The House of Rumour (12 page)

Where to begin? There is so little time. The whole story of how I first became involved with the Circle would take too long. I will start from the morning of 28 April 1941. Three days ago.

White blossom was falling from the trees in the park as I walked to the university. I recall a sense of indignation that spring would dare show its face in this godforsaken country. And a feeling of dread. Even nature has its propaganda, its scattered leaflets of lies and deceit. I knew the truth then: that white flowers are flowers for the dead.

I met Kurt in the atrium and we discussed our essays set by Professor Dietrich on the great romantic Heinrich von Kleist. I, like most of the class, had concentrated on his epic play
Die Hermannsschlact
with its depiction of the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest, the glorious historical victory of our German race. I had written an appallingly crass tract on national destiny and the sacrifice of the individual in the service of the Volk. But then I needed to appear to be a good student and a diligent National Socialist. Kurt, on the other hand, always seemed determined to be reckless.

He had instead chosen an obscure work for his critique and one not on the official reading list. ‘On the Marionette Theatre’, Kurt explained to me as we made our way to class, was a curious philosophical treatise by Kleist in the form of an ironic dialogue. In it one of the interlocutors asserts the astonishing notion that grace appears in a purely bodily form only in a being that either has no consciousness at all or an infinite one: that is to say, either in a puppet or a god.

In class, after a brief and sombre discussion on the romantic tradition, Kurt began loudly to argue Kleist’s strange observations on the excellent quality of ‘lifeless, pure pendulums governed only by the laws of gravity’. Mankind’s fall from grace, he went on, was in its consciousness, and the effect of eating from the tree of knowledge has made us clumsy and full of self-doubt. I felt sorry for Professor Dietrich as he attempted to steer the debate into more orthodox waters. He has already been denounced for allowing ‘degenerate’ ideas to be discussed in his department and it seemed obvious to me that Kurt was using this obscure work as a satire on the vain ideals of classicism. But most of the class appeared merely confused by his arguments.

They imagined him as a harmless fool but I knew Kurt to be fiercely intelligent (though he always tended to get carried away with wild imaginings). He had become my closest companion since my brother Ernst was taken from us.

‘Behold our puppet utopia, Hans,’ he said to me afterwards as we watched a squad of the National Socialist Students Association march out to the playing fields.

‘You should be more careful, Kurt,’ I chided him. ‘Talk like that can get you into trouble.’

‘Only a god can be equal to inanimate matter,’ he told me. ‘That’s what Kleist was really getting at, that we need to go all the way. We’ve left the Garden and the door is barred behind us, but if we make the journey all the way around the world maybe we will find an entrance at the back of Paradise. We must go on to absolute understanding.’

‘You mean that we must eat again from the tree of knowledge to regain our innocence?’

‘Certainly,’ he replied. ‘Kleist says that when that happens it will be the final chapter in the history of the world. And “On the Marionette Theatre” was his last work. A year later he shot himself and his lover on the banks of the Wannsee.’

‘Kurt.’ I lowered my voice and with a nod beckoned to my friend to bring his face close to mine. ‘Do you really believe that we live in a puppet’s utopia?’

He grinned, as if relishing a sense of intimacy and intrigue.

‘Oh yes!’ he whispered, his eyes darting to and fro.

‘And what if there were people secretly working against it?’

Kurt giggled.

‘Not you, Hans, surely?’

‘What if I was?’

His face froze into a solemn mask.

‘Hans,’ he muttered, ‘I hate this wretched state of life. I wish I could find the back door to Paradise.’

‘Then join us.’

‘What?’

‘I’ll explain tomorrow. I’ll come to your apartment.’

I left Kurt and made my way to the Mühlbergers for my violin lesson. I brooded on Heinrich von Kleist’s suicide pact. I think I mused on how sweet it would be to find someone whom one loved so much that one could die with them. I certainly feel that now. With somebody else to go with, death might not be such a cold and lonely business.

Heinz Mühlberger was a teacher and an amateur-theatre director, his wife Elsa a musician. It was my brother Ernst who first got to know them before the war, when he was in their drama group. Ernst served in Poland and came back on leave with terrible stories that he could not tell our parents as they simply would not believe him. So he discussed what he had seen with the Mühlbergers and, as he confided to them his growing sense of anger and disaffection, it soon became clear that the couple were part of a clandestine network of resistance known as the Circle.

‘Imagine a pebble dropped in a pond,’ Elsa told him. ‘It might make only a ripple but its circle expands and communicates with others.’

Ernst joined them and soon recruited me. He arranged violin lessons for me with Elsa Mühlberger as a cover so I could be used as a courier, with a false compartment in my violin case to carry messages, even anti-government leaflets. Ernst was killed in action in France last spring.

When I arrived at the Mühlbergers they were preparing a surprise for their son Melchior’s sixth birthday the next day. In a corner of the living room they were arranging a collection of tiny painted wooden animals. With green felt they had fashioned fields dotted with little trees of coloured paper. A hand mirror served as a pond for a family of miniature ducks, above which hung a mobile of the moon and stars attached to the ceiling.

The Circle had been in crisis since last summer. Every new German victory proved us wrong. All of our secret protestations against fascism seemed useless as it marched on in its unending parade of success. We had all but given up producing anti-government leaflets and instead concentrated on developing communications within our own group and with other anti-fascist networks that were supposed to exist. We were also gathering intelligence that we might pass on. Heinz Mühlberger made contact with a man connected to the Russian embassy with the code name Nebula. There were even rumours of approaches to the Circle from the British Secret Service. But the possibility of involvement in espionage only accelerated the sense of fear and desperation among us.

