Gossip From the Forest

by Thomas Keneally

  Wemyss: Two extremely different stories.

  From the veins around the Marshal’s eyes a humorless irony was secreted. Christ, I hate these reptilian generals!

  The Marshal: The question I ask you is, which story should we tell to our heads of state?

  Wemyss: I shall inform Mr. Lloyd George that there was a local mistake.

  The Marshal: Very good.

  He began to smile in a parental way, the way he would have smiled at a naïve cadet who had just uttered the academy’s version of truth. And so powerful was the Marshal at touching off the sonship glands in other men that for a little time Wemyss felt stung. His brain leapt to prove itself full-grown.

  Wemyss: What then will you tell the Premier?

  The Marshal: The softer version. The Premier lacks certainty.

  Remembering Clemenceau’s ferocious certainties, Wemyss wondered if the Marshal was speaking of the same man.

  Wemyss: You believe what Herr Erzberger says? About chaos? About Bolshevism?

  The Marshal: Herr Erzberger colors it rather highly.

  He smiled.

  Wemyss: My Marshal, I understand this: they are imperial plenipotentiaries, the men on the other track. If by tomorrow we discover there is no longer any empire their powers are void. I would be very surprised if our statesmen did not understand this. No matter what version of the courier’s problems we send them.

  The Marshal: It’s a matter of sustaining their faith. And the same with the German gentlemen.

  Wemyss sought his reading spectacles, for he could not tolerate seeing the Marshal’s impish square face too clearly. My God, he thinks he can sustain the empire in being until he no longer needs it—say till eleven o’clock Monday morning. He thinks those German delegates are here at his nod, accredited by his certainty.

  Beneath the thick brows, in the Marshal’s eyes, sat a fanciful or perhaps serious proposition: everything will go the way it ought if you will simply accept for a day or so that I am the God of Moses. And can part the waters.

  BEDTIME CHILDISHNESS

  It was ten o’clock before Matthias and the others heard that von Helldorf had passed through the lines in a less than promising manner. They all became short-tempered, since the news foreshadowed what they all feared. Germany would not afford them an easy re-entry.

  The count gave up the little work he had been doing, handed to von Winterfeldt the few pages he’d covered, said good night to no one but Matthias and went to his cabin.

  The general stood up amongst his cluttered submissions.

  Von Winterfeldt: The count must be fetched back, Herr Staatsminister. Our document has to be ready for morning.

  Erzberger: I could fetch him back. Perhaps. But he would tend to be disruptive.…

  Von Winterfeldt: It’s a sort of desertion. To go away like that.

  Erzberger: Perhaps he can’t write any more. I doubt if I can myself.

  The general’s hand crumpled the corner of a written page.

  Von Winterfeldt: We have no business taking account of our limitations.

  Ignoring him, Erzberger looked around the saloon for Captain Blauert. The young man sat in a corner marking papers with colored pencils and laying them on the floor in piles—blue with blue, red with red. Tranquil as a schoolteacher in the mountains.

  Erzberger: Captain Blauert, are you tired?

  Blauert: No, Herr Erzberger.

  Erzberger: Can you type?

  Blauert: Ninety words a minute, sir.

  Erzberger: Wonderful. If the gentlemen and I left our observations on the terms with you, could you edit them? Remove the repetition?

  The general beat his papers with his left hand.

  Von Winterfeldt: I believe some of the phrasing of my arguments must be retained.

  Blauert: I have already begun editorial work on some of the memoranda Herr Erzberger has given me. I can assure the general I shall try to retain his polish.

  The general put his hands in his lap.

  Von Winterfeldt: Come and take what I have.

  The naval captain followed Erzberger into the sleeping wagon, called after him in the corridor.

  Vanselow: Herr Erzberger, can you tell me? Must our consent to the terms be unanimous?

  Erzberger: I hadn’t thought of the problem.

  Vanselow: I have decided I cannot consent to the naval clauses. So I ask.

  Erzberger: The Chancellor will tell you to sign.

  Vanselow: My son is four years old. What sort of name would I pass to him …?

  At the base of his neck, Erzberger could feel a devouring exhaustion, and in the calves of his legs.

