Diary of a Dead Man on Leave

by David Downing

  I had more than the Nazis to worry about. Over the last few years, many comrades have arrived at clandestine meetings only to discover that their work abroad is over, that they are needed back in Moscow for “reassignment” or “retraining” or “review” or any of the other words Yezhov and his crew use to disguise the usually fatal fall from official favor. Lately, I have, somewhat to my surprise, begun to wonder whether I would obey such a summons. This would seem strange to my comrades, most of whom have, like me, spent the last twenty years believing that life outside the party would be essentially meaningless. It’s a belief that’s hard to abandon, and a year ago I would have had no hesitation in taking the train back to Moscow. Which, of course, is probably why no one has asked me to do so.

  I digress. After arriving in Dortmund with almost two hours to spare, I walked down to the river for a look at the meeting place—an open-air, tree-shaded café close to one of the bridges—and then back into the city center in search of a good coffee shop. I found one with wonderful pastries near the Marienkirche and sat outside in the sunshine, sipping at the strong Viennese coffee and heroically struggling to keep the cream cake from oozing all over my shirt.

  Someone had left Friday’s edition of the Frankfurter Zeitung on the adjoining table, and I glanced through it in search of the paper’s once-famous liberalism. It was gone. Like the Völkischer Beobachter and our local daily, if a trace more elegantly, the Zeitung was spewing out Nazi propaganda. The lead story was the new “Strength through Joy Motorcar,” the subject of Hitler’s speech on Thursday morning, which had, like all his broadcast speeches, effectively brought the country to a halt. There’s no doubt that the figures are impressive—the car’s going to be on sale next year for around 1,000 marks, and families will be able to get their hands on one for weekly payments of around five. Calling it the People’s Car is another touch of genius—Hitler understands that National Socialism needs to appear socialistic, even as he seeks to destroy everything in Germany that actually fits the description.

  I digress again. At a quarter to twelve, I walked back down to the river and ordered myself another, much inferior, coffee at the outdoor café, and took a seat at one of several wrought iron tables that looked out across the almost dry bed of the Emscher. In the old days, we used to use novels as recognition signals in Germany, and before I left New York, the local ILS office spent several days trying to identify writers who were certain to remain unbanned. Goethe was the only one they’d come up with, so the previous weekend I’d purchased the copy of Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, which I now laid down on the table in front of me.

  A few minutes later, she walked across the river bridge. I knew her as Elise, which probably wasn’t her real name. Like many comrades, she’s someone I’ve come across at irregular intervals over the years, but never really gotten to know. I think I first met her at Karl Liebknecht House in 1922 or 1923, and our paths have crossed in Moscow on several occasions—the last, I think, in 1932. She’s probably about thirty-five years old, with shoulder-length brown hair, brown eyes, and a figure just the right side of plump. Today, she was wearing a simply cut cream dress and cream shoes with blue bows, all of which made the most of her suntan. She certainly looked nothing like a Comintern regional agent.

  She steered herself through the tables toward me. “Josef,” she said, smiling and leaning over to kiss my cheek. “Have you finished your coffee? Let’s walk.”

  As we started down the path beside the river, she put her arm through mine, and I felt a jolt of something—surprise, I suppose. It’s been so long since I had that sort of casual physical contact with a woman, the sort of nonsexual contact that assumes an existing affection, whether sexual or platonic. It sounds absurd, but that touch was probably the most disturbing thing I experienced all day.

  If she noticed, she gave no sign. Following standard protocol, she began by telling me the place and time of the next treff—if for any reason, we had to split up in a hurry, I would know when and where to go.

  I then reported on the situation in Hamm, slipping back into the language of the party with an ease that felt almost insulting. I told her that there was considerable discontent on the shop floor, but that this was being channeled into purely economic demands by a combination of Labor Front carrots and the fear of Gestapo sticks, that, in short, there were no objective conditions for conducting political work. I said that there were probably enough committed ex-party members and sympathizers in the yards to set up an underground group for sabotage work, but that finding out exactly who they were would be like playing several games of Russian roulette with the same gun.

