Good People (28 page)

‘In 1940 we'll erase “national”, in 1941 we'll erase “Polish”, and in 1942, the word “man”,' Thomas laughed.

Weller did not appreciate humour of that kind. He believed that cultured people should exercise irony rather than cynicism, and that black humour was the province of nihilists.

Before long, at least in the view of some who consulted it, the scientific approach of the model endowed it with the power of prophecy, and they began to ask questions that implicitly required the delegates of the Foreign Office in Warsaw to predict the future. Thomas and Weller resisted such inquiries, but a predictive tone nonetheless sometimes crept into their answers. They took care to offer these forecasts with a bundle of reservations, of course: while certain events were likely to occur, so were others.

Inquiries were received from every conceivable quarter, ranging from the highest levels of the Reich to a minor intelligence officer from Lublin. One question that gave Thomas particular satisfaction was received in early 1940 from the office of Carl Krauch, chairman of the board of I. G. Farben; the company, in cooperation with the government, intended to build gigantic factories at a cost of 800 million Reichsmark in Upper Silesia, near the city of Oświȩcim. Would the honourable representative of the Foreign Office analyse the
composition of the population in the region and recommend a strategy to enlist the Poles in support of the project? Thomas devoted a week to a report that would impress Krauch, and attached a personal letter in which he implored Krauch to consult his office on any matter.

Someone from the Gestapo asked whether the Poles, as a group that had been oppressed for many generations by foreign conquerors, had developed manipulative techniques to arouse empathy. Their men complained that they found it hard to behave with sufficient severity towards the Poles. Weller claimed that the model could not answer such a cruel question, and Thomas accepted his opinion. Weller was also the one who insisted on responding to the inquiry of the Foreign Office in Berlin about the lies being circulated by the Poles regarding atrocities committed by the occupying Germans: were there precedents for this ‘Polish tendency to exaggerate'? Surely these accusations had been directed against other occupiers—the Russians, or the AustroHungarians. From a historical perspective, was it possible to characterise the Poles, like the Jews, as chronic exaggerators?

Many officials—including Goebbels, Rosenberg, the gauleiters of Reichsgau Wartheland, Danzig and West Prussia—completely ignored the model and forbade their subordinates to send questions to them. Krüger, the commander of the SS and the police in the Generalgouvernement, was contemptuous, but the district governor admired it. Hans Frank, the governor-general of Poland, had limited respect for it. Heydrich regarded it as ‘a harmless project of the Foreign Office, which is begging for a bit of involvement in Poland', and therefore SS men were permitted to address questions to them.

The speed with which their office became a well-known agency of the Third Reich didn't surprise Thomas: any new organisation, whether a regime of soft-brained bullies or a company that sold the inner organs of corpses, would gradually adopt jargon, ceremonies, departments and nicknames testifying to its acceptance, though it had at first glance seemed totally monstrous.

As expected, Weller rejected opinions of that kind and called those who held them ‘degenerate and pathological'. In his opinion, the rise
of the model was a tribute to devoted work, clever strategy, to the disorder that prevailed in Poland, which forced confused government agencies to seek advice.

Despite the accelerated pace of work, Weller did not change his habits. He read all the newspapers, and took an hour and a half for lunch. Sometimes, out of personal interest and a sincere desire to help his country, he devoted himself to tasks that had nothing to do with his duties. In response to the venomous criticism by Britain—the object of Weller's deep hatred—of the German bombing of Poland, he spent two weeks making a list of all the places where the Royal Air Force had bombed and killed civilians from the end of the Great War until the present. He roamed around the office as though possessed: ‘In India—endless, of course. And in Yemen, Palestine and Iraq. And in Africa—in Uganda and Kenya, and nowhere did they face a threat like Poland's threat to us, so how do they dare?' To clinch his point he would quote Tacitus.
‘Solitudinem faciunt pacem appellant.'
*
The way officials from the Foreign Office could waste precious hours chattering about things beyond their control amused Thomas.

Weller, though wasting time was a matter of principle for him, constantly complained about how much he had to do. Thomas preferred days when he was in the grip of work fever, when he had no time to think, to yearn, to confront the knowledge that another lonely day had passed. Only when he lay in bed at night, hearing music and laughter in the apartments of young officers, did he imagine a blank sheet of paper, and on it, a letter to Clarissa.

