by John Boyne
They were dead. I had killed them all.
Throughout my story, I had kept my eyes focussed on the table before me, not at Maurice. Now, however, there was nothing left to say so I lifted my head, uncertain what expression I would find on his face, but it was neutral.
‘And after that?’ he asked me, seeing that I was not going to speak again until he did.
‘After that I went home,’ I told him with a shrug. ‘I never saw Alysse’s parents again. I assume they were taken to the camps and that they died there. The next day, when I returned to that street, the bodies had been taken away and the only evidence remaining was the blood between the cobbles and on my own boots. And soon there was a war and I took part in it, and then the war ended and I came to England to read and to write. The rest of my life was peaceful until I won The Prize. And until I met you,’ I added carefully.
‘I think we should go back to the hotel,’ he said, looking away.
‘But don’t you want to talk more? To ask me anything?’
‘No,’ he said, standing up and putting his coat on. ‘I just want to sleep, that’s all. We’ve talked enough. I’ve heard all that I need to hear.’
I nodded as I rose, feeling wounded that he was not willing to comfort or condemn me. This was my story, the story that defined my life, and yet he seemed impervious to it.
In the hotel, however, alone in my room, I became upset. I had hidden these secrets inside myself for half a century and to reveal them to anyone, let alone to one who had reawakened in me a desire that had lain dormant for decades, was so overwhelming that I knew I would not sleep. I paced in my room for a long time before crossing the corridor towards his suite, knocking cautiously on the door. When he opened it, his shirt unbuttoned, his feet bare, he seemed both surprised and irritated to find me there.
‘What?’ he asked. ‘It’s late. What do you want?’
‘I thought perhaps we might talk,’ I said.
‘I don’t think so, no.’
I pressed forward, trying to get through the door, but he held out a hand and placed it firmly against my chest.
‘Please,’ I said. ‘I had an idea, that’s all.’
‘So tell me your idea.’
I hesitated. I didn’t want to speak of it out here in the corridor but it was clear that he was not going to let me inside. ‘You know I return to Cambridge tomorrow?’ I said.
‘Yes, of course. What of it?’
‘It’s a very good place to write.’
‘So do some writing.’
‘I thought you might like to join me there, perhaps. I daresay I could find you rooms—’
‘I’m not interested in living in Cambridge,’ he said. ‘Don’t you ever think, Erich, that perhaps you’ve seen me as you wanted me to be and not as who I am?’
I frowned, unwilling even to consider this as a possibility. ‘You might like to read for a degree there,’ I continued. ‘Even if you don’t have the necessary school results, I’m sure—’
‘Erich, I said I don’t want to live there.’
‘But it’s such a beautiful city. Sometimes I’ve thought it might be nice to buy a house,’ I added, making up new ideas as I went along. ‘You could have a room there,’ I added, unable to look him in the eye now but staring down at the floor. ‘A room of your own, of course. And as I have no children, then someday—’
‘I’m tired, Erich,’ he said. ‘I’m going to bed.’
‘Yes, of course,’ I said, turning away, my voice barely audible in my distress. ‘It was a foolish idea.’
I began to make my way down the corridor towards my room but his voice calling out to me made me turn around.
‘What was his name?’ he shouted.
‘What?’ I asked, confused by his question. ‘What was whose name?’
‘The boy. Alysse’s younger brother. Do you remember his name, or was his life as meaningless to you as hers? What was his name, Erich?’
I stared at him, swallowing hard. I looked around me, at the carpet, the paintings, the lampshades, hoping for inspiration, but nothing came to mind. I turned back to him and shook my head.
‘I don’t remember,’ I said. ‘I’m not sure that I ever even knew.’
He smiled at me, shook his head, and then he was gone.
The following morning, when I came downstairs with my suitcase, I enquired after him and the receptionist told me that he had checked out an hour earlier.
He had left no message for me.
8. West Berlin
True to his ambitions, Maurice’s debut novel was published the following year to both positive reviews and strong sales and, in his first interviews, he revealed that his central character, a young homosexual falling in love with his best friend in pre-war Berlin, was based on me.
‘All of Ernst’s actions in my novel come from stories that Erich Ackermann told me about his own life,’ he repeated time and again on television, on radio and in the newspapers. ‘Although I’ve invented some characters and amalgamated others to serve the story, the basic facts remain true. Having been a great admirer of Herr Ackermann’s work since my teenage years, I was naturally shocked by some of the things he revealed to me about his past, but while no decent human being could condone his behaviour, whatever he did fifty years ago does not detract from the power of his fiction. He remains a very impressive writer.’