  I told her about Dariusz Müller, that I thought he might have recognized me, but didn’t know from where or when. One or more of our exiles living in Moscow might remember something useful, so could she put in a request for some digging?

  She said she would. “Moscow’s looking for optimism,” she said, without apparent irony.

  “They won’t find much here,” I said.

  “I know. Everyone agrees about that.”

  “So what next?” I asked.

  “You know how it works. They’ll go through the reports, then make their decision. If war breaks out, just sit tight. If it doesn’t, you’ll probably get new instructions next month.”

  After we parted in the city center, I walked back to the station and caught the local train for Hamm. Sitting by a window as the countryside unfolded, I felt a strange mixture of elation and unfocused grief. The worst had not happened—I had another month of grace, of living what passed for a normal life in Hitler’s Germany. It might be—it is—unreal. I am, of course, playing a part. But like the actor who loses himself in a particular role, I am feeling more at home in my role than my real life. I enjoy my work at the yard and the feelings of achieving something useful that accompany it. I cherish all those conversations, trivial and otherwise, which I share with my fellow workers in the canteens and bars. I have enjoyed, and am still enjoying, getting to know Walter. And I love these hours in my room, sitting in the armchair or close by the window, indulging in those greatest of luxuries—reflection and doubt.

  Sunday, May 29

  Erich has been arrested.

  The first I knew that something serious had happened was when Anna thundered up the stairs late this afternoon and asked if I could keep an eye on Walter while she went out. He was busy doing his homework downstairs, but just in case . . .

  I said of course I would. She offered no explanation for her sudden departure and, as I soon discovered, had said nothing to Walter either. But he knew his mother well enough to be worried. His math homework was finished, but mostly by me.

  Verena had also been pressed into emergency duty, and while she and I struggled to finish the half-produced supper on time, Walter and Marco commandeered the kitchen table for a board game. A single glance was enough to tell me that Walter had at least one ear cocked toward the front door and his mother’s eventual return.

  She finally came back around nine, looking decidedly careworn. Walter ran to greet her and was quickly shooed into the family’s part of the house. She told him to get ready for bed and thanked me for looking after him. I took my cue, and went back up to my room.

  About half an hour later she knocked on the door. I invited her in, and for the first time in our acquaintance, she agreed to take a chair. “Erich was arrested today,” she began. “Walter knows, so you should too.”

  She told me how it had happened. Erich and several of his friends from the Traveling Dudes had hitchhiked down to the Rothaargebirge on Friday evening for a weekend of hiking and camping. Late on Friday they had gotten involved in a shouting match with some members of the SA in a beer garden, but no punches were thrown, and the Dudes had thought nothing more of it. The storm troopers, however, had been less forgiving, and had alerted the local Kripo. These worthies had trailed the Dudes back to their mountain camp on the
Saturday evening and hunkered down in the surrounding bushes to enjoy the gang’s repertoire of anti-Nazi jokes and songs. Eventually, unable to tolerate any more slurs on their glorious leader, the mixed band of Kripo and storm troopers had emerged from hiding and attempted to arrest the youths. A fight had broken out, during which several Dudes escaped into the darkness and one SA man ended up in the campfire. Erich had received a blow on the back of the head and woken up in a police van an hour or so later. He and six others were now in a cell at the Dortmund Gestapo headquarters.

  When Anna recited one of the offensive couplets—“Get out your cudgels and come into town / and smash in the skulls of the bosses in brown”—I couldn’t resist a smile, and she noticed as much. “I could murder him,” she said, “but it’s hard not to feel proud of him too.”

  I smiled again, and we just looked at each other for a moment, sharing the recognition that we’d reached a new level of complicity.

  I asked what would happen next.

