The Sins of the Father Read online

  Eli used to come to the Thursdays. He was probably the only Jew who did. But he was an old friend of Albrecht’s, who introduced him to Nell as “the cleverest man I know. He’s an economist. Schacht eats out of his hand.”

  Nell had learned enough of German politics to know who Schacht was, and to be puzzled.

  “He exaggerates,” Eli said,

  When he smiled he looked ten years younger, and that first smile knocked Albrecht from his place in her heart. It was as simple as that.

  “I don’t understand,” she said, meaning everything.

  “You are amazed that I collaborate with the regime?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “But it’s quite simple. You have an English saying – or is it American? – if you can’t beat them, join them.”

  “I still don’t understand.”

  “The only way to overcome the revolution is to lead it. Well, I don’t claim to do that. But – you realise I am a Jew, don’t you – the only way in my opinion to defeat the Nazis is to infiltrate their movement.”

  Did he, even then, believe that was possible? He was conceited enough, she told herself years later; no doubt about that.

  But at the time she was impressed. And then Eli leaned over, and putting his body between her and the other people in the room, touched the corner of her mouth with his forefinger.

  “You’re in love with Albrecht, aren’t you?”

  She couldn’t answer.

  “He’s my best and oldest friend. That’s how I know,” he said. “But it’s impossible, I’m afraid.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “If you can’t see, then I’m not the one, and this isn’t the place, to begin your education.”

  She couldn’t tell Eli that it didn’t matter any more, not since he had first smiled at her.

  Two days later, she lost her virginity. Eli dipped his finger in the blood and touched first his mouth, then hers, then licked his finger clean. She moaned. He smiled down at her. They were in his apartment. A lithograph of Kaiser Wilhelm II looked down on the bed. Schumann played on the wireless. In the sitting-room beyond, the Pomeranian, feeling neglected, began to yap.

  “Albrecht could never give you that,” Eli said. “You’re a sweet child.”

  He lit a cigarette and put it in her mouth, then another for himself.

  “It’s so nice to be able to forget politics and everything,” he said. “Eventually, there is nothing to equal the act of love with woman who really wants you.”

  He stretched out on the bed beside her, pale-skinned, wiry.

  “You’re very furry,” she said.

  “Virility.”

  Later he said he would take her out to dinner. “Ring the Gräfin.”

  “No,” she said, “I can’t do that. And what about the little dog?”

  He tried to persuade her, but she was adamant.

  “English principles,” he said. She didn’t know whether he was laughing at her or not.

  That was how it began, and it went on like that for two or three months. There were many days when she could not see him, but when they did meet it was always good. The cold came to Berlin, a damp, penetrating cold that made her distrust the permanence of the city and conscious of the waste of plain, lakes, and leafless forest stretching away from the suburbs to unimaginable distances.

  Towards Christmas, love made Nell afraid. She felt she had lost the privileges of the foreigner whom nothing can touch. She began to take a desperate interest in the politics she had been able to regard as a game for other people. She became aware of murmurings around her, of Eli and Albrecht breaking off conversations when she appeared. “You mustn’t be involved,” the lover said when she protested.

  He couldn’t see that loving him committed her to involvement. What happened in Germany happened to her, for that reason. When she tried to tell him this, he silenced her with a kiss.

  “I’m not a child,” she said.

  “Believe me, I know that. I’m not a pervert.”

  “Oh you make a joke of everything, whenever I try to be serious.”

  “Not at all. There is nothing more serious than us. Believe me, everything will work out.”

  But, despite this, the future was a country neither chose, or dared, to explore. Sometimes she worried about that, being a conventional girl who had been brought up to expect that love led directly to marriage. It was indeed strange to think of herself as someone’s mistress. Not that she was exactly what she understood by that; Eli hadn’t after all established her in an apartment, which was what being a mistress meant to her, if it wasn’t a matter of adultery.

  One afternoon she was sitting with the Pom outside a café, when a thin young man in dark glasses approached her. She wasn’t alarmed; love had given her the confidence necessary to brush anyone off. And she wasn’t attracted; there was something reptilian about him. Anyway she distrusted men who wore sun-glasses in winter. But he addressed her by name, with a note of interrogation.

  “Yes?” she said.

  Something official about his manner prompted her to add, “If it a question of papers?”

  “Why should you think that? I am sure your papers are in order. May I sit down?”

  Without waiting for a reply, he pulled out a chair. The Pom sniffed at his ankles. He said nothing until the waiter had brought two more cups of coffee, and then: “Does your father know your lover is a Jew?”

  “What makes you think you have the right to ask such a question? What the hell has it got to do with you?”

  “Oh, I have the right. And I might ask also whether the Gräfin, whose guest you are, knows that the Jew is your lover?”

  She felt herself flushing.

  “Ach, I thought not.”

  “Who are you?”

  “That is unimportant. However,” he flashed a card at her. “I belong to a branch of the Reich Security Service which has the responsibility of investigating such matters.”

  “What matters? Love affairs?”

  “No. Matters concerning Jews, and relations of Jews with Aryans.”

