At that time the largest collection of papyri in the world was housed in London in a famous place called the British Museum and the man who had found the papyri was now the Professor of Papyrology in Oxford. The Russian arranged with this professor that Conrad should be granted a fellowship to study in London. He promised Conrad that if his work in England was successful, he would recommend him to a post in the Grosser Kurfürst Institut in Berlin. Anyone with a good post there was supposed to be set for the rest of his life.
In a time when the whole world was nearly broke and jobs were as scarce as snowballs in August, this would have been heady stuff for any ambitious young man and Conrad had become exceedingly ambitious. He noted in his diary that his entire life’s work leaped before him in a kind of map. After the papyri and routine studies in Politics and Economics, he would concentrate for several years on the history of art. Then he would set out to complete what he called “My Grand Design.” He would harmonize traditional History with the new findings in Psychology, Biology, and Anthropology and out of the mixture he would develop a new Moral Philosophy based on a combination of all these elements. Quoting an earlier German professor, he wrote in his diary: “I know where I stand now, but it may take the rest of my life to build the roads to take me there.”
None of this will make any sense to André Gervais or anyone else of his age. It makes no sense to me, either. The Germans of that time were famous for their addiction to grandiose projects and the time would come when even Conrad would ask himself what real difference there is between the ambition of a man who sets out to conquer all the people in the world and that of the one who sets out to conquer all the knowledge in it.
The trouble with Conrad was that he had put so much of himself into his academic work that he knew hardly anything else. At twenty-five he was still a virgin. Now with a fine job and what looked like a sure future he could afford to marry and the time for marriage had come.
TWO
Eva Schmidt was the only daughter of a minor provincial industrialist. All I know of him is that he spoiled his daughter, suffered from chronic constipation, and went annually to the sulfur baths at Wiesbaden. Conrad had met Eva through one of her three brothers whom he knew in the university. There are no photographs of her, but Conrad later described her as a picture-postcard Germanic beauty with flaxen hair, a light skin, and the kind of figure they called vollschlank, which meant simultaneously buxom and slim. I knew a few German girls and one of them was great to know and another was very good, but they were of a much later generation. In Conrad’s youth a German bourgeois girl was supposed to have no future outside marriage. Eva was twenty-four, her father reeked with money, and if Conrad had not been so engrossed with his books and documents it might have occurred to him that if nobody had wanted to marry Eva before, there must have been a good reason.
After a wedding much too expensive for his taste, they spent a two-weeks honeymoon in Paris before setting out for London. Conrad was reticent about his personal life and he has left me with only a few facts about his time with Eva. I assume that the honeymoon was a sexual disaster and that what followed in London was worse.
His working routine would have been pretty awful for any young wife even if she loved him, was intelligent, and had some inner resources of her own. Eva was invincibly stupid and sexually frustrated. In London Conrad worked eight hours a day in the Museum on those ancient papyri documents and in the evenings he read learned books connected with his work. He had assumed that Eva would keep herself busy seeing the London sights and learning English, but she had no interest in London and detested all the English people she met. She learned no more of their language than was necessary to do some elementary shopping.
This provincial heiress had grown up in a large house with servants and she thought it degraded her to have to live in a small flat in Bloomsbury. As she had never learned to cook, they ate most of their meals in cheap restaurants in Soho. It was even worse when it came to entertainments. Eva knew too little English to follow a play or a movie. Conrad loved classical music and she liked Viennese waltzes and second-rate jazz. After three orgasmless months, Eva discovered herself pregnant and the marriage collapsed. By this time she loathed Conrad and decided to escape from him. Without telling him she was pregnant, she left for home, spent a few days with her parents, and then went to Berlin for an abortion.
During the next two months Conrad wrote her a letter three times a week and she answered none of them. Finally he returned to Germany and found her just where he expected, at home with her family. There must have been some ugly scenes before he finally concluded that the only solution was divorce.
It was at this point that he discovered just what he had got himself into. Eva screamed at him that if he wanted a divorce he would have to pay for it. The price she named was more than he could afford, and she knew it. He had ruined her entire life, she said. No man would want her after what she had been through on account of him, and so on and so on.
I don’t know what the German divorce laws were at this time and Conrad did not mention them in any of the material he left. Though he was a baptized Catholic he no longer belonged to any formal religion. Eva was probably a lapsed Lutheran, so religion was no impediment to divorce providing they both wished it. I would have guessed that he could have divorced her for desertion, but as the decision seems to have depended on her, I can only suppose that she had some legality on her side. Anyway, he went back to London.
I wish I could say that Eva Schmidt merely entered Conrad’s life and left it, as a person may enter a hotel by the front door and go out by the back. Certainly he believed that this was what she had done and though he felt mortified and ill-used, he must have been relieved not to have her around any more. He never expected to see her again, but it did not turn out that way. Some years later they met each other in Germany, and in circumstances where she had all the advantages and he had none.
