by David Fraser
Then he had taken her out to dinner again: and started to show her aspects of Vienna which her previous study for an art diploma had entirely omitted.
And then she had found herself in love with him.
Marcia would not at first admit to herself that her feelings for Toni Rudberg were in the least serious. She had no confidante in Vienna and it is always hard to establish the truth of an emotional condition purely by self-communing. She said to herself that Toni was good company. It was a relief after the kindly isolation of life in the Rudbergs’ flat, endless discussions about her status, her ‘difficulties’, the attitudes of the authorities, the protracted interchange of correspondence with Arzfeld – it was profound relief after this wearisome, genteel imprisonment to find herself again escorted, entertained, finally wooed by an attractive man.
She did not in the least trust him. ‘He is utterly unlike Werner,’ she said to herself. Werner had had the same easy charm, the same dominant, assured masculinity. But Werner had, too, an inner seriousness, three dimensions, she told herself. He was a deep man. Toni, on the other hand, changed his moods, his opinions like quicksilver. She never knew if he meant a word of what he said. But when he told her he adored her she hoped that he did. She was not wholly unaware that she deceived herself. Even Marcia, on the whole innocent, English in upbringing, did not think that Toni was faithful to her while in Vienna. When away from her she simply could not imagine him except in pursuit of a woman, and probably of several simultaneously. Toni never spoke of such things as marriage. She could not connect him with any idea of a permanent or profound relationship. ‘But oh!’ she thought, ‘how much I want him!’
And so, Marcia had fallen in love with Toni. They had become lovers. Her days were entirely spent in joyous anticipation of their next assignation. Toni had a flat in Vienna, and Marcia’s acquaintance with the city and ostensible pursuit of art studies during the first months of 1940 made meetings comparatively easy. Sometimes he would call on his uncle and aunt and deliberately pretend he scarcely knew her.
‘Ah! Fraülein Marcia! How good to see you again!’
His easy smile, his laughing brown eyes in a bronzed face disguised the fact that only twenty-four hours before they had been ecstatically in bed together on the other side of the Ringstrasse. It made it even more fun, and it provided huge emotional relief from the sombre reflections about her situation which otherwise crowded in on Marcia’s mind.
Then Toni had told her he was leaving Vienna. It was March, 1940.
‘Oh, beloved! Oh, darling! When?’
‘Very soon. But listen. I mustn’t tell you where I’m going –’
‘To Germany, it must be.’
‘To Germany, it must be, as you say. Now Cousin Amalie has said the Arzfelds want you to go and stay. Why not? You don’t belong to dear old Werner now – and I was fond of him, believe me, but that’s past – you belong to me. But it would be proper to visit your ex-fiancé’s family. And you know them.’
‘Would I be near you?’
‘Well, if I got a short leave it might be easier than visiting Vienna. I could stay at some hotel nearby, make some excuse, call on the Arzfelds, and we’d make plans, spend some time together. Just at the moment it seems as if you wouldn’t be stopped travelling.’
The other person who brought relief to Marcia’s unhappy and anxious heart was Anna Langenbach.
She had not been many weeks at Arzfeld when Lise said one day,
‘Of course you remember our cousin Anna Langenbach? She received us when we broke down in Anthony’s car near the Langenbach house.’
‘Of course. She was charming! She drove you here afterwards and I met her.’
‘She’s had a sad life. She had a baby, you know, a little boy, last winter. And months before that her husband was killed in a flying accident in Spain. Poor Anna!’
Marcia said nothing of Anthony’s passion for Anna. It was their business, it might have been transient, unimportant, despite Anthony’s seriousness about it. Probably Anna would only be embarrassed by his name. Poor, darling old Ant! Marcia’s eyes filled with tears Lise did not comprehend. As naturally as she could she said,
‘Does she still live with her parents-in-law? They were nice, I remember you saying, quiet, nice people.’
‘Yes, it’s her home of course. And there was no other son but Kurt – Anna’s husband. So the little grandson is precious to them. Franzi. She looks after him wonderfully, she’s a pertect mother. But sad and lonely. She’s very capable. She’s going to come and stay here, with Franzi, for a few days in September. Perhaps even for two weeks.’
