Dominion

by C. J. Sansom

  He went into the kitchen. A tall refrigerator contained rye bread, spiced sausage and cheese as well as several bottles of beer. Good, the English policeman would probably expect a drink when he came. He went into the bedroom, took off his jacket and shoes, and padded back to the lounge in his socks. A little clock on the mantelpiece showed a quarter to seven. The policeman, Syme, was not due until eight thirty. Gunther wondered what he would be like. On his walk to the flat from Senate House he had noticed how shabby and tawdry London looked; dog dirt and litter on the pavements, tired-looking people shuffling home after work, no zest or sense of purpose in their step. A newspaper hoarding spoke of more strikes in Scotland, a Special Conference of the Scottish National Party resolving to assist the authorities all they could in return for a convention to consider Home Rule as a first stage towards possible independence. Gunther’s own vision of the future, the German vision, was clear and logical and bright; a total contrast to this confused, dirty mess of a country. He switched on the television that sat in a corner. A cowboy drama was showing, cheap American nonsense, not allowed on German television. He turned off the set, lit a cigarette and sat staring at the seascape, remembering his childhood.

  Gunther had been born in 1908, six years before the Great War. His father was a police sergeant in a small town not far from Königsberg in East Prussia, Imperial Germany’s easternmost province. He was ten minutes older than his twin brother Hans. They looked identical, the same square faces and light-blond hair, but their personalities were different; Hans was quicker, funnier, with a quicksilver energy Gunther lacked. Gunther was more like his father, solid and steady. He was a clumsy, untidy boy, though, always creasing his clothes, while Hans was as neat as a new pin.

  Both did well at school though Gunther was a plodder while Hans was quick and imaginative, too much sometimes for the disciplinarian teachers. Gunther always felt protective of Hans, yet at the same time jealous, envying him for the qualities that made him the more popular twin among the other boys and later, with girls. It was Hans, though, who always wanted Gunther’s company, while often Gunther preferred to be alone.

  Their mother was a small, tired, self-effacing woman. Their father was a big man, with a craggy face and a moustache with upturned waxed points like the Kaiser’s. In his uniform with its tall helmet he could look intimidating. He believed in order and authority above all. When the Great War came he spoke proudly of bringing German order to all Europe. But Germany lost the war. The decadence and disorder of the Weimar Republic that followed horrified the ageing policeman. Once at the dinner table, not long after the war, he told them with tears in his eyes, ‘There were students demonstrating in the town today. Anarchists or Communists. We came and stood on the side of the square, to make sure it didn’t get out of hand. And they stood there laughing at us, mocking us, calling us pigs and lickspittles. What will become of us?’ Gunther was horrified to realize then that his father, his strong father, was frightened.

  At secondary school, Gunther developed an interest in English; he was good at the language and became fascinated by British history and how Britain had built a gigantic worldwide empire. Germany had overtaken Britain in industry, but had been too late to create an empire to provide the raw materials it needed. His teacher, a strong German nationalist, taught how England was in decline now, a great people gone to seed through democratic decadence despite their magnificent past. Gunther wished Germany had an empire, instead of being what the teacher called a cowed nation, provinces hacked away at Versailles, the economy ruined by reparations. Gunther would tell Hans about his thoughts of Empire and his brother, who had much more imagination, conjured up stories for him of great battles on sweltering Indian plains, settlers in Africa and Australia struggling against hostile natives. Gunther was in awe of his brother’s ability to picture another world.

  The twins often went out cycling at weekends, along the straight dusty roads between the plantations of tall firs, the forest stretching away into shadowy darkness on each side. One hot summer Sunday when they were thirteen they went further than before. They passed carts lumbering by, little villages, a massive redbrick Junker country house surrounded by wide lawns. At lunchtime they stopped to eat their sandwiches by the side of the road. It was very quiet and still, insects buzzing lazily in the heat. Hans had been thoughtful all morning. He said now, ‘What shall we do when we grow up?’

  Gunther nudged a stone with his foot. ‘I want to study languages.’

  Hans looked disappointed. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t do that.’

  ‘What do you want to be?’

