Earthly Powers (73 page)

       "I have the means to get you to England with little trouble. I have a passport for you. Thank God you speak English. It's as an English physician that you must travel."

       "Why a physician?"

       "Because the most suitable passport of those stolen by your son Heinz belonged to a physician. It's as simple as that."

       "Has he been stealing much?"

       "Oh yes. Also soliciting on the streets. But he's not in jail yet. Except for the odd night in the lockup he's lived a very free and self-indulgent life. A remarkable young man. I hope you'll be glad to see him again."

       He grinned. "Perhaps I should have read one or two of your books after all. You have this English quality—what may we call it? Sense of humour, tolerance, forbearance. There must be a single word but I don't know it. I shall not, of course, be at all glad to see him again. I thought that perhaps by now you would have packed him off to New Zealand to his mother."

       "Strangely enough I hadn't thought of that. I thought only of the reuniting of father and son. I look forward to witnessing the first embraces, the first tears of Gott sei dank."

       "There will be no embraces or tears. I stay here. Until they come for me. But I shall kill some of them first." He fondled the bolt of his rifle Austrian, a Mannlicher.Schoenauer, 6.5-mm. calibre, as he was to tell me later.

       "I see. And when do you think they'll be coming?"

       "Soon, soon. Have you heard of a small reactionary man of letters named Johannes Braunthal? No, of course not, why should you. A critic of sorts and a sort of novelist. He has found his true-Beruf-how do you say it?—"

       "Calling, vocation, métier. What excellent English you speak, by the way."

       "Thank you. In the SS. A cruel little man like so many literary critics. He will make sure that I am put to lavatory cleaning or whatever Jewish intellectuals do in these camps of theirs."

       "I think," I said, "you underestimate the intentions of these people as regards the Jews I understand that there is serious talk in Berlin about the extermination of the entire race."

       "They've talked a lot about that in Vienna too. They always have. Jew-hating is no monopoly of the Nazis. Still, grateful as I am for the trouble you seem to be taking on my behalf, I feel that I must stay here and wait for the worst. But first I shall kill Johannes Braunthal. I've always wanted to do that anyway."

       "He probably knows this. Therefore he will not come himself. Besides, these people usually arrive in the middle of the night. They break in and point guns at your bed."

       "I shall hear them break in. As for sleep, I sleep mostly in the front room in a hard chair, facing the window, my gun cockedis that the word?—and ready."

       "Do they know where you are?"

       "Oh, they will find out. I may even send for them. You would be a very useful ah ah emissary. You see, I'm coming to the end of a piece of work. There too you could be useful. Take it back to the free world."

       "What is it?"

       "A curious thing. Have you heard of a Latin author called Frambosius? No, of course not, very minor like Braunthal. And also Austrian, the name being a Deckname or pseudonym, his true name Wilhelm Fahirot of Klagenfurt. He died in 1427, he wrote in Latin. Oh, here is his book, you may see for yourself." And he handed me, as reverently as the SS man had handed me back my Himmler letter, a little book with rotting brown covers, duodecimo I supposed, the pages spotted as with liver disease, the content a poem of about a thousand lines, Latin hexameters, the title Vindobona.

       "Vindobona?"

       "Means Vienna. I do not know how good your Latin is. Mine has inevitably improved since I started to translate it into German. In rhyming verse. It is a remarkable prophecy. A horde of human-sized rats floods into Austria from the northern lands and sets up its government and culture in the capital. The haute cuisine is garbage and the music is squeaks, the chief pastime is leaping at the gentle or the infirm and tearing out their throats. Their flag is of four legs stylized on a black ground. Those who will grow whiskers and glue on long tails and walk like beasts are accepted into the community of rats. The king rat is called Adolphus."

       "Good God."

       "I have perhaps one hundred lines left to do. I have written already the long introduction. I think I can get it all finished before Braunthal and his ruffians come for me."

       "You can finish it in London. In my study. I think you must make up your mind as to that. I'm not going back without you."

