The Song Before It Is Sung

by Justin Cartwright

  Conrad sits on one of the high stools with a croissant and a cappuccino, the best in London, produced by an old Gaggia. Soon he sees Francine peering in. He stands up and goes to the door and kisses her briefly.

  'What would you like?'

  'What are you having?'

  'A cappuccino and a croissant.'

  'I'll have an espresso. Single.'

  When he brings over the espresso they sit in silence for a few moments. He looks at her to see if there is any obvious change.

  'What do you think?' she asks finally.

  'Firstly, I am terribly sorry it didn't work out with John.'

  'Not even a little bit pleased?'

  'No.'

  'That's sweet of you.'

  'Do you still love him?'

  'I never loved him. I just wanted a better life. Things were getting on top of me.'

  'Including John.'

  'Ho, ho. Same old Conrad. No, I felt desperate.'

  He looks at her face; under the neon it is pale and wary. The familiar face that spent nearly ten years next to his and then positioned itself next to John's. The essence of a relationship is located here, in the face. That is why whores never kiss. It's odd that the sexual organs are the focus of attention in pornography, when kissing is a far more intimate activity. The Romans knew that. When Emily put her tongue in his mouth that first night, he was shocked and thrilled.

  'It's not because of you. I was overwhelmed. But it is because of you that John and I have split up. He asked me if I still loved you, and I said yes. I couldn't lie. I realised it that day after all, but I was too stubborn to tell you.'

  'Ah, that last, mythical day.'

  'Don't mock.'

  'Can I say one thing about this baby?'

  'Please.'

  She looks ready for a blow.

  'Nothing should be decided on the basis of who the father is. Is that possible, anyway, to find out?'

  'Not really. Not at this stage.'

  'Presumably at this stage abortion, termination, is relatively simple?'

  'Yes.'

  She looks down at the counter.

  'Fran, I mean it. Whatever you decide, it's not going to be because it is or isn't mine. One thing is sure, it's yours.'

  'OK.'

  'And?'

  'I can't decide. I so want a baby. But as we know, it's not simple.'

  'Because I am a wastrel and you have a career.'

  'No, Conrad. I don't think that. Maybe I never did. I just thought you sort of disregarded me. Who is your new girlfriend?'

  'She's just someone I met. She's called Emily. Trust me, it's not going to last. It was just a reaction. She thinks I am good-looking and I'm grateful.'

  'You are good-looking.'

  'And you are beautiful.'

  'I am fading fast.'

  'Just give me a couple of days to think it over and then we must decide what to do.'

  'We?'

  'We always wanted to have a child.'

  'Oh Conrad.'

  She is crying. He holds her hand. She looks so miserable, so crushed, that he feels his own eyes welling.

  'What a pair we are,' he says.

  There is kickboxing on the giant television screen at the end of the bar. He watches determinedly.

  'I could do locum work until the baby is born.'

  'Whoa. You're the one with the career path, remember.'

  'Conrad, I have to tell you how dreadfully sorry I am for what's happened. All I can say is that it has been a terrible, terrible mistake. I don't expect anything from you. I don't deserve it, but I had to tell you face to face. I've got to go now.'

  The colour is rising on her throat.

  'Franny, always rushing.'

  They walk up Frith Street hand in hand as they used to. But Conrad knows that nothing will ever be truly the same. He stops himself from pointing out the spot where Mendel and Elizabeth met to talk about Axel von Gottberg.

  They turn into Greek Street. As she releases his hand, he feels this uncoupling deeply, the feeling you have when sex is finished, a symbolic separation which (the pain of the past minutes has made him extremely sensitive to these emotions) seems to speak of mortality, because each separation, each parting, depletes the material that binds you together. You know that you can never gather up the shards of innocence and blitheness to make something whole. And this, rather than the moment of death itself, is probably the meaning of mortality. He reaches over to kiss her, but she half ducks away from him and his lips just brush her cheek.

