by Stephen Fry
He pushed back his spectacles with a thumb. “She particularly asked . . .”
I started towards him. His eyes widened in fear and he flung up a hand. But I knew the type. Can’t get me on that. Thin, weedy, brainy, knobbly, weak. They are the ones to look out for. The mulish obstinacy of the weak is harder to break than the determination of the strong.
“Bollocks!” I shouted into his face. “Tell her, bollocks. If she asks after me, tell her I said bollocks.”
He nodded, the cold ivory of his anemic cheeks patched with highlights of murky orange pink.
I put my hand to a row of neatly labeled test tubes.
He croaked in alarm.
Then everything in me slowed. I saw the blue veins on Donald’s throat twitch and his mouth fall wetly open. I felt the muscles in my arm gather for a huge push that would send the test tubes flying across the laboratory floor. I heard the blood in my ears roar as it was sent surging to my brain by the tornado of anger in my chest.
I pulled my arm suddenly back as if I had been burned. On each test tube a blue meniscus swayed with faint relief and Donald’s dry throat swallowed with a rasping gulp.
Maybe I was a fucker on the inside, but not on the outside. Just couldn’t do it.
I walked from the room whistling.
Leo affected a complete lack of surprise.
“She’ll write you,” he said. “You can bet on it.”
He was concentrating on his remote chess, tugging at his beard and frowning at the position laid out on the table in front of him. Just a couple of kings and rooks and a pair of pawns.
“Same game?” I asked, plucking at the horsehair leaking from the arm of my chair.
“It comes to a crisis. Endgame. The chamber music of chess it is called. In my hands, more like the chamber pot of chess. I find it so hard to make the right moves.”
Stick to physics, I thought to myself, eyeing his self-satisfied giggle with disgust, and leave the jokes to others.
“Who’s the guy you’re playing?” I asked.
“Kathleen Evans, her name is.”
“She a physicist too?”
“Sure. Without her work I could never have built Tim.”
“She knows about Tim?”
“No. But I think maybe she is working on something similar with her colleagues at Princeton.”
“Princeton?”
“The Institute of Advanced Studies. Not connected to the university.”
“Still. All the same. Princeton. I hate the fucking place.”
“Einstein went to Princeton. Many other refugees too.”
“Jane is not a refugee,” I said coldly. “She’s a deserter.”
“You know Hitler made a great mistake there,” Leo said, ignoring me. “Berlin University and the Gottingen Institute contained most of the men who invented modern physics, and a large number of them fled to America. Germany could have had an atom bomb in 1939. Earlier maybe.”
I rose impatiently and scanned the books again. “What’s with Jews and science anyway?” I said.
“Half the scientists here today are Asian. Indian, Pakistani, Chinese, Korean. Something to do with being an alien maybe. No cultural roots, no place in society. Numbers are universal.”
“This Princeton babe you’re playing chess with, this Kathleen Evans. She’s not an alien by the sound of it.”
“She is British, so in America, yes, she is an alien.”
“Another deserter.”
Leo did not dignify this with a response.
“Anyway,” I said. “You should at least be able to crush her at chess.”
“How so?”
“You Jews are brilliant at chess. Everyone knows that. Fischer, Kasparov, those guys.”
“You Jews?” Leo looked up from the board in surprise.
“You know what I mean. You Jewish people, if you prefer.”
“Ah,” he said softly. “You haven’t understood, have you? It’s my fault of course.” He rose from his chair and came up to me in front of the bookcase and placed a hand on my shoulder. “Michael,” he said. “I am not a Jew. Not Jewish.”
I stared at him. “But, you said . . .”
“I never said I was a Jew, Michael. When did I ever say I was a Jew?”
“Your father. Auschwitz! You said . . .”
“I know what I said, Michael. Certainly my father was at Auschwitz. He was in the SS. That is what I live with.”
MAKING SMOKE
The Frenchman and the Colonel’s helmet: I
“You are impossible to live with, Adi,” laughed Hans Mend, shrugging his shoulders with exaggerated good grace to concede the argument. “From now on, whatever you say goes. Black is white. The sun rises in the evening. Apples grow on telegraph poles. Denmark is the capital of Greece. I promise not to disagree with you again.”