       "Ah." And he smiled. "How will you take me back if I am not willing to go? I have a gun, you I think not. But I'll make a bargain with you. Stay here in the country air and let me finish my work. I have wine in the cellar and whisky in that tantalus over there which is wearing, you see, an old velvet tricorne. The water from my well is like wine. I have a sack of dried beans and a pan of them soaking. There are two hams, one of them from Westphalia. I have learned to make bread, more satisfying than the making of novels. There is a bed for you up that stair there and there are blankets. Three or four days give me. Then we can talk again. But you understand that my heart is set, if that is the right expression, on killing Johannes Braunthal." The narrow world of the writer, the pettiness of his enmities. The Anschluss to Strehler meant little more than a chance to kill a critic. I said, "There are British and American critics I myself should like to kill. But that is a luxury. The necessity, an urgent one, is to get you out of here. I've a sense of responsibility to literature, pretentious as that must sound."

       "And a desire to get poor Heinz off your hands. I cannot blame you altogether. Send him to Christchurch, New Zealand, a dour city which will quieten his exuberance. Go to the kitchen now and make us both some coffee. I have real coffee from a Brazilian admirer. Have you by chance brought some real British tea? Twining's? Or from Jackson's in Piccadilly? It was buying tea there that I first met Amelia, who became my wife. She was trying to force herself on John Middleton Murry and Katherine Mansfield, her compatriot. She taught me all my English. Box of birds—do you know the expression?"

       "I regret I brought nothing except a passport. I mean, I had but one aim in mind. I thought that tomorrow we could be on the flight to Milan, be out of the Reich with all speed. Perhaps even tonight—"

       "No, we must not rush matters." There was, yes, a tinge of the Oceanian in his speech. The voice was harsh and yet had a wienerisch singsong. He occasionally coughed phlegm into his mouth and swallowed it. The eyes were black and bold and devious. The dirty grey hair fanned or rayed. The skin was russet, the nose huge, the mouth full of crooked brown teeth. He had a Sherlock Holmes pipe on his desk and now he lighted it, dribbling. The smell was of a burning herb garden. "Make," he watered, "coffee and ham sandwiches. Let me continue with my work. The king rat Adoiphus is enforcing the teaching of the rat language in human schools. It has a very limited vocabulary."

CHAPTER 53

The red light went on, just as in Broadcasting House, Portland Place, W.1, and the pleasant young official from the Propaganda Ministry said, "Welcome to the Third Reich, Mr Toomey."

       "You make it sound as if it were my first visit."

       "Ah no, of course we know it is not. We know you as an old friend and, in addition, one whose books have been greatly loved by the German people. It is all a great pity, is it not, this misunderstanding that has come about between two great nations."

       "Misunderstanding is always a great pity, especially when it turns into war." The reader will already have divined what happened. I spent the first week of September, both relaxed and stimulated, in the house and garden of Jakob Strehier. The weather was gorgeous and the apples fell. We were quite removed from the outside world of terrible enactments, and I had all I needed except cigarettes from the Burlington Arcade. But Strehler had a pound of blond tobacco for rolling, as well as packets of Pferd papers, and he even showed me the craft of fixing a tube with one hand only. I had previously met only one man, except for film cowboys, expert in this knack, and that had been young Eric Blair at a P. E. N. meeting. He lost it, for some reason, when he became established as George Orwell. Strehler practised the skill distractedly when looking over what he had just written. Like most pipemen he regarded cigarettes as palate cleansers between smokes.

       He was nearly at the end of his translation of Vindobona when the forces of the Nazi State arrived. It was early morning and I was asleep on the sheetless bed in the loft above his study when he came and softly breathed black coffee and ham on me, shaking me gently, saying, "There are men coming through the wood." I was awake at once. He considerately rolled me a pipe opener.

       I said, "For God's sake remember who you are. Do you have the passport in your pocket?"

       "It will not work."

       "It will and must. Two Englishmen staying in the country cottage of Strehier. Strehler's gone. We don't know where he is. It will be easy."

       "These people will know me. Unfortunately Braunthal doesn't seem to be among them. I must demand that Braunthal make the arrest. I have all things, or rather one thing, ready for Braunthal."