  She turns suddenly under an arch, and she is gone. Is she going now to talk to John to tell him she is pregnant? It could be John's baby, after all. He can't bear the idea that she may have conceived with John's sperm. But nature is coldly undiscriminating; you can conceive a baby by a rapist or with a whore or in a one-night stand. What Mendel, who was eating lunch just there with Elizabeth sixty-five years ago, knew is that there is no generous intelligence at large in nature or anywhere else. At that time, just a few years before his death, Axel von Gottberg still kept faith with the idea of spirit making its way in the world of beings and things towards some conclusion. The chaste, clear, barbarian eye, as Stefan George the poet put it, could see these things.

  As Axel sat with Elizabeth gazing at the electrified fence, the tower, the prison blocks of Sachsenhausen, had he realised at last what he was up against in this world?

  Was it possible for them to imagine what was coming? Mendel discovered very early on that awful things were in process, while von Gottberg still chose to believe in the new order that was coming in Germany. But did he lose his faith outside Sachsenhausen? Did he forsake the fable of blood and desire? After Elizabeth rejected him, after his Oxford friends turned away, and after the FBI trailed him in Washington, Axel von Gottberg came back to Germany and later that year, four weeks after war was declared, married Dietlof Goetz's sister, Liselotte, in the Pleskow village church. All the foresters and cowmen still left on the estate, formally dressed, and the village women and children in their Sunday clothes, formed a guard of honour and threw flowers from their gardens in their way as Wicht the coachman drove them from the church to the house in the shooting brake, which was garlanded with flowers. Pulling the brake were the black and grey horses, Donner and Blitz.

  In the pictures von Gottberg looks happy enough. Axel's best man is his brother, Berndt, who was to describe him as a traitorous dog less than four years later. Berndt has a duelling scar beside his mouth, which seems comical, even absurd to Conrad. Von Gottberg's father is not present, but in the formal wedding photograph his sisters and his mother sit on either side of the bride and groom, with scores of relatives all around. Upper-class people have extensive family ties, and their members are summoned for these occasions: like tastefully dressed migratory birds, they obey the summons. Within two months Liselotte is pregnant.

  Everyone who has children says your life changes, nothing prepares you for the reality. But also having children can be self-centred. Some of Conrad's friends imagine that they have become creators, they have been trusted to keep the sacred flame alight: zeugen, to beget, which was a big idea with the German poets. They would beget a new society.

  Later that afternoon before Emily has to go to pick up the children from school, which Conrad imagines is besieged every afternoon by huge four-wheel-drive vehicles until the tiny hostages are released, showered with lavish praise and equipped with their suspiciously accomplished works of art, she comes to the flat above the bakery. She is drunk.

  'I had lunch with an old chum,' she explains cheerfully.

  She has to take a phone call in the middle of their love-making. She is lying on her side and he is behind her. The shape of her back and thighs seems to be expressly formed for this. The conversation is short and tense. Quickly she gets up and dresses.

  'Sorry, got to go. Love ya loads,' she says, fastening her skirt and then running her hands through her hair.

  She bangs the door shut. Perhaps one
of the children is ill or perhaps the mysterious Dion requires something of her. His penis has responded modestly, by retreating into itself. It's a defensive posture. Very strange how it seems not wholly dependent, like a small country whose foreign affairs are managed by a bigger, more sensible state. Like Andorra or Monaco or San Marino.

  Conrad considers his life, so changed in a few days. He is sexually involved with a whacked Chelsea girl (girl-woman would be more accurate); his wife is pregnant and hoping for reconciliation; it is possible he is a father. Also a man called Ernst Fritsch claims to have knowledge of the film of Axel von Gottberg being hanged. There is no obvious link between any of these facts. The flat has been quiet for weeks, just the papers and letters moving and drifting, but now the place is the focus of energy, like those lay lines that new-age folk believe bisect the country at key places.

  When he comes back with some milk and stamps, Tony steps out.

  'Your bird was in a hurry.'

  'She had to pick up her son from school.'

  'She weren't properly dressed, you dog.'

  'Jesus, Tony. Stick to baking.'

  'Hehwah. I've got a nice focaccia for you. You got to keep your stremf up, mate.'

  In Tony's eyes he's gone from recluse to dirty dog: Fuck a rat, it's the quiet ones you gotta watch out for.

