Secret Protocols

by Peter Vansittart

  ‘What’s that, Kurt? Are you hungry?’

  ‘No, I’m hungry.’

  Several youths, Acrobats by nature, heads together, plotting, sniggering, complaining, clustered at the pump. Or bargained for the girl, meek behind them, jug in hand. ‘She looks’, Wilfrid said, ‘almost virginal. Rare though not inspiring. Well, the sadness and mad hopes of the young! I once met a Malayan girl with an impressive-sounding name that, in the vernacular, meant “my Father wanted a boy”!’

  He was meditative, then returned to his chair. ‘It’s been said, too often, that a young face resembles a rose. You might prefer a heliotrope. But any flower, even wild by the roadside, refutes the zealot instructing us to refrain from feeding the hungry and clothing the naked, in order to hasten the end of the system and gain absolute power. Absolution for the unforgivable. Instead, you and, more problematically, myself, are learning to love the unlovable. As for little Friedl, unworthy of troubadours and lyricists … our companions, brave, loyal, unselfish, reliable, nevertheless contemplate what they call mass assault. The ancients symbolized our problem as the Gordian Knot. Alexander, in his greatness, or because of his greatness, lacked patience. He died young, you remember. An imbecilic treatment of life.’

  The message I imperfectly understood, though it must counsel restraint. But then what? High thoughts, well-adjusted patience, would not unlock Wolf’s Lair or withstand the Russians.

  Before I left him he selected a book from a neat pile, sought a particular page, then, as settling the matter beyond dispute, read out: ‘You’ve seen anger flare, two boys huddled into a ball of what was mere hate, and roll upon the ground … But now you know how such things get forgotten, for there, before you, stands the bowl of roses.’

  3

  Though the war was surely ending, a German advance in Bavaria was rumoured. I cursed Friedl. A little scared, at a loss, I was over-strained: spots in my eyes, unhealed scratches, coughs. The one-sided talk with Wilfrid rankled, I rebelled against his habit of uttering the controversial as if it were a truth clear to all but the wilful. At such times he was not Xenophanes but Robespierre, overclean, ineffable, not quite human, or a clever professor enjoying giving unexpected answers to questions routine or not always asked.

  Vello ignored us, chances of a deal receded. From Wolf’s Lair a scream, whether or not faked, was heard at night, like tearing calico. Again, we must wait on Wilfrid.

  He was refreshed, at ease, and, overalls removed, almost smart in trim blue jacket, well-washed open green shirt. ‘I have often thought that shabby compromise is an arrangement unjustly maligned. It may be possible for me to reach it.’

  Protests were strenuous. ‘Wilfrid, you can’t …’ But he could and was already leaving, passing through the camp with his habitual nods, small greetings, enquiries, making for the gates, at which, trailing behind, we had, at his brief order, to remain, the crowd around us whispering, nervous.

  He reached the barn, huge, patchily thatched, rotten, a woman gripped my hand as the door opened, then slammed, the sound like a gun-shot. ‘It’s a rat warren,’ the woman breathed as he disappeared.

  Throughout the long afternoon, under a sun round and yellow, like a poster, the crowd swelled, now subdued, now muttering. Some thought that Wilfrid had deserted us, would ride with Vello to seek the British and their General Monty. In myth, so recommended by Wilfrid, there could be wordless desire for the downfall of the beloved – Baldur, Achilles, Caesar. People, oppressed by tensions and the warm, sickly air, sank into hopelessness. Once a stir passed over like a breeze as Vello appeared at the door, surveying us, his stare, bludgeon nose, twisted mouth, his metal belt, his fists, compressed into the stiffness of pine or gallows.

  Trained on the barn door, we were held together by fantasies of the upshot. Purple melodrama has its truth, paring the moment to death or deliverance, the abject or proud, sunlight or midnight. Several, fainting, praying or in hangdog nothingness, were on their knees. Moments slouched by or ceased altogether, as in other tales, when the lord lies wounded, crops wither, dancers’ feet, harpists’ fingers, drinkers’ hands, freeze. Heavy as Hindenburg, the atmosphere was about to split when Friedl suddenly slid out quietly, faintly, as if through a crack in the great door, one cheek bruised, eyes looking nowhere, but head and shoulders defiant, demanding credit, until she half ran to a side-gate, the crowd parting, then enclosing her.