‘In my childhood, I hoped, just like U, to become a great man. He was enchanted by the natural sciences and modern engineering, and I, who belonged to the next generation, was drawn to the world of merchandise and sales. From my youth I was attracted to it, and that was the world I knew and studied. Until recently I had no reason to see that choice as a mistake. On the contrary, it seemed that the spirit of the age tended in that direction; even Lenin, the great Communist,
instructed his people to learn to trade. U was disappointed when he understood that he wouldn't find answers in the paths of knowledge he had pursued, and I was parted from my calling by fate. In a way both U and I were confronted with a moment when the certainties of our lives collapsed. We were forced to start from scratch. To acquire new qualities…'

There was something amusing about it: he wrote to her only in his head, not leaving a single incriminating page behind, but he disguised Ulrich, Musil's hero, as U. He had taught even his imagination a lesson or two in caution, and remembered not to mention the hero of a banned novel.

One night he wrote again in his head: ‘The inability to act on love is a curse that has been cast upon me. Recently I realised that she was right, the woman who told me that I would always be alone if I didn't do something about it. Perhaps these nights in Warsaw, in which I lie in a strange bed in an apartment that isn't mine, sharpen the dread of loneliness I have always known. Feelings of longing, possibly exaggerated, rage in my soul, and I think of you, my dear, on the day when you removed from the mantelpiece the brass-plated rifle shells that my father had collected on the battlefield, along with his Iron Cross, and the picture of nine young men in uniform, and reserve officer Werner Heiselberg in the Forest of Argonne at sunrise. Seven of them were killed, another lost an arm and a leg, and the ninth lost his brother, his young wife and his money, and committed suicide. Only my father survived. Even my mother, who casually kicked him out of the house, didn't dare remove those items from the mantel. And you? You didn't say a thing, and two days later they had disappeared.

‘Allow me to remind you of at least two sun-drenched mornings in Grünewald and the laughter in your eyes after you had bargained down the cost of the ticket on the Stadtbahn, and how, after you scolded the conductor, he reduced the fare because you were a member of the NSV. And I insist on adding several other Sundays in the ice-cream parlour in Olivaer Platz, where the counter staff took such a liking to you that they prepared a special platter of mixed flavours so that you
could decide which was strongest. I think of those days, and how wonderful you were; remember Rilke's lines:
Liebender, euch, ihr in einander Genügten,/ frag ich nach uns. Ihr greift euch. Habt ihr Beweise?
'
*

One night, when they were drunk, he confided in Weller, who asked: Why don't you write to her?

He was silent, then explained that, when they parted, they decided Clarissa could live in his apartment if she wished, but since there was no knowing how long he would be gone, maybe a year or more, there would be no obligations between them, and she could see other men, with one reservation: she could not bring any men back to the apartment. The separation wasn't coincidental. He didn't want to make things difficult for her, especially if she had already given her heart to another man, and in fact he expected her to write to him about her feelings. Weller scoffed at this. How could Thomas display such faintness of heart in love?

‘The first letter must come from you. You're the one who left Berlin, and your honour requires you to write to her. If you don't want to know about other men, don't ask. From my acquaintance with women, she will tell you.'

All that weekend Weller urged him to sit down and write, and told Thomas stories about how he courted his wife. He seemed to be intoxicated with their new intimacy and began to give Thomas advice about becoming more aware of the little pleasures of life. He would like to find Thomas's office empty once in a while, to hear that his friend had gone for a stroll along the river, to a fine restaurant, to spend time with a woman. Encouraged by Thomas's nods, he peppered him with other questions. Why hadn't he told him that he had been married? He never mentioned his wife's name. Even more than that, Weller was interested in his mother: there was some little thing that wouldn't let him rest, and he hoped he wasn't going too far by raising the subject. He understood, of course, the tragedy that had struck
Thomas with Frau Heiselberg's death, but the few times he had mentioned his mother he had not said at all that she was no longer living. Thomas was sure, he said, that he had mentioned the terrible illness that had led to her death, and in any event Weller had attended her funeral. So it wasn't as if he were concealing anything.

‘I wasn't suggesting that you were hiding her death,' Weller said, apparently taken aback by Thomas's answer. He wanted only to remind Thomas that he regarded him as a close friend, and hoped that Thomas also trusted him, since true friends can help one another in situations like this. Silence fell, before Thomas announced that he had decided to write to Clarissa. ‘I wish to thank you, Weller, my friend, for your good advice and heartfelt generosity.'

For two days he shut himself up in his room and wrote. He tried to be witty and imaginative and not too wordy. He polished the style and chose the most beautiful quotations.

Clarissa's answer arrived two weeks later. The letter wasn't short, about six pages of dense handwriting, but the main point was in the last two pages:

And at the end she wrote: