Therefore Choose (26 page)

“Were they helpful?”

“They said there was nothing to be done for her.”

They sat silently for several minutes.

“Working in a medical publishing house, that was not bad.”

“Some was not bad, public health and prevention. But medicine became the German body, racial hygiene. They would have been better working on actual harmful elements, like cancer. Racial issues took over: the good blood, elimination of contaminants.”

Anna was suddenly silent again, pensive.

“Good, and noble,” she said. “Everyone thought of themselves as fit rather than unfit. There were no private citizens, no doubting thoughts. Should the foot start doubting the brain? Healthy members of the body politic.”

“With your magazine,” George said, “that's not what you thought.”

“I always felt close to German literature. That's why I made jokes about my relative, the mad Heinrich. Being German was meaningful to me, reading German literature. I didn't pay enough attention.”

“How do you mean?”

“I didn't notice how important being German became for everyone. We had been humiliated in the first war. Now we could be proud, decent people; that's what everyone thought.”

“But when?”

“I hated Hitler's thugs when he came to power. The Brownshirts, they were revolting. Then that stopped, at least for the most part. He seemed to bring it under control, realize that there had been excesses. Obviously, I thought, things like that must happen with revolutions. Things started to go back to normal, started to improve.”

“You mean in 1936 and 1937.”

“Then he joined us back to the German-speaking people in Austria, and then in Czechoslovakia. Everyone thought there would be a war. But there wasn't. I thought perhaps I'd been snobbish. I thought perhaps he was a shrewd statesman, because not only were German people reunited, but suddenly other nations respected us, acknowledged what we had done.”

“‘Peace in our time,' that's what our prime minister said.”

“German society began to flourish. People had jobs. It felt as if we were going forward.”

“They closed your magazine.”

“A big part of the idea among us, of the Volk, was sacrifice. The magazine was a sacrifice. That's how Werner put it.”

“You understood it in that way?”

“I was upset, terribly. Then I thought I was being selfish. Indulging in artistic interests. I thought perhaps we had to grow beyond selfishness.”

“And the Jewish people?”

“When the magazine was closed, and Judit went back to Amsterdam and Odile to Paris, I was very upset, but they had to. Judit was lucky to escape. After we were closed and they left, I felt empty, as if everything I had worked for was nothing. Bereft, I suppose. Looking back it's difficult to know. I thought perhaps I had been wrong in what I'd wanted.”

George looked at her, trying to think himself into being a German in 1938, when something powerful had been steadily replacing what people had once thought.

“So it wasn't Werner? He didn't persuade you?”

“I came some way towards him. I could understand people who believed. You remember I told you that was my talent, being able to get inside a way of thinking?”

“I remember,” he said.

“I could understand Werner. I could not have got together with him if I had not been able to do that.”

Anna paused, pensive.

“Closing the magazine without recourse,” she said. “Arbitrary. It made me fearful of stepping out of line. I went along with it, didn't make the slightest fuss. That showed me I was not courageous. I was anxious, too, about my mother.”

George looked at her again, trying not to think of her and Werner.

“The people around me,” she said. “They felt we were all moving forward. Our magazine was international, but that idea wasn't strong enough.”

“How do you mean?”

“We liked the idea that we three were of different nationalities, German, French, Dutch. We liked the idea of drawing on the world's literatures. We wanted to send our magazine all over the world. We were children.”

“Wasn't the idea that literature is about all humankind?”

Anna looked at him with the most wan of expressions.

“It's difficult to think myself back to that period. It seemed to become about whom you could trust. Werner said that we couldn't trust the people who had betrayed us, the French, the Jews, the Communists. But we could trust ourselves. Especially if we all thought the same. So that's what people did.”

“All thought the same.”

“Exactly. The Volk.”

George thought about Werner's idea for a thesis, about whether minds could join, and if so, how. He put a hand to his lips, as if to stop himself speaking. But there was something even more pressing.

“Back then,” said George. “When you asked me, back then, in 1936. I still can't see how you knew that we could choose … I wanted to be with you.”

“It was after that,” said Anna. “There was an exhilaration in the air. Except, of course, for people who were unfit: for those who had some mental disease, or were crippled, or the wrong blood. The nation had to be racially fit, move forward, commit resources to the healthy.”

George did not know whether she was speaking directly or in irony.

“I wanted to choose,” said George. “Like you. But I didn't know how. How did you know? Because you were right.”

Anna glared at him, as if annoyed that he was trying to divert her from her thoughts.

“I didn't know what would happen,” she said.

George felt panic that he had annoyed her, suddenly worried that she might get up and leave.

“How could I know that?” she said. “You're not recommending hindsight?”

“No, I'm sorry. That's not what I meant.”

Anna was silent. Despite the danger George felt, he could not restrain himself from saying what weighed on him.

“You knew something, back then,” he said. “Something I didn't know.”

“You are making it complicated. It was simple. I knew I could choose to be with you. I knew I could throw myself into a life with you. You weren't ready.”

“I wasn't ready.”

“Come by my office tomorrow morning, about eleven. I'll give you my diary. It's in a school exercise book. I started to keep it when the Russians reached the suburbs of Berlin, when they got within range so that they could shell the city. I told you about it, the one I gave Werner to read. I'd like you to read it.”