  She said the duty officer had told her Erich would be brought to court sometime in the next two weeks. “He’s one of the oldest in the group,” she added, “so he’ll get one of the stiffest sentences. Three months, at least, I should think. And of course he’ll lose his job.”

  I told her she shouldn’t worry overmuch about that—the way things were he’d have no trouble getting another one. “And unemployment . . .” I was going to say, would probably be the least of his worries.

  She picked up my unspoken thought perfectly. “We’ll be at war in a year, won’t we?” she half asked. “But will the English and French really fight for Czechoslovakia?”

  At this point, I made a conscious effort to draw back. It would have been so easy—so comforting—to continue this discussion, to share my belief that the German economy needed a war, that Hitler’s real ambitions were in the east, that the Soviet Union would have no choice but to fight. If her husband had been a Communist, then there was a good chance that she had been one too, and we would recognize each other in the ways we described how the world works. And that would have represented another, irreversible level of complicity, one I could not risk.

  “I don’t know,” I said in answer to her question, and she seemed to sense my retreat from openness. She got up to leave and thanked me for listening to a mother’s worries. I told her I’d be happy to look after Walter whenever she needed to visit Erich.

  Monday, May 30

  This morning’s breakfast was a dramatic affair. Ruchay was in the middle of spreading cherry preserves over his roll when he came upon Erich’s name in the list of those arrested in the Rothaargebirge. Knife suspended in midair, Ruchay read the appropriate bits out loud. “Did anyone know about this?” he asked the rest of us.

  I made the mistake of admitting I did. “Frau Gersdorff asked me to look after Walter while she went to see the police,” I explained, but Ruchay was far from mollified.

  “We should all have been informed,” he insisted.

  “I don’t see—” Barufka began, but at that moment Anna came back into the room with the second pot of coffee.

  “You should have told us about this,” Ruchay said angrily, waving the paper at her. “Not left us to read about it.”

  Her hand shook slightly in the act of refilling Gerritzen’s cup, but her voice was steady—and cold—as a rock. “I don’t believe it is any business of yours, Herr Ruchay,” she said.

  “Such behavior is everybody’s business,” he almost spluttered. “Particularly those of us who live under the same roof as your son. Something like this is bound to reflect badly on all of us.”

  “I’m sorry you feel like that,” she said quietly. “If you are not happy here, and you wish to leave without the required notice, I will of course understand.” And with that, she calmly walked out.

  I felt like applauding, but Ruchay was less impressed. He stared at his coffee for what seemed an eternity and then got up and left the room without touching it. The rest of us listened to him walk down the hall and heard the knock on the family connecting door. We couldn’t make out what he said to her, but it sounded for all the world like the hissing of snakes. He didn’t come back for his coffee.

  When I got back from work this evening, I found that Anna had gone to Dortmund, leaving Verena to cook and watch over Walter and Marco. She had left a message asking me to look after Walter and Andreas if she was not home by the time Verena and Marco left.

  Supper was a much quieter affair than breakfast. I was expecting more tantrums from Ruchay, but he seemed strangely deflated, and had considerably less to say than he usually does.

  Verena and Marco left after eight, and Walter was soon ensconced in my window seat. He was obviously upset about Erich’s arrest but trying hard to be grown-up about it. He kept asking, in various ways, what I thought would happen to his brother, and I kept saying I really didn’t know but that I doubted whether it would be anything terrible. “Because he’s not a Jew or a Communist?” Walter wanted to know.

  He talked about Erich, something he’d never done with me before. They’re obviously not extremely close—five years is a big gap, after all—but there seems no trace of envy or hostility. Walter’s angry with Erich for worrying and upsetting their mother, but he clearly admires his brother for the willful independence that leads him into such trouble. According to Walter, Erich’s a “doer” rather than a talker, but that doesn’t mean he’s stupid. “He says if you know how things work, you don’t need to know why.”

  We went down to check on Walter’s grandfather and had just made him a cup of chocolate when Anna returned. She told us Erich was fine and that he’d probably be appearing in court at the beginning of next week.

