All That I Am (24 page)

In the morning Dora came out to make coffee. I was cleaning lenses at the table with a soft cloth and alcohol, preparing to start a new project, photographing the workers at the docks. Mrs Allworth’s husband, a foreman there, had arranged entry for me. Dora wore a singlet and pyjama bottoms. It was warm up here already.

‘Hans left early?’

‘Yes,’ I lied. I kept polishing.

‘Ruthie?’

I put the lens and cloth down. I’d have to look at her. ‘Why can’t you include him?’ I said. ‘Give him something to do?’

‘He’s writing the Great Novel of Exile, isn’t he? That’s quite a job.’

‘Don’t be cruel.’

‘I’m not being cruel,’ she said, but her voice softened; she knew making fun of him was a cruelty to me as well. She pulled out a chair and straddled it back to front. ‘I’m being careful. For all our sakes. Bertie’s and mine and both of yours.’

I bit my lip. ‘He just wants to be useful.’

‘All right,’ she said, ‘I’ll think of something.’ And she took her two cups back into the bedroom.

As I was leaving, Dora put her head around her door. One bare, brown shoulder.

‘I just remembered. What about
The Other
Germany
as a title for your bulletin?’

‘Good idea,’ I said.

‘Not mine,’ she replied, ‘Toller’s.’ She eyed my camera gear. ‘Don’t miss your boat, then.’ Her voice contained a lazy singsong, a feeling I could hardly remember. She gave me a captain’s salute and slipped back into her room.

Later, she did pass on to Hans some of the material Bertie was sending her, and other information from German publications so we could use it in our bulletin. It was mostly about the setting up of the camps for political prisoners, and the fate of people we knew in them. Ninety-five per cent of the people in the camps were from the political opposition–the time had not yet come for the campaign against the Jews and the others.

But Dora kept for herself the high-level documents, to try to place articles based on them in the British dailies. I presumed they came from Bertie’s contacts in armaments factories–they were order forms for parts, invoices to the government. She saw her task as being to get the information into the public eye, and at the same time to protect Bertie, and his sources in turn, from discovery. It was always a balance between these two things: the information, and its possible, terrible price.

It is hard to know when something begins, when the result first becomes possible. And then there is the other point, the point at which there is no pulling back from what you have set in train.
Take this cup from me
, Christ said, didn’t he? But by then it was already too late.

TOLLER

It’s eight a.m. Two knocks at my door and she comes straight in these days.

Clara’s hand is unsteady, holding out the
New York Times
. Her voice is clotted with anxiety. ‘Paul’s boat has reached Havana harbour but Cuba won’t let them dock–the government is demanding huge sums. Where can anyone get that from? I don’t—’

I take the paper from her. The headline is ‘Refugee Ship on Approach’. She can’t wait for me to read it.

‘They were meant to stay as tourists in Cuba, awaiting a visa for America.’ I can hear her effort to control her voice, to make this a rational matter of entry permits bought and honoured, to convince herself that the world is reasonable and her fears cannot be real. ‘Paul has a landing document–my parents paid for it with the ticket–now the Cuban President has cancelled them all. I don’t understand—’

‘They’ll give them visas,’ I say. ‘Or some kind of permit.’

Clara pinches her nose together, closes her eyes and swallows hard.

‘They’re hardly going to turn away a whole ship of people,’ I say, ‘now, are they?’

She smiles a little, as if, yes, what a silly, black thought. Then her face clouds over again. ‘There are letters to the editor,’ she points at the paper, ‘against letting them land here if Cuba turns them away. Saying there are not enough jobs for our own kind—’

‘Are there letters in favour too?’

‘I think so…’ She sits, picks at a thread on her sleeve. ‘Our own kind,’ she repeats.

‘You have to ignore that,’ I say. ‘I’ll write a letter too. Let’s do it now.’

I scan the article. There is a photograph of the SS
St Louis
in Havana harbour. It looks oddly festive, a string of flags flying from bow to stern. But it is surrounded by a ring of police boats. Behind those are small craft from which relatives and friends already saved wave at their loved ones. The Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, the piece says, is going down there to try to negotiate something for the refugees with the Cuban government. The US government has gone very quiet. The Canadians have rejected the refugees outright. And in Europe, Hitler is making the most of the situation, saying if the whole world is refusing to accept the Jews, how can Germany be blamed for their fate?

