Traitor's Gate

by Michael Ridpath

  ‘Are you trying to make me feel guilty?’ Conrad said defensively. ‘Unless I talk to her, she’ll kill herself? Is that it?’

  ‘No, no. You’re not responsible. She is and she knows it and that is precisely the problem. But she did what she did for love of her father. Most girls don’t love their father that much, I know I don’t, but for Anneliese he is the most important person in the world. She worships him – you can tell that whenever she talks about him. I’m not defending what she did, but I do understand it.’

  ‘Did she ask you to come?’

  ‘Absolutely not,’ Sophie said. ‘She would be mortified. As far as she is concerned there is no chance that you will ever have anything to do with her again.’

  ‘Well, on that we are in agreement.’

  ‘She has told Klaus that she won’t see him any more.’

  ‘Lucky man,’ said Conrad. ‘But look, why are you here?’

  ‘You see, the thing is...’ said Sophie, glancing down into her empty glass, before looking at Conrad with those large frank blue eyes. ‘The thing is, she loves you.’

  Conrad snorted. ‘She hardly knows me.’

  ‘And I suspect... well, I suspect that you love her. Am I right?’

  Conrad wanted to protest, but suddenly he couldn’t find the words.

  ‘I’m sorry. I must be going. I apologize for intruding on you like this. You must think me an interfering busybody. But Anneliese is one of the people I am fondest of on this earth and she has had a very difficult time these last few years. So, I think, have you. Goodbye, Conrad.’

  Four hours later, Conrad found himself on the corner of the quiet cobbled street where Anneliese lived. Everywhere was silence; no one dared venture out in this area late at night these days, apart from the Nazi thugs, of course. A drawing of a man hanging from a gallows was scrawled across the window of the little cobbler’s opposite Anneliese’s tenement building.

  Conrad could feel the indecision creeping up on him. He had walked rapidly the whole way from his own flat, urging himself on, but now he was almost at his destination, uncertainty tugged at his sleeve, and whispered a name in his ear. His heart was beating fast. The urge to go ahead and do what his heart told him to do and damn the consequences was almost overwhelming. It was an exhilarating feeling, but he had felt it once before, when he had proposed to Veronica. ‘Veronica,’ the voice whispered. ‘Remember Veronica.’

  But Anneliese was different. She had to be different. If it turned out she really was just like Veronica, life would be unbearable. The world would be unbearable.

  Shaking off his doubts, he strode along the street to the door of the building and knocked. Two minutes later, amongst loud muttering and grumbling, the door was opened by the landlady, in dressing gown, slippers and curlers.

  ‘Good evening, Frau Goldstein, I’m very sorry to trouble you so late at night—’ Conrad began.

  Frau Goldstein’s frown turned into a smile. ‘Herr de Lancey! A pleasure to see you again. Fräulein Rosen is upstairs. And she is alone.’ Conrad smiled quickly at the landlady and climbed the stairs. On the landing, outside Anneliese’s door, he hesitated. He remembered the last time he had been there, Klaus Schalke’s heavy tread, his big body appearing in the doorway in front of him.

  What the hell was he doing?

  He knocked.

  He heard movement inside the room, and knocked again.

  ‘Who is it?’ The voice sounded tired.

  ‘Conrad.’

  The door opened slowly, and there was Anneliese, in a dressing gown. She looked pale and nervous, almost frightened as she saw Conrad’s frown.

  He smiled.

  Her eyes studied his and the apprehension melted away. A smile spread across her own lips. ‘Conrad,’ she said and fell into his chest. He held her, tight, so very tight.

  19

  After that night Conrad and Anneliese spent every spare moment together. It was easy for Conrad; his visits to the Stabi became less frequent, but the time he spent there was much more productive. Suddenly his novel began to flow.

  For her it was more difficult; she had her shifts to do at the hospital, but Conrad was happy to adjust his life to fit around hers. They just didn’t get much sleep. Any distance between them was banished. They made love all the time, that first night with a manic desperation, afterwards with humour, with languor, with tenderness, with whatever mood took them. It was like nothing Conrad had experienced before. It was wonderful.

