Second Violin

by John Lawton

  The next day Bemmelmann called early to tell him that Hirschel had slit his own throat in the night.

  § 9

  ‘Kings and Tyrants come and go, Rothschilds go on forever.’ If that is not the motto of the Rothschild family, it should be. An empty Rothschild palace – empty of Rothschilds that is, a few dark spaces on the walls where paintings had been removed, but otherwise full of Rothschild furniture, Rothschild crockery, Rothschild opulence – had been seized by the Germans for the exclusive use of the SS.

  By the time Stahl got there, his comrades-in-arms had achieved a remarkable semblance of normality, of continuity. White-jacketed waiters served black-uniformed officers, silver platters and soft shoes, scarcely raising their voices above a whisper, aiming for that servile pretence of invisibility, while the SS roared and guffawed and preened – plain as jackdaws, vain as peacocks, all twinkling buttons and buffed leather. But for the unseemly loudness of the members, it struck Stahl as being less the Munich bierkeller that had spawned these vultures than a bad parody of some London club. The sort of thing he’d read about in the works of P.G. Wodehouse.

  ‘I’m going back to Berlin in the morning. I have seen enough,’ he told Schellenberg.

  ‘No matter–we have everything under control. You must try this lemon torte. It’s simply delicious. Matches the Earl Grey like peaches to cream.’

  ‘Really.’

  ‘The apricot’s good too. Except, of course, the apricots can hardly be fresh at this time of year. You know, the Viennese make exceedingly good cakes.’

  ‘Then perhaps it would be a good idea to keep the patissier out of the camps until after the apricots fruit in August?’

  Schellenberg paused mid-bite, swallowed with a slow, saurian gulp of the throat and said, ‘Do you really think he might be Jewish?’

  ‘I was joking, Walter.’

  Schellenberg laughed, a soft little schoolboy giggle. Tucked into his tart again.

  That was the problem with Nazis, Stahl thought, no sense of humour.

  § 10

  20 March

  Hampstead, London

  It was going to be a green day. He’d no idea why. It was just the way it felt. The green of leaf unfurling, the green of sap rising. He had a fat, and as it happened green, anthology of English verse on his desk and was trying to find the line about ‘a green thought in a green shade’ . . . but clearly it was not the first line of anything and he couldn’t remember the name of the bugger who’d written it or even in what century he had written it. Was it Donne or some bugger like Donne?

  Alex caught sight of his younger son passing the door, pulling on his jacket, a slice of toast clenched between his teeth.

  ‘Frederick?’

  Troy took two steps back, took the toast from his mouth and said, ‘I’m due at work, Dad.’

  ‘Work? I don’t understand. Where is your uniform?’

  ‘I’m a detective now. Remember? About six weeks ago? I joined CID?’

  ‘Of course,’ Alex said. ‘CID. Plain clothes. No more boots.’

  ‘No more boots. Exactly. But I am in a tearing hurry, so if you could just . . .’

  ‘A green thought in a green shade?’

  ‘Marvell. Andrew Marvell.’

  ‘Ah . . . not Donne then?’

  ‘No, not Donne. Not even the same generation.’

  ‘What does it mean?’

  ‘Could I tell you later?’

  Alex went back to his anthology, to Quiller-Couch’s index of authors and found ‘Marvell, Andrew, 1621–78’ . . . and from that the lines he had half-heard in the ear of the mind:

  The mind, that ocean where each kind

  Does straight its own resemblance find;

  Yet it creates, transcending these,

  Far other worlds, and other seas,

  Annihilating all that’s made

  To a green thought in a green shade.

  Oh fuck – what did that mean?

  His son would tell him the next time they met. Alex thought he had more insight into the English mind than most foreigners might manage, but his son had the distinct advantage of being English.

  Then the phone rang.

  ‘Good Morning. I wonder if I might speak to Sir Alexei Troy?’

  ‘Speaking,’ Alex said.

  ‘Nicholas Lockett here, King’s College, London. We’ve never met but we have a mutual friend in Sigmund Freud.’

  ‘A friend I have not seen in many a year. How is he? Indeed, where is he?’

  ‘He’s still in Vienna. And actually that does bring me rather quickly to the point. I’m trying to get him out.’

