Therefore Choose (25 page)

“Then the Russians.”

“Of course, the Russians.”

“I've spent a lot of time in the last ten years thinking I should have accepted your offer.”

“Then you, too, could have been in Berlin.”

“I'd have tried to persuade you to come away.”

“You're not doctoring. I thought you would not.”

What could he say?

“Have you thought about it, what you said to me then?” George said.

“After Werner, after the war, I did hope. Irrationally, I hoped you would come to find me.”

She let the significance of what she said hover between them.

“In some way that helped keep me alive,” she said. “You did find me. You're here. I'm grateful.”

“I've thought about you a lot.”

“I've changed. Changed too much. Implications for all of us.”

George looked at her, wondered how much she had changed.

“Everything has changed,” she said. “Between people too. I told you at the time, the path divided. The war. The Russians …”

“Was it bad when the Russians arrived?”

She cast her eyes down and a bit to her left.

They sat in silence.

“Some women tried to hide,” she said. “One woman in our building disguised herself as a man. Maybe a few escaped, but not many.”

“Terrible.”

“The spoils of war. Or biologically, a male thing. Males assert their rights to the conquered country, father the next set of offspring.”

They were silent again.

“That is what Werner could not tolerate,” she said.

“That's why he won't talk to you?”

“Won't talk?” she said. “It's more radical than that. I no longer exist.”

George was preoccupied with what Anna had hinted at the day before. Here was confirmation. Werner was no longer her husband. George thought he should make no sign. Despite my mistake, he thought, there could be a second chance for me, a second chance for us.

“Werner wouldn't talk to me about you,” said George.

“He was on the Eastern Front,” said Anna. “He was in constant danger. His men were killed.”

“On the Eastern Front? He'd have been captured by the Russians. He'd still be in Russia somewhere.”

“He didn't tell me much,” said Anna. “He said they ended up near Dresden. He said he thought about my father being there. As the Russians advanced, his unit was annihilated. He and three of his men were separated from the rest. He commandeered a lorry. They drove towards the west. ‘To regroup,' he said.”

“He told me he was a prisoner of war of the Americans.”

“I heard very little about what happened to him.”

Anna looked very grave. “We were not able to communicate,” she said. “He was just here for a short while, after the war. Less than twenty-four hours. One act of sexual intercourse. I made the mistake of giving him my diary to read. I thought it would help him understand how difficult life here had been. Instead, the opposite.”

Anna looked abstracted, as if she were remembering what happened.

“He was fighting against impossible odds. His unit was lost, nearly all the men for whom he was responsible. Here was I, at home …”

George regarded Anna steadily. He wanted her to look back at him, but she would not meet his eyes.

“I had been living in a building of apartments. There were twenty or more other women, and some elderly men. We all stayed in the basement together during the bombing and the shelling. Then the Russians arrived on our street, right outside. They took over the ground floor of our building.

“When Werner came back, he shouted at me. ‘You knew what would happen if you stayed there.' Shouted and shouted. ‘Why did you wait so long? Why did you wait two days before you went to hide? Why didn't you leave when you saw the Russians arrive? Get out of a window at the back, or into the roof space. Anywhere.'”

George had a mental image of women huddled in a basement, or in their apartments. Trapped in their building, knowing the Russians were on the ground floor.

“Maybe you didn't know,” she said. “Racial purity included the purity of women. Child-bearers for the new order.”

“He probably felt bad because he and his comrades weren't able to protect their women.”

“I've never felt so distant from anyone, not even when … An ocean of distance. He couldn't understand me. I couldn't understand him. Impossible to meet. There was nothing between us, not memories, nothing.”

Anna paused, as if she were trying to make sense of this.

“It was as if I recognized someone in a crowd,” she said. “When I went to speak to him, it turned out to be someone else. We won't ever see each other again.”

George was silent, thinking hard …

“What about you?” she said. “One of the victors.”

“Really?” George felt surprised by the question. “My mother was killed by a V-2,” he said. “The house you visited in Leytonstone. I was in the artillery. I did things I never thought I would do. I killed people. I commandeered their houses, stole their food.”

“You think we deserved it?”

“I find it hard to make sense of, except in terms of Hitler as a wicked person, a Pied Piper who led the people of Germany into a war of astonishing destruction.”

“A German folk story, ‘The Pied Piper,'” she said. “From Hameln, a town not far from Bergen-Belsen. From where those pictures went all round the world. The concentration camps. The newsreels, the newspapers.”

“I went to that camp, on the third day after it was liberated. I couldn't believe it.”

Anna's eyes looked at him, astutely. He could see that the fact that he had been there registered for her.

“One pipe, one voice, one Führer,” she said. “I hadn't thought of it like that before, but you're right. The Pied Piper, a kind of myth. And to think, at one time, we Germans used to adore the ancient Greeks, who introduced us to that important rhetorical construction
…
…on the one hand…but on the other …”

“That was an older world.”