  Erzberger: Abstain from signing if you want. Don’t come round me behaving like a child.

  The captain moved his feet in the manner of a boxer but his head lay squarely locked down on his chest.

  Vanselow: It’s hardly fair to mention my uncharacteristic tears of this morning.

  Erzberger: I don’t give a damn for your tears. Abstain if you wish.

  He turned away and staggered toward his cabin. As unevenly as if the train were moving.

  Vanselow: It’s different with you three. You’re all fat with rank and wealth. You’re simply paying for what you’ve been given.…

  Erzberger felt so threatened by this talk.

  Erzberger: Paying? Where do you think we’re at? A grocer’s shop? Paying!

  Vanselow: Why should I pay as you do?

  There was saliva on his chin and his teeth looked very sharp. Erzberger whimpered.

  Erzberger: Abstain, stay in your cabin, have the vapors. I’ll make your excuses to the others. But don’t give me trouble.

  Matthias was permitted to go on his way toward bed, but the sailor still followed and harassed his flanks.

  Vanselow: I didn’t expect my defiance to be treated with such contempt. Thank you, thank you, Herr Erzberger, for indicating what you think I’m worth.

  Erzberger: Go to hell. Eh? Go to hell.

  At last the captain ceased barking at his heels and turned back toward the saloon. Perhaps to cry? Erzberger wondered.

  THE COUNT, GUN IN MOUTH

  Hoping for a companionable word before bed he paused at the door of Count Maiberling’s cabin. From inside he heard a heavy and well-oiled click of metal. At first he thought the count was working at the metal clip of the window shutters but then understood that he had heard the mechanism of the service revolver at work.

  He opened the door wide. The count sat on his bunk, looking askance above the mouthful he had made of the revolver barrel.

  Erzberger: What’s this?

  The count pulled the trigger and swallowed the metallic sound from the unloaded chamber with apparent thirst. Then he took the gun away from his face, making a moue at the faint taste of oil he had got in his mouth.

  Maiberling: I’m just getting used to the situation.

  Matthias could not but believe the three of them had planned their bedtime childishness.

  Erzberger: Don’t you realize the delays involved if you had an accident?

  Maiberling waved his left hand.

  Maiberling: A man has to have some outlet.

  The blood quaked in Matthias’s hands, at the rims of his ears.

  Erzberger: I wish you’d all damn well stop. The general vain about his bloody prose style, Vanselow old-maidish about his navy, you play-acting with your revolver. There’s no room in this business for such pettiness.

  He could see the diplomat was hurt and laid the pistol down as if it were an excusable luxury he’d been asked to give up, against all reason.

  Maiberling: Pettiness. It has many faces. Don’t you remember the spätzle?

  There was all at once a buoyancy in the arches of Matthias’s feet that offered to pitch him, claws first, at the count’s throat.

  SPÄTZLE

  Because of the business of spätzle, his favorite dish, Erzberger had been given a public name as a gourmandizer.

  It had happened this way. Two
years before, Herr Angele, a member of the Reich Barley Administration, had been dismissed from office during a north German conservative movement to cull as many south German liberals as possible out of positions of leverage. Angele appealed to his local member, a man who had taken on the northerners often enough and survived to talk about it, a man with a temperamental weakness toward crusading. Herr Erzberger.

  One afternoon Angele called at the Erzberger house in Schöneberg and found that Herr Erzberger had not yet come home. Paula Erzberger, small, restrained, pretty but motherly, also a southerner, though of a better family than Matthias’s, broke open like a flower to the sound of a Württemberger accent and invited Herr Angele into the kitchen, where she was cooking.

  They spoke of the food shortages. Matthias is a steak-and-red-wine kind of man, Paula told him. But I can’t get eggs to make him spätzle. Herr Angele told Paula that, since he owned a malt factory in Herr Erzberger’s constituency, he could help Paula out with food parcels from the south. So for eighteen months the Erzbergers’ larder was enriched by Herr Angele’s shipments of sugar, butter, geese, flour, ham; and eggs for the spätzle. Erzberger himself, working his sixteen-hour days on every day but Sunday, was scarcely aware that his house was a special sphere of plenty in blockaded Berlin. He ate absent-mindedly, relished absent-mindedly, absent-mindedly grew fatter.

