All That I Am (30 page)

I hoped for a joke, that he still could. ‘To advertise us Reds in here?’

‘No.’ He shook his head, biting the inside of his top lip. ‘To hope we are passed over.’

Hans’s account and Bertie’s were the same.

Each afternoon the two of them had walked out of Strasbourg proper, along the River Ill. The days were getting shorter, the ground held the sog and feel of winter. Boys out of school played football in a field of unsprung grass. They set the goals at the ends with their satchels, the boundaries of the pitch with pullovers at each corner. There were three on each team, brothers and friends probably, a little one of about nine, and the others twelve or thirteen. On the fourth day the eldest called the two men over into the game.

Hans and Bertie left their coats on the side of the road and joined opposite teams. They had not run for a long time, or felt the air in their lungs and the joy of kicking a ball. Hans had enough French to chat.

‘Real leather,’ he said, spinning the ball on one finger.

‘Birthday present,’ the littlest one replied, proud as if he’d sewn it himself.

‘Nice,’ said Hans. ‘I learnt with a rag ball. This is much better!’

Hans was a good kick when the ball got to him, but Bertie was surprisingly nimble, dodging between the others to get it down his team’s end so a boy with big knees could kick it between the satchels. ‘Yesss!’ The boys danced and punched the air, pleased with their new recruit. Bertie beamed, and took off his waistcoat.

‘Not bad,’ Hans said. He rubbed his hands together, smiled at his team. ‘Now let’s get serious.’

‘Don’t listen to him,
mes p’tits
,’ Bertie countered. ‘We’re up, and we’re staying up.’

They were still kicking, running and laughing, streaked with mud, when the sun began to set. They could smell wood smoke from the evening fires.

‘Don’t you boys have homes to go to?’ Hans called, panting, from one end of the pitch.

‘Nah,’ the big one said, ‘not till supper time.’

‘All right then.’ Hans shook his head in mock apology for the slaughter he was about to inflict. ‘You asked for it.’

Play was at Bertie’s end, but a skinny, determined kid on Hans’s team got in and pushed the ball out through the scrum of legs to him. Hans mothered it down the pitch ankle to ankle, trying to stay ahead of the little legs around him. Probably too soon he gave an almighty kick. His leg overstretched and he fell backwards; the ball careened off course, not between the goals at all but way over them, beyond the pitch to the other side of the river. Hans fell groaning to the ground.

‘Sorry,’ he called. ‘Your kick.’ He stayed put. ‘I think I’ve done my ankle.’

The boys looked uncertain. The little one was trying not to cry. His brother put his arm around him. They started packing up their things.

‘What’s the problem?’ Bertie asked. ‘We’ll get it back.’

‘We’re not allowed,’ the brother said. ‘The river’s the border.’

‘It’s guarded?’ Bertie asked.

‘Not here,’ the boy said, ‘but further down.’

‘Righto then,’ Bertie said, ‘I’ll go.’ He looked at Hans. ‘You all right?’

Hans was packing mud on his ankle. ‘I’ll be fine in a minute,’ he said, not looking up.

Bertie left the pitch and slipped down the embankment to the river, where he found an arrangement of new-looking planks across it. The water was shallow but fast-flowing. He walked in the direction of the kick through a couple of willows. Sky, grass, trees, stones were fading into one another. Still, he should be able to see it, a round, whitish ball. On the other side of the river there was a ridge with a dirt road along the top. It must have come to rest here, over the lip. He scrambled up.

A car, waiting. One in the driver’s seat and another standing outside. Holding the ball. Smiling.

Bertie, puffed, smiled back, started to approach. ‘
Bonsoir
,’ he said. The man kept smiling.

And then he knew and turned and bolted, his head white with it, his body so noisy–his chest, feet–he couldn’t hear if they were coming behind him. He slid-scattered down the embankment, his back open as a target. He felt nothing, not his feet, not the water.

When he reached the others he couldn’t speak.

The boys were gathered around Hans, who was still on the ground holding his ankle. Bertie hid behind them and bent over, wet and struggling for air. ‘You–hear–a car?’ was the first thing he got out. His eyes were staring, wild. ‘You—?’

Hans looked up. ‘What?’

‘A car.’

Hans understood then. The boys looked at Bertie’s empty hands. The little one wiped his face on his sleeve.

‘I’ll go,’ said Hans.

‘No!’ said Bertie. ‘It’s just a ball.’

Hans stood gingerly on his foot. ‘They’re not here for me,’

he said.