“The truth is never welcome,” said Adi superbly, putting the book away and jumping to retain his stride as they walked together along the duckboards.
Whenever you argue with him, Hans thought, he pulls out that wretched Schopenhauer. Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, The World as Will and Idea. It contained all the answers, it seemed. Above all it contained Adi’s favorite word, Weltanschauung.
“The fact is this,” said Adi. “I was reading the propaganda leaflets that the British use for their own troops.”
“But you don’t speak English!”
Adi shifted uncomfortably. To be reminded that there was anything he could not do displeased him. “Rudi translated for me,” he growled.
“Ah, of course!” Rudolf Gloder’s English was, like everything else about him, entirely without fault.
“The point is that the British in their pamphlets represent us Germans as barbarians and Huns.”
“Us Germans.” If Weltanschauung was Adi’s favorite word, then this was his favorite phrase. “We Germans believe . . .” “We Germans will not accept . . .” And Adi himself a Wienerschnitzel. But that’s “them Austrians” for you, thought Hans.
“Of course they say that,” he said. “It’s propaganda. What do you expect? Extravagant compliments?”
“That is not the issue. They are lies, naturally, but they are psychologically sound lies. They prepare the British soldier for the terrors of war, they preserve him from disappointment. He arrives at the Front and he sees that his enemy is indeed brutal, that war is certainly hellish. His leaders were right. This war will be a hard struggle. So Tommy digs down with added resolve. And what does our own propaganda tell the hopeful German boy, newly enlisted? That the British are cowards and can be crushed easily. That the French are lacking in discipline and forever on the brink of mutiny. That Foch, Pétain and Haig are fools. These are lies, but they are not psychologically sound. When our men arrive at the front they soon find out that the French are in fact deadly disciplined, that Tommy is far from a coward. Conclusion: Ludendorff is a liar, headquarters are nothing but rogues and conmen. They begin to disbelieve the great phrase on the posters in Berlin, Der Sieg wird unser sein. The thought that this too might be a lie grows in their minds. Perhaps, they think, victory will not be ours. Result: a sapping of the will and low morale. Defeatism.”
“Maybe,” said Hans uncertainly. “But you believe that victory is assured.”
“The belief is the point!” Adi pounded his fist into his hand, his eyes bright with excitement. “The will creates the victory! Defeatism is a self-fulfilling prophecy! You do not create the will to win by telling bad lies that are easily found out. We will win if we will the winning. There is nothing we Germans cannot achieve if only we believe. Nor is there any depth to which we cannot sink when we lose our faith. There can be no room for doubt. A solid wall of belief is what we need, strong enough to defend our Germany against the enemy without and the cowardly incursions of t
he pacifists and shirkers within. Unity, only unity. If your own side does not believe your propaganda, what hope is there that the enemy might?”
“That’s why you beat up that corporal?”
A few days earlier Adi had startled everyone by picking a fight with a hulking corporal from Nuremberg. “The war is a swindle from first to last,” this corporal had said. “It’s not our war, it’s a Hohenzollern war. It’s a war of aristocrats and capitalists.”
“How dare you talk like that in front of the troops!” Adi had screamed, hurling himself upon him. “Liar! Traitor! Bolshevik!”
Adi was a lance corporal, yet he had no respect for rank in and of itself. He had been offered a promotion years earlier, but there was no provision for promoting a regimental runner above the rank of Gefreiter, so Gefreiter he had remained.
This full corporal, this Obergefreiter, had driven his gorilla fist into Adi’s face time and time again, but to no avail. A lack of will perhaps. An incorrect Weltanschauung. In the end he fell into the mud, blood oozing from his nose and mouth, while Adi stood over him, sides heaving, lips flecked with creaming spittle.