The Mühlbergers argued in whispers as Heinz painstakingly herded model pigs into a cardboard farmyard. How can we trust the Soviets since Stalin made his devil’s pact with Hitler? What if the British are secretly negotiating a peace with Germany? Heinz looked up at me.

‘Hans, we need you to run an errand.’

‘We shouldn’t involve him in this,’ Elsa protested. ‘He should be trying to organise the students. They’re the future.’

‘I think I’m about to recruit one of my fellows,’ I told her.

‘That’s good.’

‘But I’m not scared of carrying out actions for the Circle.’

‘Elsa, you know we can’t go ourselves.’

‘But—’

‘What is this errand, anyway?’ I asked.

Heinz beckoned me closer and told me of a woman with a message from British Intelligence, who wanted to work with the Circle and its contacts. She had information to prove that this proposition was genuine.

‘It’s too dangerous,’ Elsa murmured as she carefully placed in position a farmhouse fashioned from a box that had once contained sugar lumps.

‘Her name is Astrid Nagengast.’ Heinz gave me an address to memorise for the following evening. ‘Be careful.’ He smiled. ‘She’s a fortune-teller.’

When I got home my stupid parents were huddled around the wireless, the cheap little ‘people’s radio’ with its dial restricted to approved stations and its big round speaker that every household secretly knows as the ‘Goebbels-snout’. Fanfares preceded the announcement of the German army’s march into Athens. As I crept past, my father stood up and grabbed my arm.

‘Hear that?’ he declared, a fat tear rolling down his face. ‘England is finished! We’ll soon have vengeance for our Ernst.’

Next day when I told Kurt that I had to postpone our meeting until later that evening he became suspicious and provocative.

‘Are you on a secret mission?’

‘Please, Kurt, don’t make foolish jokes.’

‘Maybe you just don’t want to see me.’

‘Of course I do. We’ll talk later.’

Astrid Nagengast had a sharp face and bright eyes, with a mass of silver ringlets scattered across a high, proud forehead. It was hard to tell how old she was. Fifty? Sixty, even? What was certain was the striking elegance and vitality in her looks and demeanour. Age is life, the only real proof of it. Youth always seems closer to death, I thought, recalling the fallen blossom of the day before.

‘Do you know what you’ve come to collect?’ she asked me as she showed me into a small study cluttered with books and peculiar objects.

‘No.’

‘Don’t worry. It’s a simple thing, foolproof. It shouldn’t put you in any danger.’

There was an African mask on one wall, a chart of the zodiac on another. Above a desk littered with papers and curios hung an etching of some alchemical diagram. I looked around, wide-eyed.

‘Esoteric knowledge,’ she said with a smile. ‘Nothing to be afraid of.’

‘Are you really a fortune-teller?’

‘Well, one has to be careful. There’s been something of a clampdown in the past few years. It’s completely illegal in Berlin. I’m a voice teacher mostly. And a breath therapist, but I still have plenty of psychic consultations. If anything, there’s been a rise in demand.’

‘What?’

‘For astrologers, clairvoyants. The future has become a serious business lately. For example, so many people wanted to know when the time was right, you know, to leave.’

‘You mean Jews?’

‘Jews, yes, and others. Most of us left it too late.’ She sighed. ‘And there are the others who believe in it. I’ve had army officers as clients, worried about upcoming campaigns. It’s been amazing how many secrets they’ve let slip. Plenty of the higher-ups are superstitious too. We can use that against them. And they’ve had fortune on their side for so long, they’re scared that their luck is about to change. Well, it is.’

She opened a drawer in her desk, took something out and handed it to me. It was some strange kind of playing card. I looked at it. In profile a crowned and bethroned man held a sceptre and at his side was a golden shield emblazoned with an imperial eagle. The face of the figure was slightly smudged. At the top of the card was the number IV, at the bottom the legend:
L
’
EMPEREUR
.

‘That’s the message you’re to take to the Circle. It proves we’re acting in good faith.’

‘It’s a code?’

‘Yes. And if your friends are able to understand it, then it will in turn give us proof of the Circle’s operational status. In itself it’s a harmless token. If you get stopped and asked about it just say you found it in the street. Tell your friends that we need to pass something on to a contact in the Deputy Führer’s office.’

‘Another card?’

‘You’re a clever boy. There’ll be something else, too. But the cards are a good basic cypher. They’re a memory system. You’d better go now, you know far too much already.’

I called at Kurt’s flat on my way home. He lived in a fifth-storey apartment with a small balcony. Here we could converse freely, away from the anxious family table, far above the fear-haunted streets.

I talked about what had happened with my brother Ernst: how he had realised that the war was wrong, that everything the party said was a lie. I told him how Ernst had joined the Circle through the Mühlbergers and how I had become involved. Kurt shuddered when I told him about the atrocities Ernst had witnessed in Poland.

‘With so much of hell in the world,’ said Kurt, ‘there must be a heaven somewhere.’

‘We have to work for it,’ I told him. ‘For peace. For justice. There’s a group of us. Will you work with us?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I can hardly believe it, Hans. Is this real?’

‘Of course.’

‘But this evening, for example. You said you had to go somewhere, some secret mission or other. How do I know that it’s not all some sort of made-up story?’

‘Why would I do that?’

‘I don’t know. It could be a trick. Or a trap.’

‘Kurt, really.’

‘Look, Hans, this is treason you’re asking me to get involved in.’

‘I know that.’

‘Then trust me. Show me something so that I know this isn’t just a game.’

I took out the playing card from my violin case and held it up. I explained to him that it contained a message.

‘How marvellous,’ said Kurt. ‘A code. Have you worked out what it means?’

‘Of course not. I’m simply meant to pass it on.’

‘Let me see it.’

He took it from me.