The first I knew of any of this was during a lecture I was giving at Cambridge on Thomas Hardy. It was one that I had given many times in the past and I was interrupted halfway through when the door swung open to reveal a cameraman and a young news reporter who stormed towards the lectern without introduction to ask the question that I had been expecting for most of my adult life:
‘Professor Ackermann, do you have any reaction to claims by the novelist Maurice Swift that you wilfully sent two Jews to their deaths in the Nazi death camps in 1939 by reporting them to the SS, and also provided information that led to the murder of two other young people on the same night?’
The silence that filled the hall seemed to go on for a terribly long time. For me, it was like time itself had stood still. I looked down at my notes with a half-smile, and it was difficult not to feel the finality of the moment as I shuffled my papers and returned them to my satchel, glancing around the lecture theatre in the certain knowledge that I would never speak from that or any other dais again. Looking out at my students, I saw them staring back at me in a mixture of disbelief and confusion and my eyes settled on a girl whose hand was covering her mouth in shock. She was a mediocre student and I had recently given her a low grade for one of her essays, and I knew immediately that she would take pleasure in my downfall, revelling in the fact that she had been present to witness it. I was there, she would tell her friends. I was there when they confronted the old Nazi and told him they knew all the things he’d done. I wasn’t surprised. I could always tell that he was hiding something. He broke down and cried. He started screaming. It was horrible to watch.
‘In fact, it was three young people who were shot that night,’ I said to the reporter, stepping off the stage and making my way towards the door without undue haste. ‘Although you’re correct that two were sent to the camps. So the number of deaths on my conscience is actually five.’
Events moved quickly after that. Perhaps if I had not won The Prize, the newspapers would not have taken as much interest in me but of course I had acquired some small measure of celebrity that was pure oxygen to the fire of publicity that followed. Also, it was 1989 and the last of the war criminals were still being discovered in places as far removed as South America, Australia and Africa. To add the name of a small provincial English university town to that list provided a scandal that the columnists could live off for months. As a writer, I could hardly blame them for drawing as much blood from the story as possible.
The authorities at Cambridge suspended me immediately, issuing a press statement to the effect that they had known nothing of my wartime activities and had
taken me at my word that I had engaged in no criminal behaviour during the Nazi era. They summoned me to an emergency meeting but I declined the invitation, as perhaps I should have declined all invitations over the previous year, and offered my resignation instead by letter, which they gratefully accepted by return of post.
Bookshops across the world removed my novels from their shelves, although the organizers of The Prize itself refused, in the face of staunch criticism, to rescind my award, saying that it had been given to a book, not to an author, and that Dread remained a sublime work, regardless of the monstrous actions of its creator. In response to this a great number of writers boycotted The Prize that year, refusing to enter their books, and only when the fuss died down did they seek the approbation of a small glass trophy and a sizeable cheque once again. A film adaptation of Dread, scheduled to begin shooting two months later, was promptly cancelled, while representatives from my publishing house – a company with whom I had worked since my debut novel appeared in 1953 – contacted me to say that in the light of recent events they felt they could no longer offer the level of support to my writing that they had done in the past. I was released from my contract with immediate effect, they added, and my six novels would soon be allowed to fall out of print. (They made no mention of my ill-advised collection of poetry, although I can only assume that this was an oversight on their part.) So my work was to be obliterated, my contribution to literature over half a century expunged from the record as if I had never once put pen to paper. And I accepted all of this without rancour. What, after all, could I possibly have said to justify myself?
It took me some time to move my belongings from my rooms. There was a lifetime’s worth of books there, not to mention decades of correspondence and papers to organize, and to my great dismay some five hundred students, many of whom I knew personally and with whom I had formed what I’d believed to be friendly connections, paraded through the streets while I remained in situ. They held banners with my picture in the centre, a Hitler moustache drawn above my upper lip and a red line slashed through my face. Nazis out! they cried. Nazis out! A stone was thrown through my window and the culprit, an undergraduate in the history department, was suspended from classes for three weeks. A petition was delivered for his reinstatement and he acquired heroic status among his peers, even appearing on an episode of Newsnight to defend his actions. Oh, how the young people delighted in their outrage!
Most of the major newspapers and media organizations contacted me directly with requests for interviews – my agent had stopped representing me, of course, so their invitations came by phone to the college porter – offering ridiculous amounts of money in exchange for putting what they termed as ‘my side of the story’ in the public domain, but I declined every bid, making it clear that I had nothing to say in my defence. I committed the acts of which I am accused, I told them. I am guilty as charged. What more do you want from me?
I chose not to read Maurice’s novel at first but then one afternoon, as I was making my way through Heathrow Airport for the last time, I saw it displayed in considerable numbers at the front of a bookshop:
Two Germans
by Maurice Swift
I thought it a lazy title and, had I been in his position, might have gone for something a little more sensational, but I picked it up nevertheless and glanced at the endorsements on the back cover. Naturally, both Dash Hardy and the Spanish novelist had offered glowing praise for the book.
