Dora didn’t burn the letter, but she didn’t respond to it either.
Two weeks later another one came, in the same two envelopes. This time it was an offer to meet in a public place of her choice.
She called the embassy number and said she’d come in.
I went with her. The embassy was in St James’s, a grand corner building on Carlton House Terrace. Inside, long corridors led off an atrium. Dora and I sat on a carved wooden bench. I had come because she wanted me to, because we both thought–completely irrationally–that if they were going to make her disappear it might be harder with two of us.
The assistant who came to get Dora wore an enamel swastika brooch on her lapel. The woman ignored me.
‘Shall I wait here then?’ I asked her.
‘If you like,’ the woman said to the space above my head.
‘How long will they be?’
‘Impossible to say.’
I started to choke, to battle for air. Dora leaned into my ear as she stood up. ‘Don’t let them see it,’ she whispered.
Waiting makes your mind roll forward, uncontrolling all the waking dreams. I tried to focus on small things: the lion’s paw leg of the bench opposite, the zigzag pattern of the floor tiles, the heavy frosted lights hanging from chains at intervals along the ceiling. I watched the doors in the corridor open and shut, releasing sometimes the bleat of a phone, sometimes a person. Secretaries in neat suits and stockings walked past me, their hair coiffed and mouths painted, interchangeable assistants. They looked capable of reducing anything to an administrative decision, a memo in sub-numbered paragraphs. I felt dishevelled, scrappy, undeserving of a place in this lacquered, decided world, even though I’d taken some care this morning: my one skirt suit, spare underwear in my bag. I couldn’t have told you if I’d dressed and packed for detention or to ward it off.
After a time I ceased to think. I counted doors. I blurred my eyes in and out of focus. She will come back to me. Part hope and part anxiety, this dumb lay prayer would keep her safe. She will come back to me.
One of the doors further down the corridor opened. It was a man. Disappointed, I kept watching so as to take my mind with him, step by lanky step away from here. He passed a secretary, who nodded at him familiarly. He was walking towards the other end of the corridor where there was a window, and as his knees bent a diamond of light formed and unformed between them. A clench in my stomach: I knew that walk. I knew from its long-legged laxness it was Hans.
I believe I would have let him go.
In front of him another door opened. Dora came out.
They stood at twenty paces from one another, a moment of recognition. And then I was up, running to them. Hans turned to watch me come, the third wheel spinning.
‘What are you doing here?’ Dora was asking as I reached them.
‘Dora,’ he said, calmly. He was in his good suit. ‘Fancy seeing you here.’ He turned to me. ‘Ruthie.’ He kissed me ceremonially on the cheek then drew a fine paisley-print handkerchief from his pocket. He dabbed his forehead. ‘I am here,’ he said in a low voice, ‘to try to help Bertie. With a passport.’ He smiled, a little sheepishly, I thought. ‘Wasn’t going to tell you till it worked.’ Then he tilted his chin at Dora. ‘Though I might ask you the same question.’ The smile was still there, but his eyes were steady, unflickering.
It was the only time I ever saw her pause for an answer, look unconvinced of herself. She cleared her throat.
‘Same,’ she said. ‘Me too.’
After we got home Hans went out to the shops for beer and chips. Dora couldn’t stop smiling, couldn’t sit down. She told me she now had a source from very high up–a legal adviser to Göring, no less. It was a chink in the great machine; it was unbelievable. She couldn’t tell me who it was, of course, that would endanger him. And me as well, if They thought I knew.
But in the relief of her coming out of there safe and sound my mind had unfrozen and it had come back to me. I remembered being a child watching a jaw flex in anger through a crack in the door, and I remembered her fig-leaf quip. I knew who the source was.
We heard Hans’s footfalls on the wooden steps. Dora lowered her tone and put her hands on my forearms. ‘Don’t get upset,’ she said. I sensed what was coming. In that instant all joy from this little victory drained from me. ‘You can’t tell Hans. At all.’
‘That’s not fair,’ I said. ‘You leave him out all the time. It makes him worse.’