The worst part, Bertie wrote to me, was not when he’d seen the men. The worst thing was waiting for Hans to return.

It was almost dark when Hans limped back with the ball under one arm. ‘Spoke perfect French,’ he said to Bertie, in German.

‘
Pardonnez-nous ce drame
.’ He smiled at the boys as he handed the little one back his football.

The boys ran home, no doubt with stories of panicky, paranoid Germans for their parents.

Bertie put Hans’s arm over his shoulder to help him walk towards the lights of town. Both of them aware that the car had not yet put its headlights on, nor turned on its motor.

‘Perfect French doesn’t mean much,’ Bertie mumbled. ‘Might still be Them.’

‘We need to get you away from the border,’ Hans said.

Bertie nodded as he walked and was glad Hans couldn’t see his face.

Bertie had a wireless in his attic. ‘Listen to this,’ he said to Hans on their last afternoon, turning the dial. There were snatches of French, Dutch, Swiss German. When he got to the official Hitler channel he muttered, ‘Uh-huh.’

Hans thought he must have wanted to listen to some propaganda, to mine it for what they were covering up. But Bertie kept turning the tiniest bit further. ‘Here we are,’ he said, sitting down.

It was a single voice, no musical jingles, no announcement of the time, nor the station. ‘This channel broadcasts right next to the Hitler channel, hoping people will find it,’ Bertie explained. He shook his head a little. ‘See if you can pick who it is.’

A male voice was saying, ‘How can we allow this pudgy, cake-scoffing homosexual, this flatulent nailbiter, to represent Germany? But seriously, they say that the Leader is a teetotaller, a bachelor, a non-smoking vegetarian, as if he were a man removed from our normal, base desires, uninterested in satisfying himself. Concerned only with the wellbeing of the German nation. But we say he fulfils his bloodlust in other ways. You do not have to read Dr Freud to know that desire denied does not go away of its own accord. It warps and moves like a river denied its course, it flows on to drown other things. And in the case of Adolf Hitler, those things are us.’

Hans listened intently. Ten minutes later the voice said, ‘And I leave you, friends, till 18:00 GMT or 19:00 Berlin time tomorrow.’

Bertie’s face broke into a grin, half-clown and half-cemetery, with his crazy hair and crooked, tombstone teeth. ‘So, can you guess?’

‘Couldn’t have put it better myself.’ Hans was shaking his head, smiling. ‘Is it from inside Germany? That would be out-and-out suicide.’

Bert shook his head.

‘The voice is familiar somehow.’ Hans smoothed his tiny moustache. ‘I give up.’

‘Rudi Formis!’

Rudi had staged one ‘technical difficulty’ too many at the state radio station in Berlin and the Nazis had come after him. He escaped over the border into Czechoslovakia and immediately started assembling a secret radio transmitter in the roof of an inn at Slapy, smuggling in antenna parts and everything else in his suitcase. And from there he had started broadcasting anti-Hitler messages.

Bertie leant back with his hands behind his head. ‘Unbelievable, eh?’ he said.

‘The man is a genius,’ Hans said. His eyes were bright. ‘He must need people–we could write for him?’

‘No.’ Bertie’s tone was definite. ‘He’s being very careful. Won’t tell anyone where he is. I’m one of the very few who know.’ He couldn’t help the pride in his voice. ‘Sometimes I send him information, but it’s through an intermediary in Prague.’

‘Priceless,’ Hans said.

‘Yoo-hoo.’ There’s a curtain on a rail that runs inside the door of my room, to give me privacy, and so people don’t get a fright, opening straight onto a spectacle such as
moi
. But you can’t be protected from everything. A hand and some pinkish fuzz appear on one side of it.

‘You right for visitors?’ Bev’s voice is businesslike and caring at once–so she knows the drill too?

‘Come in.’

‘Well then,’ she says. She pushes aside the curtain with a swoosh and there she is, a huffing and puffing reminder of my other life, the outside one with biscuits and banter and sunshine walks. Bev is wearing a long white T-shirt which hangs down over her pillowy body, and leggings underneath. Around the neck of the T-shirt there are coloured sequins, and for an instant I can think of nothing but a life-size vanilla ice-cream cone with sprinkles. She bustles about, finding a chair and pulling it over, plopping a bulging supermarket bag on her lap.

‘What’s goin on here, then?’

‘Not a lot,’ I smile at her.

