News From Berlin (15 page)

She refrained from asking the obvious questions: why didn’t you tell me when we first met, why tell me now, why wait so long, why leave something so fundamentally important to me lying somewhere in an envelope? Oscar gave the extended fingers a light squeeze. It was the most intimate gesture he was capable of.

All the tables had been cleared by now, and the waiters were giving Oscar and Kate impatient looks.

The night in Kate’s flat was spent waiting for morning to arrive. No longer used to sharing a bedroom, they lay staring wide-eyed into the dark, now and then dozing off, now and then whispering “Are you asleep?” Their beds were like two small islands adrift in an uncharted ocean.

So much had been discussed and so much left unsaid that they rose exhausted. Over breakfast they sat with expressionless faces drinking their tea, each sunk in their private thoughts of the restive night. The sounds of Barkston Gardens coming awake could be heard through the balcony doors, which were open to the early sunshine.

Hardly a word was said as they made ready for Oscar’s departure to Berne. He would not be seeing Matteous, whose lesson was not until late afternoon. Oscar said how sorry he was to miss him, and hoped they would meet some time later in the year.

“Stick with him, Kate, that letter of his must get written.” She glared: he didn’t know what he was talking about. Later that year? Would the world still exist, would their lives still
fit together, would Emma and Carl be free, and the Russians, God, the Russians, what would become of them?

The morning seemed without end, just as the night before. At two o’clock it was time to go; he had a daylight flight, for a change.

Kate made one final mention of Emma and Barbarossa, and one final appeal to him. He gave her a look as if to say that she had missed the point entirely. They waved at one another from their separate islands. He waved again from the pavement outside, and went on his way. She stood on her balcony.

*

Like a sleepwalker, he boarded the bus, the train, the plane. Like a sleepwalker, he arrived in Lisbon, and at long last found himself in Berne. A tool in nobody’s hands. Every movement he made was automatic and slow. He trailed after the people ahead of him, joined queues when required, submitted to customs checks, showed his passport to whomever it concerned. Papers, documents, where to, where from – he complied dutifully with every demand during the interminable journey home. Home to the stark vacuity of the house on Ensingerstrasse, where the postman whistled as he made his deliveries, where children played games on the
pavement and the occasional motor car drove by at a snail’s pace. Where there was not the faintest intimation of the war that was all over the newspapers: Crete fallen, tank battles in Africa, planes shot down, vessels destroyed. A paper reality, abstract. It was a normal day in June.

Oscar arrived at three in the afternoon, the sleepiest, haziest hour of the day. The emptiness overwhelmed him. It was strange how the absence of anything could have such an effect. As if nothing was familiar, as if he had stepped into someone else’s life, had penetrated, thief-like, into a domain that was his but stripped of value or memory. The doors and windows were closed, the table had not been cleared, the sofa was strewn with old newspapers, the clock stood still. The occupant had clearly left in great haste, whether intending to return was impossible to say.

He stood in the middle of the room still holding his travel bag, because there was no-one to take it from him or say “You can leave your luggage over there”.

He who tries to forget remains a prisoner, he who cares to remember feels free.

Oscar wished in particular to free himself of the memories of the past few days.

“Do you still have that envelope, Oscar?” Kate had
looked away when she asked him during breakfast the next morning – couldn’t resist asking, of course. Two days ago already.

“I kept it along with the notes for my thesis. In an envelope from Hotel Vita in Milan.”

The cardboard box containing his thesis material had travelled with him to each of his postings, and was now in a cabinet in his study, labelled “
Milan 1909 / Thesis 1913
”. The ink had faded, the scrawl was barely legible. He had never opened the box again, but had seen it very often, confronting him balefully both in his mind’s eye and from its recess in the cabinet. Roy de Winther. How could a man so brilliant die so young, a man so attractive, happy, enterprising, and successful? One careless mistake by an engine driver, one drowsy signal master’s oversight.

“To live is to dream, and death, I think, is what awakens us.”

