Dora skipped up the few steps to our front door, checked the basket behind it for mail. There was a letter from her mother, one from Bertie to me, and an invitation to the Liberty sale for Hans.
‘Nothing sinister in that,’ she said.
‘I’m not so sure,’ I replied. She laughed.
We raced, still elated, up the stairs. I was behind her; she was humming some latest English hit, making time with her steps: ‘“When my baby/comes to me/we will sit in the—”’
Our door hung open. The lock smashed off the jamb. Inside, the world was white, sharded and broken up. Paper all over the floor. The hall cupboard door in front of us jemmied open too–documents spewed off the shelves. I saw the grey half-print on one of a shoe.
Dora motioned me to silence. Slipped slowly into each room, checking they were gone. Then without a word she went to the cupboard and started to pick up her papers. I looked down where I stood and saw a document from the textile works at Zeulenroda; another typed and signed ‘S.A. Black Bear’.
I went into Hans’s and my bedroom. Every drawer was pulled open. Underwear, trinkets, my Dutch cap–on the floor. The bed was stripped, strewn with our clothes, the pockets pulled out from trousers and jackets and dresses. The cardboard box I kept my photographs in had been tipped over the floor. I walked out.
In the kitchen the mess was brutal. Drawers had been pulled loose and the cupboards were all open, ashes dumped from the stove and trodden through the flat like a taunt: they knew we couldn’t call the police. An egg had been smashed on the counter and Nepo sat lapping at it, calm and neat as ever. What did you see, puss? They’d pulled my rolls of film from the ice chest and exposed the reels, which hung now in bizarrely festive curls over the table.
I went back to our bedroom. Books lay pulled open and broken-backed over the rug; the scrolled curtain-rod ends had been unscrewed, as if they might hold something. They lay oddly on the ground like severed ears, or question marks.
Dora was in the doorway, still not speaking.
I looked up. ‘They took their time.’
‘Or knew where we were.’ She was holding a document. ‘If this is still here I doubt there’s anything missing.’ Her hand was shaking. The document was from Bertie, via his source inside the army. It was what Dora had used for the Times article.
She gestured around us at the papers everywhere. ‘They might have photographed some of this though. Left it all here as evidence to get us with later.’
I understood her words but I couldn’t string their sense together. ‘Who’s they?’
We glanced back at the front door, which we could no longer close, let alone lock.
‘Could be either,’ she said. She was tapping her lips with her fingers.
I didn’t want to sleep in the flat. What if they returned? But Dora said we couldn’t go; we couldn’t leave all this material here with the door open. For the neighbours, or anyone else, to find. She called Professor Wolf. He came around from his room in Boswell Street, in his hairy cardigan and carrying his briefcase, as if to convince himself he was here on business, or perhaps to give a special, one-off, night-time tutorial. He looked more frightened than we were.
I wedged a chair under the remnants of the lock to keep the front door closed. Then I put a trunk full of books behind it. Dora and Wolf went to bed. I couldn’t lie down alone, so I spent the night putting away all the exposed and fingered things in my room. When daylight came I spread fresh sheets on the bed and tried to sleep.
Before Hans got back from France we had a new lock put on the front door, and a thick bolt and chain added across the top. We also had Yale locks fitted on all the internal doors: living room, kitchen, bedrooms, and replaced the one on the hall cupboard. We carried rings of keys and became our own warders.
Dora negotiated with the other tenants in the building to have the fanlight above the entrance door boarded up. She told them we’d suffered a burglary and had money and jewellery taken; she mentioned a ‘spate’ of thieving in Bloomsbury.
Mr Donovan, the nice retired insurance salesman who lived in the flat underneath us, was used to minutely assessing risk. He said, ‘But they didn’t get in through the fanlight, did they?’
‘No,’ Dora replied, ‘someone opened the door to them, or they picked the lock.’
‘Just to put them off then, is it?’ Mr Donovan said, but he didn’t object.
I don’t think we knew ourselves why we wanted the fanlight boarded up. It doesn’t make much sense. Perhaps we were already beyond reason and dealing now in omens and signs, battling an unseen enemy fierce as God.
