Hopeful Monsters (3 page)

I thought I might now join in by saying - But didn't you want

my father to protect this young man and the girl by saying that they were two of his students at the university?

My mother went out of the room. We could hear her talking, or crying, with Magda in the kitchen.

The girl said to my father 'Don't you care?'

My father raised his eyebrows; gazed at a corner of the ceiling.

The young man said 'In my opinion, the scientific reality is that there is this repression of the masses.'

My father said 'I see.'

After a time the girl said 'Excuse me, I will go and see if your wife is all right.' She left the room.

We sat at the table and drank our soup - my father, the young man with pince-nez and myself. I thought - Oh yes, our various visions, like arrows, are going out and coming crashing round on to the backs of our own heads.

Then - But it is true that my mother must have had difficulty in getting the materials for the soup?

After a time the young man said 'But the masses have the real power according to the iron laws of history.'

My father said 'Then for God's sake join them.'

The young man stood up and bowed, and went out - presumably to join my mother and the girl and Helga and Magda in the kitchen.

I thought - So now, yes, my father and I are alone in our airship.

My father sat staring at a corner of the ceiling. I thought - But it is all right, it is all right, even if there are things one does not understand and cannot say: is not this what you have taught me?

Eventually a bed was made for the young man in the drawing-room; the girl was to sleep on the floor of my room.

Sometime during the night people did in fact come knocking at the door of our apartment; I heard my father going to answer the door; he was calm, authoritative; after a time the people who had knocked went away. What my father had said was that there was no one in the apartment except his family and servants; he could give his assurance on this point on the authority of his position at the university. I was in my bed with the girl beside me on a mattress on the floor. I was thinking - Well what does one understand? What is truth? What is authority? What is caring for others, in this lonely business of our airship?

It was a day or two after this, I think, that the revolution of the left-wing extremists that had been simmering came to the boil in Berlin:

this was the second week in January 1919. The eruption of the left wing brought out the right-wing extremists; there were gangs in caps and thick dark suits running through the streets; gangs in makeshift uniforms clanking about in lorries. I saw comparatively little of this; for a week I was not allowed out of the apartment. I would stand at the window and look down. What I understood vaguely at the time and in more detail later was that the left-wing extremists, or Spartacists as they were called, had emerged with rifles and machine-guns; had attacked, and taken over, three or four newspaper offices (this might have seemed apt to my childish vision, since I saw their business as being to do with the banging about of bits of paper). There was sporadic shooting, a few hundred deaths, a failure in storming government buildings. Railway stations and the Telegraph Office were occupied: but all this was being done not so much by the workers as by people who had said that it should be being done by the workers - in accordance with the iron laws of history. Workers for the most part stayed at home. And the right-wing gangs took time off from their clattering in lorries to retire to cellars and drink beer - and to wait for the time perhaps when they could re-emerge and deal with the left-wing extremists who in the end would have to emerge from the newspaper offices without even having had any beer.

I would sometimes hear the sound of firing in the streets; sometimes see the lorries going past with the men hanging on like the claws of crabs. Once there was a column of people with banners going past and they were shouting 'Out! Out!': later there was a column with banners containing slogans of the other side going past and they were shouting 'Out!' I would think - But where are the people dying in the streets? Or are they being kept like a score, as in a game of cards.

My father stayed in the apartment for a few days; then he was needed at the university. The young man and the girl had moved on to another hiding-place. Some of my mother's friends would come to the door now and then and there would be whispered consultations in the hallway; they would sit for a short while on the chair on which Rosa Luxemburg had sat. I thought - They are like tops that have been whipped up by Rosa Luxemburg, and are now running down.

Once a day Magda or Helga or my mother would go out to try to get food; they would have to queue in streets where there was the sound of firing. When they came back they would rest in the

chair in the hallway, and we would gather round: I thought -Perhaps tops are kept spinning by the sound of firing.

I tried to talk with my mother. She would sit with her back to me at her desk in the drawing-room or at the table in the kitchen. I would say 'But what is happening?'

She said 'It will not be a defeat. It will be a victory.'

'But where is Rosa Luxemburg?'

'In hiding.'

'How will it be a victory?'

'In the end, it will be a victory.'

I imagined Rosa Luxemburg crouched like a small hawk at the top of someone's airing cupboard.

Then there was an evening when there were more than the usual comings and goings at the door of our apartment. My father had come home; he went to join in whatever was happening. I sat on my own in my room. I was often on my own in my room at this time; I used to plan how, if the gangs from the street came to get me, I would climb out of the window and up the ventilation area in the centre of the building. But then what should I do - fly above rooftops? This particular evening, after the more than usual comings and goings in the hallway, there were just the sounds of my father talking quietly to my mother and my mother crying; then my mother began to make a noise like howling. I went out of my room and along the passage. My mother was sitting on the chair in the hallway and my father was standing over her. My mother was hitting him with her fists. I said, as I so often said, 'What's happened?'

My father said 'They've found Rosa Luxemburg.'

My mother said 'They've killed her.'

My father said 'Come to bed.'

My mother said to my father 'You killed her!'

I thought - Do you mean my father's thoughts, like arrows, went right round the universe -

My father said 'You go to bed.'

I said 'Me?'

My father said 'Yes.'

I thought - But I don't think you've killed her!

My father sat up with my mother most of that night. Sometimes she became calm; sometimes she cried and shouted. It did not seem that anything my father said made any difference to my mother. I

sat in my room and listened. I thought - You mean, my mother doesn't want to see what it is she herself has been doing?