A line from a poem. Oscar stood where he was, letting his mind wander. Then he set his bag on the floor, went over to the sofa, gathered the newspapers and burned them in the fireplace. Slowly, his soul returned to him. And Lara. She had been with him all along, inseparable from him in mind, locked in soundless, abstract dialogue. He would phone her shortly,
tell her he had arrived in Berne and would be going straight on to Fribourg. Fribourg, the name of the town sounded so free, so fresh and unfettered, so like her. This was it, there was no going back now. Love by accident, by fate, without escape or future. He wished he could have stayed with her in the snow of the Berner Oberland – which was what he had wished from the start, a little over three months ago. From Berne to Fribourg was a stone’s throw, so why not pick up his bag and go?

He had no answer. He left the bag where it stood, and stretched out on the sofa. Dog-tired he was, his legs leaden, even lying down made him ache. The machine ground to a halt. He dozed, though not for long. A dream jolted him awake, something to do with his mother. His first impulse was to telephone her. Old habits – his mother had been dead for a good five years. She had died with the illusion that peace could be maintained, having kept her war resister’s brooch with the broken rifle like a crucifix on her bedside table, next to the photograph of his father, whose early death meant that Oscar had never got to know him properly. His mother, a one-man woman, as she liked to call herself, had not remarried. She remained wedded to an absence that cast a long shadow both forwards and back. The dream
that woke him was not new: it was of his mother raising her arm like a drawbridge in an attempt to wave.

He knew where the image sprang from. “You should get me some poison, Oscar. I cannot, will not go on like this.” It had not been a recommendation, rather a non-negotiable order. The belligerence of a very old, lifelong pacifist. The words did not seem to be her own, just as her voice seemed to rise from unknown depths, dark, imperious, even repellent at times. Week after week saw her intoning her mantra of self-willed death, and him refusing to act on it. His loving, strong, desperate mother, who subsequently threatened to throw herself from the window. The ultimate deed, the rebellion of a life under duress. She meant what she said, of that he had been convinced. His response had been no less adamant: she should stop eating and drinking, he would stay with her, keep vigil, hold her hand to the last. He knew a doctor who would prescribe morphine if the pain grew unbearable. At length she conceded. When the doctor came with his potion for everlasting sleep and Oscar took her hand in his, she said: “I won’t have to jump now.”

The nights on a mattress beside her bed would stay with him forever. So would the groans and whimpers of her frame, now shrunken to a comma. A night on a mattress, two steps
away from death, lasts a long time. The feeble wave of a stray arm, raised at a passing signal, at the moon through the clouds. So much is certain: in the hour of our vanishing all is unknown.

“Kate de Winther?” a courteous voice enquired from below. Her name sounded droll in Italian, she thought. She was sitting on her balcony waiting for Roy, whom she expected any moment. She leaned over the stone balustrade. The man looking up at her wore the Italian railway uniform.

“Lost your way, have you? The station is miles away,” she retorted laughingly. To her surprise, there was no reply. All he did was motion her to come down. So Kate was left to smile at her own joke as she descended the cool stairs in her bare feet. Her pale yellow dress was almost white in the sunshine, and she remembered thinking how hot the railway man must be feeling. He began to say something she did not understand. She would never understand. He must have caught her as she fell.

*

The scene leaping unbidden into her mind was one that had obsessed her a lifetime ago. In the days before Oscar.

She was on a different balcony now, her lookout post at the beginning and end of each day. Since Oscar turned up out
of nowhere, everything that had previously been firmly in place had come loose. Her life with Roy had returned in all its intensity. “Forgetting is the enemy of happiness,” she had read on a calendar somewhere, words of wisdom she had dismissed at the time, thinking you could just as well turn it around and say “Happiness is the ability to forget”, and that had been her solution. But it hadn’t worked. Because this deferred grief, or rather the melting of the frozenness, the exquisite act of remembrance, had been going on for days now. She no longer opposed it. Kate de Winther, that was who she was, the old name she was so comfortable with, the best of names, better even than her maiden name.

