The Song Before It Is Sung (8 page)

She was reluctant to learn his little speech, but he explained to her, although he was himself already out of the loop, that
interviewers are not interviewing a candidate to discover her worth, but rather to see if the candidate can bring allure to
their own lives and careers. What they are looking for, Francine, he proclaimed, is a stooge, a true believer. He doesn't
proclaim any longer.

Sitting in that interview, ten years ago, was his wife's lover, then a newly appointed consultant of Obstetrics and Gynaecology.
If Francine's ghost-written spiel hadn't been so appealing, she might not have got the job. But he can't expect any retrospective
gratitude now.

Mendel's way of tackling the growing tensions in Europe was to look more closely at ideas and their effects. Idealists, he
wrote, have produced some of the most terrible cruelties in history. Although he saw that the philosophers around him were
undoubtedly right to believe that ethics had no rational basis in logic, he came to see that we must act ethically according
to common sense. He also saw, as he once told Conrad, that Oxford philosophers were going down a blind alley if they believed
that there was some incorrigible proposition waiting to be discovered. In the thirties, he told Conrad, academics were in
the grip of this fallacy. Most philosophers in Oxford, he said, believed in a version of determinism, although of course none
of them had ever met a determinist. His reading of the history of ideas offered an entirely different perspective, namely
that ideas and beliefs are often in conflict, so the important question, it seemed to him, was not the truth of the ideas
themselves, so much as the resolution of them, and that could only be realised by understanding human longings. Conrad remembers
not only the conversation in Mendel's rooms, but also the rooms themselves, with the mullioned windows looking out towards
Christopher Wren's clock, and the panelling that the years had infiltrated so richly, and the Roman head on the mantelpiece,
acquired in Jerusalem, and the books and papers stacked and scattered so profligately. In his journalistic fashion, Conrad's
father had loved books, but in Mendel's world books were not objects of self-congratulation - upmarket interior decoration
- but living things, as alive as the souls that produced them. In books you could find the whole history of mankind (he didn't
exclude novels and poetry) a history that includes folly and heroism and idealism and cruelty; he said more than once, quoting
an American poet, that books are the bees that carry the quickening pollen from one mind to another. And Conrad in his own
fashion has always felt happiest surrounded by these living dead.

Francine demanded a regular cull of books as though there was a limit to the number of books you needed at any one time. Anything
over that limit, for example, books you were never likely to read again, was an indulgence. But Conrad kept them, all except
for best-selling novels. Now he's sitting in his own All Souls, in a crowded room above Baiocchi's Bakery, The True Taste
of Italy, in Camden Town, surrounded, his feet actually lapped by, the souls of the departed in book form, reading the letters
of Elya Mendel and his friends. Each time he sees von Gottberg's beautiful handwriting he feels a jolt. Von Gottberg may have
proposed marriage to her cousin, but he continues to write deeply romantic letters to Elizabeth, remembering their walks in
London and Oxford, visits to her mother's house in Kent and dancing at the Café Royal; they both loved dancing. She was married
at twenty-one, her husband was a friend of von Gottberg's, but he was now in Athens on a posting. It seem certain to Conrad
they had been lovers once and that this continued after her marriage. He was one of those people who insisted on maintaining
his friendships with lovers.

The visit to Pleskow was not a success. Whatever happened angered Elizabeth, who kept copies of her letters:

Dawn comes. It takes Conrad some time to locate himself. It's as if he finds himself in an unfamiliar room in a foreign country,
without knowing how he got there, although he has been awake all night. Beneath him the bakery is coming to life: the ovens
hum and whirr and the smell of the yeast as the proven bread is taken for baking is comforting. It tells him, more clearly
than the murky view from the smeared windows, where he is.

VON GOTTBERG STILL does not believe that war is inevitable. He is working in Hamburg as a prosecutor, the only job he can
find as a non-member of the Party. Still he is resisting joining. He wants, nevertheless, to play a part in his country's
life and has applied for a post at the Auswartiges Amt, the Foreign Office. He believes that the Nazi Party will leave the
stage of history soon enough; it is just a symptom of the changes to come. Why join? One day the president of the lawyer's
association calls him and explains to him that he wants to talk to him in person.

Two days later he presents himself. The president knows his father. They walk the length of the garden of the president's
office, and out along the inner ring of the Alster. Von Gottberg knows that this is not because the president wants some fresh
air, as he tells his secretary, although there is plenty of that blowing in up the Elbe from the North Sea.

