What he seemed to wish to do, seeing my anger, was to increase that anger and convert it into lust. I would take him by force, something I could see he was used to. He needed, in fact, a good punitive buggering but he was not going to get it from me, at least not yet. I ordered him to his room, but he said he wanted to go out to a nightclub and would I give him some more Pinke. He had spent all of the five pounds, a lot of money in those days. To bed, sir, we're going to have a serious talk in the morning. He scheissed off, snarling. During the night I half woke to find him proposing to get into bed with me, hot and naked. I slapped out at him and he spoke words I could not understand, something that had been Primitive High German but had now turned to street dirt. He sulked and cursed back off to his room and I heard him fist his bed like an enemy before getting into it. This would not do.
He did not get up the next day till after eleven. He came yawning and tousled, also naked, into my study and said he wanted breakfast. Make it yourself: there, see, is the kitchen. And then, oh, let me do it, you're certain to break the crockery. So he sat with coffee and fried eggs, trousered and shirted but barefooted, while I spoke sternly to him. He must learn to behave. These apartments, which were once a single mansion owned by the Duke of York, whose second title was Albany, had been turned into bachelor chambers at the end of the eighteenth century and had accommodated great men like Lord Byron, Macaulay, George Canning and Bulwer-Lytton. They were very particular about whom they had here, and there were strict rules of decorum to be observed. Did he understand? Ja ja. He must not bring home drabs in the small hours, he must learn to behave like a gentleman. Ja ja ja. I would send him, I said, to the Berlitz School to learn English. Then I would see about finding him work somewhere. He pouted. Time was short for us all, he said prophetically, it was necessary to live a little before the bombs dropped and the poison gas circulated. Nonsense, I told him, there was not going to be any war. Here is a ten-shilling note, it is plenty of money. It will buy you lunch and dinner. Today I myself lunch and dine with friends. Go to see the wonders of the National Gallery and the British Museum, take a boat to Greenwich, enjoy yourself quietly and soberly. And do not come home later than eleven tonight. Come home, moreover, unaccompanied.
He did not come home unaccompanied. He came, somewhat chastened, in the company of two plainclothesmen, both with moustaches. "This is the address he gave us, sir," said the one of senior rank. "The name he gave is this, sir. Is that right? And this name is yours, sir?" He had a bit of paper with that basic information on it.
I said, "You'd better sit down. I take it you're on duty, but I don't suppose you'd say no to a drink. I certainly won't." I began to pour whisky at once and lavishly into the Heinrich Wilhelm Stiegel glasses I had brought back from America.
"Soda for him, for me straight," the senior man said as they sat. "I take it you know what he was doing, sir?"
"I can guess. Don't ask any more questions for the moment. Let me tell you all." I told them.
"Doesn't look much to me like a Jew, sir," said the junior one. "More of a real Nazzy type. One of them storm troopers like you see on the newsreels."
"Just like that?" the other said. "Just dumped on you like that?"
"There are a lot of refugees that are going to be dumped on us," I said. "Hitler's going to slaughter all the Jews he can lay his hands on. We're going to have to make some adjustments. Morally, socially, everything."
"The fact is, sir," said the senior man, "that he was picked up by us on Goodge Street openly soliciting. The law's the law, and we can't make adjustments to use your words for them who don't know the law. They have to learn it, and that might mean the hard way. For him there it may have to mean deportation, sir. If he tries it again, that is, and he looks to me the type that will." Heinz sat deep in an armchair, sulkily and loudly smoking some ghastly brand of cigarette he had discovered somewhere that smelt like a Mexican twitchfire.
"You mean back to the Third Reich and the concentration camps."
"Our streets have got to be kept clean, sir," the junior said.
"That's Hitler's idea, too."
"We can't speak for him, sir," said the senior, "though there may be something in what he's doing. We can only speak for our job which is the law. Give him a good talking to in his own lingo, which he says you speak like a native. Why would that be, sir?"
"Suspicious, aren't you? Is there some law against an Englishman getting his German grammar book out and doing some hard study?"