  “But I’m English,” she said.

  He permitted himself a smile. It was a very thin smile with no humour in it.

  “Then you must know,” she said, “that Dr Czinner is a distinguished economist and employed as a consultant by the Ministry of Finance and the Reichsbank.”

  “I know that that indulgence has been extended to him – and not yet withdrawn.”

  “I was frightened,” she told Eli.

  “That was doubtless the intention.”

  “He wanted me to spy on you. He made that very clear. I told him he was as absurd as he was offensive. But I don’t like it. Eli, I’ve been long enough in Germany, darling, to know how things are. We don’t have to stay here.”

  He put his arm round her shoulder, drew her to him, kissed her first hard, then very softly, on the lips.

  “But I must,” he said.

  She allowed herself to be silenced for the moment. She felt fortified by love; like brandy on a cold day, it kept her warm and glowing. There were times when she seemed to have been interned in a madhouse: when she heard the Fuehrer on the wireless screaming against the Jews, or on that occasion in a restaurant in the Kleiststrasse when two bloated and rather drunk uniformed Nazis seized a middle-aged man by the collar and threw him against the wall and then kicked him eight times – she counted – and nobody dared to move. With a forkful of fish suspended in the air she watched the other diners lower eyes and pretend to be occupied with the food which, nevertheless, they could not bring themselves to lift to their mouths. Albrecht was with her that evening, and his hand, which was warm and a little damp, rested on her wrist; she knew he was imploring her to say nothing. Decent people, she realised, had become like the three monkeys: they spoke, heard, saw no evil, for fear they would bring evil upon themselves. The little man who had been beaten up was helped to his feet by an elderly waiter who escorted him to the lavatory, as soon
as the two Nazis had made their happy departure.

  “He’s a lawyer,” Albrecht said, “a distinguished one, who has had the misfortune to defend several enemies of the Reich.”

  “But how can you live here?” she said.

  “We could talk of duty,” Albrecht said.

  When she told him about the man in dark glasses who had wanted her to report on Eli – she thought of it as sneaking – he only said, “Now you see what we’re up against.”

  She was impressed by his confidence; of course she wanted to be deceived, to be told that her fears were no worse than nightmares, and that everything would come out all right. She had been brought up to believe this, in the right class of the right nation, to which nothing worse than accidental and personal tragedy could happen; terrible in itself of course, but involving the victim in no generic cataclysm.

  As if divining her thoughts, Albrecht touched her cheek with the back of his hand, and said, “They too are dreamers who won’t, or dare not, confront reality. They set up an ideal Germany which is unrealisable, and so, in order to realise it, as they think, they must destroy. They refuse to see things as they are, to see, in short, that Jewish culture, Jewish science, have been the most vital forces in German history throughout the last century. But because their view of life is not founded in reality, it cannot prevail. It is a form of perverted Platonism they offer, and I say with Nietzsche that the cure lies in Thucydides. In the end, Nietzsche says, it is courage in the face of reality that distinguishes a man like Thucydides from Plato. Or, I might add, a man like Eli from Hitler. Plato, Nietzsche says, is a coward before reality, consequently he flees into the ideal. So is Hitler, that’s how he acts therefore. Thucydides has control of himself; so has Eli. Consequently he also maintains control of things. So does Eli.”

  “That’s all very well,” Nell said, “and I admit this is all miles above my head, but how can you say Eli maintains control of things, when nasty little men are able to spy on him and ask me to do so?”

  Albrecht said, “Believe me, Eli knows what he is doing, while they move like sleepwalkers.”

  It was through Albrecht that she met Kinsky, and through Kinsky that she came to understand Albrecht. Then she saw all three of them – her lover and her two friends, for Kinsky was so funny and charming that he at once became a friend – as men who were performing an intricate dance on a high wire stretched across an abyss, without a safety net.

  “Why don’t you run away?” she asked Kinsky.

  “I am always about to do so,” he said, “next week. But then something, or someone, happens to prevent it. And I ask myself: where would I find life as interesting as that which is forced on me here?”

  “Oh,” she said, “you are all three so stupid, so pleased with yourselves.”

  Like little boys, she thought, not daring to refuse a dare.

  For a few weeks she was angry with Eli, and refused to see him. Not seeing him made her miserable. Not seeing him meant that she did not even have the reassurance that he was all right, hadn’t been damaged, beaten up or arrested. That was absurd, for he relayed messages to her through Albrecht and Kinsky and telephoned the Gräfin, who passed on the message that Nell wouldn’t see him. Nevertheless she woke, frightened, in the night, hearing a dog bark from the next street, listening to the murmurs which so easily translated themselves into the sound of boots ascending the staircase of the block of flats where he lived.

  In the spring, Hitler marched into Czechoslovakia smiling at the promises he had given Chamberlain and Daladier at Munich. Nell went to the cinema and saw the tanks rumble like dull fate through the streets of Prague. The audience applauded, and she left the cinema and telephoned her lover.

  “I’ve been wrong,” she said, “I must see you at once.”

