Your Face Tomorrow: Poison, Shadow, and Farewell (68 page)

'I wasn't there when she received and read it, but she showed it to me afterwards, or, rather, translated it for me: although Maria spoke English, Val's German was better, and that was the language in which they wrote to each other. It was a long letter, but not that long, I mean not enough for Maria to be able to explain all that had happened to her during the War years; she summarized the most important facts. She, too, had married and her name was now Hafenrichter; however, her husband had died at the Russian front, leaving her a widow. She was managing to scrape a living in the international zone of Vienna (as you know, Vienna, like Berlin, was divided into four occupation zones: American, British, Russian and French, and the center was international, that is, it was controlled and patrolled by the four powers simultaneously). She spoke about her current hardships, the same dire situation as in German towns and cities, although Vienna had suffered less devastation, and she asked for help, although without specifying what form that help might take, money, medicine, clothes, provisions . . . Her parents, Mr. and Mrs. Mauthner, had died, as had one of the four sisters, the third, and it was presumed that the oldest, Ilse, was also dead, for she had vanished along with her two small daughters. The only surviving Rendl was the boy, whom she had taken in and whom she now wished to send to England, and she was asking Valerie's help in that regard too, if possible: the child had had a terrible time, and in Austria he faced a bleak, poverty-stricken future, and she could barely manage to support herself. But the worst thing was . . .' Wheeler's voice faltered and he hesitated for a moment, then recovered. 'The worst thing was that she explained to Val what had happened: "I don't know how," she said, and those were the words that tormented Valerie from the moment she read them until her death, the words that killed her: "I don't know how," she said, but the SS had somehow found out that Rendl had a Jewish grandmother and had bribed officials to have her name removed from the records. The records in question, though, hadn't been destroyed, only moved elsewhere and replaced with false documents: the originals turned up and the accusation was found to be true. The SS were very strict on the matter of racial ancestry, Maria told Valerie (imagining that there would be no reason why Valerie would know about that), and it seems that the case reached the ears of Himmler himself, who was enraged by such deceit and determined to make an example of Rendl, mostly in order to wring confessions from any other SS officers who were in the same or a similar situation, promising them that if they did confess, he would treat them more leniently, or at least less severely, than their impostor colleague. The discovery, along with the rumors that followed Heydrich's death, that even he had been "half-Jewish"'—'Heydrich,' I thought, 'who died slowly and in great pain, from those bullets impregnated with poison'—'led him to believe, as I found out later, that his purer-than-pure body of men had, in fact, been transformed, since the enactment of the Nuremberg Laws, into a refuge for
Mischlinge
and even for "half-Jews," reasoning, as was proper to a mind as sick as his, that there could be no better disguise for the prey than to camouflage themselves as hunters. Well, perhaps his mind wasn't so very sick when you think of Delmer or, even more so, of Jefferys, who were both capable of dreaming up the most complicated plans and machinations. Or when you think of mine, perhaps, for we all had war minds, there are no healthy minds in wartime and some never recover. But returning to the letter: Maria had managed to learn what Rendl's exemplary punishment had been: to be sent to a concentration camp as a prisoner, even though he was only a "quarter-Jewish"; and not just that, but one day, the Gestapo turned up at his house in Munich, where he and his family were living at the time, and took the girls away. They didn't take the boy because he wasn't there when this happened, he was staying in Melk with his grandparents, and once the Gestapo had got over their initial rage, they didn't bother overmuch to seek him out. When Ilse, horrified, asked why they were doing this, all they would say was that the girls were Jewish, but that they had no proof against her; if she wanted to go with the girls, that was her business. Properly speaking, those girls were only one-eighth Jewish and would normally have been considered to be "German." But that was the reprisal, the punishment: making "full Jews" of the descendants of the man who had deceived and tricked them. After all, as Goring said, or Goebbels, or perhaps it was Himmler himself: "I decide who's Jewish." None of this became public, of course, it would have made a terrible impression, it was made known only to the officers of the SS, as a warning to them to tread carefully, and that is why the PWE heard almost nothing about it. The SS were very keen on secrecy and childish rituals. According to neighbors who witnessed the scene, Ilse got into the car that was about to carry her girls away and no more was heard of any of them. It was supposed that, once in a concentration camp, all trace of them would have been lost and their "origin," which was the reason they were there, quite forgotten, and they would have become, in effect, Jews or, at best, "dissidents"; no, there was no "best" about it: their fate would have been the same. Maria didn't want to deceive herself with fantasies, she had no hope that they were alive. She assumed they were dead, with no room for speculation or doubt, especially once information was published about the gas chambers and the mass exterminations. So that was what the letter said, Jacobo. Maria ended by saying that she didn't know if Valerie was still alive or if she would ever read those lines, but she begged her, if she
was
alive, to send her news and help as well, especially for Ilse's son, young Rendl. He would have been about eleven or twelve at the time.' Wheeler paused, took a breath and added: 'If only those lines had never reached her eyes. If only no one had ever told her. I wouldn't have seen her kill herself. I wouldn't have been left alone and sad.'

