I always threw a glance into Domagk's room as the Schwebebahn traversed the I G Farben works, but I never glimpsed him. We crossed the Wall, the main shopping street of Elberfeld, festooned with long Nazi banners. Flags were to be flown on all days of national significance, of which the Germans had many. Some brave or foolish housekeepers or shopkeepers flaunted the red, black and white horizontal stripes of the old Weimar Republic, the flag which Hitler described with a lapse of his usual prudery as, 'a bedsheet of the most shameful prostitution'. Shortly the swastika was to fly all over Germany triumphantly alone, hoisted to the peak of its flagstaff by the law of the land.
The month of April had jolted past fiercely. When the Germans recovered their breath from Hitler's sweeping up full political power, people began to say it was not dangerous, or even significant, because the Nazis were a minority party. But the Nazi rank and file were aghast that the Third Reich had gloriously dawned with the Jews still opening their shops, sitting in Court, teaching in school and even walking the streets. The Storm Troopers took over. On April 1, they organized a national boycott of Jewish shops. They pushed into courtrooms and forced outside Jewish barristers and judges. Hitler had to seize back the initiative by hastily signing the Aryan Decrees, barring Jews from the universities, the civil service, schools and the legal and medical professions. Hitler's scrawled signature abolished as easily the ancient German states and unified the Reich, surmounting the frustrations of Bismarck's whole lifetime and proving his own promises to be written on water. April had been a month to open the eyes of the Germans, had many cared to be roused awake.
'Hey there, old man! Aren't you going to introduce me?'
I looked up from my seat, startled, amazed and alarmed. Standing above was Jeff Beckerman. It was a warm day, and he wore his light grey English suit with chalk stripes, on his head a floppy white linen cap with a button in the middle. I had never known him to take the Schwebebahn, though he came in every day from the black and white villa he rented at Vohwinkel, out beyond Elberfeld. I had never known him to move more than a hundred yards anywhere without his car.
'I saw you get aboard.' He had pushed his way through the crowd of standing passengers, and was grinning broadly. 'I had to take the Cord into the garage. One of the brake drums has cracked clean across, it's one of the faults with that car. I hope to God the Jerries know how to fix it.'
His eyes were pawing Gerda. She gave an unsure smile, realizing that this was the American I had spoken about so often. I stammered some words of introduction in English and German. Already I saw the long-feared consequences of her meeting Jeff, whose air of wealth and worldliness picked him from the seedy passengers of the Schwebebahn like a sovereign in a handful of pennies. Jeff seized her hand, shaking it with the enthusiastic vigour he applied to his car. 'I'm sure glad to meet you, Frдulein. I've heard a whole lot about you from Jim.'
'Frдulein Dieffenbach speaks virtually no English,' I said stiffly.
'Then she must learn! Sure she must, it's not fair, a girl like her in Wuppertal and I can't speak to her. Tell her I'll hire her a teacher.'
I translated this dutifully. Gerda put her hand to her mouth and gave an uncharacteristic giggle. I supposed it was a joke. I should not have been surprised at Jeff sending a professor of English ringing the Dieffenbachs' doorbell.
Gerda's stop was before ours. By then Jeff had contrived in bilingual conversation a promise for all three of us to take a spin in his car the following Sunday afternoon-if of course the brakes were working. As she disappeared with a smile through the sliding doors, he nudged me hard in the ribs. 'It was mean of you, hiding her all this time. She's a ripping girl, _nicht wahr?'_
'She's very serious, you know,' I said discouragingly. 'She doesn't find anything worth talking about which doesn't affect the lives of five million people.'
'I don't believe it. She's schцn, she doesn't have to wear her brains like a fancy bonnet.'
'Nobody in the world takes their job more seriously than a German schoolteacher. Not even the President of the United States.'
'You're wrong, old man,' he said cheerfully. 'All women are only interested in little things, food, clothes, if it's going to rain and ruin their hair, whether a man helps them out of an automobile or takes his hat off in an elevator. That's why women make rotten politicians, they've got a proper sense of values. Anyway, I like intelligent girls.'