  ‘I want to be a policeman, like father.’ Hans smiled, his blue eyes alight. ‘We could both join. Catch all the bad people.’ He pointed a finger down the empty road. ‘Bang, bang.’

  In 1926, when the twins were eighteen, Gunther won a place to study English at Berlin University. Hans, bored with school, had already left and taken a clerk’s job in Königsberg. He seemed to have forgotten his dream of following their father into the police. Gunther had not; he had thought about it many times but the prospect of going to university was exciting. He had never left East Prussia before and longed to see Berlin. His parents, delighted with his success, encouraged him.

  The evening before Gunther left he sat with his father by the fire. The old man was nearing retirement; he was happier these days, life was easier. A degree of prosperity was returning to Germany under Stresemann after the nightmare of the Great Inflation. His father gave Gunther a beer and offered him a cigarette, smiling through the thick moustache, drooping now, that had turned from blond to white, stained yellow-brown with nicotine.

  ‘A son of mine, going to university. The train will take you across the Polish Corridor, the part of Germany that was stolen from us in 1918. They’ll pull the blinds down over the windows while you cross Polish territory. At least, I think they still do that. I hope so.’ His heavy face became serious. ‘You take care now, don’t get into bad company, nightclubs and places like that. A lot of bad things go on in Berlin.’

  ‘I’ll be careful, Father.’

  ‘I know you will. You’re a steady lad.’ The old man smiled again, sadly. ‘If it were Hans I would be worried. I don’t know what he gets up to in Königsberg.’ He shook his head.

  Gunther said nothing. He had always known he was the one his father preferred, though he felt Hans was better than him in so many ways.

  Gunther spent three happy years in Berlin. He seldom visited the flesh-pots; his friends were mostly quiet, studious people who, like him, despised the avant-garde Berlin crowd, the artists and hack writers and queers. One day during his first week, he was walking along a street far from the city centre with some fellow-students, watching the scenes around them. Looking down an alley, Gunther saw an extraordinary-looking old man staring at him. He wore a long dark coat, and his black hair, surmounted by a skullcap, curled round his cheeks in long side-locks. He stared back at Gunther with fearful, hostile eyes. Gunther said, half laughing, ‘Who the hell was that?’

  One of the others said, in a voice full of contempt, ‘A Jew.’

  ‘They don’t look like that. What about Steiner and Rabinovich in our class, they look and dress just like us.’

  His fellow-student turned on him angrily. ‘Those Jews, they pretend. That old man is what they really look like, but most of them dress and talk like us, pretend to be Germans, so we won’t recognize them as they steal from us. Don’t you understand anything?’

  The encounter made Gunther feel queasy, gave him for the first time a sense of the strange, half-visible threat in their midst.

  In the summer of 1929 he left for England for a year at Oxford; he felt alone and out of place the whole time there, surrounded by people who mostly seemed either to be decadent aristocrats or pretending to be. Gunther wasn’t political, but like his father he supported the conservative German Nationalists who wanted Germany to be great again, stable and ordered. He longed for East Prussia’s clean, b
racing air as he endured the endless, dirty English drizzle. He had no money to socialize or travel and sometimes went for days without talking to anyone; he studied and studied, English history especially. He had letters from his parents, and less frequently, from Hans, who was bored in his clerk’s job but couldn’t think what else to do.

  That autumn the American stock market collapsed. In Britain businesses closed and unemployment mushroomed. Gunther learned that things were terrible in Germany too, the brief prosperity of the late twenties gone, unemployment rising to millions, homeless workers in Berlin paying to sit on stools in draughty halls, with elbows balanced on ropes strung across the room on which they leaned to sleep. The politicians seemed helpless, running about like headless chickens. Hans wrote that he had lost his job in Königsberg and gone back to live with their parents. Nobody knew what was going to happen next.

  In the summer of 1930 Gunther returned to Germany, glad to shake the grime of England from his feet. Arriving in Berlin he saw homeless beggars, women and children selling themselves on street corners. On the tram from the station to his university lodgings he passed a Communist demonstration, men in mufflers and caps marching under a red banner with the hammer and sickle, carrying placards demanding work, singing ‘The Internationale’.