This incident had resulted in a loss of popularity among the newer men, despite Adi’s Iron Cross, Second Class, and his reputation as scrounger of food and supplies, First Class. The old sweats, Ignaz Westenkirchner, Ernst Schmidt, Rudi Gloder, Hans himself, they still felt great fondness for the bloody-minded Austrian. But he was trying to a fellow, no doubt about that. Life would be more comfortable without him. More comfortable, but more dangerous perhaps, for he knew no fear.
They were nearing the main communication trench now, nicknamed the Kurfürstendamm after Berlin’s main shopping street. Adi slowed up.
“I remember the first time I was ever deloused,” he remarked, apropos of nothing.
“October, four years ago,” said Hans promptly. He raised his eyes past the Ku’damm and the forward trenches, across no-man’s-land toward Ypres. “Four years ago and four miles away. We’ve come full circle, Adi. A mile a year. Quite an achievement. Quite a war.” He raised a defensive hand to his face in haste. “That’s not Bolshevism, I promise you! Just a foolish remark.”
To his surprise, Adi smiled with genuine glee. “Don’t worry, I never hit friends.” Kameraden. Another favorite word.
“The Lord be praised. I value this face.”
“I can’t think why.”
Heavens, thought Hans. That was almost a joke.
“No, in fact that was not the first time,” Adi continued. “The first time ever I was deloused was in Vienna nearly ten years ago. They called it an Obdachlosenheim, but it was in fact a disgusting and humiliating prison. The pension money from my family had run out, no one was buying my paintings. I had no choice but to throw myself upon the mercy of the state.”
Hans shuddered slightly. Adi almost never spoke of his home or his background. When he did there was often an inconsistency and an overuse of melodramatic language that led many to suppose him a fantasist or a liar. “Throw myself upon the mercy of the state” indeed! “Line up in a doss-house” was all he meant. Bless him.
“How terrible for you.”
Adi shrugged off the sympathy. “I made no complaints. Not then, not now. But I tell you this, Hans. Never again. Never again.”
“Never again? Never again?” A cheerful voice behind them. “That doesn’t sound like our beloved Adolf!”
Rudi Gloder came up between them and clapped a hand to the shoulder of each.
“Herr Hauptmann!” Adi and Hans snapped to a salute. Gloder’s steady succession of promotions in the field from Gefreiter to Obergefreiter, Stabsgefreiter and Unteroffizier, had been swift and inevitable. That he had crossed the Great Chasm and made it to Leutnant, Oberleutnant and now Hauptmann had surprised only those who had never fought and lived alongside him. Some men are born to rise.
“Cut that out,” said Rudi shyly. “Only salute when other officers are watching. So tell me, what is this talk of never again?”
“Only this, sir,” said Adi. “Hans and I were talking about the Frenchman and the Colonel’s helmet.”
Hans was astonished at the fluency of the lie. So fast and so natural. That Adi did not wish to talk to anybody about his less than glorious past in Vienna was natural. That he should be most reluctant in front of Gloder of all people, that too was to be expected. Adi was more resistant to Rudi’s charms than the others were. Hugo Gutmann, their old adjutant, he had actively loathed Gloder, but then Gutmann was a Jew and Rudi had never been afraid to show his contempt for him, indeed had once called him to his face an aufgeblasene Puffmutter. Adi had no time for Gutmann either, even though it had been Gutmann who had so energetically pushed through a recommendation for his Iron Cross. So it was certainly not loyalty to Gutmann that caused Adi to be less impressed than most by Rudi’s radiant personality. Nonetheless, immune or not, it was strange to lie so easily and casually to a Kamerad . . . strange and a little disturbing.
“The Frenchman and the Colonel’s helmet?” said Rudi. “It sounds like the title of a cheap farce.”
“You haven’t heard?” Adi sounded surprised. “One of the men watching the enemy trenches this morning saw Colonel Baligand’s Pickelhaube, his best Imperial lobster-tailed helmet, being waved triumphantly backwards and forwards on the end of a rifle. They must have captured it in the raid on Fleck’s dugout last night.”
“French bastards,” said Rudi. “Child-molesting shits.”
“I was saying to Mend here, sir. We must get it back.”
