Kanata (42 page)

“Fear is expensive, Herr Prime Minister,” Goering said. “But useful, no?” He attempted another smile. “England fears us. We fear England. Who has the greater cause? Let me ask you directly: If the peoples of Germany and Austria—being of the same race—should wish to unite, and if England would try and prevent them from doing this, would Canada support England?”

Canada, King replied, would examine the issue independently of Britain and decide for itself.

“I do not wish you to have the impression that we are planning to take possession of Austria,” Goering said, though he was planning it, and Czechoslovakia as well, a nation of witless peasants who craved leadership and would welcome the tanks. Goering's stomach rolled, guttural noises issuing. What had he eaten the night before? A large piece of veal, an ambitious actress. Perhaps it was the cognac.

Germany was obsessed with the purity of blood, to protect it and revere it, a religion. Canada was the intermingling of blood, creating a new race, a global experiment. One was the past, the other the future. Which was which? King cautiously commented on these theories of bloodlines.

“I am a general,” Goering answered, shrugging. “I think with my blood.”

A general sees the world as a hierarchy of force, King thought, and Goering was no different. He and Goering had talked for an hour and a half. King would barely have time to drive to the old palace of Paul von Hindenburg on the Wilhelmstrasse to meet with Hitler. He thanked Goering for the coffee, repledged his friendship, and left.

At the palace, the Führer's elite guards saluted the arriving prime minister, and King congratulated himself on this diplomatic coup. What other leader had dared to view first-hand Hitler's worrisome nationalism, with its cunning marriage of order and barbarity? Hitler awaited him on the second floor. King walked across the marble floor that stretched out like a desert, his footsteps echoing slightly. Hitler's face was unlined and without expression, his hair still unclouded by grey. King had been warned of the man's charm; don't be seduced by the evil genius.

King felt uniquely qualified to talk to Hitler, to act as liaison between the dictator and an uneasy world. This was Canada's role, certainly. Did they not explain Britain to America and America to Britain? They would do the same for Germany and England. The Germans of Berlin, Ontario, were hard working and law abiding and peaceful (many of them pacifist Pennsylvania Mennonites, and perhaps too peaceful during the last war).

King gave Hitler a copy of Rogers's biography of him, and opened it to the page that showed the house he was born in.

“You know I was born in Berlin, Herr Hitler,” King said.

Hitler sat immobile as Schmidt the interpreter translated.

“Berlin, Ontario.” Schmidt passed on the punchline, and Hitler stared without expression.

King complimented Hitler on the tour that Ribbentrop had arranged and ventured some praise. “What you have done with the workers, it is remarkable.”

“The workers are remarkable,” Hitler said. “This is what is often overlooked by governments.” The
Volk
.

They discussed their mothers; Hitler was as devoted to his dead mother as King was to his, a surprise.
He is certainly a spiritualist
, King thought, though he didn't bring this up. Hitler had the quality of a mystic, and a quality of greatness too, perhaps, though he was surprisingly modest. Still, there were concerns.

“As any man of responsibility, Herr Hitler,” King began, “I cannot help but raise the issue of war. We have increased our own expenditures on defence. Reluctantly, I should add. But the reason for this is the increased outlay in German military spending and the growing unease in Europe. I had to give money to the military to unite my country.”

“Then we have something in common, Herr King. I too was required to give money to the military to unite my country.” Hitler offered a mirthless, understanding smile. “We are not arming for purposes of aggression, this I assure you. But you must appreciate what the Treaty of Versailles has done. Should we be held in indefinite subjection? Or do we assert ourselves and in so doing, preserve the self-respect of the nation? My interest is in improving the conditions of the German people. A war would certainly undo the work that we have already done. People respect strength. A simple truth. I saw what the last war did. With the weapons we have now, all of Europe would be devastated by war. There would be no winners, Herr King. There will be no war.”

King had his assurance, something to take to London. But Hitler continued.

“I'm not like Stalin. I can't just shoot my generals and anyone in the government who disagrees with me.” (Though hadn't he done just that during the Night of the Long Knives? Roehm controlled the
Sturmabteilung
, four million young men filled with revolution and blood. Roehm could have turned them on Hitler, and who is to say he wouldn't have—the wolf-hearted Roehm who would bury his mother alive for an ideology—so Hitler had him shot like a dog. At any rate, he was homosexual.) “I accept the Treaty of Versailles with all its indignities. What I don't understand, Herr King, is the Treaty of Alliance between France and Russia.” Russia, the world's most dangerous enemy and worse as a friend. Perhaps this would prove ill fated for France. As for Russia, it was gloriously ill fated all on its own.

They spoke for over an hour. Hitler gave King a photograph of himself mounted in a silver frame that was warmly inscribed in remembrance of his German visit. They shook hands.

“I wish you well in your efforts to help mankind,” King said.

Outside, in the courtyard of the Hindenburg palace, its oppressive grandeur, the dark lines of a Grimm's castle, King reflected that Hitler was, if nothing else, a patriot. King had his car take him back to the hotel, where he had lunch. The emotion in Germany was warlike; they were drunk with wild god. And Hitler was their god.
Perhaps
, King thought,
I am a medium for the forces beyond
. He had read Joshua at breakfast, the walls of Jericho coming down and all within slaughtered, men and women and children. (The only one spared was Rahab the harlot, another curious sign.) World history at its most perilous moment,
and somehow King had a defining role to play. A confluence of events and coincidences had brought him to the centre of all this. He would need to keep in touch with the spirit world, would need advice.