And Anna had arrived, complete with charming, serious Franzi. On the second day of her visit, a Sunday, the girls were at home. Sunday was no rest day at the hospital but on this occasion both had been given a holiday, as occurred every few weeks. Marcia felt Anna take her arm.
‘Lise wants to have Franzi to herself, believe it or not! Let’s go for a walk.’
They walked in woods which brought Werner vividly to Marcia’s mind. The trees had been opening to the spring then, when she and Werner had ridden through the beechwoods. Now autumn was in the air. Marcia felt gripped by a great desolation. Yet she had work to do: somewhat to her surprise she found work at the hospital a profound relief. Its very squalor helped heal her mind, assuage her guilt. Lise was sweet, her father remote, a little embarrassed, always courteous and kind. But oh! The loneliness!
They sat down on a fallen log.
‘It’s a lovely place, isn’t it?’
Suddenly Marcia found herself shaking with sobs. Anna put her arm around her.
‘Poor little love! I know how you must feel. You lost a fine man.’
‘It’s not that. At least, it’s not just that.’
‘I can imagine the other things.’
And Marcia found herself pouring out her heart. She talked of her predicament, of her home, of the terrible sense that by some light, spontaneous, love-directed decisions a year ago she had burned her boats, had placed herself in a terrible no-man’s land in this war, fair game for the hatred, the weapons of both sides, had become an interloper, a suspect in Germany and a traitress to England.
‘Anna, you’ve got English blood, do you understand me a bit?’
‘Of course. Your love crossed frontiers. It was inconvenient, highly indiscreet. But it was not wicked.’
‘God knows what my family think of me now! And will I ever know? I think it would be better if I were killed. This bombing – it will be heavy in Germany one day, I expect. It would be better if I were bombed. Then the problem would be over.’
‘Yes it would, but these things are not always easy to arrange!’ Anna’s arm was firm and comforting around her. ‘One day, perhaps, I will tell her certain things,’ Anna thought, ‘but not yet. Not quite yet.’
She said, ‘Life is still ahead of you, Marcia. The world is a difficult place, in certain ways a terrible place today. But it will not always be so. Nor will you always be alone.’
Then Marcia told her about Toni.
Anna laughed – kindly but aloud.
‘Toni Rudberg!’
‘You know him?’
‘Everybody knows him or about him. I’ve met him twice, I think, and I quite understand your feelings. He’s very charming. But you should not hope too much. He is not a serious person.’
‘But I have to hope too much,’ said Marcia. ‘Otherwise I couldn’t face the days. I have to hope. And I’m not sure what to hope for, except Toni. Now fighting has started properly I can’t hope for one side to smash the other in this war because it would mean the smashing of people I love. Toni, or – or Frido and the Arzfelds – or you: or Anthony and all the people I love at home.’
‘A cause may go down,’ said Anna neutrally, ‘and individuals survive.’ With what Marcia imagined was an attempt to lighten the atmosphere, Anna added –
‘I suppose your brother is in the army?’
‘Bound to be,’ said
Marcia. ‘He was in the process of becoming an officer when I left England. But I don’t know. I don’t know whether he’s alive, how can I? I know nothing! I’m in enemy territory.’ She started crying again, despising herself for it. And Marcia remembered Anthony’s voice, so tense, so utterly determined, so unlike the usual stuttering, teasing Ant – his voice saying – ‘None of you will ever understand. I’ll love her till the end of time.’ He might be different now, he might be dead, or crippled, or married. But it might – it just might – still be the same. Suddenly she said,
‘He loved you, Anna!’
To her surprised consternation she found that Anna’s head was on her shoulder. And Anna was crying too.
‘Some day,’ she murmured obscurely, ‘some day –’
They walked back to the house together. And at the house they found that the postman had called and Toni’s third letter to Marcia had arrived – the letter which announced a possibly imminent visit to Arzfeld.