"No offence, sir, I was just interested. I thought there might be some tie-up you didn't tell us about."
"I've told you the situation as clearly as I could. I take it you've never heard of Strehler, who got the Nobel Prize for Literature. I take it you've never heard of me."
"We don't have much time for reading, sir." To Heinz, "You were lucky tonight, young fellermelad. You won't be so lucky next time. Say that to him in his own language, would you, sir?" I said it. The two listened like phoneticians. "Very nicely put, if I may say so, sir, not that I understood a dickybird."
"Thank you for your forbearance and discretion. I'll make sure it doesn't happen again. Another whisky?"
"A short one for the road, sir. Plenty of soda in his."
There seemed no point that night in raving at Heinz. He was, anyway, somewhat shaken at the prospect of being sent back to the Nazis with a docket saying Jude. The following morning I took him to Harrod's and, in the appropriate department, bought for him a rucksack with steel frame, shorts, boots, sleeping bag, and a youth hostel membership card. I was going to turn him into a bloody Wandervogel. In Harrod's travel department I bought him a second class one-way ticket to Glasgow. There was a nonstop train leaving King's Cross the following morning at 7:40 A.M. He could see the beauties of bonny Scotland and sleep in the heather and catch cold and die. I gave him lunch in Harrod's restaurant--steak and kidney pudding and plum duff, a meal sufficiently stultifying--and bought cold provisions in their food department for that night's dinner--a roast chicken, half a ham, potato salad, Mrs. Goodber's cherry cake, genuine Viennese Schlagobers for his coffee. I took him home and supervised his packing. He was still docile. He even said that he quite looked forward to seeing the beauties of Schottland and how much money was I going to give him? Ten pounds, I said, ten bloody pounds and no more, he must see how long he could last on ten quid. If he lasted as long as six weeks, then I would give him a reward of a flyer. I got him into bed at ten and quietly locked his door after ensuring that he first evacuated his body thoroughly. I set my alarm clock for 6:15 and dragged him out of bed and into a taxi and to the station. He looked very delectable as a backpacked blond Wandervogel. I saw him onto the train and waved him off with joy. Gute Reise.
There was peace for a week, peace so pure as almost to be palpable. Then I received a telephone call from Falkirk. It was the voice of a Presbyterian inspector of police, articulate under the burrs and very grave. A young man by the name of Strayler had been picked up trying to steal a bicycle. He gave your name and address, sir. At the moment he is in the lockup. He comes before the magistrate in the morning. He has no visible means of support. He says he was robbed of everything, money, rucksack, even, as is evident from his appearance, razor. Tomorrow he will get off with a caution as this seems to be his first offence and he is an ignorant foreigner. But what do you propose doing about him, sir? I said I would telegraph money for a ticket back to London, mean while keep him in a cell and feed him nothing but bread and water. Beat him if he causes trouble. Trouble, aye, do you hear him now? I heard Teutonic shouts and hangings a long way away. Dearly as we'd re'ish administering a wee bit of corporal punishment, sir, this is Scotland, not Nazzy Germany. He gave me the address of the police station.
I groaned in my very bowels. What was I to do with him? The only thing was to break Strehier's resolution to stay in Nazi Austria, indifferent to the future, ready to face the worst. God help us, none of us then realized in our innocence what the worst was. If Strehier had n
ot yet been cuffed and trounced off to camp it was because there was no hurry: there were plenty of undistinguished Jews around to persecute first before insulting the Swedish Academy. I saw it as the only solution: the reunion of father and son on free soil, but a long way from Albany. Was I myself now to assume the burden of arranging for Strehier's asylum? The morning mail had a letter from a certain Professor Waldheim of the State University of Colorado, inviting me to come over and give a series of lectures and seminars on the contemporary European novel. Who better qualified to give them than the most distinguished contemporary European novelist of them all? I would write to Waldheim. There would be no difficulty about arranging for Strehler's temporary asylum in Britain, though the agony of getting the Reichsfluchtsteuer and the other punitive imposts paid and the man himself to see that his future lay with his son would be intense: the agony had better be shared. The PEN organisation must help, as also Strehler's British publisher.