  I came back up here and wrote the above, conscious throughout of the feelings lurking at the back of my mind, feelings I have struggled to keep at bay throughout the day. There was another item in the paper this morning—a lurid, almost ecstatic account of the terror Japanese planes have been raining down on Canton for the last few days. The paper reported that five hundred people have been killed, nine hundred wounded, but as old China hands know only too well, such figures are almost always underestimates. The correspondent also wrote that thousands of Chinese had fled across the Pearl River in sampans, hoping for shelter in the international settlement on Shameen Island, only to be beaten back by soldiers and sailors of the imperialist powers. The correspondent seemed uncertain whether to condemn Germany’s English and French rivals for behaving in such a degenerate colonial manner, or to congratulate them for showing the nonwhite races who’s in charge.

  It is eleven years since I was in Canton, but I can see that river, those sampans, the international settlement, as clearly as if it were yesterday. I can feel the heat, smell the streets, feel the sudden dryness in my throat when the reality of betrayal struck home. Most of the Chinese comrades I got to know in 1927 were dead within days, and I’ve never been back.

  Lin’s son Chu would have been thirteen this October, seven months older than Walter.

  Tuesday, May 31

  I was enjoying my ten-minute break this morning, sitting outside the office in the sunshine, when Dariusz Müller sat down beside me. He said that a few months earlier he and a few other yard employees had set up an unofficial “Working Group” to discuss work-related matters. They met every few weeks in someone’s home, and he wondered if I’d like to come along to this evening’s meeting. I told him I didn’t think I’d been back in Germany long enough to have many useful opinions of my own, but that I’d be interested to come along and listen. He told me the place and time—a street only fifteen minutes’ walk away from my boardinghouse at eight o’clock. I said I’d be there and then spent the rest of the working day wondering whether I should be.

  I took a roundabout walk to the house in question, partly out of conspiratorial habit, partly to enjoy the bright summer evening. Despite the late hour, the loc
al park was full of small children making joyful noises and watchful parents sharing a chat and a smoke. There were lots of young couples out for a walk, and the benches were full of old people basking in the golden sunlight. And there was hardly a uniform to be seen. At such moments it’s easy to forget the poison pumping through this country’s veins.

  The meeting was held in the downstairs front room of a small terraced house. The front door was opened by the tenant, a short man with an unruly shock of dark hair and worried brown eyes. He introduced himself as Joachim Wosz and went around the circle of seats naming the other nine men who were there. Müller gave me a smile; the other eight offered wary nods of acknowledgment. With the exception of Wosz, they were younger than I expected, in their late twenties or early thirties. I recognized all their faces from the works canteen, but Müller was the only one on my memorized list. As the meeting got underway, I found myself almost soothed by the familiarity of it all—the worker’s room lined with books, the shabby furniture and serious faces, the feeling that everyone had one ear tuned to the discussion, one to the street outside.

  We worked our way through a formal agenda, which consisted of issues likely to arise at next week’s Labor Front meeting. There was talk of demanding an overtime ban, and of focusing attention on the rising number of accidents that have taken place since the recent introduction of a new safety regime. A long discussion followed about a particular dispute involving one of the yard managers—a friend of Ruchay’s, I think—and one of the women canteen workers. She is facing a disciplinary hearing for dumping a bowl of soup in his lap, and while there seems to be general agreement that she did it on purpose, the man himself is considered a Nazi toad.

  I listened, offered a few bland remarks, and did my best to read between the lines. It was clear to me that this Working Group consists of party activists who have spent several years out of contact with the émigré leadership. In the absence of any outside direction, they have made the best of a bad job, agreeing on political goals among themselves, and then using regime-sponsored forums such as the Labor Front to spread them among the wider workforce. They may also be involved in riskier activities such as printing and distributing literature, but probably nothing more than that. Their lack of ambition may reflect a sound grasp of the local reality, or it may be due to lack of direction. Or both.