‘Look,’ she said, ‘we don’t know what he was doing at the embassy.’ She wouldn’t voice her suspicions, whatever they were.
‘Same as you, remember?’
She let go of me. Her look changed from one of a tiny Napoleon to a sympathetic friend. ‘It’s not even that. Really, it’s just that the fewer people who know anything of this at all, the less likely our source will be exposed. I know it’s hard, but you have to go along with me on this.’
I’d never been able to disobey her.
The three of us celebrated that night over steaming chips rolled out in newspaper. We toasted Bertie’s future and told ourselves we were closer to getting him out. ‘Great minds,’ Hans said to Dora as they chinked glasses.
In my memory I have a fisheye lens and I see us from a high corner in that little kitchen. I watch the lithe dark one who speaks with her hands, fiddles with cigarettes and matches, chews her fingernails while someone else is talking. Her shoes are off and one knee is bent up to the table. I see the stiller, quieter me, smiling and torn. And I see Hans, drinking and joking like a man saved, like one who has found his god or been admitted to a longed-for club. It looks like we are together, we three, in the picture.
That was our life then, a sequence of celebration and despair, as if the whole world were on drugs.
As Hans and I got ready for bed I couldn’t help it. I’d bottled it up all day. ‘Why didn’t you tell me what you were going to do?’ I blurted.
He was sitting half undressed, his bare torso soft in the light, something so known to me, so dear. I sat down beside him.
‘I just wanted to pull a rabbit out of a hat.’ His face was sorrowful. He kissed me. ‘I don’t even know if it’ll work.’ He looked at the floor. ‘I can’t have another failure.’ He meant in front of Dora.
I put my hand on his knee. ‘Next time, you tell me,’ I said. ‘I hate this feeling.’
He nodded. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I know.’
TOLLER
The bell rang at my Hampstead flat. I looked out the window. There she was again, standing on the stoop, black hair twisting the sun inside itself, pale summer dress. I had not seen her for a month. Next to her was a suitcase, a dun-coloured rectangle with a horn handle that looked vaguely familiar.
Christiane was out buying groceries. She would likely come back before going to lunch with her new friends from the theatre group.
I opened the door to a moment of adjustment; Dora’s face no longer fitted the picture I had been quietly nursing. Was she taller? Paler? The sockets around her eyes were darker. A nicotine stain on her eyetooth that wasn’t there before. The mind makes a shoddy likeness–oh, why can’t we hold on to them properly? But in less than a second the mistaken memory-picture was obliterated by the breathing, smiling reality of her: she is here.
‘I have something for you.’ The voice was the same, airy and sure.
I looked down at the case. It was, indeed, one of mine.
‘Come in, come in.’ She moved to step over the threshold but I didn’t give her any room and leant in instead, kissed her full like a homecoming. She tasted of mint and smoke and something in me was stronger. I put my hand on the small of her back and pressed her into me.
‘Nice to see you too,’ she smiled, pulling away. ‘Can you bring it up?’
The case was heavy. In my room I opened the straps and pulled its hinges apart and saw my own words, typed and bound with metal-clasped elastic. I Was a German on the top, and Look Through the Bars underneath it. There wer
e poems and a sheaf of notes from my bedside table stuffed in the sides. Thoughts I did not remember having and would never have again. Though it was my past it felt like my future: I was restored to myself. My eyes filled.
‘How…?’ I dreaded to think it had cost her, or someone close to her, something awful.
She moved from one foot to the other and I noticed she was wearing evening shoes, midnight-blue velvet and completely out of character. She was beaming. Her happiness was always someone else’s.
‘Uncle Erwin Thomas!’ she said. ‘The other case is coming soon.’
She was alight. She kicked off her shoes and tucked her legs beneath her on the bed.
Two weeks before, she said, she had been summoned to the German embassy on Carlton House Terrace. She was terrified that because German law applied there she might go in and not come out. But it helped to go with Ruth. ‘She was more frightened than I was,’ she said, adjusting the pillow behind her back. ‘So I had to keep my wits. The whole place was very graaand, but it still smelt like boiled potatoes.’ Which is to say, she smiled, of Germany.
