by Allan Massie
And yet I cannot regret that fault, that betrayal, in the name of affection, of my constant purpose in life.
It is only by deeds that a man defines himself; words lead him into a maze of uncertainty.
Franz: I have no more to say. You will please express my thanks to Dr Birnbaum. Your mother will not wish to receive a message from me. For her, I died long ago.
As for you, if you choose to marry Fräulein Czinner, whom I thought a charming girl, you do so with my best and warmest wishes. Yet you will have to overcome terrible obstacles.
You should continue to call yourself Schmidt, though pride and natural affection might prompt you to resume the name of Kestner.
All my actions were justified by the law of the SS which commanded us to spare neither our own nor the blood of others if the life of the nation demands it. Nevertheless it is too late, and also absurd now, to die with the words “Heil Hitler” on my lips. If you wish to give a statement to the press you may say that I admire the development of Israel as a National Socialist state.
It seems absurd to die like this, but then life has often seemed absurd to me. Only recognition of necessity keeps absurdity at bay.
And so I say “Farewell”; may you be more fortunate than your loving father.
PART THREE
AFTERWARDS
ONE
Becky was for a long time a name on Christmas cards, and then, the cards stopped, or I couldn’t be bothered to look at them. I forgot about her. Then she was a girl standing beside an old-fashioned bicycle with a basket in front of the handlebars, and the basket full of red and yellow roses. That was outside my stepmother’s cottage, and she was wearing denim shorts and a cream-coloured cotton jersey. She was warm from bicycling, her face dewy, and she smiled and said, “You must be Gareth.”
I was just back from Vienna, and she looked so English. I was twenty-five and training to be a historian. My subject was the Rosicrucians, with particular reference to the influence of Rosicrucian ideas on the court of the Hapsburg Emperor Rudolf II. It is not a subject of general interest, but it had kept me occupied in Vienna, with trips to Prague for two years, with time off for beer drinking and Austrian girls who were as emotionally undemanding as I found them willing.
My mother (who was Welsh and had landed me with my Christian name, not that it matters) was killed by a flying-bomb in 1944. My father, a regular Army officer, but nevertheless only a major at the end of the war, then married Sheila Macmaster, who is the cousin of Becky’s mother Nell. Then Dad went off his head, after they had produced two children. He was shunted into a bin with no prospect of recovery. So I couldn’t blame Sheila when she took a lover, an Australian painter called Doug. They had two more children – Sheila liked breeding. I always got on well with her, but this explains why my home life was fairly non-existent, though I still used her place when I was in the UK. But we didn’t correspond, bar the odd postcard. I just dropped in and kipped when I felt like it, if there was an unoccupied bed, which wasn’t always. I had an income from a farm on the Welsh Border, which used to be my granddad’s, and which was let to an uncle.
So I didn’t click when Becky told me her name, having forgotten the Christmas cards. But looking at her cheered me up. She was a nice change from my Viennese girls who mostly ran to fat and smelled of onions or chocolate. Straightaway I found myself considering questions of time and geography – the eternal when and where of seduction – especially after Sheila told me that on account of other people having got in first I would have to doss down on the sofa in the living room which converts into a bed. Though I would have had no objection to that as a location, I didn’t expect this girl to share my broadmindedness. It would have to be outdoors first, I thought. There was a spot near the river I had found convenient in the past.
It’s not exaggerating to say that that first evening I thought about little but how to get Becky into bed with me. I stress this because nothing in the previous manuscript can have conveyed to you just how sexy she was.
I never find descriptions of girls much good, and in the detective novels by which I make my living nowadays, I usually leave them out, though I’ve known my editor insert them, perhaps for her own pleasure. So what can I say of the way Becky looked? She had long legs, and I can’t tell you how many girls I have fancied seeing them seated and then gone off because they stood up and revealed their legs were short. There was a touch of rust in her hair, her eyes were grey and her mouth what is called generous. Her face was not quite symmetrical, and as she sat sideways to me at the supper-table, showing her left profile, her nose was on the short side as if the tip had been broken off. Her breasts were small. In the half-light, sideways on, she looked like a boy, but I didn’t find that a turn-off, though I’ve never seen the point of boys myself, unlike many of my friends at King’s. It did occur to me though that she was the sort of girl queers might fancy. So do I, however, I said to myself. She hardly spoke that evening, and I didn’t mind that either. I’ve never been able to stand chattering girls. It’s not often anyway that a woman says anything worth listening to. They’ve better uses for their tongues than talking, as an Austrian friend of mine, a barman, once said.
One thing did puzzle me. Doug, whose attitude to women is that they’re fuckable and paintable objects, treated her with a gentleness I’d never seen in him before, or since, come to that. But I don’t mind being puzzled.
The mystery was revealed the next morning when Sheila took me aside, which was never easy in that house.
“You know this Kestner trial,” she said.
“Well, I haven’t been following it. These things bore me.” Which was true, incidentally. I generally speak the truth, except in certain matters.
“But you know who Kestner is?”
“I’m not actually buried in the sixteenth century. Sheila. It’s just that I find it more interesting.”