  The Bangladeshi who owns the corner shop is growing a beard. On the early evidence the plan seems to be to grow it straight down and untended in the religious fashion; back in the flat he wonders why it is that people are always looking for the incorrigible proposition. He remembers Mendel telling him that he took great comfort from the idea that life has no meaning. It frees you from irrational practices, like growing a beard as a billboard for your views.

  Emily's Holly Golightly behaviour does not trouble him. For the moment the arrangement, unclear though it is, suits him fine. She calls, very cheerful, and suggests they carry on later where they left off.

  'OK. I'm just going through the papers. I may have to go to Berlin soon.'

  'Cool. They have some great clubs there. They really, really know how to party.'

  In her world cities have no historical or artistic resonance; they are simply places to go and get mashed. Having a laugh is an imperative for these people: they fall off ski lifts; they run their jet-skis on to coral after too many rum punches. And they get off their faces in clubs in Berlin. So he imagines.

  He starts writing a letter to Mr Fritsch, using his dictionary. He intends to say that he would be very much interested in meeting Mr Fritsch to discuss the filming both of the People's Court and the executions. Could Mr Fritsch suggest a suitable place to meet? He will discuss financial matters when he knows what Mr Fritsch is suggesting. He wants to check his German with a friend, but he decides he must keep his enquiries secret. He writes:

  Sehr Geehrter Herrn Fritsch, Ich bedanke ihnen für ihre Brief. Das ist für mir, wie historicher Forscher, sehr bedeutend. Darf ich bei ihnen in Berlin eine Besuch machen? Wenn siefilr mich etwas zeigen kann, dan kann wir uber Finanzen besprechung. Mit freundlichen Grüssen.

  Conrad thinks it is important to mention money right away: he imagines Ernst Fritsch in an East Berlin tenement desperate for some cash. As a Nazi he would not have received a pension and life in the new Germany is hard for the Ossis anyway. He seals the envelope and goes out again to post it, hoping it is not too full of errors.

  He remembers Mendel writing that to be understood you have to share a common language and have the possibility of intimate communication. By the time war broke out, it seems that the plea von Gottberg had made for trust was misunderstood. But also it became starkly apparent that he and Mendel shared neither a common past nor common feelings.

  15

  WHEN BRITAIN AND France declared war on Germany on 3 September 1939, Oxford lost colour. It faded like an old carpet. For Elya Mendel the finer points of academic philosophy seemed not only trivial, but even ridiculous now. Other young dons were leaving town as officers, but he was not able to apply because of his foreign birth. He tried to take up the Foreign Office's offer of work, but they seemed to have forgotten him. He waited in Oxford, reporting to the Town Hall to roll bandages and check gas masks while the Foreign Office went through its checks. His birth in Riga was a handicap. He thought of moving to the United States; he was frightened of what might happen to him if the Nazi invasion took place. He wrote to Hamburger suggesting that some institution might be persuaded to employ him.

  It was a miserable winter. His rooms were always cold and Oxford, despite Lionel's crazed bonhomie, appeared to be sinking into depression. Then he received a letter from the Foreign Office saying that it did not wish to employ him in any capacity. For a week he remained in bed. But — as Conrad sees so often in the correspondence — some important figure intervened on his behalf and he was asked to go to London after all to advise the Russian section. He wrote to Hamburger that he was scared of bombs, but went to work in London with joy. He had been shaken by his rejection, which was the confirmation of his foreignness even though he was a fellow of All Souls.

  My parents saw All Souls as their own acceptance in England. I haven't dared tell them that my first six years in Riga have returned me to the ranks of the alien. Nothing like a war for the noxious gases to seep out of the cracks.

  There is no mention of von Gottberg. The start of war was evidently the end of understanding. It may have been convenient, in the same way that families can forget after a bereavement, each member seeing for their own reasons an opportunity for an overdue dissolution of ties, something that happened at high speed when Conrad's mother died. He thinks that for Mendel the threat to the Jews was sufficient reason to forget his old pal. It was a threat that von Gottberg had fostered in a small way with his ill-advised letter. Von Gottberg was aware that he had lost Mendel's cherished esteem and he almost certainly knew that Mendel had briefed against him in Washington.

