Just as I was knotting my tie, I heard a knock at the front door. I hoped it was Mrs Cornelius or even Putzi Hanfstaengl. I had decided to tell them everything, even about Prince Freddy’s blackmail. In my circumstances it was just as well to throw oneself wholly on the mercy of one’s friends.
I opened the door, a word of greeting on my lips. But instead of a friend I found two uniformed policemen saluting me politely. They seemed a little surprised to see me smiling. One had a typical round Bavarian face, nurtured on good beer. The other was taller, an amiable wolf.
‘Thank goodness,’ I said. ‘Just the chaps I want to see.’
A little baffled by my reaction, they asked if I had noticed any intruders in the building. I was immediately relieved. Obviously I had not been singled out. Other residents had reported the same problems.
Yes, I said, I was pretty sure I had been burgled but had no idea what might be missing. Murmuring politely, the policemen came into the apartment, glanced around, and then asked me if I would mind returning with them to make a short statement at the Ettstrasse police headquarters. They were deference itself. They had already taken this liberty with some of my neighbours. It would only be a matter of minutes. They could talk to me here, but the stenographer at the station could take down the details.
I told them there was little more I could offer. I had not noticed anything missing. Was their suspect some sort of pervert who merely enjoyed entering other people’s apartments? They were a trifle insistent. They said how extremely sorry they were. These things had to be reported at the station. Those were the rules. The gesture on my part would simplify their overloaded work schedule. They promised I would be back in time for lunch. Perhaps I could also bring my identification papers, which would be formally needed?
At length I could only acquiesce. I asked for a few moments and went to the bathroom. I splashed some water on my face, took another quick, deep sniff of restorative, put a little extra in my secret pocket, should I need it on the way home, replaced the packet in the usual hole under the sink, found my papers and returned to my living room where the policemen awaited me. I still had no suspicion of what was to come.
* * * *
FORTY
You say there is nothing to fear from the East? I say you are searching in the wrong places. Look to Australia or China or South-East Asia, not to Russia or her empire, who will always be European, for it is Christendom herself that Russia defends, just as her free Cossacks ensured her boundaries for centuries. For it is written that the borders were drawn upon the world by God’s own finger tracing them as He traced the mosaics of our history.
For a while I forgot these things. I forgot them in Odessa.
Things I had forgotten in Odessa: I had forgotten so much in Odessa. I gave up the memory of my simple, lustful wanton life, my Golden Age. This was not what I had planned. But in my despair I began to remember again. I have no memory, no memory of that other. Routines are performed, but I forget their origins. My rituals sustain me. I breathed the roses of forgetfulness in that ancient isle, the sweet isle of sanctuary. Believe me, I am not compromising you. Have you ever heard me complain? Nobody wants to know what happened. That’s show business, says Brady the child-killer. Is there some primitive sense they have that by killing us they empower themselves? There are more terrible ideas than this, I suppose. But they behave like film stars, these secret service interrogators, these prison guards. Salachti. I read what I could in the camps but most of what they gave me was not exactly designed to stimulate the mind but rather to reduce it. There are teachers who take great joy in passing on wisdom. But we must not forget the other kind of teacher, who loves to repress knowledge, to leave us more ignorant and brutal than themselves. Guilty or not, few deserved to be the props for the showmanship of illiterates or sadists.
‘Pyat?’ He was sarcastic. ‘Are you sure your name isn’t Finif?’
I understood him all too well. He held up five fingers and then made the old sign for the Devil.
We are our own country, we, the exiles. Our past and present are held in common, as is our pain, but we hold disparate notions of the future. Some of us expect to return, to pick up the threads of our lives exactly as they were the day we were taken away. Others anticipate their old world improved and cleansed. But I know what it would mean for me once I got back. I dream about it but the dreams are not always pleasant. In the most recent dream Esmé sits naked, reading aloud from the Bible in Hebrew while my mother listens. She is not the old fraud I saw that time but my real mother whom I waved goodbye to from the Kiev train. Finif! I knew that insult. Five. Fiinf.
‘What’ll you give me for half a sawbuck.’ He was grinning, this Yankee shyster. He held up a five-dollar bill. ‘A fin?’
‘A herring for a tin,’ I said. ‘Don’t insult me. Get out of my shop.’
* * * *
FORTY-ONE
What would make me so lonely, here among friends, where Mrs Cornelius herself sees me almost every day, is always available to me? What makes a man forever alone? What determines his fate? All that is mine, my faith, my memory, my hope, should invigorate me, make me one with the world. Instead, I feel like one who stands in line, shuffling forward every few minutes, to his death. I, who have escaped every transport, every selection, who have escaped death so many times, fear it. As retribution? No, for I shall ascend to heaven, to that divine moment of forgetting when soul and mind take separate turnings and identity dissolves.
What is restored to us in death? It cannot be anything but truth. It can only be the ultimate moment of knowing. Or is it the first moment of not knowing, of the death of self, the end of this witless struggling?
I leave my life and my inventions to anyone who can put them to good use. The rest I leave to Portobello Road and the secondhand trade, for recycling, to comfort strangers and the unborn.