  The term had not yet started, so Gunther went back home, the blinds on the train lowered again as they crossed the Polish Corridor. He arrived back at the house; behind its little fence the garden his mother tended was as neat as ever but in the warm sunlight the cottage looked dowdy, in need of a coat of paint. His mother opened the door and embraced him. ‘Thank God you’re back,’ she said. His father was sitting in his usual chair by the fire, a jug of beer by his side. ‘Hello, son,’ he said. The big man looked shrunken somehow, huddled. Gunther and his mother sat down at the table. He asked, ‘How are things?’

  His mother answered, ‘Not good. Your father’s pension has been cut. It’s hard to manage.’

  Gunther asked, ‘Where’s Hans?’

  ‘He should have been back by now.’ She smiled. ‘He is so excited you’re coming.’

  ‘Does he have a job?’

  His father made a sound like a snarl. ‘Oh, yes,’ he said bitterly. ‘Hans has a job all right.’

  Gunther looked at his parents, puzzled. His mother lowered her head.

  He heard the kitchen door open. Hans came into the room. He smiled at Gunther, white teeth in a tanned face. He wore a uniform that Gunther had glimpsed on the Berlin streets: brown shirt and black trousers, beautifully ironed with sharp creases, a brown cap and dark tie, solid black boots. Gunther’s first thought was how fine Hans looked, what a contrast to his own pallid rumpledness. His twin’s shirt sported a bright swastika armband.

  That night Hans took Gunther to a meeting. He had joined the Nazi Party that spring and for the last two months had been working for them as a youth organizer. The Party was taking on more people with the Reichstag elections due in a few weeks.

  Gunther knew little about the Nazis, just that they were a fringe party with a few seats in the Reichstag; he remembered hearing about a comic-opera putsch in Munich when he was a boy, newspaper pictures of a man with a fierce frown and a toothbrush moustache. Upstairs, in their old room, Hans now told Gunther all about the Movement, his eyes alight and happy. ‘We’re on the march now, we’re hoping for a hundred deputies in the Reichstag elections in September.’

  ‘A hundred?’ Gunther asked scoffingly.

  ‘Yes. People are joining us in hordes. The bourgeois parties have failed Germany.’

  ‘Bourgeois? You sound like a Communist.’

  ‘In Berlin we’re chasing the Communists off the streets,’ Hans said seriously. ‘We’re a German party, a racial party, we’re for Germans of all classes.’

  ‘Father doesn’t seem to approve. I’m not surprised if your party’s into street fighting.’

  Hans shook his head vigorously. ‘Only to stop the Reds handing us over to the Russians. When we take over, we’ll bring order back. Real order. It won’t be easy, though, we know that. We’re realists. Father thinks that somehow you can wave a magic wand and go back to the Kaiser’s time but it’s not like that. And then . . .’ Hans’ eyes lit up. ‘We’ll make Germany the master of Europe.’ He laid a hand on a thick volume on his table, reverently, like a pastor touching the Bible. ‘It’s all set out here, in the Leader’s book Mein Kampf.’ The gleam in his eyes, mirrors of Gunther’s own, was frightening but compelling too. ‘Come on, Gunther,’ Hans said, spreading his arms wide. ‘You know Germany’s been done down and crushed, that this isn’t how it’s meant to be.’

  ‘I know, but . . .’

  Hans leaned forward. He asked his brother, ‘What do you believe in?’

  ‘Getting away from English rain.’

  ‘What are you going to do now?’

  Gunther shifted uneasily. This was a new Hans, jabbing these questions at him. But Hans had always thought about things more than he had. ‘I don’t know,’ he answered. ‘While I’ve been away – I’ve decided, this academic stuff isn’t for me, I thought of giving it all up, maybe even joining the police after all. Doing something real, something honest.’

  ‘Come with me tonight,’ Hans said quietly. ‘I’ll show you something truly real and honest.’