  Early in the new year of 1918 Paula was handed a summons for receiving food illegally. She was sick with grippe at the time and had to be handed it in bed. The shame, she said. Her delicate hand made a fist. It’s that Frau Dittman.

  On 25 March 1918 in the local court she was convicted and fined 200 marks.

  The Berlin conservative papers made much of it. Reformer Erzberger fattening on spätzle while his not so much younger fellows gnawed hardtack in the mud.

  Now Maiberling, who had telephoned him at the time, and offered him fellow feeling!

  Erzberger: You yourself? You never ate more than a citizen’s ration?

  Maiberling: I’m not saying that.

  Erzberger: Do you know that they, those Junker bastards, have never forgiven me. Not for eating spätzle. But for telling people how we were treating the Africans.

  Maiberling: Yes. Yes.

  Erzberger: I told the house that a Prussian army shot thirty thousand East Africans in one year and burned crops so that another quarter of a million starved. These are recorded deaths.

  Maiberling: Yes. Yes. I know you—

  Erzberger: I told the Germans that General von Trotha ordered the shooting of every male Herero in South-West Africa. And drove the women into the Kalahari.

  Maiberling: I know, I know, I know. Don’t boast. It made your career when you were very young. General von Trotha was a gift from God.

  Erzberger: Is that the kind of mind you have?

  But even behind his fury he was thinking, yes, that’s the size of it. There’s so much fat politician in me. Even if not enough to make life always comfortable.

  Maiberling: What were you? Thirty? Thirty-one? The bloody Hereros set you up for life.

  Erzberger: Stand up and tell me that.

  For the count still sat on his cot, the revolver on the coverlet while Matthias pawed the basin and bent above him.

  Maiberling: Go to hell.

  Erzberger: Let me tell you. Everyone warned me it was political suicide to bring up those African scandals. Everyone told me I’d be a victim for life. Well, I got away with it, but ever since they’ve been after me, that rat pack.… And all they’ve been able to find out in ten years is that my wife received food parcels from a malt brewer. Great scandal, that! Eh? How would you have come through the last ten years, Count Maiberling? With your mistress, with your harlots in lovely Bucharest and that woman—what was her name?—Frau Blesniak in Sofia.

  Maiberling: You want to make me angry, I suppose.

  Erzberger: I want to sting your bloody hide.

  Maiberling: Soon, Matthias, I’ll take you up, I’ll demand satisfaction.

  He did, in fact, as rehearsal for that time, offer the service revolver butt-forward to Matthias. Matthias sniffed at it.

  Erzberger: The trouble with your class is that you think even death is an aristocratic ritual.

  The count laughed.

  Maiberling: A regular Bolshevik yourself, Matthias.

  He began unlacing his boots.

  ERZBERGER’S HAPPY DREAMS

  In his cabin he suffered a happy dream of taking his daughters for a walk in the woods near Munderkingen. They were more or less lost but he knew throughout that a climber’s cabin would occur and kept joking his four-year-old, whom he carried on his shoulders, out of weeping. The cabin presented itself, beyond a fringe of pines and full of lamplight. He lit the fire with the breath of his paternity and vivified little Gabrielle’s hands against his heart and saw tall Maria, an ample woman in anyone else’s terms, undress by a bunk. Kind Jesus, he said, don’t let her be a nun.

  But where is Paula? he thought. Who cooks my spätzle? Why have I cut Paula out of my happy dreams?

  The First Sea Lord had never known his father, had lost him two weeks after being born. It had happened in as Gothic and ancestral a way as any fanciful child could have hoped for. On the north side of the Firth of Forth Wemyss Castle is found, a building as glowering as all the other Scottish castles travelers find ruined throughout Scotland. But by some special arrangement with the British Navy, Wemyss had survived the ruinous first half of the eighteenth century when warships used to sail up firths and lochs and bombard Jacobite structures.

