A Future Arrived (23 page)

He put the notebook aside and turned off the light. There was still pain in his jaw but he felt better having written about it. He sat on the edge of the bed and listened to the night sounds of the city, the rumble of traffic along Neue Friedrich Strasse and the bridges of the Spree. He thought of automobiles filled with contented people on their way home from theaters or restaurants, the men in dinner jackets and the women in furs, whizzing past the dark shadows of narrow streets where men in shoddy clothing prowled like wolves.

L
IGHTS BURNED IN
the early morning hours in the offices of all the wire services and newspapers throughout Berlin. By four in the morning of September 15 the election results, except for a few provincial districts, had been received. The figures were stunning.

“Nearly six and a half million votes so far for the Nazi party,” Dix said in a toneless voice. “Quite a gain from eight hundred thousand they received two years ago.”

Martin peered over his shoulder at the clattering teletype machine. “How many seats?”

“Over a hundred, I'd say.”

“A hundred and seven for certain,” one of the editors remarked. “That makes them the second largest party in the Reichstag.”

The three men stared numbly at the machine, the names of cities, candidates, parties—the tally of votes—appearing in typed blocks on the white paper.

“Hofhauser lost in Stuttgart to the Nazi candidate by two thousand votes,” Dix said. “Poor Emil.”

Martin shook his head. “Poor everyone.”

“And your kinsman won in Munich … Werner von Rilke … but no surprise there. The Nazi paymaster.”

Martin turned away from the machine and poured a cup of coffee from an alcohol-heated urn. The coffee was bitter and scalded his tongue. To think of Werner was to think, in a symbolic way, of Germany itself. Werner had marched off to war in 1914 as a twenty-three-year-old infantry officer loyal to kaiser and fatherland. He had been horribly wounded in the abdomen by a grenade and had been brought back to a Germany plunging into revolution and anarchy. The defeat, the continuing allied blockade, the humiliation of Versailles, the French occupation of the Rhineland, the despoiling of his country—even by his own relative—had embittered him. Paul Rilke had bought for six million dollars family holdings worth twenty times that amount. But the dollar had been king as the mark tumbled into the rat hole of inflation. Werner had spent his share in seeking political solutions to the overwhelming problems of the Reich. Among the myriad splinter parties he had backed in 1922 had been Adolf Hitler's National Socialist German Workers. It had obviously turned out to be a sound investment.

Dix joined him at the coffee urn. “Will you be making a broadcast today?”

“I hope at midnight … six
P.M.
New York time. I asked for fifteen minutes on the shortwave, but I may only get five.”

“And what will you tell America?”

Martin shrugged and slurped at his steaming coffee. “What can I say? Facts and figures, I suppose. It's too early to speculate on what this is going to mean to Germany.”

“Not too early,” said Dix quietly. “Too late.”

A
LBERT FINISHED PACKING
his suitcase and Rudy insisted on carrying it downstairs for him. Frau Bernstorff, who managed the boardinghouse, met them in the main hall and kissed Albert on the cheek. She was a plump, jolly woman who fretted over her “young men” and pampered her favorites.

“Be sure to come back next year,” she said in English.
“Mein jung Englander.”
And kissed him again.

He liked Frau Bernstorff. She was a woman who had known far better days. Her husband Klaus—who puttered about and did the bookkeeping—had been a hotel owner who went bankrupt during the inflation years.

“I'll try, Frau Bernstorff,” he said, knowing in his heart that he would never want to come back to Berlin. He noticed that a photograph of Adolf Hitler had been hung next to the one of President Hindenburg on the wall behind the concierge's desk. The old field marshal and the corporal side by side. He mentioned the photograph to Rudy as they went out to the street to wait for the taxi.

“Oh, that,” said Rudy airily. “Bertha Kiss-Kiss has great faith in him. The savior of Germany, she says. But she hates the Brownshirts. Scum, she calls them … feels certain they'll be eliminated once Hitler gains the support of the army.”

“Do you believe that?”