I grew depressed and panicky. My relationship with Gerda was insipid, but I had the comfortable feeling that she was my property, if only because I had no rival. My dislike of Sunday's expedition deepened when Jeff arrived at the Dieffenbachs' gate in bright-buttoned blue blazer and white flannels, looking readier for yachting than motoring. He grasped a huge bunch of pink, white and red carnations, elaborately arranged in a cone of frilled paper. Gerda's eyes glowed at the flowers. Her mouth opened at the Cord gleaming in the sunshine. Dr and Frau Dieffenbach came into the narrow front garden, similarly impressed with vehicle and burstingly self-confident owner. Young Gunter scurried round touching the white coachwork reverently. Even the two maids peeped in whispering admiration through the front lace curtains. I had a painful feeling of unnecessity.
It was a glorious afternoon. The sun shone from a blue Sunday sky unhazed by smoke, and Wuppertal hardly smelt at all. The streets were full of strollers in their sombre Sunday best, the walls thick with Nazi banners, and streamers with the repeated exhortation, _Honour Work and Respect the Worker!_ The morrow was May Day, declared a national holiday by the new Government, there were to be parades and rallies all over Germany. Hitler was himself to address a hundred thousand pairs of ears on Tempelhof Airdrome in Berlin, plus countless more in every home and, through lamppost loudspeakers, in every public square of the Reich. The pomp was to show the Nazis as neither puppets of the capitalists nor conspirators of the bourgeoisie, but true champions of the German worker. On the following day, May 2, Hitler emphasized this by taking over all German trade unions, occupying their offices with Storm Troopers, sequestrating their funds and jailing their leaders
We had the car roof folded back, the warm breeze tugging the brim of Gerda's black straw hat and running its fingers through wisps of her pale hair. She wore the ankle-length blue and white striped cotton dress which I had imagined bought for my own benefit. I sat in the back, still with my Trinity scarf. Jeff drove eastwards along the river, which flowed through Wuppertal like its gut, growing progressively filthier. Beyond Barmen the grimy town fell away from us and the valley became walled with the unspoiled woods of the Marscheider Wald. We stopped amid the huddle of steep red roofs against a lake which composed the village of Beyenburg. It was overshadowed by a fifteenth-century sandstone church, barnlike without transept, which we perfunctorily inspected before Jeff found a cafй where we could sit outside under a brightly striped umbrella _а la franзaise._ He ordered coffee, cream cakes and brandy. Nazi-dominated Germans enjoyed the freedom denied Englishmen of sipping spirits on a Sunday afternoon.
Gerda refused the brandy but ate several cakes. I found myself translating Jeff's compliments and gallantries, and her shy, smiling replies. When Jeff tried asking her through my own mouth to take dinner with him the following Saturday, I jibbed.
'What's the matter, old man? You're not engaged to her, are you?'
'No, but I'm rather keen on her.'
'Oh, bull! Maybe I should tell her about that little brunette in Cologne?'
'I never touched that woman.'
He looked mockingly. 'You don't say?'
'We sat in the kitchen and talked about the drugs they're experimenting with at I G Farben.'
He jerked his head across the table. 'Would she believe that? _Du lieber Gott!'_
'How about you and that tart in Berlin?'
'I keep telling you, Heike wasn't a professional.' He arrogantly stuck out his legs in their spotless white trousers. 'Anyway, women prefer a really experienced man of the world.'
Gerda was searching both our faces, puzzled an
d disconcerted by the tone of our exchanges. 'Genung!' Jeff exclaimed. He commanded the waiter, _'Bitte, bringe noch zwei Glases Cognac.'_ I noticed that he was beginning to use more German.
My tide of jealousy rose. My anchor was Gerda's personality. How could a level-headed schoolmistress with a mind and will of her own fall for the dash and extravagance of Jeff? What touching faith I had in the constancy of woman! The next Sunday afternoon Jeff appeared in beautifully cut plus fours with knitted brown socks and hand-made English brogues. He invited Gerda for another drive. This time I wasn't asked.