I went to see Charlie Evans at Messrs. William Heinemann and discussed the situation with him. I was told, over a glass of warmish Amontillado, that Strehler was, of course, a highly prestigious author and Heinemann was honored to have him on the list, but unfortunately he did not sell anywhere near so well as Willie Maugham and Jack Priestley. There was probably something like thirty-five pounds due to him in royalties. I went to see the urbane secretary of PEN, who, over a glass of warmish South African sherry (Spanish sherry was out, definitely out, it stank of republican blood), told me of his admiration of Strehler's work and what a good idea it would be to get him out of that horrible fascist Germany, Hitler's no better than Franco, damn their four eyes, and the next general meeting of PEN would discuss what could be done. I went back to Albany and the clear realisation that it would all be up to me.
Heinz returned hangdog, in filthy shirt and shorts and with golden fuzz all over his chin. The Albany porters shook their heads when they saw him. They shook their heads when they saw me: my tenure would be cut short, no doubt about it, this was, despite Lord Byron, an establishment of long cherished respectability. Heinz cheered up in the bath, singing, with a slight Scottish accent, "The Umbrella Man":
"Toora lumma lumma
Toora lumma lumma
Tooraleye eh
Any umber ellas
Any umber ellas
To mend to-day?"
He came out shaven and suited and hungry.
"How the hell," I said, "did you manage to spend all that money so quickly?" Robbed by men he had thought good and decent. "Why did you try and steal a bicycle?" The only way to get back to London. I toyed deliriously with the notion of buying him a bicycle and sending him to Land's End on it. He was overjoyed to be back with me in London, he said. He desperately desired to see Walt Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Wearily I took him that evening. We had to join a long queue. A couple of files ahead was Val Wrigley with a nondescript boy.
Val waggled his fingers and stepped back to join us, saying first to the boy, "You have the money safe, Charles? It is two tickets you must ask for. I am not deserting you." And to me, "Well, whom have we here? Such handsomeness, bracing as a bath with pine essence in it, straight, I take it, from some health through joy camp among the conifers." Val was always very sharp and quick. He could even tell, something in the eyes and mouth and incurious ears perhaps, that Heinz probably did not understand much English. "Very toothsome, I must say."
"This is the son of the great Jakob Strehier. Heinz, darf ich einen grossen Dichter vorstellen--Valentine Wrigley." And then, hope and cunning beginning to boil within, "Here, Val, is your chance to do something for the cause of the oppressed."
"Jewish, is he? One would never have thought. Aryanly delicious." That damned misused word.
"I am not Jew."
"All right, dear, nobody's forcing you." And to me: "I know your hypocrisy, Kenneth Toomey, I haven't forgotten. Cause of the oppressed, indeed. Not one ounce of altruism in that aging carcass. I know you of old."
"Your own carcass doesn't look too good."
"No? Handsome is as handsome does. Do get him to say that in German. A most sinister language it's become, hasn't it? Sends shivers right through me." The queue moved forward. Heinz seemed much taken with Val's uninhibited admiration. Ein grosser Dichter. Handsome was as handsome did.
I said coarsely, "Untouched, I can assure you. And properly house-trained."
"Death of the libido? My dear, I saw Sigmund Freud with his daughter in a pub, would you believe it? That mouth looks terrible. He was quite bucked to hear somebody talking about the Oedipus complex. Speaks beautiful English, very slangy. Getting some splendid refugee specimens, aren't we?" And he twinklingly nudged Heinz.
I got Heinz briefly off my hands by giving him Val's address and sending him there with his racquets and suitcases. Before that I gave him money daily to spend most of his time with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, which he adored. He saw it seventeen times and it improved his English. "Magic mirror on the wall," he recited to the cheval glass, "who is fairest of them all?" He knew the answer to that. He could reel off the names of the dwarfs. He sang "With a Smile and a Song" in falsetto. Walt Disney did not wholly tame him but he quietened him down. Temporarily.