There was a factory to tour in the afternoon, and when he arrived Ribbentrop was there to meet him. In his brown suit, he looked like a salesman, and he was a salesman of a sort, touring the world's capitals, asking them to limit their arms manufacture, asking them in a way that made them do just the opposite, allowing Germany to say that the world had turned down its pleas of disarmament, and that it had no choice but to keep pace.

There was a rumour that Ribbentrop was having an affair with Wallis Simpson. Perhaps it was strategic: In the event that Edward became king, he would have his ear. But now Edward was marginalized. He and Wallis were visiting Germany as well, testing world opinion on their tragic love.

The late June air was pleasant and the sun bounced off a thousand windows.

“I trust your visit with our Führer was altogether illuminating,” Ribbentrop said.

“A surprising man,” King said. “A patriot.”

“His love for his people is without boundary. You can see now the import of our mission. If there is to be war, we will all be found guilty by history, yes.”

If there is war
, King thought,
England and Germany will clash, and France will be a casualty
. In Berlin he had toured the zoo, been to youth camps, and seen the grandeur of the Olympic Stadium. He stared at the sleek factory, its facade stretching for a hundred yards. “What do you make here?” King asked.

“Efficiency,” Ribbentrop replied.

5

N
ORMAN
B
ETHUNE,
C
HINA,
1939

Who would have guessed that China would become his mistress? Bethune had rejected Canada (too aloof), Russia (too dark, finally), and Spain (a tragedienne on the world stage). Near Chi-Shan he came across a mule that had its legs broken and ears and tail blown off by a bomb dropped from a Japanese plane. The beast was lying in agony on the side of the road because no soldier would shoot it, afraid the owner would claim damages. Bethune took out his jackknife and slit its carotid artery and it quietly expired. What kind of doctor murders a mule? a soldier asked Bethune's interpreter. What kind? Bethune answered rhetorically. One who is arrogant in the service of humanity, that's what kind. He
had cured his own tuberculosis. There is a little of God in every doctor.

In the spring he turned forty-nine. No longer young, and international brotherhood was no longer a youthful passion. He had come to China as he had left Spain: angry, troubled, abusing his colleagues and himself, drinking a bit too much. But he was happy in China, who wasn't his mistress finally, he supposed, but his last wife. Contentment rather than passion. That was the role of the last wife, was it not? You would read by the fire together, inquire how the garden was going.

He started a medical training school. There were 2,300 people in makeshift hospitals and a few doctors, but there was no money coming in from Canada or America. Perhaps he should have expected as much. For a year he had had no books, no radio, magazines, or letters; no English. The only thing he had read were weeks-old editions of San Francisco newspapers that had been used to wrap cakes and knives. He read about
The Wizard of Oz
, and its gamine star, Judy Garland, with whom everyone had fallen in love. The movie was in colour, like life itself. He knew the Yankees were on pace to win the pennant, but he didn't know if Roosevelt was still president. He didn't know who the prime minister of England was. No news from Canada at all. It would be too much to hope that King had been voted out of office.

He had been deaf in his right ear for three months. His teeth were neglected and he badly needed a Western dentist. His glasses were cracked and his vision compromised at any distance. On the border of northwestern Hopei, he was as isolated as if he were on the moon. Life was in the hospitals and in his head. Marian touching him at that party in Westmount as he left, her husband in the next room, leaving
the party feeling loved, and happy in the mourning that had already begun for the loss of that love, walking downhill among the mansions, revelling in that delicious misery. Days went by when he didn't see a reflection of himself. He dreamed of coffee and rare roast beef, apple pie, music, and women.

In November he was planning to go across Shansi and down to Ya'an on foot, a distance of five hundred miles. He thought it would take six weeks. From there, Chungking, then to Yuman in the south, to Hong Kong, and finally San Francisco. In North America he could raise money and hopefully recruit some volunteers. Had he become an old man? he wondered He wouldn't know until he was back home. Everyone was old here, a consequence of war.

He had met Mao Tse Tung, a brilliant tactician. There was none of the divisiveness there had been in Spain. Mao would drive the Japanese out, marshalling those sheer numbers, waves of citizens joined by common cause.

A
few days before he was planning to leave he cut his finger while operating on a soldier, and the cut became infected. A tiny wound, yet the most significant. We are undone by our greatest successes and smallest failures, he thought. He returned from the front, too weak to operate, and joined the 3rd Regiment east of Yin Fang. His fever was high and he was vomiting violently; it could be septicemia. The poison was spreading and it would attack the tissue and then the organs, which would hold out briefly before failing in their prescribed order: liver (a veteran of many assaults), kidney (an innocent), and finally the heart (scarred, remote, perhaps ready to die). He tried phenacetin, aspirin, woven's powder, antipyrine, and caffeine; all were equally useless.

He had already died once, in 1927, lying in the Trudeau Sanatorium with tuberculosis. He was thirty-seven, just divorced from Frances (one of the few things that got easier as his life went on), contemplating his own death. He took forty yards of brown wrapping paper and created a mural that he titled
The T.B.'s Progress
, modelled on Hogarth's
Rake's Progress
. Using oil pastels he painted nine panels. In the first, he was in the womb. The second showed him being embraced by a beautiful angel with iridescent wings. He drew his childhood as a dangerous journey through a wood, surrounded by animals that represented diseases (the measles were a tiger, he recalled, and a dragon for diphtheria). These were the real terrors of childhood, those unseen bacteria that ate lives.

He had written poetry for each painting. He was a dreadful poet, something he had known even as he wrote all those poems, yet he kept at it. He was young then, or at least not old, and poetry is a prerogative of the narcissist. At any rate, all he was able to do in the sanatorium was contemplate his unfinished life.