Conrad’s experience with Eva, and much more his love for the next woman in his life, saved him while still young from turning into the intellectual dinosaur he was well on his way to becoming. I can say this for him, he was willing to learn from experience even though he never got over his compulsion to make big generalizations. Here is one of them:
“If History is the study of men in society, I can thank Eva Schmidt for teaching me something most historians ignore, namely that fifty percent of the human race is composed of females.”
On the same page in the diary follows another notation that raised my eyebrows a little:
“It is reasonably certain that Henry VIII contracted syphilis when he was a young man and this could explain much that otherwise is mysterious. When young, Henry was amiable. Could not the megalomania and cruelty of his later years be explained by the fact that the disease in its third degree damaged his brain and made him paranoiac? The beheading of his wives made him famous, but it was of minor historical importance compared to the megalomania that refused to accept the authority of the Pope. This led, of course, to the policy of aloofness from Europe and the establishment of the Church of England. Hence it follows that this unknown woman who shared her disease with Henry was an extremely important historical agent. What would the Archbishop of Canterbury say if it were proved that the Church of England would never have existed had it not been for a wandering spirochete?”
As this singular pensée followed his previous reference to Eva Schmidt, I toyed with the notion that Conrad himself might have picked up a dose from a London prostitute after she left him. But I don’t really believe it. It was just another of the ways in which his over-complicated brain tended to work.
Now, before I continue, I must deal with an exasperating problem that has nagged me ever since I began this record. It concerns the dating.
As anyone old enough to remember will recall, the old dating system in which I grew up was abolished twenty-five years ago and replaced by the new one which took off from that particular year, which became our Year One. This w
as part of the Bureaucracy’s plan to obliterate the past. It was tied in with their Diagram. They calculated that after enough time had elapsed, the Past would be reduced to such a jumble of legends, propaganda, and inaccurate memories that none of the younger people would be able to think about it even if they wished to, or blame the Bureaucracy for having cheated them. For a while this colossal fraud seemed to be working; it worked well enough to make me wonder whether I myself had really lived through what I had seen. Until I met André Gervais I thought they had got away with it. Now it seems they haven’t.
Anyway, in our present system I am writing in the year 25. But as almost everything I write about happened during the old system, I will use the old system in my story and hope that any younger people who read it will at least be intrigued by the novelty.
I now resume in the year that used to be known officially as the nineteen-hundred-and-thirty-fourth year of Our Lord. André knows who Our Lord was because I lent him my Bible and he was fascinated by the Four Gospels. That Jesus Christ had lived more than two thousand years ago was something he could not grasp because he had never had the chance to understand time and its passage. The name of Christ he had always known. Everyone knows it and uses it, for it has survived as a swear word. If any of my readers are curious, all they have to do is to change the date 1934 to what in derision I call 80 BTB; that is, eighty years before this Third Bureaucracy abolished the old system.
THREE
One dank autumn night after Eva left him, Conrad Dehmel went to a concert in a famous London auditorium which a few years later was destroyed by bombs dropped from German aircraft. During the first movement of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony he sat immersed in the music, his eyes closed, his chin resting on the heel of his hand. When the first movement ended and he opened his eyes, they came to rest on a young woman in the cello section. All through the allegretto which followed his eyes never left her.
By this time Conrad had made a variety of friends in London. Some of them were English, but his closest friends were Germans and Austrians who had come to London to escape the bureaucracies in their own countries. A few of these were musicians. Three weeks after the concert he met this young cellist at a Sunday supper party given in honor of an exiled Austrian pianist who had been playing in London. Eva Schmidt had made Conrad cautious of women, but by nature he seems to have been a romantic and I certainly know that when his emotions were aroused he was the least cautious of men. He fell in love with Hanna Erlich and it was the real thing.
I can envy him. For though I have made love to more women than I can remember, and to some whose faces and bodies I remember but whose names I have forgotten, though I was very fond of Valerie and truly loved Joanne, I never fell in love in my entire life. No salmon ever sang in the streets for me because of any girl I knew; no sky ever blazed with Perseids. A psychiatrist once congratulated me for this, calling me a realist free of illusions. He was a fool. Even before I was thirty I understood that this was the price I had paid for becoming promiscuous at fourteen with girls as promiscuous as myself.
Like most Germans and Japanese, Conrad was a camera buff and I have more than forty small photos of Hanna Erlich. In most of these pictures she has a happy expression, in some a piquant and enquiring smile, in a few others a deep reflectiveness suggesting the sadness of a civilized person at the end of her civilization but still refusing to believe it. Her brows slant up delicately into a wide forehead. Her nose is too slim and artistocratic to have been a thoroughly satisfactory organ, for it pinched her antrums and she often suffered from sinus headaches. Conrad said she seemed tall because she carried herself well, but when I examined a picture of the two of them standing together I noted that the crown of her head was no higher than the lobe of his ear and he was not an especially tall man. In her teens she had studied ballet and she moved with a grace and litheness that were a revelation to him after the climsy stiffness of Eva Schmidt. He said that her voice was a rich contralto with a throb in it. Though she was only twenty-five years old, her hair was a rich silver shot through with darker tracings like the pure old silver that does not reflect the light but absorbs it. If I had ever met a woman like her when I was young I would have been wild for her, but by now you probably know me well enough to understand that I’d never have had a chance with her.