  ‘I cannot help but wonder that he did not leave the sooner. The writing has been upon the wall these last five years and more.’

  ‘Quite. It’s all a bit last minute. But the upshot is the Nazis won’t dare touch him yet. In fact, they’ll let him go. There’s been some quite remarkable behind-the-scenes pressure. President Roosevelt has been kept informed and there’s even a rumour that Mussolini has spoken directly to Hitler about Freud. The problem I have is not getting him out, it’s getting him in – in here, I mean.’

  ‘I understand. I understand also the urgency. The Nazis are still responsive to the notion of world opinion. That cannot last. Freud must leave while the door is open. I take it you’re lobbying?’

  ‘I’m pulling every damn string I can find. And, of course, you’re one of them, almost needless to say. I’ll speak to the Home Secretary myself, I’ve met him socially – I was wondering if you couldn’t write a leader or if there weren’t some prominent politicians you could call?’

  ‘Of course,’ Alex said, making a mental list, reaching for a pad and pencil. ‘How about . . .’

  § 11

  ‘Were you out bricklaying?’

  ‘Painting. But I am happy to be distracted . . . everything today is too . . . green,’ said Churchill. ‘Besides, I have all the time in the world to paint. I may do nothing else for the rest of my life. I shall watch governments tumble like ninepins from the safety of my easel. To say nothing of the obscurity.’

  Out of office might, on one of his black dog days, seem an obscurity tantamount to invisibility to Churchill. Alex saw it as self-pity. The man’s profile was as high as that of any cabinet minister. He had his ‘Focus Group’, a cross-party gathering of the rebels, and he had the freedom no minister had to write for any newspaper that would publish him – as well as a regular column in the Evening Standard. The country knew what Winston thought because Winston told them. Alex would publish the man himself given the chance. But he wasn’t. ‘Obscurity’ was lavish self-pity.

  ‘One of those days, eh?’

  ‘As I said, Alex, too green by a yard and a half. One craves a little red or pink. Now, what can I do for you?’

  ‘Freud.’

  ‘Freud?’

  ‘As in Sigmund.’

  ‘Ah . . . the trick-cyclist.’

  Alex had met so few English prepared to reap the benefits of psychoanalysis. All enquiry into the mind was a matter less of explanation or enquiry than of pathology as far as they were concerned. You ignored the mind until it was sick. First you tried cold showers and laxative, and then you consigned it to the mercies of the psychiatrist – usually referred to, as Churchill would have it, as the ‘trick-cyclist’. Alex did not feel it within his powers to explain to Winston the difference between a psychoanalyst and a psychiatrist. That Winston had heard of Freud was the best he could hope for.

  He elaborated the case Lockett had put to him. When he had finished, Churchill said, ‘Do we need him?’

  An odd choice of word, but one Alex understood.

  ‘That is not my point. He is old, I fear he may well be ill . . . he will hardly be a vital force in our culture, but his symbolic value cannot be exaggerated. If the Nazis keep him, there is . . . there is what I can only think of as a propaganda coup. If he stays, and I gather he has taken some persuading to leave, that propaganda value would be
irredeemable. No, we do not need to have him, but we need the Nazis not to have him.’

  ‘Yet the buggers will let him leave?’

  ‘For now, yes . . . in a year or perhaps less, who knows? When their contempt for the rest of us reaches its zenith, who knows?’

  ‘Then we shall rescue your trick-cyclist. I shall call anyone who’ll still listen to an old backbench has-been like me and do what I can for you.’

  ‘Has-been? Surely–’

  ‘Alex, how many MPs did you call before you called me?’

  This was no time for white lies and spared feelings.

  ‘Six.’

  ‘Good Lord . . . you mean I made the first eleven?’

  § 12

  28 March

  Berlin

  They met late in the afternoon, over coffee and cream cakes in a noisy café off the Ku’damm.

  ‘I’m going to Vienna.’

  ‘How did you wangle that?’

  ‘Didn’t. The Nazis did it for me. They’ve kicked our man out. Someone has to stand in for a week or two. I drew the short straw.’

  Rod raised an eyebrow at this.

  ‘What do you mean “short”? I thought you wanted to be where the action was?’