  Shamed by my own inactivity, I had scarcely thought of her. The barn remained fixed in its very lack of commotion, its morgue isolation, until, neither unobtrusive nor histrionic, Wilfrid walked out, his smile large, barely natural – the Pole said later he had rubbed himself with air – and, in a general gasp, we saw he was wearing an Egyptian tarboosh, red, tasselled, jaunty. He could as well have sported a cap and bells and painted stick, for a comic dance. Feeling we should applaud, we did nothing, overtaken by relief, astonishment, sensations of unreality. He would of course explain nothing, never mention it, the incident was as personal as confessional or medical examination. He might have done no more than told them a story, implausible but adroit. It might one day supply me a larger story of my own, written not from knowledge but ignorance, bending, colouring, or spoiling language, striving not for the sublime but the unusual.

  On 7 May 1945 we heard very distant bells. General Jodl had signed unconditional surrender, then was allowed to address his captors, his troops, the world:

  In this war, which has lasted more than five years, the German people and armed forces have achieved and suffered more than perhaps any other people in any other place. I can only hope that the victors will treat them generously.

  PARIS CONFERENCE

  1

  The apartment, high in a pillared, lemon-tinted crescent off rue des Cinq-Fils, had a largeness unrelated to size, considerable though this was. Light from oblong windows flowed with radiance, promise; space was extended by blue-and-white arches replacing doors, by the Juan Gris, Derain, Matisse reaching deep into an atmosphere leisured and calm. Flowers glowed on Buhl tables, white ledges; stone carvings glimmered in alcoves, silvery, grey, roseate, spiky and metallic, one, more tender, of a nude oriental girl, was cut, I always thought, by Wilfrid himself. Two bronze Cambodian Buddhas were slyly humorous. Tiny enamel boxes, jewels in antique settings, Persian miniatures, tiles decorated with heraldic stags, with butterflies, even a Viennese lorgnon, gleamed beneath books precisely arranged to their language. Prints, folios, maps, were stacked in gold-and-black Louis Quinze cabinets, and, in a small octagonal study, shelves of records: Mozart and Haydn quartets, alongside such chanteurs as Sablon, Trenet and Piaf. ‘I agree’, Wilfrid said, ‘with Cellini, that an architect should be adept not only in draughtsmanship but in music.’

  From above our crescent we would contemplate night-time Paris: a gigantic illuminated S, a neon spray across steep slanted roofs, a spire above dim, massed trees, the floodlit Column balancing the Dôme, then Sacré Cœur, aloft, like a bright, unblinking eye.

  I might sit with him as he worked. Sometimes he talked without looking up, pausing when flowers or cut-glass moved from shadows into a flake of sunlight.

  Throughout, the telephone rang, Wilfrid patiently, leniently, listening to pleas, complaints, enquiries, then suggesting a scheme, recommending a doctor, bank, hotel, often with a minute demur, small joke, murmur of comfort.

  I heard him name the best available chocolates, an inexpensive but reliable Left Bank restaurant, the last Nazi Governor of Paris, a Jacob Wasserman novel, a youth hostel to be avoided, the whereabouts of an SS fugitive, the inadvisability of a wedding night in a wagon-lit.

  ‘Wilfrid, you overdo it. Some take advantage.You’re a permanent Court of Appeal.’

  ‘That, wouldn’t you say, is better than a Supreme Court.’

  Sometimes I considered him not a court but an astrologer, advising on cosmetic surgery, the outcome of a peace congress, the desirability of an abortion.

  Lisette, cheerful, assiduous, grateful for some past, unr
evealed services, came daily to housekeep. To my curiosity about her he replied that he preferred paintings without too many details. ‘Lisette is on terms with her neighbours.Very bad terms.’

  Minor housework was provided by myself and Marc-Henri, dark in eyes, skin, personality, younger than me and of similar amorphous status. Slight, he was uncommunicative yet knowing and unfailingly resentful of me. No more than of Lisette did I know his origins. He would stand at a mirror ruffling his black, crêpe-like hair, restyling; then shaking it back to its usual sprawl. My attempts at conversation he would interrupt by saying he had lost interest. Occasionally, he deigned to play tennis with me, his hectic anxiety to win costing him too many points.Wilfrid, he said, was the better player, ‘by not too much’. He spoke with the grudge habitual when forced to admit another’s superiority. His incessant loss of interest guaranteed that I had lost mine, and we co-existed in armed truce, poison-sacs not dried but in abeyance.