“You Tommies and Yanks found more concentration camps. Then more and more and more. Now everyone knows what we were doing, we Germans.”

“Did people in Germany know, at the time?”

“They knew. But they decided it was best not to know.”

“How do you mean?”

“We had a government ministry that let us know what we should know. No Ministry of Information. We had a Ministry of Propaganda. That's why I've been ferreting out bits of information, here and there. I try to see what really happened. Even in a newspaper office, there's not much that seems clear.”

“But people did know about the camps?”

“There were concentration camps already when you were here, before the war. You knew that. Everyone knew. For political opponents.”

“But the Jews?”

“You heard about Kristallnacht. You wrote to me about it. To be Jewish was to be an opponent.”

George tried to think about what she was saying.

“From 1944, when the English and Americans and Canadians crossed the Channel, we were waiting for the end,' said Anna. “People distanced themselves, from the Nazis, from the crimes. That became the way in which they did not know. They didn't want to be in the wrong when the Allies arrived.”

“You had a terrible time.”

“I was staying outside Hamburg for a couple of weeks when you bombed it. You see … I think we did deserve it.”

“The RAF …”

“It was in the afternoon. They came from the west, waves and waves. They flew over where I was staying. The Luftwaffe was nowhere. We were a few kilometres outside the city. We could hear the bombs exploding. You've never seen such a fire. A couple of days later we got a ride into the city on a lorry. Wood was smouldering. Almost nothing left. There were a few people, picking through the ruins. Do you know that most of the people killed in bombing raids are civilians?”

“I did know.”

“There's an English writer I came across, Ethel Mannin. When the Fascists bombed Guernica, she wrote a poem called ‘Song of the Bomber,' about the evil bombers, the sound of their evil engines. It's hard to think of machines that are made only to destroy as instruments of good, whoever's flying them.”

“I don't know the poem.”

“Machines for killing. We become the machines.”

Next evening, George saw Anna again
. He knew it could not be quick, but he had begun to hope that they might be able to come close to each other, little by little. There was a deep sadness in her, a reticence, but not the impenetrable barrier he had encountered with Werner. Perhaps they would be able, once more, to meet.

“When I was at school,” she said, “I used to think words had meanings. Before the war and during it, when people felt pleased with themselves, they would say, ‘For all this we thank the Führer.' As time went on there were shortages, nothing to eat. Towards the end, the publishing house closed. We were bombed. Then the Russians came. We would say, ‘For all this we thank the Führer.'”

George thought, If Anna and I can actually meet … it will take a long time. There's a chasm between us. Bridges need to be built. What could they be built from? Not the usual materials, not sex, not attraction, not mutual interest.

“We were swept along by men,” she said. “War is a manly thing, marching in step is a manly thing, rape is a manly thing.”

George tried to find a bridge to what she was feeling. “You think there could be a different kind of world?” he said.

“When the Russians came, I thought, It's the world of men. That's what has come to an end. It has destroyed itself. It's clear I was wrong again. The big men are still there. Stalin's there, stronger than ever. President Truman. He was good with the atom bomb, don't you think?”

“This too will pass.”

As he heard himself, George knew it sounded stupid.

Beneath her irony, Anna still had the heart to be conciliatory. “From the ruins, new buildings.” she said. “From chaos, the phoenix of a new society. Is that what you're saying?”

“We have to move on, surely.”

“Perhaps you're right. The Russians and Americans at each other. It's hard to feel hopeful.”

“You could come away with me.”

“When we said those things, it was a special moment. I'm not that person now.”

“We could construct something.”

“Before the war we were innocent. We could say we've travelled from innocence to experience. That would be to misunderstand everything. We've not become wiser. We've been damaged. Like the buildings.”

Having seen the buildings, which had taken so much time and so many craftsmen to raise, it was difficult for George to disagree. Buildings are built in times of hope.

“Before the war, when we were young, we didn't know much,” said Anna. “We were undeveloped. But we were whole. Now we're not. Then, we made the choices that led to this. People think that evil is outside us. The reason it's called evil is that it gets inside. One finds oneself doing things, choosing things.”

George did not know how to bring her back from these thoughts. He had similar thoughts, but she was heading towards an abyss.

“It was a time of madness,” George said. “The fantasies of a man who played with people's lives in the way a twelve-year-old plays with toy soldiers. Conquering Europe and Russia. Being a great nation. The thousand-year Reich. Perhaps the reason it appealed to so many people was because it was so childlike.”

“Remember we used to say that choosing our actions changes us,” she said. “We were right. I didn't kill people directly, I didn't denounce people, but I worked for a medical publishing house.”

“What's wrong with that?”

“Our magazine was closed down,” she said. “You know that. Ideas about modernism in literature. Ideas about being international. Of course it was closed. When I was with you I started thinking that medicine might be worthwhile. The possibility of the medical publishing house came up. The owner knew my father, and he had liked our magazine. I thought it might be helpful to know some doctors who could tell me if my mother was having the right treatment.”