'My boy, I can't endorse you for the Foreign Office, despite your father's good name. Your request was sent to me by Berlin
for a reference, but my hands are tied. You are not a member of this association and that would be seen as a rejection of
National Socialism.'

'I don't reject National Socialism if that's what it is. In fact I am all in favour of both socialism and nationalism. But
I can't join the Party. It's not possible for me. I have friends in other countries who would misunderstand. My aim in joining
the Foreign Office is to work for our country. I don't want a war, but if I join the Party I will appear to be in the war
party. I would have no credibility at all.'

'Just join the association. Not the Party. Then I can write you a glowing reference.'

'Mr President, you are a member of the Party, I assume?'

'I am.'

'Do you want a war?'

'Of course I don't want a war. Nobody in Hamburg wants a war. But the problem we all have in every professional association,
as you know, is that we have been required to swear an oath. Germany is going in one direction and you either jump on the
train or you are an outcast. Can I tell you in confidence that none of us is happy? We tell ourselves we can work from the
inside, we can make things better. Now, let me speak quite frankly, if you don't join the Party or our association, you will
end up in a concentration camp or in exile.'

'I will give you my answer tomorrow. And I thank you.'

Dietlof is exhilarated as they stop at a bar for a beer.

'We can't beat up every Brownshirt in Germany,' says Axel.

'We must try. It is our sacred duty.'

'What have we become, Dietlof?'

'I am leaving. I am going to America. There is no future here.'

'Look. Let's walk a little, I want to talk to you.'

'One more beer. It's thirsty work beating up these animals.'

They leave the bar. Dietlof is unconcerned that the Brownshirts might be looking for them. But Axel is nervous until they
break free of the close alleyways and walk along the lake where the rigging of moored yachts is slapping and chiming against
masts and spars. Goetz is in his uncle's shipping business in Hamburg, but his family home is also in Mecklenburg.

'Dietlof, can I speak honestly to you? I know I can trust you. I have been talking to my friends in England and there is a
chance we can stop the war. If everybody like you leaves, there will be no future — as you say — for our country. Another
war will be a complete disaster, again. The Nazis apparently are unable to see that the whole world will eventually be against
us, including America.'

Von Gottberg explains that there is resistance to Hitler in the Army Council and that General Beck, the supreme commander,
is absolutely against any foreign adventures. There is a plan to deal with Hitler when the time is right. His friends in England
are absolutely against a war too. It only requires all sides to hold their nerve.

'Dietlof, it is our destiny, our duty, to stay in Germany and fight for the country we love. My dear friend, when I saw you
punch that bastard, I felt strangely exalted. It doesn't need many of us to stand up for Germany, for what you and I would
call the true Germany. But first, and this is what my work is, we must persuade our friends in England and America to allow
Germany some return of pride and dignity. It they don't do that, Hitler will flourish on the people's resentment. Believe
me, Dietlof, we need you. You must stay.'

Dietlof Goetz was to say years later that Axel von Gottberg's passion, his eyes brimming, his voice quivering with emotion,
made him ashamed of his plan to join his brother in New Jersey. Von Gottberg convinced him by the Alster that it was only
by demonstrating to the world that there was another Germany, not seized by madness, that they could live honourably. The
life of exile, he said, is a half-life.

Down below the bakery is making its first deliveries of the day. The bread is stacked on wooden trays to be loaded into the
vans. Conrad sees the tortoise shapes, the brown carapaces, from above and he is reassured. Human life depends on small rituals
and the daily bread is surely one of the most basic. No wonder the Church appropriated it. He sits among these papers, anxious
that they should not miscegenate with the earlier papers that lie in disarray around the flat. I am losing my hold on order,
he thinks. I am more engaged with Mendel and von Gottberg than I am here, in my own home. I must see my friends. Although
they have become strangely silent. Perhaps Francine has been briefing against me. I must re-enter the physical world, as Rosamund
put it.

What happened at Pleskow, he wonders? Letters are only the outcroppings of an underwater reef. Elizabeth Partridge will tell
him what Axel von Gottberg said to her that evening in the little house by the lake. But he knows already that von Gottberg
joined the lawyers' association and soon after that, the Party, because he was appointed a counsellor in the Foreign Office,
Information Department. With the new job he moved back to Berlin, and into a small apartment. Every morning he walked to the
Information Department in Kurfürstendamm. Sometimes he was summoned to the ministry at Wilhelmstrasse. And at the same time
he began to attend meetings of the Kreisau Circle, a quasi-religious opposition group which met on Helmuth James von Moltke's
estate, Kreisau.