The next morning details came through about what had happened - or what people thought must have happened - to Rosa Luxemburg. She had been found hiding in someone's house by one of the right-wing gangs roaming the streets; she had been taken to the Eden Hotel to be interrogated; then the gang had said they were going to hand her over to the police. On the way out of the hotel she had been hit on the head by a rifle butt; she had been pushed into a car half dead. In the car she had probably been shot, and her body had been dumped in a canal. The official story put out was that on the way to the police station the car had been stopped by a mob and Rosa Luxemburg had been dragged from it and lynched. No one bothered to try to believe this. But with her death the revolution was effectively over. Her body was recovered some months later from the canal. A few of her followers continued to imagine that she must still be alive, and that the whole story was a ruse so that she could remain in hiding and eventually emerge.

My father said to my mother 'There is a sense, you see, in which something like that might be true.'

My mother said 'What sense?'

My father said 'She always knew that that sort of revolution wouldn't work. Now she can become a symbol.'

My mother said 'You and your symbols!'

My father said 'Unconsciously, she might have known this.'

My mother said 'I don't want to hear about your unconscious!'

My mother used to sit in the chair in the hallway in which Rosa Luxemburg had sat. I thought - She is waiting for Rosa Luxemburg to have gone right round the universe and to come back in through that doorway.

Later that winter my father took to going for long walks on his own; there were no more civilians with rifles in the streets; occasionally there were soldiers. I thought - My father is looking for his own way out of whatever predicament we might be trapped in.

My mother for a while spent much of the time in bed. She would lie on her back with her hands above the bedclothes and her fingers intertwining as if they groped through a grating. I sometimes sat with her. I wanted to say - It is all right! Then - But are you not where and as you want to be?

She once said 'Your father is a good man! I am so sorry!'

I wanted to say - What are you sorry about?

She said 'You know, Rosa Luxemburg was very grateful to your father. I mean, that night, when the two students stayed in the apartment.'

I said 'Then why don't you say so?'

She said 'Your father has never loved me. He loves you.'

I thought - You are trapped, all laced up, like your relations in the country: you don't want to make yourself lovable!

In the spring - I was doing lessons with Miss Henne again; my mother had begun to go out to work in a soup-kitchen in one of the poorest districts of Berlin - in the spring my father sometimes took me with him on his walks. We would go to the Tiergarten; we would look in at the zoo where there were a few sad animals in cages; suddenly there was blossom on the trees. I thought - But of course we will get out of our predicament! The high point for my father and me in our walks was to go and have tea in the Adlon Hotel - this being the meeting-place for rich and cosmopolitan Berlin, also for the French, English and American officers of the Allied Commission who were overseeing the peace terms being imposed on Germany. These Allied officers were elegant and languid; they had bright belts and boots and even hair that seemed polished; they stood in groups with the sort of vision, I hoped, that would tumble back like cannon balls on their own heads. Occasionally they were joined by one or two of their Prussian counterparts who were elegant in something of the same way except that their hair, like that of my father, was brushed upwards at the back, so that it was as if they might take off like fireworks. But there were also in the hotel groups of a kind that I had not seen before: these were short, rather orange-faced men who seemed to be slightly too big for their clothes; who were like drops of oil or ointment on the point of touching a surface and spreading. They sat round tables with their heads facing inwards: with them sometimes were women of a kind I also had not seen before - younger or at least made up to seem younger than the men; they perched on the arms of chairs and smoked cigarettes and kicked up their feet with pointed shoes. It was as if they might puncture the surface of the men so that there would be oil or ointment, spreading.

My father and I would arrive on the threshold and survey the scene. Between and around the various groups there whizzed waiters who were neat and dapper young men who balanced trays

on the tips of their fingers: they wore short jackets and tight trousers: they were like acrobats, or balls in a game of bagatelle. And there were my father and I, having landed on this strange world from our airship.

We would settle at a table and order tea. The women on the arms of chairs tried to blow smoke rings; the men with their heads together were like bubbles on the surface of a cauldron. Occasionally one of the French or English or American or Prussian officers would look without expression at the men and women gathered round a table; then he would call to one of the waiters going past with a tray, and he and the waiter would laugh and chatter.

One day I said to my father 'But how can you fight a war and then be friendly with the people you have been fighting?'

My father said 'People quite like fighting wars; then after a time they've had enough.'

I said 'And they aren't able to look at what they've been doing?'

My father said 'You're right!'

There was one particular waiter with smooth blond hair who whirled to and fro and who seemed to have special attention paid to him by the officers. I wondered - There is a glitter about him, as if of the same sort as there was around Rosa Luxemburg.

I said to my father 'What happened about that theory of Professor Einstein's - the one that said however far you tried to look outwards, you would come up against the back of your own head?'

My father said 'How interesting you should say that! They think they have found a way, as a matter of fact, of either proving or disproving the theory. The English are sending expeditions to South America and to Africa - '

One of the women who was perched on the arm of a chair at a table near us had fallen backwards on to the lap of one of the men who was like a drop of oil. She kicked her legs up into the air. Ash from the man's cigar fell on to her dress; she brushed at it, and seemed to be making out that it had burned her.

My father was saying 'At these particular places there is going to be a total eclipse of the sun. The expeditions are taking with them telescopes and instruments which will discover what happens when light from a distant star passes close to the sun. Normally light from such a star would not be visible because of the brightness of the sun, but if there is a total eclipse - '

The woman who was on the lap of the man with the cigar was holding a piece of her dress and was looking at him reproachfully.

Then she put her hand into his jacket and took out his wallet and looked inside. The man seemed to pay no attention to her; he was puffing at his cigar.