‘Anna, there is a friend of yours who telephoned an hour ago. Herr Schwede. He says that he has to go to a conference in Kassel in two days time, 26th September. He will be passing Arzfeld tomorrow. He will call at about three in the afternoon. He announced, firmly, that he would present himself! No hesitation about it!’
‘Ah! Herr Schwede.’
‘He sounded anxious to see you.’
‘Herr Schwede’s always anxious to see me.’
‘Anna, an admirer! And Marcia and I won’t see him, we’ll be back at the hospital tomorrow!’
‘Herr Schwede is the Party Kreisleiter of Langenbach. He is very active. He travels a lot on Party business. It is not surprising that he is going to Kassel. Nothing about him is surprising.’
‘Is he charming? After all,’ said Lise softly, ‘Nazis can be charming!’
Anna seemed to be considering her words carefully. When she spoke it did not seem to be with exasperation or distaste, but with a sort of scrupulous exactitude.
‘Herr Schwede is certainly the most odious man I have ever met. And perhaps the worst. I don’t intend to know him well enough to discover. I’m glad that neither you nor Marcia will be here. I’m glad Cousin Kaspar will be away at his office. Herr Schwede would disgust him.’
Lise looked troubled.
‘Perhaps he’s not as bad as you think, Anna. Some of them, even some of the very aggressive ones, resent us particularly – von Arzfelds, people like you, like us – because they think we despise them. But if we show friendliness I’m sure it’s possible to disarm that feeling, bridge the gulf. It can’t be right to make enemies of them.’
‘My dear little Lise,’ said Anna with more impatience than Marcia had yet heard in her voice, ‘you don’t know what you’re talking about. I doubt if you’ve ever met anybody even of middle seniority in the Party.’
‘I doubt if I have.’
Anna spoke now more softly.
‘And I doubt also whether you – perhaps whether any of you here – have faced, inwardly, the things these people have done and are doing to Germany!’
Lise looked at her with consternation.
‘Anna!’
‘That is what I see when I see Herr Schwede.’
‘Well, what does he want from you, Anna?’
Anna looked sternly at her. There was a silence.
‘Herr Schwede comes, most weeks, to Langenbach on some pretext or other,’ she said. ‘Everything about the man makes me shudder. Everything.’
The afternoon seemed suddenly very cold.
Chapter 10
Egon Schwede accepted a cup of coffee with a bow of exaggerated gratitude. He was a man of middle height, with a brick-coloured complexion and brown hair with reddish tints in it. His often bloodshot eyes were of pale blue.
Schwede was bull-necked, burly and broad-shouldered. His habitual expression was one of suspicion, and his brow was furrowed in what appeared a perpetual scowl. When he smiled, which was surprisingly often, he succeeded only in looking conspiratorial and ill-natured. It was impossible not to suppose that the smile was caused by the discomfiture of another. The same applied to his laugh, infrequent but exceptionally loud. It seemed to express not gaiety or amusement but bitterness and contempt.
But Schwede was formidable. He had personality. He dominated individuals and assemblies. He inspired alarm – but it was alarm mixed with respect because Schwede was also extremely efficient. He was pertinacious, thorough and, despite the somewhat ponderous brutality of his appearance, he was quick-witted. He had a nose for a situation. If there was something amiss Schwede sensed it. If there was concealment in a conversation, in the response to some question or comment he detected it, he smelt it. He had, from the first, mastered the Party apparatus in Kreis Langenbach. Every underling feared him. So did most of the population.
Schwede was an early member of the National Socialist Party. He could look back to the long years in the wilderness, when to be a Nazi in Kreis Langenbach meant exposure to taunts, incomprehension, ridicule; sometimes physical threats. He had withstood all that. He had forced men to reckon with him when precious few stood with him, had wrung from them unwilling respect.
‘You’ll see! One day it’ll turn out as I’m telling you! Germany will rise again, have dignity again, get rid of the alien filth who’ve sucked her blood for so long, ruined all of us here, lied about us –’
He had never inwardly compromised. Sometimes instructions had come down which he found hard. Sometimes for tactical reasons the Party hierarchy passed the word that there had to be support for the Communists, the Social Democrats even! Headquarters were subtle, no question of it, and Schwede believed in absolute obedience. But he found these manoeuvres unpalatable. For Schwede was not only odious. He was sincere.