  They cycled out to the forest, their front lamps piercing the darkness. Gunther was tired and his head was full of jumbled impressions of the last few days – leaving England, the long train ride to Berlin, the beggars and demonstrators, Hans in this uniform. Moths danced in the thin pencils of light cast by their lamps. Other cyclists in Brownshirt uniforms appeared, many of them teenagers in black shorts, and they exchanged happy shouted greetings with Hans.

  They came to the entrance of a forest path that led to one of the many little East Prussian lakes. Families went walking there on Sundays. Hans and Gunther had gone with their parents as children. Tonight a group of older Brownshirts, big men, stood on the forest verge where the path began, oil lamps on the ground beside a neat stack of bicycles. Hans walked over to them, extending his arm and shouting out, ‘Heil Hitler!’ It was the first time Gunther had heard the Nazi greeting. A big Brownshirt put a hand on Gunther’s chest. ‘Who are you?’ he asked threateningly. ‘Where’s your uniform? You look like a fucking tramp.’ It hurt Gunther that the man didn’t realize they were twins.

  ‘He’s my brother,’ Hans said. ‘He’s just travelled back from England.’

  The man shone a torch in Gunther’s face. ‘All right, Hoth. But he’s your responsibility.’

  Gunther and Hans joined a trail of men and boys walking down the path, talking excitedly, lighting the way with their bicycle lamps. They came to the little lake. Tall torches in braziers had been lit on the shore, a boy watching each to make sure the flames stayed under control in the dry forest. There were about two hundred people there. Hans said, ‘I’ve got to get my lads lined up. There’s a speaker coming from Berlin. Just stand somewhere on the side and watch. Don’t sit down,’ he added. ‘That would be disrespectful.’

  Gunther watched as Hans organized two dozen boys efficiently into straight lines. They stood to attention on the shore. At a command everyone fell completely silent. Gunther could hear the wood crackling in the branches. The scene was beautiful and dramatic: the torchlight, the uniformed men still in their silent lines before the calm moonlit lake, the forest behind. Gunther felt a shiver of excitement. Then four Brownshirts walked out of the trees, accompanied by a tall, slim young man in black uniform. He had light blond hair and an extraordinary, long face, ascetic with a proud beak of a nose and a wide, full mouth that somehow spoke of strength and immense firmness. He stood beside a torch, back to the forest, facing the assembly. He was introduced as National Comrade Heydrich from Berlin, recently appointed to the Leader’s personal guard.

  Heydrich began speaking, in a confident, penetrating voice. He said, ‘Sixteen years ago, in 1914, in a forest not far from here, Germany fough
t and won a great battle. Russia had invaded us, they were set to conquer and destroy us. But at the Battle of Tannenberg we threw them back. We destroyed their army. The few Russian survivors ran away. Germany suffered 20,000 casualties; brave men many of whose bones lie in these forests, in the German soil they defended. This is what brave Germans can do! So how, comrades, have we fallen so far?’

  Heydrich spoke of the surrender by Socialist German politicians at the end of the War, the destruction of the German economy by the Allies, the Depression, the dithering bourgeois parties and the growing Marxist threat. He spoke of a new Germany to be built on the ruins. He had taken a military stance, hands behind his back, his voice growing more insistent. ‘We shall prevail, because greatness is Germany’s destiny; that is the lesson of history, clear to all who read it. A legacy handed down by our ancestors who first settled these forests, the heroic Teutonic Knights.’ Gunther suddenly thought, I’ve spent years studying English history. But what about my history, Germany’s history? Have I wasted all this time?

  Heydrich raised a slim hand, pointing at the ranks before him. ‘But if we are to fulfil our mission we must be alert, aware of the enemies within and outside the Reich! It will take years to beat them down but we shall do it. The French, the Socialists, the Catholics with their masters in Rome, the Communists with their masters in Russia. And the masters of them all, the controlling hand, the enemy within and without. The Jews.’

  Gunther hadn’t thought about the old Jew he had seen in the alley for years but he remembered now.

  Heydrich fell silent. Gunther glanced over at Hans to see him looking back at him. His twin smiled and nodded. At a signal, the Brown shirts began singing, their clear young voices echoing across the lake:

  ‘The flags held high! The ranks are tightly closed!