I decided to relinquish Gerda. In love affairs I withdraw at the gentlest rebuff, like a snail in a shower. I told myself sourly that a handsome young man with splendid clothes, a feeling for flattery and with the only Cord car in Germany was irresistible. I was not wholly fair. Jeff had charm and vigour, and he was American. He brought to old-fashioned, contorted, introspective, stiff-necked Germany the fresh wind of boundless prairies, endless highways, topless skyscrapers and unlimited money. To Gerda, he was _Blondie of the Follies._
'Herr Jim, you must have a poor opinion of me,' she confessed one evening when we found ourselves alone. I made some demurring remark. 'Jeff is very insistent. And I don't get many luxuries here in Wuppertal,' she said artlessly. 'But I feel very guilty, because you are so nice and quiet, and so much more intelligent than Jeff.'
My relations with Jeff remained amicable. They had to be. He seemed to regard his snatching Gerda only as a good joke at my expense. On May 10, Nazi students lit a bonfire from their libraries. Dr Goebbels benignly inspected the flames in the Franz-Josefplatz, while they shouted _Brenne Heinrich Heine! Brenne Karl Marx! Brenne Sigmund Freud! Brenne Heinrich Mann!'_ But both national and domestic disarray seemed trivial some six weeks later, when I thought I was about to lose my right hand.
10
On Friday morning I smashed a test-tube in the lab, and from a spot of blood saw with annoyance that I had pricked my right index finger. On Friday night it was tender, it throbbed when I woke on Saturday, and over the day grew ominously red and swollen.
I hesitated to consult Dr Dieffenbach. I had lived in a doctor's house-a King's doctor's house!-since I was fifteen, but my complaints had been always too trivial to provoke the cogitations of Sir Edward Tiplady. And by the nature of her profession, my mother had an intimacy with household remedies. Though I was never a sickly child, she would regularly apply them out of interest. I was dosed with garlic against worms, rubbed with hot roast turnip against chilblains, or with a steak to be promptly buried in the back garden against warts. My bowels never remained unmoved in the presence of senna infusions, rhubarb tea and boiled onions. I became a hypochondriac, which my life working closely with medical men has aggravated. They have an instinctive way of eyeing you for promising defects, as a knacker a passing horse. I have imagined picking up as many diseases as pieces of their jargon.
'You don't look well,' Gerda said as the maids were clearing away our evening meal. She showed increased solicitude for my welfare and comfort, I assumed through her guilt over Jeff. 'And you hardly ate a thing.'
'It's my finger.'
Her face grew concerned as I thrust the swollen tip towards her. 'You must be careful. Papa had a patient the other day whose finger started just like that. In the end he got blood poisoning, and they had to take him into the hospital and amputate his arm.'
I thanked her for the encouragement.
'You must show it to Papa once he gets back.' Dr Dieffenbach had missed his dinner through an urgent call. 'I'm sure he'll be able to stop it spreading with hot fomentations.'
I sat for a while over Hans Fallada's new novel _Kleiner Mann, was nun?_ while Gerda in her glasses corrected exercise-books. I knew that no infection was trivial. My father once caught his hand on a rusty nail rummaging in the dark of the wine cellar, and had been incapacitated for weeks.
We heard the doctor come home. I shut my book and followed him to his surgery at the back of the house. He was still in his Homburg, washing his hands.
'Come in, come in,' he invited in English. 'Have you ever had diphtheria, my dear chappie?'
'No, I haven't.'
He hung his hat on the stand with a weary gesture. 'I've just seen a bad case. Membrane right across the throat and the heart affected. Its twin attack, as garrotter and poisoner. Herr Petersen's little girl, on the other side of the Zoologischer Garten, I've known him since the War. Well, it's the disease which takes four or five thousand German children to Heaven every year.'
As he neatly folded the small starched towel which he had dried his hands on, I made the remark that a physician of his skill might save the child.
'Were I the reincarnation of Hippocrates I could battle no more successfully against the Klebs-Lцffler bacillus once it's on the rampage. There are but three things I can do.' He made a gesture of resignation. 'I can inject diphtheria antitoxin into the veins. I can administer strychnine to steady the heart. And I can hope for the best. If the child's breathing gets worse, I shall be called from my bed tonight to perform a tracheotomy.' He indicated with his forefinger a cut just below his voice-box. 'There're rumours going round this last year or so that they're developing the immunization against the disease, like your Edward Jenner discovered against smallpox a hundred years ago. Perhaps that will make a dent in the mortality.'
