After he was gone, I started thinking about something one of my schoolmasters had said years before, that the military is always expecting the next war to echo the last and is, moreover, usually wrong in that expectation. The reason, he explained, was that scientists and technologists spend the time between wars trying to counter what won the last one. The Franco-Prussian War, as Walter had just reminded me, was won by the Germans’ superior mobility, so in 1910, my teacher supposed the military scientists would be hard at work trying to slow the enemy down.
I remembered thinking how right he’d been several years later, when both armies on the western front were trapped in mazes of trenches by machine guns and heavy artillery.
Only a few weeks ago the Frankfurter Zeitung carried a striking photograph—Hitler on a makeshift podium out on some Pomeranian heath, a throng of tanks stampeding past him, a swarm of the new Stuka bombers whizzing overhead. The next war.
Wednesday, July 13
The American millionaire Howard Hughes is apparently trying to establish a new record time for circling the world in an airplane. Needless to say, it was Walter who brought this to my attention, along with a request for all I knew about the man in question. Which wasn’t much. That he’d inherited a fortune from his father and proved adept at making it grow. That he’d been involved in making movies—I wasn’t sure in what capacity—and loved flying. Walter already knew the details of the airplane, along with Hughes’s prospective route and fueling stops, which include Moscow, Omsk, and Yakutsk. I tried to share the boy’s enthusiasm, but even at his age the idea of speed for speed’s sake always left me cold.
Walter also brought me up to date on our brave Himalayan mountaineers, whom I must admit I’d completely forgotten. The party is apparently still struggling up Nanga Parbat, having recently been resupplied from the air. Keen on a propaganda victory, the regime has dispatched a Junkers Ju 52s to British Kashmir, ready to drop the climbers whatever they need.
And speaking of dropping, the Japanese have resumed their bombing of Canton. Several hundred people who had no interest in risking their lives for a whiff of glory lost them just the same in yesterday’s raid. The German papers seemed most excited by the damage done to things—the shattered houseboats on the river, the overturned trains in Wongsha station, the partial destruction of the ancient Laopo bridge.
Thursday, July 14
According to German radio, a Soviet general named Lyushkov has recently defected to the Japanese. He was serving in Manchuria and apparently took the chance to walk across an unmanned border. Why he did so was not asked—perhaps the Germans assume that leaving the Soviet Union needs no explanation—but Lyushkov’s disillusion with Soviet rule was gleefully expounded. According to the defector, Stalin’s opponents have only themselves to blame, because instead of grumbling among themselves, they should have taken their case to the rest of the party. Now that history’s dustbin has claimed them, all that remains are yes-men blindly following Stalin’s lead.
Friday, July 15
Despite the prospect of two whole days off, Jakob seemed down in the dumps over supper, so I suggested a drink at the Social Club. Once he’d spent the best part of a minute staring at his untouched beer, I asked him what the matter was.
He gave me a ghost of a smile and said he was sorry. He was just depressed.
“Anything particular?” I asked.
“There’s another war coming,” he said quietly. “How can they be so stupid? After everything the last one cost us.”
I instinctively knew that he wasn’t talking about millions of marks or millions of dead. He was thinking about how much it had ended up costing him.
“It was my wedding anniversary today,” he said sadly, admitting as much. “It’s ridiculous, but I still miss her. If only . . .” He shrugged. “I just couldn’t get it all out of my head quickly enough,” he went on. “I was always surprised by how other people managed. Or seemed to, at least. How did you?” he asked, almost resentfully.
I took a sip and thought about the question. In my line of work, honest answers are usually too revealing, but in this case I wasn’t sure what an honest answer would be. In some ways, I supposed, I’d never shaken it off. I was certainly still fighting a war, one just as vicious, if not quite as visceral, as the one we’d both fought in twenty years earlier. “I got angry,” I told Jakob, which was at least partly true. “And I guess the anger carried me until I was able to carry myself. I had no one to go home to, no one who needed me to be the way I’d been before.” No one but my parents.
He thought about that. “I don’t blame her,” he said eventually. “I just wish things had been different.”
I asked if he knew where she was.
He didn’t. “She married again, a long time ago. Our boy, Martin, never mentions her, but he must know where she is. He got engaged a few weeks ago, so I sent him some money to have a decent celebration. He says he’ll come for a visit when he can, but he’s so busy at work.”
He could invite you to visit him, I thought but had the sense not to say.
I went to the bar for another round, and when I got back, we’d been joined by two of Jakob’s colleagues from the engineering department. Both were complaining about their wives, one lamenting several burnt meals in a row, the other his spouse’s incessant pleas for a Strength through Joy cruise. “She thinks you just have to ask and Goebbels turns up at the door with your tickets,” he said bitterly.
The two of them were friendly enough, but neither seemed to have noticed that the world’s going up in flames, and their ideas grew triter and less forgiving with each passing glass. As my long-dead uncle Berndt was fond of saying, the sort of men “you’d rather share a grave with than a table.”
Jakob and I left a while before closing and walked home under a sky slowly filling with stars. As we approached our front door, he apologized for being “so glum” earlier that evening and thanked me for taking him out of himself.
