roy, her first husband: wonderful and exciting. As she had told him little else, those years had assumed mythical proportions: the prime of Kate and Roy in the gilded early years of the twentieth century. Later, she had rebuilt her life with Oscar, a life of measure, a life of appointment diaries and dinners and much waiting. Waiting for a new posting, for Emma, for news from a world in disarray. Berlin had been the watershed. Kate had cast off convention and expectation to become a theatre assistant in the Charlottenburg hospital. There, the flood of insanity came pouring in by ambulance and stretcher: stab wounds, gunshot wounds, broken bones, smashed arms and legs, bleeding heads. An unending stream of casualties, victims of the violence perpetrated by the bullies against Jews or Communists. Kate knew more about what was going on than all the diplomats around her dinner table combined. She had first-hand knowledge of how far the hatred had progressed.

  *

  What was the time? Settled on his sub-tropical café terrace, Oscar whiled the afternoon away. Time had little meaning there, the siesta cancelled out all sense of urgency. He was easily drawn into the slow rhythm of a Portuguese day. He settled the bill and strolled to the tram stop. The Alfama was waking from a deep afternoon slumber, doors were opened, there was shouting and laughter. From a radio came fado music, the pride of the nation. He was not impressed. Misjudged melancholy came to mind. He remembered an evening with Envoy Sillem and his entourage, and having to endure never-ending rounds of those mournful songs. Still, Lisbon was a breath of fresh air after Berne. The city of light with the tang of brine in the breeze, the squares with palm trees, the men with their arms around each other, the gesticulations, the women in colourful dress. And no sign of war, no threat, just a strip of land on the margin of the continent, overlooked. All over Europe the lights were going out, but not there. Portugal was a lighthouse in a darkened landscape.

  The downhill ride took much longer than going up, with many more people getting off and on as the tram made its leisurely, summery way to the centre.

  Equally leisurely had been the cog-wheel train to Lauterbrunnen, nosing down the track towards the valley, down to the mainline station and ordinary trains, back to their ordinary lives. To the parting of their ways. He sat opposite Lara, his travel bag leaning against hers, which gave him the odd sensation of having achieved something. Bag nudging bag was not such a big leap from hand in hand. The thought of her clothes folded up in her luggage was pleasing in itself. Their knees touched from time to time; the compartment was small and the incline steep. They had not spoken, they had looked out of the window, seen nothing but fir trees, top-heavy with snow. In the glass Oscar caught his reflection and Lara’s in the illuminated interior, their faces averted and quiet. Two days in comparison with a lifetime was nothing, two days could not amount to much.

  A conductor passed nimbly from one carriage to the next. He paused a moment on an outside ledge to close the door behind him and open the one in front, an acrobat in the service of ticket inspection, stepping from one moving carriage to the next, each with its own complement of passengers with different destinations and yet all part of the same train chugging forward at a snail’s pace. The war was stealing closer, though they did their best to deny it by avoiding the subject altogether.

  At Lauterbrunnen, they found themselves back in the real world. Oscar saw the platform swarming with uniforms: the Swiss had mobilised a huge army. General Guisan, whose portrait hung in all the restaurants and cafés, had proclaimed that Switzerland would defend itself against any invader, whoever that might be. The man was a secret admirer of Germany, Oscar wanted nothing to do with him.

  They changed trains and resumed their tête-à-tête for the journey to Berne. The compartments began to fill up; a haze of tobacco smoke hung in the air. Three more hours of inchoate dialogue, possibly more discreet than in the mountains, but no less intense. Along the Thunersee, where the wheels almost touched the water, she pointed to a boat quietly setting sail. Winter or no winter, unfurling chalk-white in the sun. She pointed to the normal, everyday sights, about which there was little to be said.

  Afterwards, he wondered whether he had said too much about himself. He had even told her about Dick, the brother who had left Holland years earlier, and whom he missed. His nostalgia for the days when they formed an unassailable duo – something not even Kate was aware of. Two musketeers. Covered front and back, even the flanks were protected. And so they had borne the early loss of their father, and, in the confidence of their yo
ung years, had helped to raise their mother’s spirits. His brother was seventeen at the time, he a year older.

  Oscar had shed his natural reserve, but he managed to avoid going into what he did for a living. Something at the Dutch legation, of no particular interest. His vagueness elicited a quizzical glance from Lara, but she had not pressed him. Why had he talked so freely with her for two entire days, why did he feel so helplessly, unconditionally attracted to her? Why indeed. It was not for you to crack the codes of your soul. Oscar had dismissed the question as soon as it presented itself.

  “Would it be alright if I looked you up in Fribourg?” he had said as the train entered the station of Berne, to which she had nodded, tapping the leather box containing her binoculars: “I’ll be on the lookout for you.”

  When he went down the platform while the train pulled away close beside him, he had seen her through the window, sitting very still, hugging the box to her chest, her eyes closed.

  “The terminal, Senhor, this is the last stop.” Oscar alighted from the tram and ambled across Rossio Square. Even in the late afternoon the heat was heavy. He was lost, stood still and looked about him, felt in his pockets for a city map. Any direction would do, he reckoned.

  Chapter 9

  The sound of a doorbell rang through the house. She didn’t recognise it at first. Her bell never rang. Then Kate realised she had to answer it. As she approached the front door, she heard a slight shuffle of feet and someone whistling softly.

  “Hello Miss,” Matteous said. He sounded so timid, she felt herself melt. It was almost unbearable, that shyness of his every time he greeted her. He had actually come to her house! She had not thought he would act upon her invitation.