Hanna’s family was a part of the mosaic of old Europe that even in my youth was still a legend. The Erlichs were entwined with a long European experience going back into the past for centuries. My continent, the democratic continent, never had known anything comparable.
Hanna’s paternal grandfather had been born a Conservative Jew, but he became agnostic and all but two of his grandchildren married gentiles. The old man took ironic pleasure in reminding his Jewish brethren that he was much more a typical Jew than they were: “If every one of Father Abraham’s descendants had married only Jews, there’d be more of us in the world today than Chinese.” Yet all the Erlichs were proud of their Jewish genes and traced their lineage back to the aristocratic family that had emigrated from Spain centuries earlier to escape being burned alive by the Christians.
The first of Hanna’s purely Jewish ancestors to become German was the descendant of one of these refugees from Spain. He was a Polish citizen and held the chair of Chemistry in a famous Polish university. A Prussian king invited him to settle and teach Chemistry in Berlin, and from this time onward the Erlichs were integrated into the Teutonic core of old Europe. All of them prospered and some of them became distinguished.
Hanna’s father was a doctor who had served as a surgeon in the First Great War and this changed the course of the rest of his life. The physical mutilations had been horrifying enough, but what seemed far worse to Dr. Erlich was the state of mind which had brought on the war in the first place. Even before 1914 he had been interested in the teachings of Sigmund Freud and had audited some of his lectures in Vienna. Now he returned to Vienna and became Freud’s pupil for several years. The name of Freud can mean nothing to André Gervais, as I found out when I tried to describe him to André as a “mind doctor.” Dr. Erlich finally left Freud because he could not accept Freud’s insistence that the main cause of aggression is sexual. He went to Berlin and practised psychiatry on his own.
The Erlichs were a far more stimulating family than any I ever knew. They loved to argue and discuss with each other and they had much to argue and talk about because they were involved in most of the important areas of Central European life in the last years of its glory. Hanna’s Uncle Karl had married into an old Swiss family, had become a Swiss citizen, and was the director of a large bank in Zurich. A great-uncle had for a time been Minister of Finance in Austria, an older cousin was a physician and professor of Medicine in Cologne, and her father’s oldest brother, a senior partner in one of the great German shipping companies, made his home in Hamburg. His youngest brother, Hanna’s Uncle Helmuth, was a professional soldier. During the war he had reached the rank of full colonel, had won several decorations for valor, and now was a major-general in the small but exceedingly efficient army of the young German Republic.
Every Christmas the families reunited, entertaining and being entertained in rotation in each other’s homes. Much music was played and after the women had gone to bed the men relaxed with their cigars and kirsch and argued about everything that interested them. Each was a proved professional in his field, but all assumed that the ultimately important things were art, science, music, and literature, and they agreed that with the exception of science, none of these should be confined to national borders even in wartime. They had intimate friends in five different countries and all of them were fluent in at least three languages. The major-general spoke five, including Russian.
As I think I have indicated, Conrad was a pretty conventional young man at this stage of his life, but coming from a family like the Erlichs, Hanna had been living on a different plane from his. She was the first truly modern woman Conrad had ever met, and in a time and country
where most women were systematically kept down, she was an astonishment to him. She was even more disciplined than he was, but she had no sexual hang-ups whatever. She was never promiscuous and would have felt contempt for the way my sister and I lived when we were young. Just when she and Conrad became lovers I don’t know, but it was probably a month or so after they first met. Soon he was asking her to marry him. His work was going so well that his post at the Institut in Berlin seemed reasonably certain and then he would have enough money to buy off Eva Schmidt. But Hanna would not consider marriage and refused for a reason that Conrad, incredibly, refused to take seriously.
For Hanna knew, as Conrad’s ambition and concentration on his work had blocked him from knowing, that huge events and appalling personalities were poised to intervene in the personal lives of every living soul in Europe. Love as Conrad understood it meant permanence. Love as Hanna understood it in that particular time meant love in impermanence.
It is bizarre for me to have to think of Hitler again. So many books were written about him that some of them must still be around. Even André has heard his name, though it means no more to him than Attila or Torquemada meant to me when I was André’s age. My parents’ generation never tired of talking about him and his war and they bored most of us to death. But when political troubles began in my own country when I was still a boy, I knew that Uncle Conrad was much more worried than most of our own people were. I remember hearing him say to Mother, “The tragedy was that hardly any of us took Hitler seriously until it was too late. I should know, for I was just as blind as the others.”
But there was one person in this story who took Hitler seriously even before he gained power and this was Hanna’s father. When she was spending Christmas with her family, and all the relations were there as usual, Dr. Erlich asked her one evening after dinner to come into the library with him.
Voices in Time Page 24