‘So I concentrated on that for a while, till I was taken in to meet with First Secretary Jaeger. Tall, fair-haired, in his mid-forties with duelling scars. He handed me a sealed letter. The first thing I saw was the signature. When I looked up I couldn’t tell from this Jaeger person’s face if it was some kind of a test, or a trap. So I said, “Old family friend,” thinking I might need a reason to be receiving mail from the legal division of the inner sanctum of Göring’s office. Then Jaeger told me he’d brought it by hand from Thomas, and that he shared his concerns. “We are not,’ he said, “all Nazis here yet.”’
Dora tried hard, she told me, to imagine the well-fed moral anguish trapped under that fine suit and silk cravat. The difficulty must have showed in her face, because then Jaeger offered, ‘Tell us how we can prove ourselves to you.’
She took my face in her hands. ‘So, Mr Public Enemy Number One,’ she said, ‘I told them I wanted this case, intact and unopened, to be brought from the garden shed at the Bornholmer Strasse allotments to me. The other one is coming later.’
I looked down. It was an ordinary case. She had risked her life twice now for it.
‘And one other thing.’ She rummaged in her bag between manila folders and index cards with rubber bands around them and folded newspapers. ‘This.’ She pulled out an envelope and passed it to me. Inside was the blue carbon of a memorandum addressed to Minister Göring. It listed the numbers of warplanes secretly being put at the disposal of the Reich.
‘How on earth…?’
‘I didn’t even ask for this,’ she said. ‘Uncle Erwin wants to be my source now. To save his own dear soul.’
She wanted me to keep the carbon, and his three letters to her. In case they came searching the flat again.
We made love in the bed and Christiane did not come home.
She might have–I trailed my coat again for fate to make the decision for me–but she didn’t.
‘Nice shoes,’ I said as she reached down for them.
‘Ruth gave them to me. Too small for her.’ She was suddenly, uncharacteristically self-conscious. Her ears reddened. She stayed bent over. ‘Thought you might like them.’
‘They’re evening shoes, Dee.’ She raised her head and sat up.
‘Does it matter?’ It wasn’t a reproach, but a genuine question.
She slipped her feet, sinewy and fine, into the velvet, did up some buttons at the front of her dress. I watched her leave from the window. She wore no slip and as she walked from the house the dress floated around her knees, caught the curve of her arse.
RUTH
It was a Sunday. Early February, 1935. Dora burst through the door, flushed from running up the stairs.
‘Front page this time!’ She threw the newspaper on the table.
The Sunday Referee headline was ‘Troops, Tanks and ’Planes’. The byline read ‘From an anonymous correspondent’.
Hans looked over my shoulder as we scanned the article. It detailed Germany’s secret build-up of troops, the importation of materials and parts for tanks, and, in extraordinary detail, the construction program of the Reich’s military air fleet, including the exact numbers and types of aircraft the Germans were making, the weapons they could carry, the range they were capable of flying, even the locations of their hangars. Most incredibly, the correspondent said, documents made available to the newspaper showed that these warplanes would be ready for deployment within three months. The article concluded: ‘This clearly demonstrates that the intention of Herr Hitler’s government is to wage a war in which the targets are civilians in the great cities of Britain and France. There is no other reason for such an amassing of aerial power.’
We were ecstatic. Hans gave Dora a spontaneous hug. It looked as if her risks were paying off; as if the world would be warned and saved, and us along with it.
Dora was right to be so happy. Two days later Seymour Cocks, a Labour member, stood up in the House of Commons brandishing a document which, he said, ‘gives an elaborate and detailed account of the present air organisation in Germany’. Cocks begged the house to pay attention to what Herr Hitler was doing. And then Winston Churchill, a backbencher for the Conservatives, also used Dora’s information in a speech to parliament. ‘The mighty Germans,’ he said, ‘that most technologically advanced nation, mean to have a war and we will be in it.’ He pleaded for Britain to take the threat seriously, to arm herself instead of indulging in ‘pacific dreams’.