  Greene shrugged.

  ‘Quite. I mean to say they’ve taken Vienna haven’t they? They’ve got Vienna. What more is there to say? The point is to be where it’s going to happen next.’

  ‘Well . . . you could always ask for a posting to Tirana to cover King Zog’s wedding.’

  ‘Zog . . . nog . . . bog. I’m immune to sarcasm, Rod. Besides, I was thinking more along the lines of . . . well . . . Warsaw.’

  ‘Hugh, I won’t argue about Warsaw. Warsaw’s not an “if” it’s a “when”. But if you think it’s all over in Vienna you’re very much mistaken.’

  ‘Oh . . . I don’t think I meant that at all. I mean . . . it’s not over till it’s over is it?’

  § 13

  5 April

  Leopoldstadt, Vienna

  It was about two weeks later. Whilst every day brought fresh outrage, Hummel was coming to the conclusion that now the radicals and toffs among Vienna’s Jewry were under lock and key, Leopoldstadt was being left largely to its own devices. True, all Jewish assets at the banks were frozen, but Hummel did not come from a class that kept money in banks, he came from a class that kept it under the mattress – yet the kosher butchers remained open, and the Jewish cafés and restaurants were still doing a lively trade. And he still had his shop window – albeit now somewhat obscured by the word ‘Jude’ in yellow letters a foot high. It was, he thought, an odd normality. As if to prove him wrong a bang on the door at dusk, some half-hour or more after he had shut up shop, gave him that hubristic shiver down the spine. Less speaking too soon, than thinking too soon. He opened the door wide. Better to let them walk in than have them smash it in.

  In the street stood the German, the infantryman whose beat Krugstrasse seemed to be.

  ‘Can I help you?’

  ‘I want to get measured for a suit.’

  ‘You have the wrong address. It was Bemmelmann asked you if you wanted a suit. Two doors down.’

  ‘Nah. I heard you’re the best. I want a suit from you.’

  Hummel beckoned to the man to come inside. Fine, he was going to let the man steal a suit. So what?

  The infantryman said little as Hummel measured him up. When Hummel had finished and was jotting down figures on a notepad, he said ‘How long?’

  ‘Three days. If you can wait.’

  ‘I can wait.’

  ‘And the material?’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘You haven’t chosen the swatch.’

  The German looked confused. Out of his depth. Hummel pointed to the wall of swatched cloth behind him. The German turned, peered at the ends of rolls in the dim light and said, ‘What’s . . . respectable?’

  ‘You want respectable?’

  ‘Yeah. Nothing flash, just . . . respectable.’

  ‘Blue. Blue is respectable.’

  ‘OK. You pick me a blue then.’

  Hummel approached the shelves with a ‘This one might . . .’ bursting on his lips, but the German said, ‘No. Just pick one and make it up.’

  Hummel showed him to the door.

  The man breathed in the night air, shouldered his rifle, turned to Hummel and said, ‘I never owned a suit before.’ Then he strolled off as though he and Hummel had conducted a perfectly customary business transaction.

  Three days later he was back, knocking on the door at the same time of day.

  Hummel handed him the finished suit in a blue worsted, and waited while he dressed. The man stood in front of the full-length mirror. A stocky brick-shithouse of a man, exuding a mixture of pride, pleasure and nervousness.

  ‘I never wore a suit before.’

  ‘Of course not,’ Hummel said. ‘If you never owned one . . . you never wore one . . . except for your uniform, of course.’

  The man gazed at his own arse in the mirror and seemed not to hear the jibe in Hummel’s voice.

  ‘Good,’ he said. ‘It’s good. Good to be in something that ain’t grey.’

  Another twirl to look at his barrel chest under the double-breasted jacket.

  Then he said, ‘What do I owe you?’

  ‘I’m sorry?’ Hummel said.

  ‘How much?’

  ‘You mean you want to pay?’

  Hummel knew he had not kept the utter incredulity he felt out of his voice.

  ‘Course I wanna pay. Or did you think I was a thief?’

  ‘You will understand,’ Hummel said, ‘if I say that there are those among us who might think that you are all thieves.’