“Weird. Anyway, the point is that Becky is engaged to Kestner’s son. They’re in love.”
“That’s usual, I understand, when there’s the question of an engagement,” I said, doing my impersonation of Max Freyer, who used to be my tutor at King’s.
“So, hands off, Gareth.”
“For Christ’s sake, Sheila,” I said.
“I’m serious. There’s something else you should know.” And then she told me about Czinner and how he had been responsible for Kestner’s arrest.
“It strikes me,” I said, “that it would have been simpler for everyone if he had hired a gun to shoot the bastard. That shouldn’t have been too difficult in South America.”
“Well, that’s how it is,” she said.
“So, what happens now?”
“Well, Nell, as I say, has left Eli, and Becky is waiting for Franz.”
“You mean she’s waiting till they hang his dad?”
“Yes.”
“Christ,” I said, “I have led a sheltered life.”
“Yes, you have. So, remember, hands off.”
“Sheila told me all about you,” I said.
It had taken me two days to get her by herself, but here we were down by the river as I’d planned. The scene was a sort of cliché South of England landscape: meadow-grass, willows, elms. It was a hot day and she was lying there on her side with her chin in her hand, and her elbow arching her body at an angle that made the striped cotton jersey she was wearing ride up to expose a few inches of flesh above her jeans.
“I thought she might have,” she said.
I stretched over and laid my hand on her crotch which, on account of her small breasts, I thought might be her surest erogenous zone.
“You’ve had it tough,” I said.
“Oh I don’t know,” she said, and removed my hand. She nibbled a grass stem.
“You must be gone on this Franz,” I said.
“It hurts waiting.”
“Well, we’ll have to see what we can do about that, won’t we?”
So, two days later, I drove her over to Cambridge, which w
as about an hour’s drive from Sheila’s cottage. I showed her round the colleges, not forgetting to point out E. M. Forster as he doddered across the lawn in a dirty mackintosh. She hadn’t heard of him, which was a point in her favour. Another point. She said the right things, which were blessedly few. She looked very decorative lying back in the punt as I poled her up to Grantchester. She trailed her fingers in the water as girls nearly always do, but when I moored under some willows, she sat up and said, “No.”
Instead she asked me why I was a historian. “Are you really going to be a don?”
“I expect so.”
“You don’t strike me as …”
“If you mean that I’m not a eunuch, I take that as a compliment. But not all dons are eunuchs.”
“No,” she said, “it wasn’t that. It’s just that I can’t understand someone like you burying himself in the past.”
This sounded more hopeful, so I set out my philosophy of life at some length. We were having supper in the Bath Hotel by now and eating mixed grills and drinking pints of Pimm’s No. 3.
“Now it’s your turn,” I said. “Tell me about yourself. How you’ve got into this mess.”
She shook her head.
“I’m at a disadvantage,” I said. “I’ve never been in love.”
“Maybe you’re lucky.”
Two brush-offs would usually be enough to make me say, oh hell, plenty of other fish in the sea. I had no desire to be entangled with a girl, and I was pretty sure that any girl who played hard to get was the entangling type. But I felt different this time. My curiosity was aroused. I even drove back into Cambridge the next day and read up the account of the Kestner trial in back numbers of The Times. I’ve a strong enough stomach but it sickened me. Not being interested in the Nazis, I hadn’t then come across Hannah Arendt’s phrase “the banality of evil”, but I came to the same conclusion, though I’d have put it less pretentiously. It disgusted me that none of them ever seemed to have asked himself any questions about why he was doing this. Actually, I mean, that Kestner hadn’t. He talked as if organising the arrest, transportation and extermination of millions of people was a perfectly natural activity. If you go back to the sixteenth century, I thought, at least the Inquisition believed they were saving heretics’ souls and, more important, saving other people from the contamination of heresy. They may have been crazy (I think they were) but you could see there was some purpose to it, even by their standards a sublime purpose. But Kestner had no such justification. It was extraordinary that he had never felt the need of one.
I had arranged to collect Becky’s mother at the station, she having been up in London for a job interview, which we didn’t talk about beyond her saying that things could have been worse.
“It’s not bad to be in England,” she said, as we drove through the early evening, with the wheat turning yellow. “I always missed the countryside.”
That seemed to me a cue to stop at the next village pub. There were tables outside and roses climbing up the wall. A couple of Jaguars in the car park. Nell said she would have a half of bitter.
“People talk of German beer. Give me good old English bitter,” I said, coming back with a pint for myself as well as her half. “I’ve been reading the Kestner trial,” I said. “You met him, didn’t you? What was he like?”
“I’ve no idea.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that the man I met was civil, even friendly, a little nervous, but I’ve still no idea what Kestner was like.”
“You’re not suggesting some sort of mistaken identity.”
“Good God, no. No, what I’m suggesting, I suppose, is that the whole idea of identity is more fragile than we usually think. That doesn’t make much sense, does it? But how well do we know anyone? How well do we know ourselves?”
“Becky seems to think she knows the young Kestner.”