* * * *
FORTY-TWO
She had just been to see Robert Donut in The Adventures of Tartu. Had I seen it? I reminded her of Donut, she said. The film could have been based on my life. Was I ever in the Blitz? Of course, I said, but the film must have come out when I was away from London. What do you remember most? she asked.
The ash in my nostrils, I said. And how it clogged my throat. It made it very hard to see.
I have never been able to get rid of that smell, that sensation of forever being on the brink of taking my last breath. The ash flows over the world. It flows over Dachau and Treblinka and Auschwitz. It flows over Berlin and Dresden. It flows over London and Coventry, over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It fills the streets of Shanghai and Delhi. It will always be that ash. It is impossible to remove from your skin and hair, no matter what soap you wash with. Soap was always in short supply, naturally. Even the soap seemed made of ashes. We are forever breathing in the remains of our ancestors and of our enemies.
‘Tell me, Herr Peters. Are you familiar with the Dachau School?’ asks my master. ‘With Taschner, Spitzweig and so on?’
‘This was a school? I heard it was a munitions factory.’
‘No, no.’ He is amused. ‘They were artists. Very good ones. Your friend Doctor Hanfstaengls father used to sell the prints in his gallery.’
‘Painting is not one of my areas of expertise. I am a scientist.’
‘Of course. Just as am I.’
* * * *
They called it Vernichtung durch Arbeit. They wanted to make me Uneingeteilt. But there was always too much of me. I was not one of those with unwertes Leben. For me there was always Sonderbehandlung. A disheartening, a disembowelling. They loot me. They take out my organs of creativity. They take out my mind. They brutalise me and in so doing destroy small pieces of me. They sensationalise, making free with my creations. Stealing my images. Stealing my life. Stealing my eyes. Groping my soul. They are greedy for any part of my vitality they can discover. And they call this homage? There are those who pay me back in kind. Who give me stimulus. Who give me respect. Who take a line and tie new k
nots in it. Who make new stars, new trails, new nations, adding to the seas, refreshing the oceans, making something of themselves, something of myself.
We heard the new Oberführer was Deubel, the Commandant, but we never saw him. Franz Hoffmann was a crook they said. Obersturmführer Ruppert was worse.
What did I do in Tegernsee? What was so wrong?
* * * *
FORTY-THREE
There was a period, I forget exactly what the date was, when priests kept arriving. There were all kinds, at first from the evangelical religions, but then came many Catholics, after the Pope’s encyclical. He doesn’t seem to make up his mind, they said. Bishops, cardinals and so on came in on the trains. Many were made to work on the Plantage, growing food for the Gestapo and the SS. I learned later they sold it at a profit. They made them wear crowns of barbed wire and carry heavy beams of wood. They got the Jews to spit on them as they went by.
I heard some got away. Some were ‘Auf der Flucht erschossen’, killed while trying to escape.
Es gibt einen Weg zur Freiheit. Seine Meilensteine heissen: Gehorsam. Fleiss. Ehrlichkeit. Ordnung. Sauberkeit. Nüchtemheit. Wahrheit. Opfersinn und Liebe zum Vaterland.
* * * *
FORTY-FOUR
Nobody wants to know what happened. They wish to learn how many tanks fought at the Battle of the Bulge but not how many died in Belsen. They want to know the names of every general on the German or British side, but couldn’t tell you one name of a concentration camp commandant. Names which were meaningless to us are full of romance and association for them. Names which were of the greatest importance to us are hard for even the historians to recall. What did it matter to Hitler when he knew that at least the war against the Jews had been won? So he thought. What he could not have borne to contemplate is that, like some mad scientist in a movie who passes more and more energy through a monster he is attempting to kill, he only strengthens the monster. Is Hampstead Garden Village full of greater numbers of folkish maypole dancers than it was in 1930? Even the church isn’t used today. More residents of that idealised English village use the synagogue just down the road. It is the same with Hollywood. The place is filled with mock-Tudor mansions and granite keeps. For years I remained disappointed in Sherwood Forest and all the other sites I had first seen in Douglas Fairbanks films, because of course Sherwood Forest was in northern California and most of the Merry Men were from Maine. England seemed a mean, grey place after the movies. Instead of Fairbanks, Coleman or Flynn I found myself in a world of cold proprietary and semi-apologetic politesse, those early Hitchcock movies where almost all the action is played out on one set. Usually a pub. Usually in a mean backstreet. Usually in the rain. And too few Brighton Rock blondes to help you through the worst of it, though I of course had Mrs Cornelius, at least some of the time. Without that woman, I would not exist.
It was useless for me to protest in that place. He thought all Spaniards were Jews.
* * * *
FORTY-FIVE
‘I gather there have been many burglaries in the area?’
I asked them to sit down, to have some coffee. But they were on duty. They refused. I found my American passport. Most of my other papers were still hidden in Corneliusstrasse. ‘And after we have been promised improved law and order!’
‘The crimes are mainly directed at individuals,’ I was told politely. ‘Certain kinds of people are singled out. It’s the current climate. Munich will settle down soon.’