Saturday, July 16
The Évian Conference ended yesterday, and the obvious lack of any breakthrough must be bitterly disappointing for Germany’s Jews. “nobody wants them!” was the gloating front-page headline on Ruchay’s Völkischer Beobachter, and for once in its life, that rancid rag is only slightly exaggerating. Costa Rica and the Dominican Republic have agreed to take more Jewish immigrants, but the other thirty countries involved have all refused to raise their grossly inadequate current quotas. The United States, Britain, and France, who could and should have been more generous, have not only let themselves down, but offered Hitler a notable victory. To quote the Führer, as Ruchay gleefully did over breakfast, “It is a shameful spectacle to see how the whole democratic world is oozing sympathy for the poor tormented Jewish people, but remains hard-hearted and obdurate when it comes to helping them.”
More than a little rich when coming from the tormentor in chief, but hard to dispute.
Monday, July 18
Walter has end-of-year examinations this Friday, and he’s enlisted members of the household to help him with his studying. I was first in line this evening with history and spent half an hour testing him on names and dates. His recall was near perfect, and we ended up discussing one of the topics he thinks might come up: the fatal—for Germany—American decision to enter the last war.
Herr Skoumal has apparently told the class that the Americans’ main motivation was financial. According to him the Jewish financiers had loaned Britain and France so much money that they couldn’t afford a German victory. So when the Russian collapse made that more likely, the financiers persuaded their own government to join the fighting.
Agreeing with Herr Skoumal doesn’t come easy, but here he has a point, and I told Walter as much, adding that the Jewish part was probably exaggerated. The only financier I remember handing out huge loans was Jack Morgan, and he belonged to one of the Christian sects.
“
One boy asked Herr Skoumal about our U-boat campaign,” Walter reported. “He’d read in one of his grandfather’s books that the Americans objected to us sinking their ships. Before they were in the war.”
“And what did Herr Skoumal say?” I asked.
“He said the Americans might have said that, but the British blockade was killing more innocent people than submarines, so it wasn’t a real reason.”
Two for Herr Skoumal, I thought. I asked whether he’d mentioned the Zimmermann Telegram.
“No. What was that?”
“It was a telegram sent by one of our government ministers—a man called Zimmermann—to the government of Mexico, offering the return of all the land they’d lost to the United States—California, Arizona, Texas, I think—if they joined the war on our side. It was in code, but the British intercepted the telegram, decoded it, and told the Americans.”
“That must have made them really angry,” Walter decided.
It had, I agreed, but if Herr Skoumal didn’t think the matter worth mentioning, then Walter should probably stick with evil financiers and brave submariners.
Walter nodded. “I’d like to go to America.”
I asked him why.
He said he didn’t really know but that it seemed an exciting sort of place.
“It’s certainly an interesting one,” I said, foolishly forgetting my own fictional history.
“I didn’t know you’d been there,” Walter said, surprised.
“A long time ago,” I improvised. “And only for a few days. I have some relations there, and when I was booking my trip to Argentina, I found it was easy to go via New York.”
“So what did you find interesting?”
I thought about that. It was hard to explain, I said eventually. America was such a strange mixture. A country built on slavery and the murder of its natives that thinks itself the finest place on earth. “It feels like it has everything,” I told Walter, “from the best to the worst and back again.” I pushed back at the memories. “But if you haven’t studied it yet, then it won’t come up in these exams.”
“I know. And I have to do science with Herr Barufka now. You don’t know much about science, do you?”
I had to admit I didn’t. With Walter gone, I sat by the window for a half hour or more, thinking about him and America. He loves history the way I did when I was his age or perhaps a year or two older; he loves working out why things happened in the way that they did. It’s not a useful gift in Hitler’s Germany, but despite the Führer’s thousand-year prognosis, I suspect his regime will last less than twenty, and the boy will come into his own.
Our talk about America had evoked some memories of my real life there, which began in the summer of 1931 and lasted for almost a year. The months I spent in the Pennsylvania anthracite region were among the most rewarding of my life.
As I told Walter, I docked in New York, spent a few days there, and was indeed impressed by the city’s extraordinary vitality. I also received my instructions from the Comintern regional office, which was then housed in an impeccably bourgeois apartment in Queens, overlooking a private flying field that I believe will soon host the city’s first public airport. The following morning found me on a train to Scranton, Pennsylvania, where a major miners’ strike was several weeks old.
Some necessary background. Since February 1928, the Comintern had been pursuing its new “class against class” policy in which the moderate left was seen as our principal enemy. In the USA, as elsewhere, we had created new unions to both fight the bosses and outflank the older, moderate unions. In the mining sector, the new National Miners Union was taking on, and hoping to replace, the United Mine Workers. The latter, though in our view much more concerned with the interests of its officials than those of the ordinary members, still had a much higher membership, but we had established ourselves and, whenever we got the chance, did our best to show the miners that we would represent their interests better.