Dora worked more furiously, if anything, after the break-in. I ran errands for her, delivered messages by hand to other refugees, one or two to Westminster. I bought stationery, cigarettes, groceries. We had a few more desultory party meetings at the flat, at which I took the minutes. But mostly I wanted to be out of there. I worked in the ILP offices on the next edition of The Other Germany. And I went to the docks as often as I could.
Late one afternoon Dora came into the kitchen with a piece she was typing. I was washing up.
‘Listen to this for me, will you?’ She had it in her hand. ‘It’s Toller. “There comes to man sometimes a sickness, psychic or spiritual, which robs him of all will and purpose and sets him aimlessly adrift in a longing for death, a longing which lures him irresistibly to destruction, to a mad plunge into chaos.”’
She looked at me. ‘You can’t write that if you haven’t felt it,’ she said. ‘Can you?’
I didn’t know whether her question was rhetorical or not. ‘No,’ I said. ‘It probably wouldn’t occur to you.’
‘That’s what I tell him.’ She sat down. ‘I say his insight comes from that dark part of him. If he denies that, he’ll be cut off from what feeds his writing.’ Her face was as open as I had ever seen it. ‘Do you think if you love someone there are parts of them you should pretend are not there?’
I turned around, holding my wet hands out from my sides. I thought of Hans out all night with Edgar, or examining paisley swatches with Werner Hitzemeyer, aka Vernon Meyer. I had told myself that each of us must maintain some small private life, even in a marriage. I did not believe, despite one’s best efforts, that the whole world could be made visible. I stared at the table, my eyes hot and full. ‘You’re asking me?’
‘Oh Ruthie,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry.’ She got up and put her arms around me and kissed my shoulder softly. ‘I’m not good at this.’
I suppose she meant she was not good at leaving anything tacit. Her bare feet padded back across the lino into her room. The typewriter started up again.
That night I undressed before I remembered to draw the curtains. As I lifted my arms to pull the nightgown over my head I caught my reflection in the black window, the rack of my ribs a cage to hold my heart. I thought of one of my first dates with Hans.
We had gone to the Rummel, the local fair. In his caravan on a mock throne sat Agosta the Winged Man. His ribcage was inverted, wings of bone were pushing out the skin of his chest. A single rogue cell division in the gamete and a life is reversed, becomes something to display in order to make the rest of us feel normal. At his feet sat Rasha, an African woman from America, with her chest bared and shells strung around her throat. The shells had gently frilled lips which nearly met but not quite; they were tiny, porcelain-white vulvas, enfolding the darkness inside them. Rasha held no interest for Hans, but Agosta fascinated him, with his fine poet’s eyes, his perfect mouth.
Outside the caravan a man in an ape suit approached us. Breath floated out of the mouth-hole in his costume. How little it takes–some fur, a couple of glass eyes, a rubber navel–to make someone into something else. We scratched the ape playfully–Oo oo ahh ahh–though we would never have so touched a stranger. Freud was in vogue then, and Hans made a remark about our true inner beast being on display: we wait to see the creature scratch its bottom or pick its ears in public so that we feel more civilised, though
deep down we know we are not.
But as I patted the poor fellow in the suit I did not think that we were all bestial inside, waiting only for the opportunity to gratify ourselves, covering with effort and sublimation all our animal desires. I wondered whether it wasn’t the other way around; whether inside all of us there might just be a cleaner, purer, more hairless version too naked for the world.
I am aware from his cough of a male nurse who has come in and taken my hand to check my vital signs and scratch them into the all-knowing tablet at the foot of the bed. I keep my one uncovered eye closed. As he finishes I open it to catch him leaving. His hip clips the bunch of keys someone has left in the cabinet by the door. They chinkle and swing.
The keys were hanging on the outside of Dora’s bedroom door. I was just home from the docks, mid-afternoon, ten days after the break-in. Nepo jumped up to paw the keyring.
‘Dora?’ I said softly.
No answer, so I went into the kitchen and made coffee. Her big bag lay on the couch. There was no typewriter clatter. Maybe she had company.
I turned on a lamp and started to sort slides, holding them up to its shade. The flat was very quiet.
A couple of hours later I knocked on her door again–it would be odd for her to sleep during the day. Unwanted thoughts of too much Veronal, too much morphine. Though of course she was the world’s expert in these things.
