Poison, Shadow, and Farewell

by Javier Marías

  'Oh, they're fascinating, Peter. The "Carbuncle" branch, for example, which, obviously, I've never heard before. It's just that I'm curious to know what happened to Rendl.'

  'No one has heard this story before, not you or anyone. Until today,' he replied, and it seemed to me from the way he said this that he wanted to place due emphasis on the importance of this fact. 'Not even Mrs. Berry, not even Toby. Not even Tupra, who is always rummaging around in people's past lives. As I believe I told you once before, in theory, I'm not yet authorized to say what my "special missions" were between 1936 and 1946, and the same applies to some I carried out afterwards, and I've kept my word. Until today. Of course for me to say "not yet" about anything is rather ironic and even in bad taste, since permission to speak will arrive too late. There's another reason to keep quiet about the "Carbuncle" affair: my superiors never found out that I'd let him go. Not that anything very bad would have happened to me just because I'd disobeyed an order: we weren't like the Germans or the Russians, and I didn't put anyone's life at risk by doing so. However, I preferred to tell them that, as recommended, I had found him a watery grave during the crossing. After all, the fellow was as untraceable and as unfindable as if he were lying at the bottom of the Strait of Malacca with a ridiculous golf bag tied around his neck, a bag I had, in fact, forced him to carry throughout the voyage, and which I allowed someone to steal from me in that same port. (Oh, yes, there were some real idiots in the Secret Service, like the ones who lumbered me with the golf clubs.) Having played that trick on the Japanese, it was in his best interests to be presumed dead, and there wasn't the slightest danger of him going and presenting himself to some other British person, ni en pintura! And he used the Spanish expression—meaning literally 'not even in the form of a painting,' but here meaning something like 'no chance' or 'no way'—perhaps because there is no exact equivalent in English, at least nothing quite as graphic. He'd had recourse to my language earlier when he'd referred to the expression 'me voy por las ramas and had then elaborated on the metaphor in English; such linguistic mixtures were commonplace between us, as they had been between Cromer-Blake and me in my Oxford phase. 'In Rendl's case, well, it wasn't just a matter of everything having its time to be believed, we were unfortunate in that the accusation wasn't false and that he wasn't in the regular German army, the Wehrmacht, let's say, where he might have received nothing more than a reprimand, a period of detention or a demotion, or all three. Even if he had been a Party leader, his deception, with luck—and depending on what friends he had and what influence—might well have been simply brushed under the carpet.' I noticed his use of the first person plural, 'we were unfortunate.' 'It was said that the SS, on the other hand, demanded that its members should be able to prove purity of blood as far back as 1750, at least in theory and in principle. Himmler must have realized that this was an impossibilty for most applicants and that the number of men in his unit would rapidly diminish once they started to suffer any war losses. And so from 1940 on, the SS depended in large measure on volunteers from countries considered "Germanic," this being especially true of the Waffen-SS, the combat arm, which filled up with Dutchmen, Flemings, Norwegians and Danes. And later on still, towards the end, they also admitted "non-Germanic" volunteers, Frenchmen, Italians, Walloons, Ukrainians, Belorussians, Lithuanians, Estonians, as well as Hungarians, Croats, Serbs, Slovenes, and Albanians. There was even an Indian Legion and Muslim divisions, I recall a Skanderbeg and a Kama division (and there was a third one, too, whose name I can't now recall); so much for Aryan purity. And there was even a tiny British Free Corps, which really only served for propaganda purposes. But the initial severity of the 1920s and '30s gives you an idea of how unacceptable it would have been for a veteran officer to have a not particularly remote Jewish ancestor, a grandmother to be precise, and for him to have lied about it and paid for incriminating documents to be removed in order to conceal the truth and so "contaminate" the corps. While the War was on, we didn't know exactly what had happened to Rendl after we'd unmasked him, although we did know that it must have worked, because his name disappeared from the lists of officers that periodically fell into the hands of MI6 or the PWE. Jefferys, or Delmer, or the East Germans, used to pass the accusations on to the Nazi authorities through our infiltrators, and the Nazis, I assume, then carried out their own investigations. It was relatively easy to pass such information on, especially in the occupied countries, where we could count on local collaborators. It wasn't quite so easy afterwards to find out what the results had been, to know which of our false reports had "taken" and what had been the fate of those affected, which forgeries had been accepted as authentic and which not, or only by checking which counterfeit "Jew" or "half-Jew" remained in his post, and was not removed or demoted or anything. At least we knew that Rendl, without having been declared or presumed dead, in action or in the rearguard, had ceased to be a Major or a Captain, or whatever he was at the time. He no longer appeared on the list.'