The strike in progress was against the Glen Alden company, which owned mines throughout the area and employed around twenty-five thousand miners. The UMW leadership had opposed the strike from the beginning, but the local UMW had called it anyway, and we had then attempted to “capture” it for the NMU. In this we had failed, and the regional Comintern executive had decided that since, in their opinion, the strike was doomed, we should cut our losses. If we could persuade our local people to give up this particular fight, then the UMW would have to own the defeat.
I was the persuader in chief, sent to tell a lot of principled men that they should abandon a fight that wasn’t yet lost, and admit that the suffering they had inflicted on their members’ families had all been for nothing. I was not expecting the warmest of welcomes, and I won’t pretend it was easy. I did the rounds of the towns and mines and talked to as many of our people as I could. Many saw the new direction as a betrayal of our members, and in the short term, of course they were right, but I slowly won most of them over—not just to an acceptance of the new party line, but also to its long-term correctness.
My mission was successful, but that wasn’t what made the visit rewarding. During my months in Scranton, I stayed with a quite extraordinary family. Bill Brennan, the husband and father, ran the union branch in the local pit and seemed to be popular with everyone. He constantly put himself out and rarely got enough sleep, yet never seemed to lose his essential affability. The tenth person knocking on his door at the end of an exhausting day would get the same smile as the first one, the same patient listen, the same encouragement. His children got the same, and there were eight of them, ranging in age from two to sixteen.
His wife, Esther, was green-eyed, vivacious, and, if anything, even more openhearted. You might think eight children would have been enough to keep her busy, but their friends, and any stray waif who happened by, were always given the warmest of welcomes. The evening meal was always a dish, such as a casserole or stew, which could be further divided if an extra mouth turned up. While I was there, two orphaned children seemed to be permanent visitors, and if they were treated any differently from Esther’s own children, I never saw it. In addition to mothering, she ran the household on next to no money, helped out all over the town, and took an hour each Sunday to write to the local paper about whatever wrong she thought needed righting that week.
She had been brought up a Quaker, and her Communism was infused with pacifism. Yet despite her tenaciously held beliefs, she was one of the least judgmental people I had ever met. I knew she disagreed with what I had come to do, and she argued her case with passion and intelligence, but I never thought she distrusted my motives. She gave me the benefit of the doubt and, as far as I could tell, gave it to everyone else as well. I lived in her house for a little over six months, and I’ve never been more convinced that this was the sort of life, the sort of relations between human beings, that could and should be our ultimate goal as socialists. I’ve spent so much of my life dealing with the wrong, but there was something so undeniably right.
A truly remarkable couple. I hope they are still going strong.
Tuesday, July 19
A zookeeper in Munich has been attacked and killed by a four-year-old elephant. The animal in question had been there since birth and was apparently the keeper’s favorite.
A sad story, you might think, but the Beobachter’s reporter told it with unvarnished relish, as if keen to point out that nothing and no one can ever be trusted.
Wednesday, July 20
A twenty-year-old Communist named Helmut Kuhlmann was beheaded in a Berlin prison this morning. He was the seventeenth person to be executed for treason this year, with five months still to go. A few districts still use the hand-wielded ax, but I believe that Berlin employs the more civilized Fallbeil.
I have a horror of being beheaded, which I realize is quite irrational. The Fallbeil is, I believe, always a single-cut job, unlike the ax,
which history tells us can take a lot more, depending on sharpness and aim. After the head is severed, consciousness apparently ends within two or three seconds, which may seem long at the time but surely prohibits extended reflection on the fact of one’s own demise. No, I’m sure it’s short and relatively painless, but I still hate the prospect. My head and torso have been working together in life, and they should rest together in death. I also abhor the thought of dying on my knees, something I believe the Fallbeil requires.
As, indeed, does an NKVD bullet in the back of the head. Whoever said it was better to live on one’s feet than die on one’s knees knew what he or she was talking about.
I’ve seen a lot of death in my forty-three years, which is perhaps why the mere prospect of dying doesn’t bother me. There are some truly terrible ways to go, and I’ve seen a lot more of these than I wanted to. The war was bad enough when it came to tearing bodies apart, but there’s no sense of cruelty in distant artillery. Most people, on the other hand, can be unbelievably cruel in certain circumstances, and in Russia they were. They say civil wars are the worst, but nothing prepared me for some of the things I saw supposedly normal people do to other normal people’s bodies. Witnessing horrors like that, you begin to wonder whether life is worth living, let alone if others are worth dying for.
But then we all die, don’t we? And that’s why I don’t want to do it on my knees, either literally or emotionally. I want to feel my life was worth something, both for myself and for others.
A trifle maudlin, perhaps? Or a way of keeping me on my toes? I’m certainly guilty of treason and could well share Helmut Kuhlmann’s fate. It could happen at any moment—the sound of a car, a knock on the door. They say the Gestapo have gotten better at preventing suicides, so I can expect a great deal of pain before they realize I have nothing to tell them. The men I deal with in Hamm are mostly ex-Communists, but the Gestapo already know about them, and none are currently breaking the law. My only Comintern contact is Elise, and she’s probably out of Germany by now. They’d want to know where and when the next treff is, but by the time they’d checked out my lie, the truth would be worthless.
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