Rudy shrugged. “Makes sense. Why hold on to those gangsters if he doesn't have to?” The taxi pulled up at the curb and he opened the rear door. “Friedrichstrasse Bahnhof,” he told the driver, then turned to Albert and clasped him by the arms. “Goodbye, my friend, and good luck. I'll think of you slaving away at school while I'm drinking my beer at the Romanische! As we English fellows say …
cheerio and pip-pip, old cock!
”

B
ACK TO SCHOOL
. The thought was depressing. There would be something of a fuss made about his returning two weeks late, but he could justify his absence by having “been abroad.” Travel, he would claim, was most enlightening. He had also brought a leather-bound volume of Heine's poems for his housemaster.

The soft, pallid face staring out from the frame on the wall. The little mustache and lank hair. The sightless eyes. Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, president of the Republic, hanging beside him. The fleshy jowls and the white hair … the vacant, senile stare.

And Adolf Hitler telling the country in his bad German what they wished to hear. His speech in Leipzig, pledging his allegiance to the army and promising the German people that he would come to power through the ballot box, swearing that he would fight against the Treaty of Versailles even if he had to do that through illegal means. What had he meant? What sort of
illegal means?
And vowing in his harsh, near hysterical voice that
once
he came to power—no doubt there; the stating of an inevitable fact—he would form a National Socialist Court of Justice and heads would roll. Whose heads? All the shadowy enemies of the Reich, Albert supposed as he gazed through the window of the taxi. The enemies alluded to in all of the Nazi speeches; the Jews and the liberals; the “degenerate” artists, writers, and poets; the international bankers—the so-called scum and parasites who had stabbed Germany in the back during the war.

People crossing the Friedrichstrasse into Unter den Linden. People shopping … going to and from work … seated in the cafés … standing in front of the restaurants. A city like any other going about its mundane affairs in the pale October sunshine. Rough boards covering the broken display windows at Israel's department store.
JUDE
painted across a wall. Brownshirt pranks, Rudy had said. But the gangsters would go when Hitler achieved his aim of becoming president, or at least chancellor, through the process of ballot box, law and order.

And he had seen them take their seats in the Reichstag, standing high in the press gallery with Mr. Rilke and Wolf von Dix. One hundred and seven new delegates to the parliament of the land, respectable gentlemen all in their dark blue business suits. And then, unaccountably, they had all risen to their feet and walked out, leaving the remaining members talking among themselves in confused speculation. They returned a short time later, the blue suits gone, one hundred and seven men now dressed in the brown uniform of the Storm Troops, the swastika brassard on their arms, red and black—the colors of blood and iron. And the roll being called and one hundred and seven voices shouting in their turn …
Present! Heil Hitler!

He thought suddenly of Abingdon Pryory, that summer evening after dinner … Lord Stanmore rising to give a toast.
Dear friends and gentle hearts
. The words ran through his head like a litany as the taxi crawled through the traffic toward the railway station.
Dear friends … gentle hearts
… words so meaningless in this time—in this place.

T
ORCHLIGHT AND SWEATING
faces. Hysterical eyes. Bonfires in the public squares. Berlin and Munich. Nuremberg and Weimar. Students clogging the Haupstrasse in Heidelberg, beer-filled and arm-laden—burning the books. Shadows writhing on the ancient buildings, the stones of Heine, Goethe, and Schiller.

Black cars in the silent streets. The locked doors and the closed shutters. The midnight raids. The disappearance of the man next door … the quiet woman down the hall. A beginning—a New Order—and a thousand endings in dim-lit cellars or the hastily nailed and wired compounds at Oranienburg and Dachau.

“Whatever happened to Wolf von Dix? … Emil Zeitzler? … The elderly couple who owned the restaurant next to the Schiffbauerdam? …”

Do not ask such things. There is nothing to be done, even if one knows, or cares.

Protests. Debates in Geneva. Committees formed and abandoned. A wringing of hands. Mute rage. Shrugged gestures of impotence. Fear.