Wheeler remained silent and thoughtful and again raised the back of his wrist to his brow, as if to wipe away some sudden beads of sweat or as if he were again taking his temperature. 'Give me your hand and let us walk,' I quoted to myself. 'Through the fields of this land of mine, edged with dusty olive groves, I walk alone, sad, tired, pensive and old.' I had known this poem since I was a child, they were the words addressed by Antonio Machado to his already dead child wife, Leonor, who died of tuberculosis at the age of eighteen. Valerie hadn't died, she had killed herself when she was only slightly older, looking at her own hourglass and holding it in her hand. But she, too, had left Peter alone, sad, tired, pensive and old. Regardless of all the things he went on to do afterwards.

I should have expected this revelation after what Wheeler had been telling me, but I was so taken aback that, for a moment, I didn't know what to say. And when he did not immediately go on, I gave voice to a thought that slipped unavoidably into my mind, even at the risk of diverting his thoughts elsewhere and missing the end of the story:

'That's what Toby said had happened to him. I told you, don't you remember?' And I recalled, too, the look of irritated surprise on Wheeler's face when he had heard the story. 'Is that what he said: "I watched the suicide . . ."' he had repeated, taken aback, without completing the sentence. 'That he had watched the suicide of the person he loved.'

Wheeler responded at once, but this time he was more sympathetic than annoyed:

'Yes. It disappointed and angered me a little when you told me that. After all, how were you to know? Nothing like that ever happened to him, but he enjoyed playing the man of mystery and hinting at a more turbulent or more tragic past than he actually had; not that his past didn't have its moments, but that's true of almost anyone who lives through a long war. He must have stolen my story when he told you that, to make his own more interesting. That's the trouble with telling anything—most people forget how or from whom they found out what they know, and there are people who even believe they lived or gave birth to it, whatever it is, a story, an idea, an opinion, an anecdote, a joke, an aphorism, a history, a style, sometimes even a whole text, which they proudly appropriate—or perhaps they know they're stealing, but push the thought to the back of their mind and thus hide it away. It's very much a phenomenon of the times we live in, which has no respect for priorities. Perhaps I shouldn't have got angry with poor Toby like that, retrospectively' Wheeler stopped, took a couple of sips of sherry and then murmured almost reluctantly, almost with distaste: 'Fortunately for him, he didn't ever have to see that. It's not a scene that is easy to bear, I can assure you. It's best to avoid tragedies. Nothing can ever make up for them. Certainly not talking about them.'

'What happened?' And out of politeness I added as I had on another occasion, although this time I had to force myself to do what I had been taught as a child, never to put the screws on anyone. 'If you don't want to tell me, Peter, don't.'

I was afraid that, at any moment, Mrs. Berry might close the piano and come downstairs and, so to speak, break the spell, although we could still hear her music; she seemed to have moved on to Scarlatti; she always played cheerful pieces, which that afternoon just happened to be by people who had changed countries, Scarlatti having spent half his life in Spain, although no one knows how or where he died or even if he had a grave, just like Boccherini: they probably both died in Madrid and both now lie in unmarked graves. A country indifferent to merit and to services rendered. A country indifferent to everything, especially to anything that no longer exists, or to matter in the past.