The room was small with white walls, lit by a strong electric bulb in a shade like a saucer and there was a reek of carbolic. One side was occupied by an uncomfortable-looking examination couch with a horsehair-stuffed top. Against the other stood a steel-and-glass case of instruments, on top a metal sterilizer like a chafing-dish over a spirit lamp. On the desk, a dish of instruments-scalpels, forceps, curved needles-lay marinating in reddish antiseptic. Dr Dieffenbach drew a box of cigars from the drawer and clipped one with a pocket guillotine. He smoked cigars unabashed while examining his patients, I suspected even intimately.
'Well, old chappie, you are looking at me like the unfortunate messenger from Birnam Wood in Macbeth.' He was fond of parading his involuntary intimacy with English literature.
I held out my finger with an apologetic air. He inspected it in silence, while the surgery filled with aromatic smoke. He pressed the pulp. I winced 'You have a cellulitis here,' he announced calmly. 'Our old friend the streptococcus has bitten you.'
'It won't spread, will it?' I asked, alarmed.
'Who can say? If the infection doesn't resolve in twenty-four hours, I can make a little cut or two and insert a rubber drain.' His unruffled professional manner at that moment struck me as incorporating the worst of British phlegm and German insensitivity. 'Sit down, and I'll take your temperature. Chin up, my dear chappie. I shall endeavour not to send you home looking like Admiral Nelson.'
It appeared that I had some fever. He prescribed kaolin poultices every four hours. All Sunday, Gerda made them in the kitchen, spreading the shiny white china clay on a square of pink lint with a spatula, then boiling it like a cabbage in a saucepan of water. With frowning seriousness she wrapped the poultice, tight and scalding, round my finger. I always winced and gasped, and she would say as she applied the layer of waterproof gauze and a bandage, 'Remember, Herr Elgar, it is for your own good.' I felt this unnecessarily schoolmistressy.
My mind became increasingly occupied with the chances of earning a living as a one-armed chemist. I had every faith in Dr Dieffenbach. He was superior to a Krankenkasse doctor, one employed by the compulsory public sickness insurance which was established in Germany in 1883, anticipating our British National Health Service by sixty-five years. And like our British National Health Service, its doctors complained that they were underpaid and overworked, its patients complained that they could not always choose their doctor, though the Verbдnde der Artze Deutschlands did its best to provide a selection. Dr Dieffenbach looked down on the Krankenkasse severely.
I stayed on my feet that Sunday, my right arm in a sling. I clearly could not go to the brewery on Mo
nday. Anyway, Jeff was in Berlin. I awoke feeling so ill, and my hand so pained, that I could not rouse myself from my bed.
Gerda brought me some barley-water, but I was too sick even to savour her concern. About noon, Dr Dieffenbach sent a maid to summon me to his surgery. As he took off the jacket of my pyjamas, I could see clearly red streaks now reaching from my hand and up my forearm towards my heart.
Dr Dieffenbach stood smoking his cigar for the best part of a minute, inspecting the unbandaged hand impassively.
'We'll try some new pills,' he decided.
I was then so frightened I would have swallowed arsenic had he suggested it. 'Perhaps I should send a letter home,' I said shakily. 'To break the news that I am ill-'
'You are hardly in top condition for correspondence. I'll send a line on your behalf to Sir Edward Tiplady. I owe him a note on other matters anyway. But if these pills do their job properly, by the time he receives it you will be cured.'
Dr Dieffenbach went to the glass cupboard. He reached inside for the Aesculape Field Surgical Chest he had acquired from Army surplus after the War. It was the size of my Woolworth's attachй case, gleaming steel, canvas lined, every instrument's place outlined in black and fitted with German ingenuity and precision. For a second I was horrified that he was about to cut off my arm without more ado. But he produced a glass phial about four inches long, for which the chest was a hiding place.
THE INVISIBLE VICTORY Page 7