  Most of the time they stayed in Anneliese’s little room in the Scheunenviertel; it was more efficient since Anneliese didn’t waste precious time travelling to and from the hospital. Frau Goldstein was pleased with this turn of events, and was always effusive in her welcome to Conrad. But whenever Anneliese had a day off they would switch to Conrad’s flat.

  Sometimes they would venture out for forays into the Tiergarten. They would always head for the Rosengarten, where the roses were in full bloom and the benches filled with lovers like them, and then go on to one of the Zelte, the semi-permanent restaurant tents on the banks of the Spree, and dance on the terrace to Strauss waltzes.

  When they weren’t making love, they talked. It was one long conversation, which they picked up where they had left off whenever they were interrupted by the need to sleep or for Anneliese to work. It was the uncontrolled ramblings of two minds, darting from subject to subject in a manner that made sense only to them. They talked about everything: music, sex, books, dreams, their childhood, politics, food, God. Anneliese recovered her sense of humour, luxuriated in it. She even told Conrad funny stories about Paul and her time in the concentration camp. She talked about her father, about her brother Franz, who was in Bavaria learning to fly in the newly formed Luftwaffe, and her mother, who, thanks to Foley, had just left for London to join her father. The only part of her life she didn’t discuss was Klaus Schalke.

  Conrad spoke of his own family and friends, but he barely mentioned Veronica, only when she was an unavoidable walk-on character in a story. This was for two reasons: he was still married to her and that made him guilty, and shoved to the very back of his mind remained the fear that in abandoning himself to Anneliese he had laid himself open to the same kind of pain that Veronica had caused him.

  They were in Conrad’s bedroom. It was nearly midnight, but it was still warm. They were lying naked on top of the sheets, and Conrad was tracing with his finger the shape of the bars made by the moonlight through the blinds on Anneliese’s stomach. He felt very happy. She saw and she smiled.

  Then he remembered an item he had seen in the newspaper that morning. A new ordinance had been announced that would force all Jews to adopt the first names ‘Israel’ or ‘Sarah’. It followed hard on the heels of other ordinances that had decreed that all Jewish passports would have to be stamped with a ‘J’ and that Jewish cars would have to carry special number plates. Jews were no longer allowed to visit a theatre, to go to the swimming pool or certain parks, to own a radio or even a pet. This ratcheting up of anti-Semitism in legislation reflected what was happening on the streets, where random round-ups and beatings of Jews were becoming ever more common. Before the invasion of Austria in March it had been inconvenient to live as a Jew in Germany. It was swiftly becoming impossible.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Anneliese, sensing the thought.

  ‘Are you going to leave the country?’ he asked her. ‘Join your parents in London?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ she said.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I think I’m old enough to live by myself, don’t you?’

  ‘This Jew-baiting is getting worse.’

  ‘But no one thinks I’m Jewish. I don’t look Jewish.’

  ‘Oh, come on, Anneliese. With all these new regulations, they’ll have you walking the streets with a J tattooed on your forehead before too long.’

  ‘I’d much rather be here with you.’ Anneliese stretched out her hand and stroked his thigh. Her breast moved into the bars of m
oonlight and shadow. Conrad touched it. She smiled again.

  ‘I’m worried about you.’

  ‘You shouldn’t be,’ said Anneliese. ‘I’m the great survivor.’

  ‘Seriously,’ Conrad said. ‘I couldn’t bear it if some Nazi thug beat you up, or they threw you into another camp.’

  Anneliese rolled on to her back and laughed.

  ‘What’s so funny?’

  ‘I’ve been thinking about that. A week ago I thought that no one would care. Apart from my parents and my brother, of course. But I thought I should stay in Germany and take whatever punishment God wanted to give me – I deserved it.’

  ‘That’s ridiculous.’

  ‘It didn’t seem like it then. It seemed perfectly logical.’

  ‘That was last week. What about now?’

  Anneliese stroked his cheek. ‘Now I just want to think about this moment, this minute with you. Not about next month or next year.’