  Nothing could detract from my elation at the gifts of a city at peace: I was a child thrilled by the infinite promise of Tomorrow, free to wander through summer charting the half-real Paris of Revolution, Empire, Occupation, absorbing as a murder trail. Statues, churches, monuments, parks, street names – rue du Pasteur-Wagner, rue des Grands-Augustins, rue Gambetta, rue du Temple, place Victor-Hugo.

  Over twenty, I was stateless, rather sententiously regarding myself as European, emotionally independent, uncluttered by petty allegiances, though requiring temporary visas, unreliable permits. Adenauer’s West Germany was vigorously productive but no more alluring than a millionaire’s swimming pool. East Germany was a Soviet satellite.Where, Goethe had demanded, does Germany lie, where is the whole? Incessant revelations of the Third Reich finally amputated ancestral hallucinations; only Pahlen was left unsmirched. Germania had been a brawling Valhalla, prettified into Thuringian Grail-seekers, operatic robber-knights, Hollywood castles. The Hohenstaufen were forgotten, the Meistersingers were silent, Goethe and Schiller at one with the White Rose. Thomas Mann dared his protests but from America.

  Romance was very plainly an outcome of distance and song. Ballads dripped blood. A gilded coach, hussar’s belt, ‘Merry Widow Waltz’, cherry-and-chocolate torte were no more than themselves. Lohengrin farewell.

  I must shove away

  distant shores

  to mortal feet unbidden.

  Newspapers were daily jolts from the wider world. Reconstruction had steadied European chaos but had not arrested the drift into what was being called the Cold War. Korea, Berlin Air Lift, tensions between the two Germanies, Eastern Bloc. Despite nominal protests from Washington and London, Stalin, grimly unassailable, had planted Estonia with Russians, the native professional classes shredded by deportations, gaolings, executions.

  I read that Jodl had been hanged, Laval shot, Pétain sentenced to death, then sent to life imprisonment. Mon Général, contemptuous of boulevards stacked with jeering communists, had stalked away into history though his very absence made him inescapable, the affronted saviour capable of a second coming. General Halder, rescued from Dachau after accusation of complicity in the July Plot, was reported by Paris-Match to be collaborating with American historians. From Nuremburg, as from Paris a century and a half earlier, came the monotonous bleat, ‘But I only obeyed orders.’ The concentration camp, Buchenwald, near Goethe’s home, was now a Soviet Transit Camp, fatal for traitors, speculators, class enemies.

  As if countenancing my resistance to opportunities in West Germany, Wilfrid passed me an envelope. I extracted the dossier of Herr Ludwig Ramdohr, ‘Protector of the Poor and Oppressed’, Chief of the Ravensbrück Political Department, recently hanged for torture, despite relatives insisting on his love of nature and all living things. ‘Walking in the country, he sometimes gave queer little jumps to avoid crushing a snail or a lizard.’

  Wilfrid listened as he might to Socrates or Buddha, to my account of the Turret, islands, Forest, the girl who ran. ‘You will not’, his sigh was perfunctory, ‘inherit the Grafschalt of Diephlz or the more cosmopolitan Duchy of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, and you have never reminded me of Heinrich der Lowe, save, of course, in physique …’ he was resigned to making the best of my deprivations, ‘but you have very well understood that line of Baudelaire’s about the world appearing limitless by lamplight.’

  When I mentioned Stefan George, he was at once sombre, light-blue eyes elsewhere. ‘We grew away from him, necessarily. But from such as he we learnt that poetry was more than idealized feelings that come too easily. Poetry, you may agree, should be more like a rock face. He spoke ten languages, desired, I think, some international aristocracy of the sensitive and gifted, yet craved and received disciples, surely a weakness.Always. They poisoned him with incense. But he refused temptations from Goebbels. An honourable epitaph, earned by rather too few. If you look at the great musicians …’

  I did not do so. Having spoken of my attempts to write, I now wondered whether he was obliquely urging me to resume. I also remembered the Herr General’s Ten Per Cent.

  2

  On a winter morning, a hush like a pall descended over Europe unknown since the Pact, since Hiroshima. By afternoon, the entire world, San Francisco to Yokohama, Cairo to Shanghai, had halted. Parisians were moving as if on tiptoe, traffic almost vanished, voices lowered, radios seemed charged with supernatural magnetism. Stalin was dead.

  He had terrorized millions, killed his people on a scale unprecedented. Co-author of the Pact, he had been vindictive, paranoiac terrorist: in Estonia, he was Bear Ogre, Red Sky Master, fanged Forest Uncle, Bandit in the Fur Coat and, placatingly, Sweetest Old One.Yet for the lonely, timid, drifting and the vengeful he had been a chastening Father, supernal Judge, towering, protective granite, his removal letting in light but opening into the unknown. We read that, in the gulags, even slaves had wept.