‘So there is no pattern?’
‘Certainly there’s a pattern. That’s the sad thing. We don’t condone it either.’ A sigh. ‘We believe in protecting all law-abiding citizens of every race and religion. But a formal report must be made. It’s the rules.’ A small shrug. ‘Better wear your overcoat, sir. Chilly this morning.’
I locked my door carefully behind me. The pleasant ruddy-faced policeman tested it to make sure. Satisfied, he gestured for me to precede him.
‘We’ll have you back here well in time for lunch,’ said the lean one.
‘I would hope so,’ I said. ‘I have a meeting with a director. You probably know that I’m a film actor. The “Winnetou” pictures?’
‘I was a great Karl May fan as a kid,’ said the pleasant policeman.
‘Very good of you, sir, to do this.’ In spite of his manner, the wolfish policeman seemed a reasonable man. ‘These ruffians spoil things for everybody.’
We went downstairs and got into their car. The morning was beautifully cool. The air was unseasonably sharp. A civilian driver sat in the driving seat. He did not greet me. They opened the back door. I climbed in. I sat between them.
‘We are going where? To which station did you say?’
‘To headquarters. To the old “lions’ pit”.’ The ruddy policeman laughed. Because of its other street entrance, the Ettstrasse Polizeipräsidium was popularly known in Munich as the Löwengrube, or lions’ pit. I was still not alarmed. I was confident the famous German love of formal law would keep me safe, as I had committed no crime.
‘I have only the greatest admiration for Munich’s police corps, both civil and political,’ I said conversationally as we rode along. ‘I’m sure you’ll soon have the burglars behind bars.’ The policemen made no response. The atmosphere became less congenial, and I began to feel a little nervous. They, in turn, seemed embarrassed. I simply could not read their mood. I thought I had best remind them of my connections as subtly as possible. The shadow was rising in me again, the sense of panic so hard to control and almost impossible to recollect. We who have been in its power are despised by those who have never experienced it.
‘I’m a good friend of your Chief, Ernst Röhm. I’m sure he’ll be glad to know you’re looking after me so well.’ Perhaps I should not have mentioned my association with the Stabschef. It would have been better to have invoked Baldur von Schirach. I had to take control of myself. I would be home in an hour or so, and all this would be over.
‘Not our Chief, as it happens.’ The first policeman appeared anxious to make that clear. ‘But we all like praise, sir . . .’
‘Ten at the most,’ said the wolfish one. I think he had misheard me. ’A tick of the clock.’ He did not meet my eye but stared gloomily out of the window at a tram we were passing. On the pale blue side of the big, streamlined vehicle was an advertisement for my new Western. I wondered if this visit had anything to do with my recent filming. Could Freddy and Kitty have deliberately given me over to the police? I felt queasy. Other enemies must be considered. Had Kitty’s mother’s ‘dossier’ fallen into official hands? Röhm might have been careless. He might even have said something to Hitler. Had the Gestapo themselves searched my apartment?
I was sleepless and shaky. This was how the police always arrested you. Not with shouts and blows and threats, but with polite requests for your cooperation. My emotions were in turmoil. I reminded myself that if I was in serious trouble, they would not have sent two ordinary uniformed chaps. It would have been SA or Gestapo, without doubt. The Geheime Staatspolizei dealt with political issues. They would not be worried about minor burglaries or even pornographic movies. I pulled myself together as best I could and returned to my earlier, more formal manner.
The car stopped outside the tall, classical stonework of the Ettstrasse headquarters. The policemen politely helped me from the car. The entrance, imposing and solid, reassured me, and again I was reminded of the well-known German respect for law and order, convinced they would play by the rules. I had done nothing wrong. I was a victim, not a criminal. These chaps were decent upholders of traditional justice.
We went straight past the reception sergeant, who nodded to us and raised his hand in an enthusiastic ‘Heil Hitler’ salute, so I knew I could not be under arrest. The policemen returned the salute rather less energetically. We walked down Corridor B, heading no doubt for the criminal investigation offices.
But we did not stop at Corridor B. At the end of this passage was a set of doors which the red-fa
ced policeman stooped to unlock with a special key. ‘Short cut,’ he murmured. Descending a flight of steps we found ourselves in a poorly lit passage with a low roof. The doors on either side had peepholes and little grilled windows. I recognised them as police cells. My heart began to sink. But again we did not stop. We quickly walked the length of the corridor and came to door number 107, on which the vulpine policeman knocked. It was opened, and we went in.
From somewhere behind me I heard a thin, womanish scream, a kind of sob, and then silence. I felt a moment of fatalistic alarm, yet continued to force myself to believe the best. I was a complainant, not a criminal. Because some prisoner had become hysterical did not mean they were being harmed!
The doors were quickly shut behind me and relocked. Suddenly the policemen were at attention on either side of me. The room was full of young men in shirtsleeves, rushing about, picking up telephones, slamming them down, inspecting files, yelling information at one another. Clearly none of them had been in their jobs long. They seemed to have no idea what they were supposed to be doing.
The Vengeance of Rome - [Between The Wars 04] Page 59