  ‘But you must think about the future, before it’s too late. For my sake, you must get out of this insane country.’

  ‘For your sake?’ said Anneliese with a smile.

  ‘Yes,’ said Conrad.

  They kissed.

  ‘Yes,’ he repeated.

  She shook her head. ‘I can’t.’

  ‘What do you mean, you can’t?’

  ‘When I asked Captain Foley for a visa for my mother, I asked for one for myself too. I wasn’t going to, but my mother insisted.’

  ‘Good for her.’

  ‘Captain Foley said there was no chance.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I’m a communist. Or I was a communist.’

  ‘That shouldn’t matter.’

  ‘Oh, but it does. Captain Foley is explicitly forbidden from issuing visas to communists.’

  ‘That’s outrageous!’

  ‘Possibly. To be fair, no other country is too enthusiastic about us either.’

  ‘Isn’t there anywhere else you could go?’

  ‘It’s getting harder all the time. Captain Foley suggested Shanghai; it’s about the one place you can still get a visa for as a German Jew. Oh, Conrad, would you like me to go to Shanghai? I’d much rather be here with you.’

  ‘I’ll talk to him,’ Conrad said.

  ‘You can try if you wish,’ Anneliese said. ‘But I think I’m stuck here.’

  Conrad tried to do as Anneliese said she was doing, think of just the minutes, the hours they were spending together. But he couldn’t help thinking about the future, the near future. And it scared him.

  In the chestnut tree in the square outside Conrad’s flat a nightingale was trilling a complicated aria of its own composition. In the middle of the square, next to the tree, was the red-brick Church of the Twelve Apostles. Although it was a cloudless night and a full moon, and although there were street lamps around the square, there were numerous niches and crannies in pitch-black shadow. In one of these stood Klaus.

  He had been standing there for three hours, ever since he had followed Conrad and Anneliese back from the neighbourhood restaurant in which they had eaten their supper. It had been a long evening. He had waited outside St Hedwig’s Hospital in the Scheunenviertel for Anneliese, and had followed her to her building. Even though she looked tired, she had walked fast. He had watched for a quarter of an hour, and then she had appeared, changed out of her nurse’s uniform, and scurried off towards the U-Bahn, a small smile on her face. What little pleasure did she have to smile about?

  Klaus had lagged well behind her. Although he worked for the Gestapo, he had no experience of following people. His size and his clumsiness made him an appalling choice of watcher; he had other skills of more use to his employer. But Anneliese was tired and preoccupied and Klaus was certain she hadn’t seen him.

  As she had turned into the little square, Klaus knew for sure where she was going. He had had Conrad followed earlier that summer and he knew his address. He bit his lip in frustration and pounded the wall of the church with his fist. A tear ran down his cheek. That night, of all nights, he needed to see Anneliese.

  Eighteen hours earlier his mother had died. It had been quick. The doctors had thought she had beaten the mysterious ailment that had plagued her over the previous year, but all the time the cancer, for that was what it turned out to be, must have been eating away inside her, undetected. She had only begun to feel ill again a week before. The deterioration had been fast. Klaus had managed to get the day off, and by great good fortune had been at her bedside in her little house in Halle when she had died. His father was downstairs, reading the newspaper. He had smiled when Klaus had told him the news, actually smiled. Klaus had long suspected that his father had hated his mother throughout their long marriage, but it was only then that he had realized it was true. Klaus wanted to hit him, but even at that moment he was scared of the small old man. Those vicious beatings he had received throughout his youth had left him cowed and in awe of his father. So he stormed out of the house, his heart full of grief and anger. Why couldn’t the old bastard have contracted cancer instead of her? He had a disgusting rasping cough, which always ended with him spitting up great gobs of mucus. He’d been doing that for years. He should be dead, not Klaus’s mama.

  He knew it was foolish to think about Anneliese while he was in that frame of mind. When she had dropped him the reason was clear enough; once her father was out of the country he was no longer any use to her. He had never accused her of that obvious truth for fear of alienating her. He wanted her to love him, not hate him.