CHAPTER 52
It was not until the third week of August that the mode of action for getting Jakob Strehler out of Nazi Austria presented itself. I will not disgust the reader with an account of the menage Heinz and I conducted in a rented house on the outskirts of Herne Bay during the month of July. In that period Heinz was complaisant if often petulant, though he was soothed by the admiration of girls on the beach. There was also a dance hall he visited nightly. He only twice got into the hands of the police, and that was for drunken brawling. Talk of deportation for refugee delinquents was not now heard much, the Home Office adjusting itself to the steady incoming flood of the persecuted. Heinz seemed now to understand the British way of life and to settle down somewhat. Val Wrigley, unwilling for a whole month to admit to me his inability to control his enforced guest, sent him off to be a guest elsewhere. Heinz was even, for a time, a kind of prisoner in a kind of concentration camp. This was called a Ferienslager and was run by the Freie Deutsche Jugend; it was situated near Scunthorpe and its Pleasures were imposed draconianly. It was, Heinz shuddered, full of Jews. The guards on the gates were Jewish and very tough. They would hit anyone trying to get out without a permit. Everyone had to stay in and learn strength through joy. Heinz once tried to swim away from the camp but strong Jewish lifeguards dragged him back to shore.
During the first two weeks of August, which we spent home in Albany (I had started a new novel), Heinz was well-behaved but furtive and I feared the worst. He did not ask for money. He stayed in all the morning and read children's comic papers of the order of the Rainbow and Chick's Own, in which disyllables were divided for greater ease of comprehension with hyphens. I bought him a portable gramophone and English lessons on disc, but he preferred to listen to popular songs and learn the words. He sang in his bath:
"Two slippy people
In dawn's early light
And too much in laugh
To say good night."
He also sang "Blue Orchids" and "Skylark" and "Stay in My Arms, Cinderella." We ate lunch fairly amicably together, and then he would quietly go out. Where? To Hampton Court by river. To the cinema. Sausages and chips will I eat in a Lyon's Corner Haus. Have you finished the money I gave you? No, it gives a little left, thank you, perhaps tomorrow you will give. He would return, somewhat shifty but quiet and not too drunk, at about eleven.
Mrs Ollerenshaw, who cleaned my apartment, said to me, "Are you sure it's all right me not cleaning his room, Mr. Toomey?"
"Not cleaning his--?"
"He keeps his door locked. He says he always cleaned his own room and changed the sheets too when he was living where he used to live. Least, that's what I think he says. He doesn't speak English like what you and me do."
"Sorry, I never thought abou
t it. I've been concentrating on this--Locked now, is it?"
"Always locked, Mr. Toomey. You never know what young men get up to. I knew one that kept white mice in his bedroom, wouldn't let nobody in. Perhaps if you had a spare key we might take a look at what he's up to."
"I've no spare key. There was just that key always in the door."
"Well, it's in his pocket I'll wager." She had three or four knobby warts on her face with grey filaments waving from them. She was a decent hardworking woman, grey and dusty, glad of the used garments I gave her for her unemployed husband.
"I'll have a word with him when he gets back, Mrs. Ollerenshaw."
He did not get back that day. I received a telephone call from Savile Row police station. He had been picked up trying to steal a wristwatch from a jeweller's on Regent Street. Very angry I walked round and found Heinz indulging in loud plaintive Sprechgesang which nobody understood, though the jeweller, a speaker of Yiddish, caught one or two words. "It's the accent," he said, "I don't understand the accent." I spoke to the desk sergeant.
I said, "You must understand I have no legal responsibility. This is a refugee wished upon me by an Austrian Jew I haven't even met. Out of charity I've done my best for him, but here my charity stops. The law must take its" course.
"He didn't get away with it, sir. He'll only get a fine or a caution. If you've taken responsibility for him you'll have to go on taking it. Some mad ideas get into the brains of some of these coming over here from Germany and suchlike. It's the sense of being like free that does it. He's sorry for what he's done, you can see that. Nobody wants to be too hard on him. Perhaps Mr. Goldfarb here might like to forget all about it."
Earthly Powers Page 54