We write an open letter to the president, in the name of international brotherhood and our own humanity. I write: ‘To be given the chance to save someone and refuse it must be, in anyone’s religion, a cardinal sin…’

After Clara types it, she calls a boy to deliver it to the paper. When she sits again she takes a deep breath and smooths her skirt over her knees. ‘Do you think letters can make a difference?’ she asks. Her eyes are riven with pain and hope.

I pull as much power as I can from somewhere inside me, from the actor, the orator, the hope-pedlar and the charlatan.

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Yes, I do.’

RUTH

This little button, innocuous as an electric-blanket button, delivers the pethidine to me whenever I want it. They don’t bother rationing someone as old as I am.
Après moi, le déluge!
as the French say. The stuff sends me in and out of parts of my life as if they were now, more real to me than this room. From what Bev has told me, an addict can lose ten years of their life in a quest for exactly this: the constant present tense. Afterwards, those who do not die wake to a world that has moved on without them: it is as if nothing happened to the fiend in those years, they did not age or grow and they must now pick up–with school, or people they loved–only time has shunted everyone on, elsewhere.

Sometimes I went with Dora on her walks. I would discover from the destination and the pace she set what sort of walk it was. In the mornings it was usually fast, her feet moving along an unseen track–past Coram’s Fields and Russell Square, around the British Museum and back through Bloomsbury Square. She wouldn’t speak. I knew then she was pacing out some problem of strategy or a piece of writing. I don’t think she noticed a single thing we ever passed, not the school children in rows being taken to visit the museum, not the man with his forehead pressed to the glass of the phone box, not the lady cyclist with a full pannier who wobbled and swerved as Dora stepped blindly off the kerb.

Afternoons, when her work was done, we walked arm in arm like sisters, talking of whatever came into our heads, or not at all. These walks were slower, greener–often Hyde Park or Regent’s Park. One summer day on Primrose Hill we lay on the grass, our backs curved to the spine of the earth. The sky was pale as a cup. If you pressed your skull to the soft ground and closed your eyes the whole city could fall away. The air above my face was honeyed and heavy with dandelion parts, tiny midges that could not but dance. Sounds reached us divorced from their makers: a woman’s laugh, a baby’s bleat, an animal groan from the zoo. We felt the planet turn.

Something wet hard-slapped into my armpit–a ball, followed closely by the nose of a floppy blond retriever pup in skin too big for his body.

‘Nice catch,’ Dora laughed. She propped herself on an elbow. A small voice called, ‘Digby, Dig-
by
!’ then a girl with fair plaits stood panting before us in sandals. There were gaps in her mouth where her teeth had been, and also in her fringe, where she’d clearly been experimenting with scissors. The girl bent down, holding the pup’s collar in one hand and twiddling his ear with the other.

‘Sorry!’ she said, eyes gauging us. Seeing we were not cross, she added importantly, ‘I’m
training
him.’

‘I can see that,’ I replied. Satisfied, she turned and threw the ball and ran.

‘Kids!’ I smiled. I clasped my hands over my middle and lay back down. I closed my eyes. The sun exploded inside me, pink, orange, black bloodblossoms careening across the insides of my lids.

Then Dora’s hand, low and firm on my abdomen. ‘Are you…?’

I opened one eye. She was turned to me, squinting into the sun. Kept her hand there.

‘What?’

‘Well…?’

It was a question from another world, another life. I looked squarely at her face. She was serious. Hopeful even. I turned back to the blank sky, shocked at how profoundly my future had foreclosed. It was almost beyond comprehension to me, to bring a child into the madness we were living. But suddenly, in this soft afternoon of balls and dogs and toothless girls, the predators, uniformed and not, known and as yet undeclared in the city outside this park, fell away. Why let Them take that, too? Why not allow ourselves some kind of purchase on the future?

Dora maintained the small, sweet pressure on my belly. When I looked back at her, her eyebrows were raised and the corners of her lips turned down in a parody of questioning and I knew two things: that she did not, herself, expect to come out of this, and that she was curious as to what the future would hold without her. I shooed the thought away.