“It's going to be a lousy decade,”
Martin Rilke says in the Schwarzenberg Café in Vienna the day Chancellor Dollfuss orders tanks and artillery to crush the Social Democrats in the Karl Marx Hof. Democracy dead in Austria. Dollfuss dead with it five months later, the Nazi gunmen pumping their Lugers into the little man and letting him bleed to death on a couch. No room for two German-speaking dictators.

“Capone would understand,”
Martin says, mixing gin and vermouth for the CBC Radio team in the bar of the Hotel Crillon in Paris.
“Hitler would be right at home in Cicero, Illinois.”

Martin Rilke in Paris … London … Brussels … Copenhagen … Rome … Leningrad. Anywhere at all but in Germany.
Persona non grata
by order of Goebbels. No CBC Radio team in Berlin. No INA … the offices on Neu Königstrasse house a travel agency featuring cheap tours of the Bavarian Alps. No point in trying to file a worthwhile story in Germany anyway. The censors go over everything. Reliable sources dry up. Gestapo informers are everywhere.
“One must be so careful. My own sons … I'm sorry.”

News is where you find it. In the agony of China … bullet-whipped Shanghai and burning Chapei. The League of Nations imposes sanctions against the Japanese but they are meaningless. Rome has as much contempt for the league as Tokyo. Mussolini begins his own adventure in the wastelands beyond the borders of Italian Somaliland and Eritrea.

A hard country. The Gojam … Gondar. A boy on a camel takes the dispatches from the high desert to the Sudan. The world reads the reports of a twenty-two-year-old correspondent for London's
Daily Post
and looks up Abyssinia on the map. They read of barefoot armies with spears hurling themselves against machine guns and armored cars. They read of guerrilla war … the roving bands of Haile Selassie and Ras Desta Demtu … the Fuzzy Wuzzy sword wielders bounding through the bush out of a page of Kipling.

A. E. Thaxton in Abyssinia—by wire from Khartoum
.

The older correspondents, the wiser ones, travel with the accommodating Italians from the coast. They file their stories in Addis Ababa and sleep in clean sheets. It takes a young man hungry for a by-line to trail along with Ethiopian camel riders through the stony wastes and the fever trees. The stories he writes are painful and dramatic. Courage and futility. The Italians do not fight face to face any longer. They send the planes instead—the Caproni and Marchetti bombers with their loads of fragmentation bombs and mustard gas. It is the summer of the Olympic games in Berlin. The summer of Jesse Owens. Abyssinia ceases to exist. There is no news from Italian East Africa fit to print.

The teletype machines clatter away. Impersonal. Printing of beauty queens crowned and kings deposed. A revolt against the Spanish Republic by the garrisons in Burgos, Seville, and Saragossa. A General Francisco Franco flies in from Morocco to join General Emilio Mola in leading the insurgent forces. Heavy fighting in Talavera and Toledo. The Alcazar besieged …
exclusive report of Madrid fighting by A. E. Thaxton
. American baseball … the New York Yankees of the American League defeated the New York Giants of the National League in World Series play four games to two.

“I think nineteen thirty-six is the worst year I can remember,”
says Martin Rilke following a broadcast from Barcelona that has probably been jammed. His companion in the restaurant gazes out at the Ramblas, deserted in the rain except for a few militiamen and Carabineros.
“I think next year will be worse,”
she says.

The machines clatter endlessly. Boys tear off the copy and deliver it to the desks. Deadlines come and go. Leaves turn brown and fall in city parks. Trees bud again. Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne warmly received by London theatergoers in
Amphitryon
38 at the Lyric. Laurence Housman's
Victoria Regina
has at last reached the Berlin stage, but all references to Benjamin Disraeli have been excised from the play. Will Don Budge conquer Wimbledon? Nazi triumph in Austria. Cheering millions greet Hitler in Vienna following bloodless
Anschluss
with German Reich. Dramatic increase in number of suicides among Austrian Jews, but report cannot be confirmed at this time …

The machines write on.

B
OOK
T
WO