'It's not pleasant to remember, Jacobo, nor to hear either. But I think, nevertheless, that I can tell you. I suppose there comes a point when one has to tell things, after a lot of time has passed, so that it doesn't seem as if they simply never happened or were just a bad dream,' Peter answered. '"I don't know how," Maria had said in her letter, and Valerie, from the moment she read those words, kept repeating, even in German sometimes as if she were talking to Maria: "I know how, oh, I know how, I know very well, in fact, I was the one who told the SS." And she repeated over and over: "The children. How could I have forgotten about Ilse and the children? I should have thought of them, why didn't I? I didn't take them into account at all." She spent the last days of her life in torment, in hell, and at no point did she consider answering her friend's letter. "I'd rather she believed me dead," she said. "I couldn't possibly tell her what happened." "And what if you didn't tell her, but just helped her," I said, trying to convince her: "Perhaps we can do something for the boy, get him some kind of permit to enter the country and a scholarship, I don't know, I could talk to people about it and give him a hand financially." I've always had family money. My maternal grandfather, Thomas Wheeler, sold the newspaper companies he owned in New Zealand and Australia for a large profit, and Toby and I, when we were still very young, each received a large legacy when he died. I even suggested adopting young Rendl, even though I hated the idea myself. But Val was paralyzed with horror and grief, she didn't want to hear any of those ideas, and she didn't respond. She lay awake at night, and even if, for a moment, she did drop off out of sheer exhaustion, she would soon start awake, crying and drenched in sweat, and would say to me in distraught tones: "Those girls. If I had just found out what happened on my own, I might have had some right, possibly, although I don't believe so. But I found out through Maria, and I betrayed her without a thought; how could I have done that, why didn't I realize? And those girls, who died because of me in a concentration camp, they wouldn't have understood anything, and their mother who got into the car with them, what else could the poor woman do, oh, dear God . . ."' Wheeler stopped for a moment and bit his forefinger, thoughtful, tense. ('Sorrow haunted thy bed,' I quoted to myself.) Then he said: 'Treachery just wasn't in her nature, still less betrayal. More than that, those were the very last things she would have been capable of in normal circumstances. She was a fine person, someone you could trust absolutely. She was the antithesis of bad faith, of deceit; she was, how can I put, a clean person. But war turns everything upside down or creates irreconcilable loyalties. It wasn't in her nature either to spare any effort in helping her country when its very survival was at stake. She was still smarting because she had lacked the courage to infiltrate enemy territory, and so it would have been impossible for her to hold back that information about Hartmut Rendl once she was convinced that revealing it was important and could save English lives. Now, though, her perspective had changed, as always happens in peacetime, except for those of us who know that war is always on the prowl, always just around the corner, even though no one else believes it, and that what seems to us reprehensible, horrific and extreme in peacetime could happen again tomorrow with the consent of the entire nation. "War crimes" is the term they apply nowadays to almost anything, as if war did not consist precisely in the commission of crimes, which have, for the most part, received prior absolution. Now, though, Val couldn't see in what way the information she had given, the idea she had put forward, could possibly have contributed to victory. Or, rather, she was sure that if she had kept quiet the result would have been the same. And she was probably right in thinking that, as, with very few exceptions, would all the other Britons who had added their grain of sand. That's another thing that happens in time of war, Jacobo. You do everything that's necessary, and that includes the unnecessary. But who is capable of distinguishing one from the other? When it comes to destroying the enemy, or even merely vanquishing him, it's impossible to gauge what really is doing harm and what is merely a matter of shooting his horse from under him, or, as you say, lancing dead Moors or making firewood from a fallen tree.' And he said these last two expressions in my language:
'alancear moros muertos'
and
'hacer leña del árbol caído'.
'I tried every means I could to make her see this: "Valerie," I would say, "it was wartime and in a war, soldiers sometimes even kill their comrades, you've heard of friendly fire, haven't you? Or those in command sacrifice their own troops, send them to be slaughtered, and that doesn't always serve any useful purpose either: think of Gallipoli, Chunuk Bair, Suvla, and you can be quite sure that in years to come we'll find out about similar and equally bloody cases in this recently won War of ours. In every war innocent people are killed, there are mistakes and frivolous, foolish acts, there are imbecilic or cynical politicians and military leaders. In every war there is waste. Do you imagine that I haven't committed repugnant acts, things which, if I think about them now or in the future, could perhaps have been avoided? I committed them in Kingston, and even more in Accra and in Colombo. They're repugnant to me now and will seem more so as time passes, the farther off they get, but they weren't then. And that's what you mustn't do, view these things out of context and coldly. You can't look back after a war, don't you see? Not if you want to go on living.'"