  Gradually, numbness wore off, clamour began. A new name, Khrushchev, had hailed Stalin as the Father of Mankind. Supported by Sartre, Picasso declared him representing historical maturity. The Red Belt in eastern Paris held a monster parade with banners, huge portraits, music; the Right distributed pamphlets asserting that on Stalin’s orders French communists had collaborated with Germans during the early Occupation, later usurping total credit for the Resistance. Humanité retorted by faking 1940 newspapers headlining Red demands for courage to defend Paris.

  More soberly, there was anticipation of danger. The Allied Air Lift had secured West Berlin, defeating Stalin’s plans, but now, in Korea, the UN armies, the USA and Britain foremost, had lost to Russian-backed Chinese on the Yalu. Fourteen thousand Soviet tanks were reported poised to ram Western Europe on the whim of another unproved figure, Malenkov. Officially confirmed was the explosion of the Soviet H-bomb.

  Unease was tempered by spring warmth, and all Paris was open to me. ‘Knock, and I will open.’ None knew me, none would pursue me. Without responsibilities, I had obligations only to Wilfrid and was profligate with well-being.

  Many Sections were shabby from neglect, shortages, occupation. I was puzzled by ‘Vive Charlemagne’ daubed on a crumbling façade, until learning that a volunteer French Charlemagne Division had been dispatched to defend the shrinking Reich.Wartime jokes were still scattered: Fraternité, Servilité, Lavalité.

  Shops, posters, chirpy markets, awnings were dazzling, laughter immoderate, greetings passionate, Quartier Latin diverting as Offenbach, the parks dainty as Perrault. Syncopation swirled down boulevards, subsiding in Faubourg Saint-Germain where shuttered mansions stood sedate above parquet-smooth lawns. I climbed Montmartre, once, briefly, wildly, renamed Mont Marat, though here I attracted glances, sneaky, unfriendly, unavoidable as Marc-Henri’s, recognizing me as no insouciant European above the battle but an unpolished German, kinsman of Ramdohr and Jodl.

  Central galleries and arcades overflowed with colour, lovers played each other like guitars, passing entwined, carefree and beautiful, to some plein air table or bar. I found quai Voltaire bookstalls; all wa
s intensified by summer known to Monet, Pissaro, Renoir: flounced trees, speckled water, sketchily trimmed clouds, gay caps and swinging skirts, pirouettes and smiles from cabaret and bistro. Illusions of opera hats, elegant cravats, layered crinolines of the Second Empire and the sleepy gaze of its sensational yet secretive ruler. Flimsy dresses, bare flesh, young leaves were reflected in pools, birds were smart and indifferent as mannequins. Stories flickered on all sides, begging to be remembered. At Port Royal a woman ate feathers, at rue Montaigne an ex-porter endlessly bowed, thanked passers-by, opened the door of an imaginary hotel.

  Prostitutes, or likely prostitutes, damped my lust though stinging my curiosity. Reputedly they had profiteered under the Occupation and, like southern peasants, resented the stingier days of Liberation. Many might have born a new, hybrid population growing up around us, perhaps shoots of an improved New Order. Their murmurs, ‘You coming?’ ‘What’s the hurry, mein Herr?’ were troubling, like an unpleasant scent or jarring tune. Safer, more invigorating, was to lean on Pont Saint-Louis, looking down-river before reaching quai d’ Anjou, wrapped in another hush, that of high, barred seventeenth-century exteriors, austere, legalistic, where no street children twisted hula-hoops, chanted obscene ditties, taunted strangers, romped with a glee I had forgotten at Meinnenberg. When I examined Saint-Sulpice towers from the Gardens, children reappeared but expensively clad, on ponies, sailing toy yachts, rushing for ice cream, shrieking on a hobgoblin merry-go-round. All was rich, sensual theatre: stench from Les Halles, fluttering perfume from a midinette. Other words revived: chatelaine, seneschal, oriflamme.

  Sometimes Wilfrid accompanied me. Then the pace, the encounters, were different, the occasions less brittle, sometimes pointed. He would be greeted in parks, a Lebanese bar, a café and, at the place Vendôme, by a grey, stocky man, the painter Max Ernst. Friend, also monitor, he was casually training me to see the familiar at angles slightly tilted. One square, hitherto unremarkable, was place Fabien.