  She was certain he would now himself admit that he too had been mistaken, that he had failed to read reality correctly. When he said, “Yes, come to my apartment, I’ve missed you so much,” she took heart, not only because of the love and desire she heard in his voice, but, as importantly, because the suggestion of his apartment rather than a bar or restaurant seemed to her to indicate that he might at least be nervous of appearing in public as the Jew with the blonde English lover.

  But, after they had made love, as she was dying to do, he suggested that they go out to a restaurant for supper. Then she exploded, called him selfish, arrogant, pig-headed; he didn’t care for her happiness; he was infatuated with this image of himself as someone who couldn’t be wounded, couldn’t be frightened, was indifferent to events, superior to fate.

  “You’re a Nazi yourself at heart,” she screamed. “You too think you are a superman.”

  He put his arms round her. The room was quite dark and filled with the scent of roses. They were still naked. He stroked her thighs, kissed her breasts, worked long hard fingers against her buttocks, urging her to surrender everything – will, judgement, fears, trinities of heart, mind, body, past, present and future – to him once again, now and forever, amen. She pulled herself away.

  “No,” she said, pulling on stockings, doing up her suspender belt. “No, I can’t. You’re all blind,” she said, “to the reality which you boast of fighting. Kinsky at least” – she stepped into her knickers and heaved them up – “has some excuse. He’s in love with a love that keeps him here. He’s mad, but … you don’t even have that excuse.” She buttoned her blouse. Eli sat back, still naked, in a chair and watched her shadowy movements. For the first time he seemed to find nothing to say. She put on her skirt, hooked the eyes. “If you loved me…” she said, and stopped on the old line, feeling it worthless.

  “Ah yes,” he rose, and slipped into a silk dressing-gown. “That word.”

  “I thought it meant something to you.”

  “Something, yes, but not everything.”

  She held a shoe in her hand. For a moment it seemed to her that she was about to hurl it at his head.

  “You think the worst can’t happen to you, that you’re somehow protected.”

  “No,” he said, “I don’t think that.”

  The moment passed. The shoe was now on her silk-stockinged foot.

  “You’re going back to England,” he said, “and that’s the best thing. I love you. I don’t know if I will always love you, because in my opinion it is foolish to make such a boast, but I love you now, and I know it is best that you return home. There’s no future for you here.”

  “For me?” she said. “What about us?”

  He took a rose from the bowl, and then, lighting the lamp, carefully removed its thorns with a pair of nail scissors. He slipped it through the lapel button of her jacket and fastened it there with a pin. He held the jacket out for her to put on.

  “It will wither,” he said, “before you are home. Nevertheless…”

  She collapsed on the bed, weeping.

  “A cut rose, an English rose. Is that how you think of me?”

  “No, my dear. But you can’t stay here.”

  “And you can? Couldn’t there be a future for us together, in England perhaps?”

  “Oh yes,” he said, “if I married you, would that get me an English passport, as Erika Mann got one by marrying that English poet? No, I think not, I am sure that only applies to wives, not to husbands. Besides it would make me look foolish. No, I’m joking. I’m joking because it hurts me too, but I have to say it. If I came to England with you, you would not be marrying the man you have loved here in Berlin. And I would miss him too. I would be ashamed to have run away, and our marriage would be curdled by the resentment I would feel. I have work to do here. Later, perhaps…”

  The words hung in the air, then slipped away, like the sun disappearing behind an evening hill.

  “There will be no later,” she said.

  Of course her heart was broken; she let her friends (like Sheila, to whom she confided everything) know this. And when war broke out her apprehension was extreme. At least, until then, there had been letters, however c
arefully worded. And she knew from a friend of Albrecht’s, in the Embassy in London, who once – at Albrecht’s suggestion, she was sure – took her dancing at the Café de Paris, and then did so several times, presumably now for her own sake – that all three of her friends were still safe, however little that might mean. But then came the war, which for her meant, first of all, silence. And then anger with Eli festered. She told herself it was irrational, and then she argued that if he had loved her, he would have preferred her to whatever he thought he might achieve in Germany: “Which is nothing, nothing,” she told Sheila again and again.

  Nell did war-work, first in the Ministry of Information, and then at the BBC. Speaking German was an advantage at least. Her grandfather died, and there was no one to whom she could speak sympathetically of Germany. In 1942 she married one of her colleagues, Ivan Murison. The marriage was a mistake from the start; they had both got the other wrong. In the spring of 1946 she left the BBC, and went to Germany to work for UNRRA. Ivan had helped there at least; he had many contacts as a result of the reputation he had begun to gain in the last year of the war. It was his reports from the stricken and demoralised Germany of the first months of the Occupation which, as he wrote in his autobiography, “set me on the path to fame”.

  Nell was horrified by what she discovered in Germany. During the war she had schooled herself to hate the enemy. Now she was dismayed to see how they had fallen. When a fellow-worker said, “They asked for it,” she snapped back at her, “You never knew them, did you?” Of course her colleague was right: they had asked for it. But so did Lear; so, even more so, did Macbeth. That didn’t mean that you crowed to see them brought down.