All That I Am (13 page)

Hanging the red flag out our window in Berlin had no immediate consequence. What followed were the mojito weeks, a time of false calm and cocktails. God alone knows where all those limes were flown in from–what decadence!

As soon as he was appointed, Hitler called an election for five weeks’ time. But the newspapers weren’t banned straight away, so Hans wrote a few more columns, typing them at the dining table and delivering them in the evenings on his bicycle. His last piece had The Great Adolf as a failed minor politician in 1942, about to undertake a lecture tour to his dwindling support base of crackpots in the United States. ‘We sat down in his modest, twelve-room house in the Bavarian mountains,’ Hans wrote, ‘and for a time we exchanged pleasantries. I noticed immediately that the Leader was no longer sporting his famous moustache. He observed my surprise. “Germany has lost a lot of hair in the past decade,” he said, “so I thought I should set a symbolic example.”’

I spent those strange weeks going to meetings in people’s flats all around Berlin. Our little party had changed its name from the Independent Social Democrats to the Socialist Workers Party, trying even harder to be a bridge between the Social Democrats and the Communists. Those larger parties had hated each other ever since the Social Democrats sent in the troops to quash the Munich Revolution in 1919. We desperately wanted them to align now so as not to split the vote against the Nazis in the coming election. We argued and drafted leaflets and assigned each other tasks: distributing them, going to speak to the unions, recruiting new members. We felt our work was real and urgent. So did the Stormtroopers.

They started breaking up our meetings, arresting members on the street, searching our satchels. One friend who was putting up notices on a lamppost was bashed in broad daylight; another disappeared for two days into custody. Our goal of a united front against Hitler was sensible, but the level of mistrust between the parties was too deep, and their understanding of the Nazi threat to them–to all of us–too shallow. We didn’t stand a chance.

One evening at the end of February Hans and I went, as we often did, to the Romanisches Café, and then to the TicTacToe club on Lehniner Platz. We needed to obliterate the arguments in our heads, to live a little. The mojitos at home and the
Sekt
at the café had hollowed us out; we were full of bubbles and smoke and, now, unlikely to eat. Dora was meeting us at the TicTacToe.

On Kurfürstenstrasse women, some alone, some in small groups, stood around in deliberate idleness, moving in and out of the streetlights, making their cigarettes last. Darkness hid the sorrow of their cheap finery, granting them instead the dignity of honesty: here is a body-bargain, tenderness at market price.

We were mysteriously immune to the cold. Hans’s scarf was loose; my eyes were level with the scar on his throat. Drink made him generous with secret knowledge.

‘Look.’ He nodded towards a woman on his left. ‘That’s a Racehorse–she offers herself to be whipped.’ The woman had red hair under a hat at a vertiginous angle, and shiny, pine-green boots. ‘And yellow,’ he gestured discreetly at a motherly creature blooming out of golden boots like risen dough, ‘means cripples are welcome.’

The women ignored us, shaking their legs a little in the cold. Hans was revelling in showing me his night city.

‘Over there are Telephone Girls, who can be booked discreetly through the hotel. They dress as movie stars, so you can order up a Garbo or a Dietrich to the room.’ I looked at them, but couldn’t really tell which was which. ‘And those young ones,’ he indicated further down the street, ‘are from good families in Charlottenburg and Grunewald. They’re out for a fling and pocket money.’ These last were tall and slight; one of them dandled a tennis racquet.

A slim-hipped woman in a veil stood apart, watching us closely. She held a white umbrella and her dress was fastened across her abdomen by a sequined butterfly. Hans bent his mouth to my ear, tossing his butt into the gutter. ‘And that, my lovely, is a man.’

‘And how do you know all this?’ I asked in mock suspicion.

‘Edgar.’

Since they had debunked the notion of depravity for the British newspaper together, ‘Edgar’ or ‘with Edgar’ had become the answer to many questions. Sometimes I joked that Edgar was like an invisible childhood friend, the one who did all the naughty things so that Hans came out, always and in every circumstance, clean.

Hans bent and kissed me, long and hard on the mouth. When I opened my eyes the butterfly boy was still watching us.

‘Come on,’ I said, and we walked to the club.