She snorted a little laugh at my silence. ‘It’s usually, you know, a yes-or-no kind of question.’ She took her hand away.

‘No,’ I said. ‘The answer’s no then.’

She inhaled deeply, as if tired of a trivial topic. ‘This will all be over soon.’ She gestured dismissively around her at our situation. ‘We’ll go home. You can think about it later.’

A bell sounded on an emergency vehicle, getting louder as it came nearer.

‘Ambulance?’ I wondered aloud. ‘Firemen?’

‘Some Honourable Member probably forgot his pipe.’ She looked down towards the zoo. ‘Or a lucky beast has made a break for it.’

Our next party meeting was mid-August. I asked Mrs Allworth, as casually as I could, if she would mind making us a soup.

‘Righto then,’ she said. She was wiping the iron top of the stove with a grey flannel rag. She looked over her shoulder. ‘How was the beef?’

I confessed. She turned around and stared at me open-mouthed, as though her long-held views about the incompetence of the upper classes were now confirmed. But she was a kind woman and here we were, brought low. She got her face under control. ‘I can see how that could happen,’ she said, the merest trace of disbelief in her voice.

The soup was pea and ham, a rich green perfumed thing. Helmut shook hands all round, his shoulders hunched and his hair a red pelt. The skin around his eye had turned a paler yellow-green. Eugen came, and the boy, and Mathilde, swishing through the door in a black gabardine dress, a big tin of cream biscuits under her arm. We weren’t expecting Dora.

We had just sat down to the soup when the front door slammed and she ran into the kitchen. Her pullover was on inside out.

‘Look at this.’ She pulled a telegram from her briefcase and put it on the table. ‘They’re denationalising people.’

‘Wha-at?’ the boy asked. I didn’t understand either.

‘It’s a list of thirty-three people Berlin is making stateless by decree. Because of political opposition or,’ she looked down at the telegram, ‘for having “violated the duty of loyalty to the realm and the people, as well as damaging German interests”.’ She flung out her arms; her voice was fractured. ‘They’re taking everything–houses, flats, cars–stripping people of their qualifications, impounding their bank accounts, cancelling passports. They are making us legally cease to exist.’ Her hands were shaking. She gripped the back of a chair. ‘Toller and Bertie are on it.’

What happens to you if you are declared by the powers that be to no longer exist, but persist in doing so?

Hans picked up the telegram. ‘Is everyone listed here out?’ he asked.

‘Yes.’ Dora watched him scan the names. ‘You’re not on it,’ she added.

Hans looked up quickly, then recovered himself with a wry smile. ‘Don’t know what I did wrong there.’

Dora explained to the others that our friend Bertie, in exile in Strasbourg, would now have his small income from Germany confiscated. The party, from this room, would need to send him money.

‘Easier said than done,’ Mathilde replied. ‘It’s not as if we’re making pots of it.’ Mathilde had the no-nonsense manner of an old nanny. ‘He should come here to be with us. He has more chance of finding support here than all alone over there in France.’

Dora looked at her blankly. ‘I don’t think that’s such a good idea,’ she said. ‘Anyway his passport has expired. He can’t get in or out of anywhere.’

What Dora couldn’t say was that if he came here he’d be too far away to get information from across the German border. The best weapon against the Nazis would be silenced.

There were always points at which we had to decide whether the danger someone was in was worth the work they did for the cause. We became responsible for the peril we let each other assume. There should be a syndrome name for this too.

In the West End a group of expatriate Germans had formed a club for local Nazis and patriots. Its leader, Otto Bene, was a hairtonic salesman who had come to Britain in 1927. After the list of thirty-three came out, the group pinned up photos of each person on it along their wall. Over the photos–Toller’s, Bertie’s, and the rest–they hung a huge banner, painted with dripping red letters:

‘IF YOU MEET ONE OF THESE MEN, KILL HIM! IF HE’S A JEW, MAKE HIM SUFFER FIRST!’

For some reason it is harder to fear what you can see in front of you–boys in uniform led by a rabid brilliantine vendor. Fear thrives better on the unseen, because we do not want to think we are afraid of something we also find laughable.

What would that make us?

Blind.