  Conrad, living in the mouse-nibbled margins of London just a few minutes from great wealth and imposing solidity, sees the city not as home, but as a huge agglomeration of human frailty and greed, held in uneasy suspension. We live by assumptions which in reality we know nothing of, but our faith is as firm as that of religious fundamentalists. War demonstrates - perhaps it's designed to demonstrate - that we should not take any assumptions for granted. Elya Mendel was particularly sensitive to the terrible possibilities of history, while for von Gottberg six hundred uninterrupted years in Pleskow must have suggested something entirely different. For a Jew, six hundred settled years are an eternity.

  Conrad has never felt settled in London. Wherever his home is, it is not here. London is too big, too burdened, to be held in the mind whole. He doesn't really know how planets work, but he sees London as a gaseous body bound together in some mysterious fashion like a planet.

  The mystery of Emily's life is being revealed: Dion, who calls menacingly, is her drugs counsellor. He is himself a recovering addict. Crack was his downfall, apparently. Emily thinks of drug addictions as somehow honourable, a sign of higher striving. Dion has become a zealot for living clean, as he puts it. He has a hold over Emily, established when she was in rehab. She probably had sex with him; she seems to have had a lot of sex. In theory it doesn't worry him, but in practice he finds he wants to know not how many she has slept with, but on what basis she makes her choices. Their first encounter suggests that she doesn't need much evidence at all. What was it she saw, or glimpsed, in him? Whacked though she is, he has become very fond of her. Her calm, practical sexual expertise is at odds with her girlish, upbeat manner. It's as though all the categories in her world have blurred, so that life is now one long, looped film containing sex, drink, marijuana, ex-boyfriends, music, inchoate creative impulses -poetry, screenplays, painting are mentioned - all these melding into a whole that keeps revolving seamlessly.

  And sometimes at night Conrad finds that his picture of the People's Court is like that too, played endlessly, as von Gottberg stands w
ith his hands crossed speaking calmly and quietly, crossing his hands again, then speaking calmly again. These few minutes go round and round and they are unbearable because Conrad knows and von Gottberg knows that if the film stops he will be slowly hanged from a meat-hook, whatever he says, however considerate his demeanour. But something sustains von Gottberg and makes him calm. Even though he has small children and a young wife, and despite the fact that he has been tortured. And this is a mystery.

  While von Gottberg was establishing himself in Berlin, his new wife stayed at Pleskow. She was welcomed by the family, especially warmly by von Gottberg's older sister, Adelheid, whose first marriage ended when her Jewish husband went insane in New York. He had been taken to Bellevue one night after he set their apartment on the Upper East Side alight. Adelheid told her new sister-in-law that the sight of her husband in handcuffs being pushed into a Black Maria had broken her heart. A financial blunder had unhinged him. At least he wasn't going to come back to Germany to face another kind of madness. Adi had visited him in Bellevue where he sat silent. Axel had visited him more recently in New York and reported that he did not recognise him. The doctors had given him a new treatment, electro-convulsive therapy.

  Von Gottberg took a small flat near the zoo and sometimes, when he had to go to the main building in Wilhelmstrasse, walked the whole length of the Tiergarten, passing at last beneath the quadriga on the Brandenburg Gate. He went back to Pleskow when he could, taking the train to Schwerin to be met by the coachman; or sometimes he drove up in his car. His spirits always lifted as the house came into view, firstly across the lake, and then as they turned into the drive, by the oaks and the huge barns. The first thing he did when it was not too cold was to swim in the lake. The water had a unique taste and smelled of gently decomposing vegetable matter and aquatic plants, a scent that took him instantly to his childhood. Lake water, his own lake too. Next to the bathing hut was a wooden tea-house and there he and Liselotte, his mother and his sisters would meet over English tea. Liselotte said that there was always laughter and music although Axel was gloomy about the war. The panzer rush through Belgium and into France would make it more difficult to remove Hitler, he said.