The doors of the TicTacToe opened into a floor-length leather curtain drawn against the cold. We parted it. The entry level was on a mezzanine; below us lay a vast, ornate room hollowed out into the earth. I moved to the balcony rail. Pools of light shone on a hundred tables, bright circles into which hands moved, gloved or ungloved, for a drink, to ash a cigarette, touch an arm. The air was filled with trumpet notes and smoke, the chinking sounds of cutlery, laughter, something smashing at the upper bar. At my shoulder a vase of lilies breathed, open-tongued.

While Hans found the maître d’ I scanned for Dora through the chandeliers and the chrome-tubed vacuum system that linked the tables like celestial plumbing. Mirrored balls hung in the space too, taking the light and smashing it into diamond pieces that slid over the walls and the curtains of booths. I gripped the rail to hold me down, steady this spinning hour.

Suddenly, from here, in the sea of heads and limbs, under these orbs of metal and glass hanging below the pavement, all humans seemed the same–vulnerable and chittering, their movements staccato in this fractured light. They were insects–we were insects–the females with small bobbed heads, bodies sheathed in short silk and translucent dresses, beaded and open-backed and showing glimmering curves and points under skin. They trailed scarves or trains or boas in apricot, teal, gold, sky-blue. One creature wielded an outsize fan of ostrich feathers dyed puce, dark tendrils under her arm hidden and revealed, hidden and revealed as she fanned. The males were wingless, sleek and still. Except for the waiters weaving about in tails, trays at the shoulder bearing silver cocoons.

‘Table 36.’ Hans cupped my elbow and steered me down the stairs, then through the crowd. We passed Michelangelo’s
David
on a podium, knuckles resting on one thigh and his eyes averted modestly. His chest rose and fell. I glanced around to see the other living statues for this night. Naked Justice stood not far away, dimple-thighed and blindfolded and holding a scale. As we reached our table a woman in a baroque wig and satin shoes stood staring into the middle distance. She wore only three bows, one around her waist and one just above each knee. Her skin and pubis were powdered, like something under ash.

‘Bo
Peep
?’ Hans cocked an eyebrow as he pulled the chair out for me.

‘Does she call for you, my lamb?’ I smiled.

He chuckled. We had taken to using the tongue-in-cheek repartee of a married couple going through the motions of love when we were out. In public, it felt real. In private it felt like a running joke we could get serious from at any time, if we chose. (I feel, now, that it was a mistake to conceal intimacy under shared jokes. As if we had, already, run out of real things to say, or as if intimacy can survive untended.)

‘I’m not lost at all.’ Hans kissed my hand. ‘The others have asked not to be disturbed, apparently. The waiter will let them know we’re here.’

‘Others?’

‘Bert’s here too. A surprise visit–I just heard today.’

‘Bertie!’ I hadn’t seen him since he’d left for France the year before. ‘What a treat.’

Hans looked up at Bo Peep. ‘If she moves, you know, she breaks the law.’

I tapped a cigarette on my case. ‘I know how she feels.’

The law had given rise to these living statues: it forbade full nudity if there was the slightest movement. But for me the statues were not titillation. They signalled something else: in here you could shed yourself. You could be anyone, have your heart tickled and your body moved to screams. In the morning you would climb out of here into an unchanged world, but for what happened between now and then no apologies would be owed.

Hans had just lit a cigar when he was on his feet again. I looked up to see him pumping Rudi Formis’s hand. Rudi then took mine and bowed his head, mousy-brown hair brilliantined down on either side of a part neat as a furrow, and his glasses hooked behind his ears.

Rudolf Formis was one of the few people we associated with who had once been in the Nazi Party. He’d left when he felt it had cosied up to big business and no longer represented the ordinary man. Rudi was a brilliant radio technician, small and fine-fingered and sincere. He had a slight lisp, as if his tongue were fractionally too big for his mouth. If you asked him a question, there was no limit to the amount of detail he would go into to answer it, but he always had the good grace, afterwards, to shrug shyly, as much as to say, Sorry, but you asked. He’d served in Palestine during the war, where he developed a genius for short-wave radio transmitters, inventing one of the first of their kind. I used to think that fixing the finest filigree of wires to make words fly had honed his brain for detail, something he could not now unthread.

Hans was congratulating Rudi on his recent promotion to technical director of the largest radio station in the state.

‘Thanks,’ Rudi glowed. ‘Actually, there’s something I can tell you now. Do you remember your brilliant piece about Hitler at the Sportpalast?’