  'And did that please Valerie? I mean, did it satisfy her?' I asked, spotting an opportunity to remind him of the person I was most interested in. This was pure naivete on my part, however, because she was also the person Wheeler was most interested in and he hadn't forgotten her for a moment. He never, in my presence, entirely lost the thread.

  He raised one arm to his forehead—or it may have been his wrist to his temple—as if he were in pain or checking to see if he had a fever, or perhaps it was a gesture of horror. Whatever its intention, it was the same gesture he had made when he finally opened his eyes and uncovered his ears after the capricious passes of the helicopter that made a sound like a giant rattle or like an old Sikorsky H-5, 'the noise alone used to be enough to provoke panic,' on that other now distant Sunday in his garden by the river, as we sat on chairs with canvas covers the color of pale gabardine, on those chairs disguised as mammoths or tethered ghosts, when I wasn't yet working for the group and he recruited me and suggested that I join and become part of it. He took a while to respond, and I feared that he might have got stuck on some word again. However, it wasn't that, but rather—I thought a little later—because he preferred not to let me see all of his face while he was telling me what he had not yet told me, or that he needed to keep his arm or wrist near his eyes, so as to be able to cover them at once, just as I had been tempted to do several times—and as I had done, I seemed to remember, on more than one occasion—when Tupra was showing me those videos in his house. As if he wanted to be ready to hide or to put his head under his wing.

  'Yes, it did satisfy her,' he said. 'I suppose you could say that. It had been her idea, and it was her first personal, individual, distinctive contribution to the development of the War or to the search for victory. She was congratulated by Jefferys on one of his subsequent visits. As I said, he would come for a week, leave a trail of ideas and then vanish, and not reappear again for a month or more. I've never heard him mentioned since or seen his name in any book, which is why I'm sure it was an alias. Sefton Delmer doesn't mention him, so who knows who he really was. But it also left her feeling unsatisfied, uneasy. She wondered what had happened to Ilse, Rendl's wife, what Ilse's situation would have been after her husband's downfall. He was our enemy and not just any enemy, not some poor recruit, but a Nazi volunteer, determined to join the SS. More than that, he was a complete imbecile; but he was also the brother-in-law of her old friend, and the husband of the older sister who had always been so kind and patient with her. The War, though, allowed little time for doubts or regrets. For that reason, some people remember times of war as the most vital of their entire existence, the most euphoric, and in a way they even miss them afterwards. War is the most terrible thing, but when you live through a war, you live with extraordinary intensity; the good thing about them is that they stop people worrying about silly things or getting depressed or pestering those around them. There's no time for any of that, you move ceaselessly from one thing to another, from anxiety to fear, from terror to an explosion of
joy, and every day is the last day, no, more than that, the only day. You walk, you exist, shoulder to shoulder, everyone is busy trying to survive, to defeat the beast, to save themselves and to save others, and as long as panic doesn't spread, there's great camaraderie. Panic didn't spread here. You'll have heard your father and others talk about this, and your War was the same.'

  'Yes, I have heard people talk about it, not so much my father, but mainly people who were still children at the time, because my father, although very young, was already an adult when the War began. I imagine, though, that you can only miss such times when your side wins, don't you think, Peter? It can't be the same for my father as it was for you.'