‘Dora?’ No answer.
Was it locked?
I turned the handle. It felt wrong–what if she wasn’t alone?–but I kept pushing. The shhhh of papers moving behind the door, one of the many stacks–a whole city of paper, crooked skyscrapers covering the floor, and I come as the wrecker.
She was lying on the bed fully clothed. Alone.
‘Dee?’
Her eyes were open.
‘Dora?’ I heard the catch in my voice.
She moved her eyes to me and smiled without warmth, without lifting her head. ‘Come here.’
I approached the bed. ‘What is it? Are you all right?’
‘I’m fine,’ she said. ‘Lie down.’ She patted the covers beside her.
I lay down and looked up and it was like being on Primrose Hill again. In our tower I felt the earth’s spin. She rolled an arm over me and put her forehead to my shoulder.
‘Sometimes, if I am still too long, I freeze,’ she said, her words muffling into my body. I knew it wasn’t from cold.
I started to talk, to fill the room with sound, painting word-pictures, concrete and contained and, most of all, of things that were alive. I told her that if you look up through the bare twigs of a plane tree against a white sky you can see that the seed pods hang down straight, festive as Christmas decorations. I told her Nepo holds his tail with both paws to clean it. I told her that her ear is a pink cup to catch notes.
She breathed in and out slowly, holding me. ‘Don’t you leave.’
I suppose she thought that I might also go to France. ‘I won’t,’ I said.
I hadn’t written to Hans about the burglary, because there was nothing he could do but worry. As it was, he telegraphed me that he was coming home early. ‘All OK here,’ it said.
I ran downstairs to meet him. He’d grown a narrow moustache and looked, suddenly, very French. He gestured to the crudely hammered boards above the door, his face twisted into a question. I blurted out then and there about the break-in. His hand flipped to his mouth. For a moment I thought he might not come in.
‘We might as well put a red mark on the lintel,’ he said.
I hoped for a joke, that he still could. ‘To advertise us Reds in here?’
‘No.’ He shook his head, biting the inside of his top lip. ‘To hope we are passed over.’
Hans’s account and Bertie’s were the same.
Each afternoon the two of them had walked out of Strasbourg proper, along the River Ill. The days were getting shorter, the ground held the sog and feel of winter. Boys out of school played football in a field of unsprung grass. They set the goals at the ends with their satchels, the boundaries of the pitch with pullovers at each corner. There were three on each team, brothers and friends probably, a little one of about nine, and the others twelve or thirteen. On the fourth day the eldest called the two men over into the game.
Hans and Bertie left their coats on the side of the road and joined opposite teams. They had not run for a long time, or felt the air in their lungs and the joy of kicking a ball. Hans had enough French to chat.
‘Real leather,’ he said, spinning the ball on one finger.
‘Birthday present,’ the littlest one replied, proud as if he’d sewn it himself.
‘Nice,’ said Hans. ‘I learnt with a rag ball. This is much better!’
Hans was a good kick when the ball got to him, but Bertie was surprisingly nimble, dodging between the others to get it down his team’s end so a boy with big knees could kick it between the satchels. ‘Yesss!’ The boys danced and punched the air, pleased with their new recruit. Bertie beamed, and took off his waistcoat.
‘Not bad,’ Hans said. He rubbed his hands together, smiled at his team. ‘Now let’s get serious.’
‘Don’t listen to him, mes p’tits,’ Bertie countered. ‘We’re up, and we’re staying up.’
They were still kicking, running and laughing, streaked with mud, when the sun began to set. They could smell wood smoke from the evening fires.
‘Don’t you boys have homes to go to?’ Hans called, panting, from one end of the pitch.
‘Nah,’ the big one said, ‘not till supper time.’
‘All right then.’ Hans shook his head in mock apology for the slaughter he was about to inflict. ‘You asked for it.’
Play was at Bertie’s end, but a skinny, determined kid on Hans’s team got in and pushed the ball out through the scrum of legs to him. Hans mothered it down the pitch ankle to ankle, trying to stay ahead of the little legs around him. Probably too soon he gave an almighty kick. His leg overstretched and he fell backwards; the ball careened off course, not between the goals at all but way over them, beyond the pitch to the other side of the river. Hans fell groaning to the ground.