The morning after Dora’s article appeared, I woke to a knock at our door. Hans’s side of the bed was empty.
They hadn’t buzzed from downstairs, so I suppose someone must have let them into the building. There were two of them. A tall one in a uniform, double-breasted with brass buttons, and a short detective in a brown suit. I couldn’t think. Plainclothes man spoke before I could.
‘Scotland Yard,’ he said, opening a leather wallet and flashing a shiny identification badge. ‘Alien Registration Division.’
Fear trawled through me like cold.
‘We have a warrant to search these premises for evidence of activities incompatible with your residency status.’
I’d stepped back automatically and they were inside the flat already, holding their hats in front of them. Dora was still in her room. The little detective was dark as a Cornish miner, the tall one in uniform blond and upright. It’s finished, I thought. Every cupboard and drawer of the flat was filled with papers that could only mean we were doing political work. Not to mention those all over the floor of Dora’s room.
She emerged, pulling the door closed behind her. ‘Good morning,’ she said. She was dressed but her face was puffy from sleep. She had socks on her feet.
She extended her hand to the men. ‘Could I see that warrant? If you don’t mind.’
‘Of course, ma’am.’ The short fellow nodded to the uniformed man, who handed her a typed piece of paper. I saw the letterhead over her shoulder: ‘New Scotland Yard’. When Dora passed it back her hand was shaking.
She spoke in German. ‘They’re Germans,’ she said to me.
Something was making it hard for me to breathe.
‘Do you wish us to call an interpreter, ma’am?’ the detective asked, friendly enough. His English was flawless.
Dora continued in German, her voice icy. ‘That won’t be necessary.’
My mind raced. Was this a delaying tactic? If they went to fetch an interpreter we’d have time to move the most sensitive material. At least the documents that would deliver Bertie and Uncle Erwin straight to them.
‘I’d like to meet your boss,’ Dora went on in her cut-glass German.
Saliva pooled in my mouth.
‘I am sorry, ma’am,’ the detective said, enunciating very slowly and clearly. ‘I don’t speak German. Would you speak in English, please? As you began?’
Dora had a thread of scorn in her voice I had never heard. ‘Why don’t I
call your office right now?’ She looked down at the warrant in his hand. ‘The number must be here, no?’
The detective glanced at his underling, who shrugged. I blurted, in English, ‘There is nothing illegal in this flat, sirs, we have in fact ourselves been burgled—’
‘They know that!’ Dora hissed, still in German. Then, in a voice so calm, so full of hatred: ‘Sie wollen deine Furcht.’ They want your fear.
She moved to face the tall one. ‘Nice uniform. But then your kind like dressing up–don’t like yourselves much, do you? Bet you’ve got lovely big boots at home.’ She turned to the little one, who was not much taller than she. Tapped her nose. ‘What happened to you? Worried you might be mistaken for a Jew?’
The men stood there, blank-faced.
‘They don’t understand—’ I started.
‘Shut up.’
‘Dee, please—’
‘Ruth, that’s enough.’ She was looking from one man to the other now. ‘You know, boys, the education you so resent has its uses.’ She snatched the warrant back from the tall one and held it up.
‘Fucking amateurs. No Englishman signs his name Lord Trenchard. You take this back to Berlin and tell them from me: a peer uses one word only. Trenchard.’
The smaller man had his back against the door now, which hadn’t been shut after they came in. He was blinking.
‘Get out,’ Dora told them.
‘Hure,’ the tall one muttered as she shut the door behind them. Whore.
She turned the key in the lock. Their footsteps thudded down the wooden stairs and then were absorbed by the carpet. My heart beat so hard I could hear the blood in my ears. I went to the bathroom and threw up.
When I came out she was at the kitchen table. ‘I’m sorry.’ My voice was tangled, my eyes stinging. ‘I didn’t realise—’
‘How could you know?’ She wasn’t angry any more. ‘It’s one of those class foibles. And only the case in writing. I know it from Dudley, I suppose.’ She moved a hand to her mouth in an unconscious gesture of comfort. Then waved it away. ‘It doesn’t matter.’