  'Yes, you're right. I can't conceive what it would have been like if we'd lost, but if we had, I would probably only remember the horror, or have done everything I could to forget it, and perhaps, with great effort, would have succeeded. It's hard to imagine. I don't know, I can't know.' And Wheeler moved his arm away from his forehead and instead rested his cheek on his hand and sat pondering, as if the idea had never occurred to him.

  'And what happened? What else?' That was what Tupra always used to say to me during our sessions together: 'What else, tell me more.' He would not do so again nor would there be any more sessions, that much was sure.

  'The worst came after the end of the War, when the whole country raised its head to look around, and some, not many, started thinking about what had happened, what they had seen and how they had lived, and what they had been obliged to do. A few months after the surrender, Valerie received a letter from her friend Maria. They hadn't had any contact since 1939, since before war broke out. Maria didn't even know that Valerie was married and that her surname was now Wheeler. Val and I met in 1940 and got married in 1941, shortly before I turned twenty-eight and when she was twenty-one. The truth is that neither of them knew if the other was still alive. Maria sent the letter to Val's parents' address, and her mother forwarded it to Oxford, where we had moved after I'd been elected Fellow of The Queen's College in 1946. Val's father had died in one of the air raids on London. Valerie was overjoyed at first, but that feeling only lasted as long as it took her to open the envelope. That letter was our death sentence. Or rather, hers.' And when Peter added these words, some words Tupra had said came back to me, like a premonition, like an echo: 'While it isn't something any of us would wish for, we would nonetheless always prefer it to be the person beside us who dies, whether on a mission or in battle, in an air squadron or under bombardment or in the trenches when there were trenches, in a mugging or a raid on a shop or when a group of tourists is kidnapped, in an earthquake, an explosion, a terrorist attack, in a fire, it doesn't matter: even if it's our colleague, brother, father or even our child, however young. Or even the person we most love, yes, even them, anyone but us.'