  The problem was that those few days when she had been his again had transformed his longing for a lost love into an obsessive desire. If his life was to have any meaning at all, he had to be with Anneliese.

  He had tried explaining this to her, but she had been stubbornly firm. Indeed that was one of the things that Klaus loved about her: her wilful independence. He remembered, he would always remember, seeing her shouting slogans on those communist marches, her blouse tight over her breasts as she raised her fist, her hair tangled in the wind and the excitement, her face alight, not with hatred or rage, but with a passionate idealism. He had done nothing on those marches but stare at her. However impossible it seemed at the time, with her and Paul so obviously in love, and he a great shambling oaf whom she pitied, he knew that one day, one day she would be his. All he had to do was wait.

  And she was his, for a while. It had started on the day she received Paul’s ashes through the post in a cigar box. That was before Klaus had joined the Gestapo, when he was still a humble lawyer in the Berlin Prosecutor’s Office.

  Anneliese had telephoned him late in the evening to tell him; Klaus had after all been a friend of Paul’s at university. It was an extraordinary telephone call: there was no grief, no hysteria; her voice was devoid of emotion, dead. When Klaus offered to come and see her the following morning, she said she wouldn’t be there and hung up.

  Klaus had thought it over for a minute and then dashed round to her building in the Scheunenviertel. The landlady tried to refuse him entry, saying there was no sound from her room and she must be sleeping, but Klaus barged upstairs, and after banging on her door, broke it down. As he expected, she was lying fully clothed on her bed with an empty medicine bottle on her bedside table.

  He had picked her up, slung her over his shoulder and run the five hundred metres to St Hedwig’s Hospital. He was in time: they pumped her stomach, and she lived.

  He had stayed with her all night, and the following day packed her into his small Opel to take her to the little village that he used to visit on summer holidays with his mama. It was in the mountains of Silesia, near the Czech border. The woman who ran the guest house remembered him: Klaus was memorable even at fourteen – he had been a great clumsy giant at that age. Klaus and his angel spent a glorious week together while she recovered. He had to lie to his office, claiming that his mother was ill. She was too ashamed of what she had tried to do to get in contact with her own parents, at least at first
. It was idyllic: the mountain, the lake, the trees, the cows heading out to the steeply sloped pastures after their morning milking, the slow peace of the village. Eventually the week had to end, Klaus had to return to work, and Anneliese insisted on going back to her family, but over the following weeks and months Klaus looked after her. Nothing was too much trouble for him. He seemed to give her the sense of security, of comfort, of reliability that she needed. She improved in front of his eyes.

  The day he had asked her to marry him had been the most frightening of his life, and then the most joyful when she had said yes. A few months later she broke it off. Although heartbroken, truthfully he wasn’t surprised; he had always known that she had only agreed to marry him in a moment of weakness.

  This summer she had come to him once more. And she would again, in time. He thought of her as his angel, but actually he was her guardian angel, faithfully coming to her aid. It was hardly an equal basis for a relationship, but this was not a relationship of equals. He wasn’t worthy of her; he knew that. But if he was patient, patient and watchful, she would need him again and he would be there. It was their destiny.

  So he had tried to force himself to stay away and wait. But it was difficult and that night, the day after his mother had died, it was very difficult. Especially now that he had seen her with the Englishman. How he detested that man! He so badly wanted to storm in there, arrest de Lancey and take her in his arms. But he knew that if he did that he would switch from guardian angel to bitter enemy, and it would be harder than ever to win her back.

  No, there was nothing to do but stand outside the church, listen to the nightingale and watch the darkened windows of de Lancey’s flat.

  Hatred welled up inside him, mixing deliciously with love and grief.

  20

  Conrad strolled up Bendlerstrasse, past the purposeful bulk of the War Ministry, and stepped out of the bright sunlight into the cool of the lobby of the Casino Club. Despite its name, the Casino Club was not a glitzy gambling den but rather an ancient establishment in which the Prussian aristocracy could gather while they were in Berlin. Theo’s father and grandfather had been members.