And his hour had come – that wonderful hour in 1933. A sufficient majority to win the crucial vote in the Reichstag and enabling laws, so that the Führer could get on with the job, supported by the Party, could dispense with all the wretched, so-called democratic humbug which had deceived and exploited the German people. It had all happened amazingly fast, so that Party dominance of the principal institutions of the State had been achieved in remarkably few years. Nobody was sure about the Army. You only had to look at some of the senior officers when they couldn’t avoid some Party occasion! Resentful, looking down their beaky noses! Sneering! As for the rest – the Police, the Civil Service and so forth – they’d all toed the line, sufficiently at any rate.
In Kreis Langenbach there were few problems. One or two tiresome individuals had soon yielded to a little persuasion. A quiet word had, on the whole, sufficed to make them thoughtful. One journalist on a local paper had given trouble – refused to take a warning, been silly. He’d had to be taught a lesson and he was, as Schwede knew, now in the process of learning it somewhere else, somewhere a good deal less agreeable. The only three Jewish families in Langenbach had bolted in ’38 like a lot of others all over Germany. They were all shopkeepers and their shops were now in decent hands. No, on the whole he, Schwede, had a straightforward, amenable bunch of people to look after, to provide with some political leadership and understanding, to help. They’d been slow to comprehend the Party and its ideals at the beginning but after 1934 there was soon no murmuring and he wasn’t one to bear grudges. He also knew that even up to Gau level they had the sense to appreciate that this was not simply coincidence. On a recent liaison visit one young sycophant had said to him, with an obsequious smile –
The Gauleiter himself remarked the other day, when he was looking at some statistics – “of course Langenbach’s all right. Schwede’s there, what do you expect?”
With such achievements, such harmony, such sense of unity and purpose all about him, it could not fail to be a nagging pain to Egon Schwede that in one direction he was achieving nothing at all – or so it had appeared until recently. And this was in a matter which stirred him, body and soul, most deeply. The matter of Anna Langenbach.
Schwede’s career had bee
n successful well beyond his political activities, and had brought him from humble beginnings to the management of a local brewery. The brewery was a small, family affair – an excellent, small, German, family affair. Schwede got on well with his employers. He had always given loyal service. He liked brewing. He had made himself a master of the art and worked at all hours. As he rose in the hierarchy of the brewery, he tolerated not the slightest slackness or imprecision. Such leisure as he had, he devoted to the Party. He had never married. Quite early on during the Weimar days, the senior partner, head of the family, had drawn him to one side.
‘Schwede, we deeply admire your patriotism. As you know, we share it. Of course we have to be discreet, in our position. But it’s a great thing for the company to feel that the brewery is being served by one who has so committed himself to the cause of Germany!’
That was before 1932. He had nodded, satisfied. Later, all the members of the family who mattered joined the Party. They certainly didn’t lose business by it either, he reflected contentedly. And after 1934 they offered him a seat on the Board of Management on generous terms. So Schwede was well established financially. He now had shares in the brewery. He was esteemed in Party and District. Everybody was anxious to shake his hand.
But Schwede, master of his surroundings, admired, courted – and, as he knew without displeasure, very generally feared – had found it impossible to penetrate the icy reserve of Frau Anna Langenbach.
He had naturally made it his business to call at Schloss Langenbach. The old people were unimportant, of course, past giving trouble, or being effective one way or another. He’d met the Major, Kurt Langenbach, twice only. He knew his reputation as a brave airman, one who was performing useful service for Germany: teaching the untrustworthy Spaniards how to conduct themselves in aerial warfare. Langenbach had been – Schwede grunted resentfully at the memory – remarkably off-hand.
‘Ah, Schwede, isn’t it?’
‘Kreisleiter Schwede, Herr Major.’
The Major had been scarcely polite. Schwede fumed. He could picture the conversation, the contemptuous smiles after his departure from Schloss Langenbach.