       I coughed over my cigarette while I pulled trousers on; I had slept in my shirt and underclothes. I put my feet bare into brogues, coughing: "It will and must work. Let me do the talking. I told you we should have been on that plane days ago."

       "You lost your urgency."

       "You made me lose it. We're both bloody fools. Still, everything's going to be all right." We were at ground level now. We went to the front room and saw through the window six men now crackling over the stubblefield.

       "You see," Strehier said, "no Braunthal. I insist on having Braunthal."

       "Shut up about Braunthal." There were two stocky civilians in trilby hats and raincoats, two revolvered Schupos, and a Wehrmacht Unterofflzier and private, both bearing rifles. "The SS doesn't seem to be represented at all."

       "I think I know that one there, the one with his hands in his pockets. Saw him in the Gestapo place when I was trying to arrange things for poor Heinz. He knows me. Verflucht and Scheiss and so on. I had better open the door. Perhaps they would like coffee." The small company seemed disconcerted when the door was opened and Strehler and I stood before it in the cool morning waiting. It was as though they had been invited to a breakfast and were late. Strehler took his turnip watch from his waistcoat pocket: 7:51 A.M. The uniformed part of the group began to double. They halted and waited till the civilians arrived. "Do come in," Strehler said. It was all German from now on. To my surprise it was myself who was to be arrested. Neither Strehler nor I was aware that Britain and France had declared war on Germany the previous Sunday. Today seemed to be the following Sunday. The war was officially well launched. We learned all this over coffee in the kitchen. The news that an Englishman with a camera was in the vicinity had been slow in getting through to the police in Vienna. But now I was under arrest. So, of course, was Strehler. Both police and military liked the solidity of Strehler's having proved his disloyalty to the Reich by harbouring an enemy alien with a camera. He was also a Jew, of course, and should have long been sent to a work camp, but Jews were for herding into trucks in ghettos, not for picking up on specially made journeys to remote country residences. "I thought," Strehler said, "Braunthal would have been sent to get me."

       "Look," I said in German to Strehler, "I'm terribly sorry about all this. You won't have time to finish that damned poem now."

       The two Gestapo men sat on the edge of the kitchen table sipping good Brazilian coffee. The Unteroffizier and the private had their rifles trained on Strehler and myself. The Schupos stood at ease, their holsters still buttoned. The senior Gestapo man, the one whom Strehler knew and who knew Strehler, tried to work himself up into a righteous lather of philosophical patriotism by snarling, coffee safely finished, "Jewish shit, the only bastards in the Reich able to get real coffee while the rest of us have to drink muck made out of acorns."

       "That," Strehler said gently, "is because you want guns instead. You can't have both guns and real coffee, apparently. Now I don't want guns, so I'm entitled to real coffee. You should by rights stick your fingers down your gorges and vomit it up as unpatriotic poison."

       "Filthy Jewish shit," the senior man said, "shut your filthy gob before we shut it for you." He was a very ordinary looking man, shiny like a glazed bun; an unusually early shave in probably bad light had left him dotted with dried bloodclots. His companion was grey-faced, probably ulcerous; the hot coffee had made him wince, but he had finished it to the last drop. Both kept their hats on.

       I said, "What do you suppose is going to happen to me?"

       "You'll get shot as a spy and this Jewish bastard will be shot too. And another thing, it's not right for an English swine to talk good German like you do."

       "He's got to speak good German if he's a spy," the other one said.

       "I learned my German," I said, "through reading the work of Herr Doktor Strehier here, the finest living novelist. I'm not a spy, by the way. I came here on a vacation and lost track of time. How is this war going, if there really is a war?"

       "London's been bombed into a load of catshit. There's a war on all right, as you'll soon find out. The FŸhrer will be in Piccadilly Platz before Christmas. Come on, time we were moving."

       "I demand," Strehler said, "to see my old enemy Braunthal. If I can't kill him I can at least spit in his ugly face." He used the phrase from Faust, Part One: shreckliches Gesicht.

       "Shut that filthy hole," the second Gestapo man cried in dyspeptic pain. "You're the one who'll get spat on and worse."