Hans rolled his eyes. ‘I got into a lot of trouble for that one,’ he said.

‘I know. But you got the detail so perfectly right.’ Rudi bent his head to Hans. ‘Even about the microphones failing.’

‘Yes,’ Hans said, ‘but that wasn’t what—’

Rudi leant in further, included me in his gaze. ‘That was me.’ He tapped himself on the chest.

‘What? How…?’ I started to smile.

Rudi was fingering his earlobe, eyes on the table. ‘I, ah, pulled the plug.’ We stared at him for a beat, so he added, ‘Out of the socket.’

I laughed, incredulous.

‘Priceless,’ Hans said.

‘You can’t use that,’ Rudi added quickly. ‘I’d lose my job.’

‘Sure,’ Hans soothed. ‘I wouldn’t.’

‘Oh Rudi.’ I touched his arm and he flushed.

We watched him disappear into the crowd and smiled at each other. One would never have guessed it from his sober, combed-down appearance, but Rudi’s parents had been vaudevillians. In their signature act, Rudi’s father sat on his mother’s lap and she used her arms as if they were his–to comb his hair, raise a cup of tea to his lips. Rudi had spent his childhood at the back of fairgrounds, dismantling household appliances and putting them carefully back together, as if the adult world were too unreliable. I suppose the Nazis had seemed reliable to him. He hated them now with the passion of a man atoning for his past.

A waiter put our Manhattans on the table, between the silver prong with the number on it and the telephone. The band was coming on stage: five men in top hats and skeleton suits, their faces painted black and their teeth white as bones. The singer carried a toy cannon under his arm, stuffed with paper money. ‘Democracy–for–sale!’ he bellowed, then the music started up. He sprang off stage and moved among the diners, an X-ray flinging fistfuls of fake currency over us. ‘Democracy for sale!’ The money twisted and floated in and out of the dappled light. Hans plucked a note from the air and held it to the candle. He relit his cigar then placed the bill, curling and flaming, in the ashtray.

A small thud in the vacuum chute. The compartment hissed as I slid it open. Inside was a leather cigar case with the grid insignia of the TicTacToe. I raised my eyebrows in a question.

‘Not from me,’ Hans said.

‘An unseen admirer then.’

I opened it with two thumbs. A glass vial lay on green velvet. I pulled the cork stopper with its tiny sniffer spoon attached. Offered the cocaine to Hans.

The light on the phone flashed. I picked it up.

‘A little something for quick thinking,’ she said.

‘Thanks.’

‘We’re in booth 27.’

Hans pocketed the vial. We picked up our drinks and went over. When we opened the curtain Dora and Bert weren’t drinking. Instead, laid out before them were ordnance maps, a compass, several regional newspapers, open notebooks. There was a porcelain pâté pot with a laughing pig for a handle, a dish wiped clean in front of Bertie, and another with a half-eaten fish.

‘Bert!’ I cried. ‘I’m so glad. How did you—?’

‘Pull it to,’ Dora ordered.

I closed the curtain. She was rolling up the maps, a cigarette on her bottom lip and one eye squinted against the smoke.

Bert and Hans hugged, then Hans held Bert a long moment by the shoulders, towering over his little friend.

‘How well you look,’ he said.

Bert did not look well. He looked thinner, older, sallower. His spectacles were held together at the right-hand hinge with a knot of gauze that had turned brown from fingering. His goatee was already more silver than black–though Bert was only thirty-four–and the hair on his head sat sparse and feathery off his skull. He beamed.

After our university days, Bert had done time in prison. When eighty-one young men died in a ‘practice manoeuvre’ at Veltheim an der Weser, Bert had become suspicious. He studied the death notices in the local papers and visited the cemeteries and bereaved families, cross-checking the dead under their fresh mounds against official military rolls. He proved that at least eleven of the boys had been illegal ‘volunteers’ in ‘work Kommandos’ of the Black Army. The Chancellor denied any knowledge of them, as did the Defence Minister. For publication of this truth, Bert was convicted of attempted treason–violation of the State Secrets Act–and served eight months’ hard labour in Gollnow prison. After he was released he crossed the border to Strasbourg and kept up his investigations, publishing a bulletin he called the
Independent Press
Service
. Though it was still illegal, Dora was helping him distribute it in Germany.