“Certainly we must get it back! It is a question of the pride of the regiment. We must retrieve it and return with a trophy of our own. These piss-blooded children of the Sixth have to be shown how real men fight.”
It had been a matter of some annoyance to the original troops of the Regiment List that, depleted as they had been by four years of fighting, they now found themselves saddled with the Sixth Franconian Infantry Regiment, an unwelcome excrescence. These newcomers, to the veteran Bavarians’ way of thinking, were feeble and half-hearted weaklings in need of greater discipline and courage.
“I asked the Major’s permission to go alone on a raid tonight,” said Adi. “It’s in Sector K, north of the new French battery there. I know the place backwards. After all they were our trenches not so long ago. I took messages there regularly. But the Major said . . .” here Adi brought off a creditable impersonation of the regiment’s present adjutant (the Jew Gutmann had been killed leading an assault earlier in the year) “. . . he said that he ‘couldn’t possibly sacrifice a man in the cause of such reckless adventurism,’ so I don’t know what we can do now.” He looked expectantly at Gloder, and Hans could swear there was an undertone of challenge to Adi’s voice.
“Major Eckert is, of course,” said Gloder, “a Franconian. Hm. This needs thinking about.”
Hans looked at Adi carefully. The pale blue eyes were gazing with excited expectation into Rudi’s face. Hans was puzzled. Was he angling for new permission to go on a raid? He must know that a Hauptmann cannot overturn the orders of a Major. For that matter, Hans could not imagine when Adi had asked Eckert’s approval for such an action. They had been together nearly all day. Perhaps when Hans had gone to the latrines for his morning turn-out. It was very odd.
“If I had a crack at it,” said Adi wistfully, “do you think Eckert would overlook the insubordination? I’d just love to . . .”
“You can’t disobey a direct order,” said Rudi. “Leave it with Papa. I’ll think of something.”
Mend was tasting his first foul mug of ersatz coffee the next morning when Ernst Schmidt approached, in a state of uncharacteristic excitement.
“Hans! Have you heard? Oh God, it’s too terrible.”
“Heard what? I’ve only just got up, for Christ’s sake.”
“Look then. Take a look!”
&
nbsp; With shaking hands, Ernst thrust a pair of field glasses under the other’s nose.
Hans took up his helmet and went grumbling forward to the nearest trench ladder, easing his head slowly above the parapet line. The usually taciturn Ernst Schmidt must be losing control, he thought to himself.
“Three o’clock! To the left of the flooded shell hole. There!”
“Get down, you fool! Do you want to get us both shot?”
“There! Can you see? Oh God, the ruin of it . . .”
Suddenly, Hans saw.
Gloder lay faceup, his sightless eyes staring at the risen sun, his ivory throat open and scarlet pools of jellied blood spread down his tunic like frozen lakes of lava. A meter or so beyond his outflung fist, Colonel Maximilian Baligand’s grand ceremonial lobster-tailed Pickelhaube stood, spike upwards, as if the Colonel himself, buried underground, were wearing it still. Over one shoulder, in casual Hussar style, hung the richly braided mess jacket of a French brigadier.
A movement in the foreground caught Hans’s attention. Slowly, centimeter by centimeter, from the direction of the German lines, a man was crawling on his stomach toward the body.
“My God,” whispered Hans. “It’s Adi!”
“Where?”
Hans passed the field glasses over to Ernst. “Damn it, if we start up any covering fire, the French will spot him for sure. Get down, we’ll use periscopes. It’s safer.”
For twenty minutes they watched, in silent prayer, as Adi wormed his way towards the wire.
“Careful, Adi!” Hans breathed to himself. “Zoll für Zoll, mein Kamerad.”
Adi edged his way along the main roll of wire between himself and Rudi until he came to a section marked with tiny fragments of cloth, a coded doorway left by the wiring parties. This entrance safely negotiated he resumed his belly-down journey to the body.
Once he had got there—
“What now?” said Ernst.
“Smoke!” said Hans. “Now he’s there, we can put up smoke between him and the enemy forward trenches. Quick!”
Ernst bellowed for smoke pistols while Hans continued to watch.