  'I wasn't there when she received and read it, but she showed it to me afterwards, or, rather, translated it for me: although Maria spoke English, Val's German was better, and that was the language in which they wrote to each other. It was a long letter, but not that long, I mean not enough for Maria to be able to explain all that had happened to her during the War years; she summarized the most important facts. She, too, had married and her name was now Hafenrichter; however, her husband had died at the Russian front, leaving her a widow. She was managing to scrape a living in the international zone of Vienna (as you know, Vienna, like Berlin, was divided into four occupation zones: American, British, Russian and French, and the center was international, that is, it was controlled and patrolled by the four powers simultaneously). She spoke about her current hardships, the same dire situation as in German towns and cities, although Vienna had suffered less devastation, and she asked for help, although without specifying what form that help might take, money, medicine, clothes, provisions . . . Her parents, Mr. and Mrs. Mauthner, had died, as had one of the four sisters, the third, and it was presumed that the oldest, Ilse, was also dead, for she had vanished along with her two small daughters. The only surviving Rendl was the boy, whom she had taken in and whom she now wished to send to England, and she was asking Valerie's help in that regard too, if possible: the child had had a terrible time, and in Austria he faced a bleak, poverty-stricken future, and she could barely manage to support herself. But the worst thing was . . .' Wheeler's voice faltered and he hesitated for a moment, then recovered. 'The worst thing was that she explained to Val what had happened: "I don't know how," she said, and those were the words that tormented Valerie from the moment she read them until her death, the words that killed her: "I don't know how," she said, but the SS had somehow found out that Rendl had a Jewish grandmother and had bribed officials to have her name removed from the records. The records in question, though, hadn't been destroyed, only moved elsewhere and replaced with false documents: the originals turned up and the accusation was found to be true. The SS were very strict on the matter of racial ancestry, Maria told Valerie (imagining that there would be no reason why Valerie would know about that), and it seems that the case reached the ears of Himmler himself, who was enraged by such deceit and determined to make an example of Rendl, mostly in order to wring confessions from any other SS officers who were in the same or a similar situation, promising them that if they did confess, he would treat them more leniently, or at least less severely, than their impostor colleague. The discovery, along with the rumors that followed Heydrich's death, that even he had been "half-Jewish"'—'Heydrich,' I thought, 'who died slowly and in great pain, from those bullets impregnated with poison'—'led him to believe, as I found out later, that his purer-than-pure body of men had, in fact, been transformed, since the enactment of the Nuremberg Laws, into a refuge for Mischlinge and even for "half-Jews," reasoning, as was proper to a mind as sick as his, that there could be no better disguise for the prey than to camouflage themselves as hunters. Well, perhaps his mind wasn't so very sick when you think of Delmer or, even more so, of Jefferys, who were both capable of dreaming up the most complicated plans and machinations. Or when you think of mine, perhaps, for we all had war minds, there are no healthy minds in wartime and some never recover. But returning to the letter: Maria had managed to learn what Rendl's exemplary punishment had been: to be sent to a concentration camp as a prisoner, even though he was only a "quarter-Jewish"; and not just that, but one day, the Gestapo turned up at his house in Munich, where he and his family were living at the time, and took the girls away. They didn't take the boy because he wasn't there when this happened, he was staying in Melk with his grandparents, and once the Gestapo had got over their initial rage, they didn't bother overmuch to seek him out. When Ilse, horrified, asked why they were doing this, all they would say was that the girls were Jewish, but that they had no proof against her; if she wanted to go with the girls, that was her business. Properly speaking, those girls were only one-eighth Jewish and would normally have been considered to be "German." But that was the reprisal, the punishment: making "full Jews" of the descendants of the man who had deceived and tricked them. After all, as Goring said, or Goebbels, or perhaps it was Himmler himself: "I decide who's Jewish." None of this became public, of course, it would have made a terrible impression, it was made known only to the officers of the SS, as a warning to them to tread carefully, and that is why the PWE heard almost nothing about it. The SS were very keen on secrecy and childish rituals. According to neighbors who witnessed the scene, Ilse got into the car that was about to carry her girls away and no more was heard of any of them. It was supposed that, once in a concentration camp, all trace of them would have been lost and their "origin," which was the reason they were there, quite forgotten, and they would have become, in effect, Jews or, at best, "dissidents"; no, there was no "best" about it: their fate would have been the same. Maria didn't want to deceive herself with fantasies, she had no hope that they were alive. She assumed they were dead, with no room for speculation or doubt, especially once information was published about the gas chambers and the mass exterminations. So that w
as what the letter said, Jacobo. Maria ended by saying that she didn't know if Valerie was still alive or if she would ever read those lines, but she begged her, if she was alive, to send her news and help as well, especially for Ilse's son, young Rendl. He would have been about eleven or twelve at the time.' Wheeler paused, took a breath and added: 'If only those lines had never reached her eyes. If only no one had ever told her. I wouldn't have seen her kill herself. I wouldn't have been left alone and sad.'

  Wheeler remained silent and thoughtful and again raised the back of his wrist to his brow, as if to wipe away some sudden beads of sweat or as if he were again taking his temperature. 'Give me your hand and let us walk,' I quoted to myself. 'Through the fields of this land of mine, edged with dusty olive groves, I walk alone, sad, tired, pensive and old.' I had known this poem since I was a child, they were the words addressed by Antonio Machado to his already dead child wife, Leonor, who died of tuberculosis at the age of eighteen. Valerie hadn't died, she had killed herself when she was only slightly older, looking at her own hourglass and holding it in her hand. But she, too, had left Peter alone, sad, tired, pensive and old. Regardless of all the things he went on to do afterwards.

  I should have expected this revelation after what Wheeler had been telling me, but I was so taken aback that, for a moment, I didn't know what to say. And when he did not immediately go on, I gave voice to a thought that slipped unavoidably into my mind, even at the risk of diverting his thoughts elsewhere and missing the end of the story:

  'That's what Toby said had happened to him. I told you, don't you remember?' And I recalled, too, the look of irritated surprise on Wheeler's face when he had heard the story. 'Is that what he said: "I watched the suicide . . ."' he had repeated, taken aback, without completing the sentence. 'That he had watched the suicide of the person he loved.'