‘Sorry,’ he called. ‘Your kick.’ He stayed put. ‘I think I’ve done my ankle.’
The boys looked uncertain. The little one was trying not to cry. His brother put his arm around him. They started packing up their things.
‘What’s the problem?’ Bertie asked. ‘We’ll get it back.’
‘We’re not allowed,’ the brother said. ‘The river’s the border.’
‘It’s guarded?’ Bertie asked.
‘Not here,’ the boy said, ‘but further down.’
‘Righto then,’ Bertie said, ‘I’ll go.’ He looked at Hans. ‘You all right?’
Hans was packing mud on his ankle. ‘I’ll be fine in a minute,’ he said, not looking up.
Bertie left the pitch and slipped down the embankment to the river, where he found an arrangement of new-looking planks across it. The water was shallow but fast-flowing. He walked in the direction of the kick through a couple of willows. Sky, grass, trees, stones were fading into one another. Still, he should be able to see it, a round, whitish ball. On the other side of the river there was a ridge with a dirt road along the top. It must have come to rest here, over the lip. He scrambled up.
A car, waiting. One in the driver’s seat and another standing outside. Holding the ball. Smiling.
Bertie, puffed, smiled back, started to approach. ‘Bonsoir,’ he said. The man kept smiling.
And then he knew and turned and bolted, his head white with it, his body so noisy–his chest, feet–he couldn’t hear if they were coming behind him. He slid-scattered down the embankment, his back open as a target. He felt nothing, not his feet, not the water.
When he reached the others he couldn’t speak.
The boys were gathered around Hans, who was still on the ground holding his ankle. Bertie hid behind them and bent over, wet and struggling for air. ‘You–hear–a
car?’ was the first thing he got out. His eyes were staring, wild. ‘You—?’
Hans looked up. ‘What?’
‘A car.’
Hans understood then. The boys looked at Bertie’s empty hands. The little one wiped his face on his sleeve.
‘I’ll go,’ said Hans.
‘No!’ said Bertie. ‘It’s just a ball.’
Hans stood gingerly on his foot. ‘They’re not here for me,’
he said.
The worst part, Bertie wrote to me, was not when he’d seen the men. The worst thing was waiting for Hans to return.
It was almost dark when Hans limped back with the ball under one arm. ‘Spoke perfect French,’ he said to Bertie, in German.
‘Pardonnez-nous ce drame.’ He smiled at the boys as he handed the little one back his football.
The boys ran home, no doubt with stories of panicky, paranoid Germans for their parents.
Bertie put Hans’s arm over his shoulder to help him walk towards the lights of town. Both of them aware that the car had not yet put its headlights on, nor turned on its motor.
‘Perfect French doesn’t mean much,’ Bertie mumbled. ‘Might still be Them.’
‘We need to get you away from the border,’ Hans said.
Bertie nodded as he walked and was glad Hans couldn’t see his face.
Bertie had a wireless in his attic. ‘Listen to this,’ he said to Hans on their last afternoon, turning the dial. There were snatches of French, Dutch, Swiss German. When he got to the official Hitler channel he muttered, ‘Uh-huh.’
Hans thought he must have wanted to listen to some propaganda, to mine it for what they were covering up. But Bertie kept turning the tiniest bit further. ‘Here we are,’ he said, sitting down.
It was a single voice, no musical jingles, no announcement of the time, nor the station. ‘This channel broadcasts right next to the Hitler channel, hoping people will find it,’ Bertie explained. He shook his head a little. ‘See if you can pick who it is.’
A male voice was saying, ‘How can we allow this pudgy, cake-scoffing homosexual, this flatulent nailbiter, to represent Germany? But seriously, they say that the Leader is a teetotaller, a bachelor, a non-smoking vegetarian, as if he were a man removed from our normal, base desires, uninterested in satisfying himself. Concerned only with the wellbeing of the German nation. But we say he fulfils his bloodlust in other ways. You do not have to read Dr Freud to know that desire denied does not go away of its own accord. It warps and moves like a river denied its course, it flows on to drown other things. And in the case of Adolf Hitler, those things are us.’