What would Roy have done if he knew about Barbarossa, she asked herself over and over, until she could think of nothing else. Then she knew. Alright, she would go to Oscar’s bosses, or to the Foreign Ministry, if need be to the Dutch queen herself, she would spread the news, whatever Oscar said. Somebody had to. Why oh why had she left it so late – they couldn’t go on ignoring it, Oscar, that was simply not on. Those poor innocent souls along the borders, they would all die. It was June 19. There was still time.

Kate caught sight of Matteous on the pavement of Barkston Gardens, coming towards her with the uncertain gait of a
fugitive. She felt a pang of misgiving. It was the gait of someone who might retreat at any moment, double back, go home, in any case vanish from there.

“Mattteous!” She waved. Matteous looked up, and even at that distance she was struck by the whites of his eyes. The black jacket of his uniform suited him.

“I’ll be right down to let you in.”

When he entered without his satchel, she knew something was wrong. She had known from the moment she saw him. He had come to say that he was leaving.

During the few seconds that he stood in her room, not knowing how to begin and what to do with his hands, it became clear to her how dearly she loved him, with a kind of love unlike what she felt for anybody else. Not the possessive kind, nothing to do with jealousy or resentment or self-pity. Matteous had dismantled all her defences, she felt laid bare like an archaeologist’s find. It was beyond comprehension.

She wanted to tell him about Operation Barbarossa, had to discuss it with him before it was too late, ask him if he thought she was right to go to the Ministry, even if her husband said it would put Emma in danger. Which was just an idea he had got in his head, because who on earth would
suspect Emma? You do think I’m right, don’t you Matteous?

But she forgot to ask him, she forgot it all. She heard only one thing.

“I cannot live in this city, Miss Kate. I have tried for your sake, but it’s no good.”

Her eyes caught on a button hanging by a thread from his jacket, a tarnished brass button, of the kind she had seen in her mother’s button box.

No tears, please. Very briefly, she gripped the back of a chair. She had to pull herself together, suggest making tea, or coffee. Coffee, of course. Africans like their coffee black, with heaps of sugar, he had said to her one day. Come and sit with me, Matteous, at the table where we always sit, face to face, paper and ink at hand, a copybook, two pens. Museum exhibits from the past.

“Won’t you sit down?”

He complied with an air of signing his death warrant. Sat ramrod-straight, mute and motionless.

Gulls circled above the small park, their shrieks echoing in the room.

*

In Rome the doors to their balcony had been open practically all the time. Roy often sat there to write or read, quite
undisturbed by the bustle of the Corso or the cries of Italian street folk.

“Tomorrow I’ll be off to Milan for that Forum conference. Afterwards, why don’t we go to Capri? It’s ages since we’ve been there, and Marina Piccola will be wonderfully quiet at this time of year. I could do with a break from all the brushing and scrubbing. And how about having a few babies?”

Said laughingly. Castles in the air. Kate had lifted the hem of her skirt and perched herself on his knee, asking in a mock-earnest tone: “Doesn’t having babies give you varicose veins?”

Matteous and Roy, the dream of return, the return of the dream.

She asked Matteous when he would leave and how he would travel. He did not know. All he knew was that he would jump in front of a bus if he stayed. This time she made no attempt to persuade him otherwise, unlike in the past. She could hear his sad determination, and his concern for her.

He asked how they could stay in touch, and repeated what he had said about owing his life to her. Would she like to come to Africa one day? Torn between opposing nostalgias, already. He would not go back to being a soldier, nor would he go down the mines again. He would find a rubber plantation,
perhaps. Work in the forest, far away from barracks and mine shafts. Become a rubber tapper.

Kate felt the rough sleeve of the uniform against her cheek, opened her eyes, and found herself slumped in the arms of the railway man lowering her gently to the ground. People came running, cries of
dottore, dottore!
, a neighbour rushed forward with a jug of water and a towel. She saw the distraught face of the Italian, the unwilling messenger of doom, the upright citizen doing his duty by sowing death and destruction. The brass buttons on his uniform caught her eye, as they had in a photograph in the accident dossier. Tokens of impending loss.