“He’s a nice boy. I wasn’t sure at first, but I got to like him more and more. That’s why I can’t forgive my husband. You read his evidence? It wasn’t necessary, he could have left it to others.”
“Sheila says you knew Germany before the war.”
“That’s right. I loved it. I still do. Despite everything. But I was back there with UNRRA during the Occupation, in ’45–6. I saw hundreds of the survivors. Well, Eli was one of them. None of it made sense.”
She smiled at me over the rim of her tankard.
“I bet you’ve had lots of Austrian girls.”
“I haven’t done badly.”
“Do you ever ask them what their fathers did?”
TWO
I never got Becky into bed that year. It even became a joke between us, my attempts, that is. I was back in Vienna when the news of Kestner’s execution came through and I remember wondering whether she and Franz would really get together and make a go of it. I’ve never been much of a correspondent, and so I didn’t hear that he had arrived in England. Then I got an invitation to their wedding. Becky had pinned a postcard to it. It showed Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman and Paul Henreid standing outside Rick’s Café Americain; “As time goes by,” she’d scribbled. I puzzled over that message a long time. I wasn’t sure if it meant that she wanted me to accept her invitation, as she hadn’t accepted my numerous ones. It’s always disturbing when you don’t see the joke.
I didn’t go of course. A couple of weeks after the date of the wedding, I got a parcel containing a little box with some wedding-cake in it. It hadn’t occurred to me that people still sent out wedding-cake.
Then she sent me a postcard from Switzerland where they were on honeymoon. “Having a wonderful time. Wish you were here.”
I began to wonder if she was already regretting it, but concluded this was probably another joke. I wrote on a card: “Sure I remember. You wore blue. The Germans wore grey,” but I had no address to send it to.
Then I heard nothing of them for two years.
The marriage started out OK. There must have been a risk it wouldn’t, even without the special circumstances in which they found themselves. They had been separated for some time.
They had both invested enormous emotional capital in the thing. That it happened at all testified to the strength of their love. It wouldn’t have been surprising if cookies had crumbled from the start. But as I say, I don’t think they did.
They settled in London. Franz still had an allowance from his stepfather. He joked about being a remittance man. He abandoned his engineering studies. I don’t know what he worked at for the first few months, but I think he had a succession of odd jobs. He must have had some difficulty with his papers. Even in the easy-going Sixties I think he would have found it hard to get a work permit. Becky was all right of course with her British passport.
But London was easy living then. Franz began to write, worked on the fringe of the film world. Becky did some modelling, but she wasn’t the baby girl beloved of the Sixties, and had no great success. Still, either through modelling or through some connection of Franz’s, she was offered a part in a film. She couldn’t act, and she moved awkwardly: on the stage she would merely have been inept. But the movie camera liked her. They made out.
Eli came to London a couple of times, delivering celebrity lectures at the London School of Economics. When he came, Becky had lunch with him and attended his lectures. But that was all. He had no contact with Nell, who was working, as she had predicted, as a matron in a boys’ preparatory school in Hertfordshire. Then, sometime in 1967, Eli had another heart attack, on an El Al flight from Tel Aviv to New York. It was just before the Six Day War. The obituary I read made no mention, or only glancing mention, of his part in the Kestner case. That surprised me.
I had completed my thesis and taught for a year at the University of Madison, Wisconsin, an experience which completed my disillusion with academic life. It being all I knew, however, I stuck to it for a bit, getting a job at Queen Mary College, London.
It would be wrong to suggest I had been carrying a torch f
or Becky those two or three years. I’m not that sort of guy. My sex life had been perfectly satisfactory in the interim. There was a girl claiming Red Indian blood at Madison, but she’s nothing to do with the story, and I merely mention her to confirm that I wasn’t pining for Becky.
All the same I thought of her now and then, and when I got back to London seeing her again was one of the bonuses I promised myself.
It was still some months before I rang her up.
“Gareth,” she said. There was a note of exaggeration in her voice, a sort of floating tremble, and I wondered if she was drunk. “We’re having a party on Saturday night. Why don’t you come? It’ll be fun to see you again.”
“We’re living in Brook Green,” she said. “It’s the outer limit of anywhere. Or so they say.”
The music was party-loud and pop. I didn’t recognise it, but it wasn’t right for them. I was sure of that, though all I knew of Franz was what Becky and Nell had told me. I pushed my way through long hair falling over Indian cotton shoulders; joss sticks smoked in empty bottles. It was a film director’s idea of a down-market Bohemian party. I had been there five minutes or more before I located Becky. She was dancing opposite a small slim young man with curling black ringlets and a lemur’s face. She wore a cream-coloured tunic that rested on her buttocks over very short pink shorts. They gyrated for some time and then the lemur took her by the elbow and led her over to a table where there were bottles and glasses. I advanced and joined them there.
“Gareth,” her voice floated, and this time she was drunk. But it was a nice drunk, wopsy drunk, and she put her arms round my neck and kissed me on the lips.
“Charlie,” she said to the lemur, “this is terribly terribly imp. Gareth’s my dearest cousin and we haven’t seen each other for years and years and years. Mind if we …”