She smiles back. ‘I brought you some things from home.’ She takes my toiletries bag out. ‘Shampoo and a toothbrush and baby powder and this.’ She puts my hearing aid in a ziplock baggie down on the night-table. ‘And I got you today’s paper.’ She hands over the horrible tabloid I do not read, all the junk advertising in its guts spilling out. ‘And,’ she reaches down to the top of her handbag, ‘these.’ Bev holds out a little wicker basket. Inside are four of the most luscious purple-green figs I have ever seen, resting in some kind of hay.

‘Out of season,’ Bev sniffs, ‘four dollars
each
.’ This is as close to a declaration of love as I have had in a long time.

‘Exquisite,’ I say. ‘Thank you very much.’ Bev knows how I love fruit, even if she laughs at me for sometimes eating it with a knife and fork. I touch them. The precious, soft-skinned figs bring their pregnant beauty into this sterile place. They have cost her nearly an hour’s pay.

‘They are just perfect,’ I say, and I see she is chuffed. To deflect her pleasure she picks up the newspaper.

‘Them tree killers are at it again over in Woollahra,’ she says, whacking the paper with the back of a hand. Woollahra is a grand suburb, where developers have been known to sneak out in the dead of night to poison 150-year-old Moreton Bay figs so that their flats will boast broader harbour views. Like many things here, it is only evident in the perpetrators’ denial. ‘
Disgusting
,’ Bev tuts.

I look at the paper and recognise the spot where the magnificent tree used to be. The underside of the fecundity of this place is its avidity: for sex, for money. This town is all about getting away with it. If I close my eyes I can see Seven Shillings Beach below where the tree was, a strip of white sand looking across the water to the city, with an aqua boathouse at one end. A small sign on a cyclone gate declares it to be a private beach belonging to the mansions behind it, from the high-tide mark up. But the gate is always open and everyone, mansion owners and public alike, completely ignore this rule. We are all dazzled by beauty here; it is a prelapsarian world where people kill for the view but everything is always, already forgiven.

‘Pardon?’ I say. Bev is saying something.

‘How about a hand massage then?’ She leans into her bag for a tube of cream. ‘Oh yes,’ she says, ‘and here’s your mail.’ She puts the letters on the bedside stand, all of them uninteresting window-envelopes I know I won’t open. I see now, that it has come down to Bev and me. She will have to do so much for me.

Bev takes her rings off and starts to massage my left hand. It feels surprisingly lovely, the freesia smell, the touch.

‘Am I one of your old ducks now?’

She laughs. ‘Nah.’ She is kneading along the sinew behind each knuckle. ‘You’re too tough.’

I look down at my gnarly old hand. ‘You’re right about that.’ She is working it, her head bent so I can’t see her face, just her bright hair as it goes, sparse and strange, into her waxy white scalp. She is pummelling my palm, then pulling finger by finger. She catches her breath.

‘You’re,’ she pulls, ‘my,’ she pulls again, ‘eagle.’

It was around then, in the spring of 1934, that we started getting hate mail at Great Ormond Street. It was always locally postmarked, usually a phrase typed in the middle of the page, addressed to each of us individually. You couldn’t call it inventive, but it was effective. ‘PREPARE TO DIE BITCH’ was one of Dora’s. I got ‘JEW CUNTS WILL DIE’ and Hans ‘YOU
CHOSE
THIS.’ There were others. We showed them to each other and then burnt them in the stove.

After a couple of months there were calls in the night too. You’d answer the phone to emptiness, not even audible breath. The first few times I screamed, ‘Who’s there? Who’s there?’ into the handpiece. Dora put her finger on the lever to cut off the call. ‘Don’t give them the pleasure,’ she said. Hans simply didn’t pick up.

One day, I stood at the kerb on Farringdon Road, momentarily stuck, the flow of life on the pavement opening and closing around me like a stream around a rock. I wondered if fifteen paces back someone tailing me had stalled too. In this place our fates were being determined by forces which occasionally revealed themselves–in an unsigned threat, a shadow, a silent call, a plague of white paper in the flat. I felt like a bear in the Colosseum thinking that the situation he sees before him–overwhelming as it is–is the world to be dealt with, yet below him a thousand slaves on pulleys are changing every scene and the end is predetermined by forces greater than the greatest strength he might muster.

A traffic policeman stood on a podium in the road, arms moving from the elbows like a puppet. A scarlet bus careened into the kerb, disgorging its passengers, all of them with somewhere to go. They filed past a street-sweeper in a soft cap with a long-handled dustpan, they wove as if of a single understanding around a group of children being walked out of school. All around me life moved but I could not grasp it.