  One wing of the castle had been made comfortable and classic terraces ran away from it downhill toward the firth. In a twilight in the summer of 1864, Lady Wemyss went up to her room to rest because she was nearing term. Lord Wemyss and his sister sat at the top of the terraces watching the Firth change color as the light lasted and lasted from the west. Very remotely they could hear young men and women from the village of East Wemyss laughing too continuously in a pack on the road toward Kirkcaldy. In hope and terror of what the eventual darkness would do to them.

  It should have made Lord Wemyss feel very seignioral on his terrace. In fact he had been melancholy throughout his wife’s pregnancy. He had been invalided out of the Royal Navy for heart and respiratory weakness. The family ran to admirals—his father, grandfather, uncles, cousins. He had been raised to become one. Everyone said that’s why he’s so restless; he has lost his direction.

  That still evening, on the lower terrace, without any encouragement from wind or rain or lightning, the paving split loudly as a cannon. Stone flags, gods and Roman senators, balustrades and urns slid away, grinding and breaking.

  Lord Wemyss said, “That’s it. I’m dead.”

  His sister said, what nonsense. She pretended to be angry only with the Kirkcaldy landscaper who had done the work under contract. But that did not distract her brother.

  Lord Wemyss said, “Whenever an Earl of Wemyss is about to die, his death is announced to him by the sound of falling masonry.”

  When Rosslyn Wemyss grew to be a boy he could never forgive his father for responding so pat to the omen, like any of the nonpeople who inhabit ghost stories. Wemyss’s outrage still expressed itself in his sleep.

  Throughout the night of the falling terrace and the next day, the laird appeared resigned, not frightened. This seemed to the womenfolk to be the most dangerous state of mind. The family doctor could not talk him out of it. He suggested that since they intended to travel south to London for the birth, to their town house in Buckingham Gate, they should go as soon as possible.

  When the child was born a boy and called Rosslyn, Lord Wemyss looked at its face and said, “This is the last child I shall beget.” Rosslyn Wemyss would develop the bitterness any child might feel who served his father only as a spur to that father’s numinous self-pity.

  After ten days, Lord Wemyss the father died in his sleep of heart failure.

  Thirty years later Lady Wemyss reported the event
to the Society of Psychical Research. They had broadly similar cases on record: people (generally aristocratic) who had died of omens; such as the sighting of certain untoward animals or combinations of animals, of certain stains or patterns.

  When young Rosy Wemyss came home from prep school he heard his mother complain of servants. She said, they now think they’re their own lords and ladies. Perhaps they had come the full way by 1914. It was then as if they all heard or saw some great communal omen, having become their own aristocrats, and went off and died resignedly, as his father had. Noblesse oblige. Women of Britain say Go!

  The First Sea Lord dreamed of the fallen terrace, the jumbled stonework, and his father so unnecessarily reading death there. He took his father brutally by the elbow, saying it isn’t the old days, you are no clan leader with a need to answer portents. Up and down the firth and all over the decaying myths of the clans, brewers and mercers and shipwrights are building and see no presages amongst their profit-and-loss columns, yet are more important to the working of the world than any laird. Though not to me they aren’t. Not to me.

  Wait, he always begged. I’ve never seen you. Though I’ve seen masonry fall. In Lemnos and the Dardanelles and when I relieved Feisal’s Arabs in Akaba, I saw fallen masonry then. Did I lie down? So wait.

  But every time Rosslyn bullied him, his young father seemed self-absorbed.

  NECESSARY LOVE-MAKING IN 2417D

  In the morning Hope came in and told him, in an oddly disarmed sort of way for a man who did not like fornication, that the French had found a woman’s handkerchief in 2417D and a sergeant had been arrested.

  Wemyss too smiled and hoped nothing too bad would happen to the sergeant.

  Wemyss: I thought I saw a woman amongst the elms. Night before last.

  He was happier about 2417D. The woman and the sergeant had humanized it for him and it wasn’t too much to say that he felt grateful.

  He would never discover what happened to the sergeant or if a woman was apprehended. But in Compiègne and amongst old soldiers the event took on the marks of a fable. People would tell you this: that a French sergeant in the infantry regiment camped in the forest felt impelled to bring a Compiègne woman, appropriately a young war widow gone reckless with loss, through the perimeter running west, south, and east around the sidings of Rethondes.