  The soldier had to think about this. Hummel thought about it too, hoping that it was too subtle, too shot through with conditionals, to be taken for an insult. Far be it from Hummel to point out that robbing Jews was legal – trading with them wasn’t.

  ‘Mind,’ the man said at last, ‘a trade discount wouldn’t come amiss. What’s your usual price?’

  ‘For a suit like this? Seventy-five schilling.’

  ‘Sixty-five?’ the man ventured.

  Hummel had been about to say fifty-seven-fifty.

  ‘Done,’ he said softly. ‘What name?’

  ‘Trager. Joe Trager. I’m a Joe just like you.’

  Hummel doubted that the word ‘like’ could ever reasonably be used to compare the two of them but said, ‘How do you know my name is Joe? Do you have records on us all?’

  ‘Records? O’ course we got records. We got files a foot thick. But they don’t get shown to the likes of me. I’m just a regular Fritz, I am. A professional soldier. Never been more than a private and I shouldn’t think I ever will be. No, I seen it over your shop – “Josef Hummel & Son”.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Hummel. ‘Josef Hummel was my father. I am merely “& Son”.’

  Trager laughed as though Hummel had just told him the funniest thing he’d heard since the Anschluss. He was still laughing when Hummel handed him his receipt, still laughing as he slipped his uniform back on and went out into the night with his blue suit in a brown paper parcel tied up with string. The notion of hubris left Hummel. It was indeed an odd normality.

  § 14

  25 April

  Leopoldstadt

  The normal came to claim him with a calendrical regularity. Passover. The first under the iron heel.

  Hummel had the merest adherence to faith. He had endured his bar mitzvah out of loyalty to his father, a man not long widowed, but once it was done the old man had not pressured him, nor even expected him to attend the synagogue. If Hummel went, as on occasion he did, it was for the merely aesthetic pleasure of chanting and architecture, much as he might go to the theatre. Indeed, that was how he thought of services in a synagogue, second-rate theatre – second-rate but free. Passover brought obligations. Krugstrasse could not cope with an atheist, hence his neighbours ignored Hummel’s lack of faith, an
y faith, and thought of him merely as neglected, inattentive, and were it not for his industrious tailoring, lazy. Hummel was not allowed to escape the feast days that mattered nothing to him by those to whom they did matter – and, out of nothing more than good manners, he accepted invitations from most of the families in the street in the years following his father’s death. A Passover tradition is to invite a stranger into a family occasion. So it was that at Passover 1938 he found himself at Beckermann’s for the family seder, presided over by old Beckermann in a dining room crammed with his descendants . . . sons, daughters and grandchildren . . . fourteen people seated in a room that might have served Baron Rothschild as a broom closet.

  Hummel had always liked the room. After his mother’s death, housekeeping in the Hummel household had been no more than perfunctory. If something other than the functional wore out, it was thrown away and not replaced. It was worth going to a seder just to eat off a tablecloth, since, left to themselves, neither he nor his father would have bothered. It gave Hummel a pleasure that was wholly secular to sit in the overplush, nineteenth-century velvet drape and tassel clutter of the first-floor front room over Beckermann’s shop. Portraits, single and group – scarcely a space on the wall to hang one more – more beards, more Franz-Josef moustaches, and a Darwinian likeness between them all that came close in Hummel’s mind to abolishing notions of individuality. It was a visit to ur-Beckermann, to an amorphousness, that beckoned, swallowed and failed to consume. It was the kind of room he had lived in for the first ten years of his life, while his mother lived and a woman’s touch had turned the plain boxiness of the room into a magician’s cube, a chinese box, far from plain, layer upon layer of memory and history. The tangibility of trivia. Every photograph a name, every name a story. It was a journey to the public places of the heart, back into childhood. And childhood was a place well worth visiting – once in while.

  For once the elder’s prayer struck Hummel as being more acute than the mereness of analogy. For once it had teeth and it bit. Holding up a tray of matzohs, old Beckermann recited in Aramaic the prayer of deliverance: ‘This is bread of affliction, that our fathers ate in Egypt. Those who are hungry let them come and eat; those who are needy let them come and celebrate Passover with us. We are here now, in the year to come we may be in Israel. We are slaves now – in the year to come we may be free.’