Dear Bernardette,

I'm back in Berlin after seeing my friend Werner in a clinic in Switzerland, and I have found Anna, here in Berlin.

Werner is in some ways the same: the same person, but visible from another angle. He's depressed — I tell this to you, a psychiatrist — but that's not entirely it. Some parts of him that might have been glimpsed before have been emphasized, so that they stand out and dominate the whole. It's like that ambiguous figure that psychologists are fond of. You look at it one way and it's a beautiful young woman, glancing over her shoulder. Look at it another way and it's the head of an old crone. I used to admire Werner. Now he's saying things that I didn't know he could believe. It's hard to keep the former image in mind. Perhaps when we were together before, these things never came up. He seemed to think that trying to get rid of Europe's Jewish population might have been a mistake because it was a distraction from the war effort.

Anna is different. When I first knew her, I think we met in a deep way — so that our souls touched. Now she feels terribly guilty about the war, although all she did was to continue to earn her living in publishing. Now it's as if I can only see her from two hundred yards away. Perhaps we can be closer again, but perhaps you were right. Perhaps the person I knew is no more. Probably the person she knew in me is no more either. That moment is past. I feel very sad. The person she was had become a part of me. Is that what relationships do, make other people part of us? Perhaps meeting her again means I can stop longing.

Perhaps I can sneak a bit of leave and, if I do, may I take up the Monday and Thursday arrangement? So long as that moment isn't past too.

Much love, George

Dear Georgie Porgie,

Didn't I tell you what would happen? But all the same you are a poor boy. I am sorry you have lost both your friends. It's been a terrible thing, this war. I've always thought of myself as Irish with a mother who happened to be Jewish, but if Hitler had invaded he would have made me a Jew who lived in London. Off to the gas chambers with her. It brings you up with a start, realizing that. I know the English are snotty at the Irish, but I can deal with that. You English are snotty at everyone who isn't English. It's your form of childishness, to make you feel superior, and it's obvious to everyone else in the world except you. But I have never thought to be stripped of everything and carted off in a cattle truck. That's what your friend Anna feels guilty about. I don't know what could have been done to stop it. I suppose in the end we did stop it, or rather you did, you English and the Yanks and the Russians, but that wasn't what any of you thought you were stopping.

I don't know how practical it is to think in terms of Mondays and Thursdays, what with your being in foreign parts, and with your job and all. But if you can slip away for a bit, we might wangle a weekend pass.

Your Molly Malone

The first date in Anna's diary
was April 16, 1945, the day George visited Belsen, the day the Russians started shelling Berlin. She had a flat in one of those five-storey buildings that were arranged round a courtyard that had flower beds and brick paths, and large wooden doors onto the street. At the ground floor level on one side there was a restaurant, and on the other a clothes shop. The whole building had twenty or so flats. Anna lived at the top, in a flat under the eaves. A top-floor flat — like the flat they'd lived in near the Tiergarten Station, like the rooms in the house in Leytonstone. With the air raids, and as the shelling increased, people in the building spent more and more time together in the cellar.
We went backwards in time
, she wrote.
We became cave-dwellers
.

Electricity was cut off, water and gas stopped. People huddled in the cellar, went occasionally to their flats. Everyone was desperately hungry. Some of the cellar-dwellers, including Anna, would make forays to try to find food, or coal, or water. Anna saw detachments of German soldiers retreating, weighed down by their equipment, haggard, already beaten. As the front line approached, moving from east to west, she realized Berlin's civilians had been abandoned. Then came a night with no shelling and no air raids. The front had arrived. At dawn, from the window of her flat that looked over the street, she saw the first Russians appear. At midday, they started carrying out furniture from the restaurant downstairs, which had long since closed. They used the chairs for a fire, on which they started to cook. The rapes did not start until the evening. Four soldiers with guns broke down the door of her flat. One of them, the oldest of them, handed his gun to one of the others.

“Very thin,” he said. “But a bit of all right.”

He grabbed Anna and forced her to the floor, pulled down her underwear. He was very strong.

“All right,” she shouted in Russian. “I understand. Don't hurt me.”

“You speak Russian?” said the man on top of her.

“Please don't hurt me,” she said. “I won't fight. That will be better for you too.”

They took turns. It happened again the next evening. The same group appeared, and afterwards some others. Anna realized she had to do something. In the morning she saw bread being delivered by a Russian truck to the restaurant downstairs, where the unit that had taken over down there had set themselves up. She took her diary and fountain pen, a half-full bottle of water, and went down. The bread that had been delivered was there, on a table. There was a soldier in what had been the restaurant, a boy of eighteen or nineteen, one of those who had raped her, she thought.

“May I have a loaf, please?” she said.

He looked astonished at being spoken to, but she wasn't sure if he recognized her.

He shrugged his shoulders and said, “Help yourself.”

She took a loaf and walked out into the street, with the loaf and her bottle under her coat. She was surprised she wasn't stopped. She found a bombed building, and hid in its basement for several days. During daylight there was a place where light came in and she could see. She wrote in her diary to pass the time. The water did not last long, and she was desperately thirsty. One night she went out, found a queue of people at a pump, filled her bottle, and went back for several more days to her hiding place. She returned to her building. A woman who lived there said the rapes had stopped. The Russians had restored civil administration. Water started to come through the pipes, bread was distributed, civilians were organized to start clearing rubble from the streets. Anna volunteered as a translator.