I did, however, eventually read it over the course of a single afternoon. It had many flaws. For a start, it was too long. Over three hundred and fifty pages for a story that could have been told in half that amount. There were an extraordinary number of anachronisms, place names that didn’t exist at the time, and some of the prose was unnecessarily purple. I had warned him about this in the past. Just say what you have to say, I had told him, and then move on and say something else. Sometimes, after all, the sky is just blue.
But then I recalled something else I had told him in Copenhagen and felt rather proud that he had taken me at my word. Everyone has secrets, I had remarked. There’s something in all our pasts that we wouldn’t want to be revealed. And that’s where you’ll find your story. He must have scribbled that down in his ubiquitous notebook and, when a story began to be revealed to him, he knew exactly what to do with it. I had, quite literally, been the author of my own misfortune.
A photograph of Maurice appeared on the inside jacket and he looked a lot more adult than before. Gone were the checked shirts, blue jeans and stubble; now he wore an elegant suit with an open-necked white shirt and a pair of black horn-rimmed glasses. The great mess of dark hair had been tamed too for a more mature look. The photographer’s name, I noticed, was Clémence Charbonneau, and I wondered about that. Was this the friend he had met in Paris who had photographed him nude?
It took quite some time for me to have an emotional response to my relationship with Maurice but it happened at last after I had returned to West Berlin, where I rented a small apartment at the top of a building quite near what had once been the Böttcher Tavern but was now a supermarket. It was in this flat that I had chosen to spend whatever remained of my life, close to the happy memories of my childhood. I was sorting through some paperwork one evening and happened to come across the receipts for the air and train fares that I had purchased for him over the course of our time together. Copenhagen, Rome, Madrid, Paris, New York and Amsterdam. The cities where we had talked, where I had revealed so much about myself, and where I had behaved foolishly in the hope that this manipulative boy would fall in love with me. I broke down as I threw them in the wastepaper basket, wondering whether the pain that he had inflicted, the heartless manoeuvring and theft of my life story, had been worth it to him. And as I sat there weeping, I thought of Oskar, Alysse, her younger brother and the rest of her family and felt that my heart was ready to give way with grief and guilt. What right had I, I asked myself, to feel aggrieved over Maurice’s actions? All he had done was take my memories and turn them into a bestseller that would be forgotten in time. How could I possibly compare his crimes to my own?
I saw him once more.
It was a few months after I’d moved back to West Berlin and by then his novel had not only been translated into German – ironically, by the same publisher who had once produced my own books – but had become an enormous success, the biggest of the season, and I saw an advertisement in a newspaper for a reading and public interview that he was due to give at the Literaturhaus. I debated whether or not to go but, on the evening itself, my feet took me there as if by their own design. I adopted a slight disguise in case anyone present might recognize me, a pair of old glasses that I had no real use for and a hat. Plus, I had recently grown a beard and moustache, and had aged considerably.
An enormous crowd had gathered for the event and I took a seat towards the back, flicking through a brochure from the bookshop advertising their new titles. There was a flurry of applause when Maurice made his way towards the platform and, to my astonishment, I recognized the man who accompanied him and took to the microphone first. It was the same disgruntled actor who had been unwilling to read my chosen excerpt from Dread all that time ago; he had been hired once again for this evening and must have been happier with Maurice’s selection than he had been with mine for he read with great spirit, receiving a hearty round of applause from the audience when he had finished. Afterwards, as Maurice proceeded to answer questions posed by a journalist on stage, it struck me how confident he was up there, how knowledgeable in his literary allusions and witty in his self-deprecating remarks. He was a natural, I realized, and would surely be a great success for the rest of his life. His writing would improve and the media would embrace him with open arms. I felt certain that his future was guaranteed.
When audience members asked about me he answered them honestly and said nothing that was either slanderous or untrue. He did not try to denigrate me and continued to maintain that while his book was a wor
k of fiction based on fact, this did not take away from the novels that I had written over the course of my life.
‘I do not believe that Erich Ackermann was an evil man,’ he remarked at one point with a shrug. ‘Just a misguided one. What you might call a fool in love. But a fool in love at a very dangerous time.’
I rolled my eyes at this. It sounded like something he’d said a hundred times before, a piece of bland fortune-cookie wisdom that he knew would lead the audience to nod wisely and consider him both forgiving and charmingly naïve. When the event ended he stood up, revelling in the applause, and a queue formed for his signature. I was uncertain at first whether to join it but finally took a German-language edition from the pile and took my place at the back. He barely glanced up when it was my turn, asking, ‘Would you like me to put your name on this?’ but then he caught my eye and what else could I do but smile at him? He had the good grace to blush as I turned the book to the title page, shook my head and said, ‘Just a signature, please,’ which he offered with a trembling hand, watching in some surprise as I walked away. I felt a certain victory over him at that moment, although for the life of me I don’t understand why, as I had achieved nothing of consequence.