Voices in Time

by Hugh Maclennan

  “Only for a fortnight with Eva.”

  “I’ve spent a year and a half in Paris and I tell you the French will do nothing but quarrel among themselves. As for England, she seems tired to me, but perhaps she’s only confused. My Uncle Helmuth, by the way, has the greatest respect for England. As he puts it, she still has one more good war in her. He also thinks – or thought – that for this reason Hitler won’t provoke her.”

  He touched her cheek and found it moist with tears. “Hanna dear – why do you cry?”

  “I’m sorry, Conrad. I’m terribly sorry but I can’t –” she choked back a sob and said, “It’s going to be an awful time we’ll have to live in. It’s a terrible time to have fallen in love, and I have! I have! The millions of people who are falling in love all over Europe and don’t know what I know! I envy them because they don’t know.” She straightened, her voice steadied, and she looked out over the river. “Who signed this letter you got from the Institut?”

  “The chairman of the board.”

  “Had you ever heard of his name before?”

  Startled, he asked why she had asked such a question. She repeated it.

  “No, I never heard of him, but board chairmen come and go. He’s somebody appointed by the government. The Grosser Kurfürst has always been a state institution.”

  “So Professor Rosenthal didn’t sign the letter?”

  “Why should he have signed it? It wasn’t in his province.”

  “Do you really believe your Professor Rosenthal will keep his directorship much longer?”

  With this she reached him hard, for Erwin Rosenthal was the man under whom Conrad had intended to work in Berlin. He was the world’s greatest living art historian. He was also a Jew. Conrad protested to her.

  “The very fact that Rosenthal is still there proves that the situation isn’t so bad as you think.”

  She rose to her feet. “Then go, Conrad, for you’ll never believe me till you see for yourself. You have decided to go home. Your life is yours, as I’ve often told you. So go home and see for yourself.”

  He was so disappointed that his mind felt bruised by her words. Later he would record that when he heard her say this it was as though she had planted a time-bomb in the foundations of his life.

  “Hanna, is this your way of telling me you’ll never go home?”

  “For my father and brother and sister I will go home if they need me. I’ve begged all of them but my father to leave. I understand why he’s decided to stay. He tells me that Mother would be in no immediate danger because in Mother there’s no Jewish blood – as these crazy barbarians would put it.”

  Again he was astonished. “But none of you have been Jewish for a century!”

  “We’ve never denied our Jewish ancestors. Why should we? Incidentally, it would do us no good if we did.”

  “Hanna – this anti-Jewish talk of his, it’s only propaganda. It’s been going on in Europe for centuries. Propaganda, that’s all.”

  “Indeed it is,” she said softly, “and horribly successful propaganda. How many Christians like Jews as Jews? Individual Jews – often. But Jews as Jews? How many Jews like gentiles as gentiles? Individual gentiles, often.” She paused and said, “Look at me, Conrad!”

  He looked at her.

  “Just why did you – you yourself – think it important to mention that my family had not been Jewish for a century?”

  He could not answer this because he could not deny what her question meant. She put her hand on his wrist and continued.

  “It’s far more than that, of course. Far worse. Not even the Jews in Germany can bring themselves to believe what’s going to happen to them. It’s too incredible to believe it. My father is certain that Hitler’s obsession with the Jews is the key to his psychosis. He thinks it’s the one thing about which he’s entirely sincere.”

  “So you’re telling me he’s mad?”

  “What is ‘mad’? A word.”

  “Well, if he’s insane, how has he been able to do what he’s done? Seventy million Germans aren’t insane.”

  “Neither are the frock-coated Victorian gentlemen who run the French and British governments. They’re saying just what you’re saying. He can’t be insane because look what he’s doing. He can’t be insane because he’s pulled a great nation out of despair and he’s getting the people back to work. And of course they don’t want to discourage him because he’s cleaning the communists out, and with the communists destroyed, their investments will be safe.”

  There was a long silence between them. London rumbled reassuringly around them. He felt tears in his eyes.

  “But what of us, Hanna? What of us?”

  “I will marry you if you can get rid of Eva. But I won’t live in Germany with you and I won’t even think of marrying you until you’ve gone home and seen for yourself. If I talked you into abandoning your ambition you’d resent me for the rest of your life.”

  “I’d never do that.”

  “You’re human, Conrad. Indeed you’d resent me if that’s what you thought had happened. So go home, Conrad. Go home and make up your own mind after you’ve seen it there.”

  That summer the weather was hot over most of Europe and before Conrad left England they spent a week together on the Channel shore of the Isle of Wight in a small cottage lent them by one of Eva’s friends. The south coast of England swarmed with holiday-makers but they had a small private beach to themselves. The transatlantic liners of the time passed close to the shore on their way in and out of Southampton and one night a huge one hove into view. High on her masthead shone the lights of an enormous swastika and they both knew what that ship was. She was the swiftest vessel on the oceans and she was calling at Southampton on her return voyage from New York.

  In Conrad’s diary of that week, the last peaceful one he was ever to spend with Hanna, occurred this single line: “We made love every day and all the goodness of life was in it.”

  The week ended, they returned to London, he packed his bags, packed his books into massive wooden boxes and nailed down the covers on their tops. Hanna went down to the station to see him off on the boat train. When the train started he leaned out the window of his compartment waving to her. The sun streamed through the open cleft in the station roof making a partial rainbow in the smoke and steam. It fell on her silver hair and as the train gathered speed he watched her grow tiny, but he still could see the little flicker of white from the handkerchief she was waving to him.

  FOUR

  The ship that took Conrad home was another German liner making Southampton its port of call en route from New York. He had not been aboard more than an hour before he felt the tension.

  There were passengers returning after many years in the Americas to serve the new Germany. He saw a group of arrogant, loud young men, some of them with Latin features, who had been born in Argentina and were coming to Germany to enlist in the Nazi army. They all wore swastikas in their buttonholes. At dinner that night Conrad’s waiter informed him that he was hoping to rejoin the navy, that he had served in the last war and had been in one of the battle cruisers at the Skaggerak. Noting Conrad’s name on his placecard, he said, “Herr Doktor, our chief gunnery officer had the same name as yours.” He named the ship.

  “He was my father,” Conrad said.

  “Korvettenkapitän Dehmel ist Ihr Vater! Wie geht es ihm? He was the best gunnery officer in the fleet. Nobody who was not there could know how good he was.”

  The waiter stood very erect when he took the order, and the others at the table looked at Conrad with respect.

  Afterwards, strolling through the ship, Conrad noticed an elderly Jewish couple huddled in a corner and wondered why they were going to Germany. Their faces were expressionless but they seemed afraid. He crossed to where they were sitting, bowed, and invited them to a cognac. The old man seemed grateful.

  “You are very kind. For myself, I will take only soda water, but for my wife a small kirsch would be good. Indeed yo
u are kind and I would like you to let me pay. The waiter refused to serve me.”

  Conrad looked over his shoulder, beckoned to the waiter, who came over grudgingly.

  “A kirsch for the lady, a soda water for the gentleman, and a cognac for me.”

  The waiter hesitated. Conrad stared at him and said, “I have given you my order.”

  He turned back to the old couple.

  “I am a professor of History,” he said. “Or should I say, I am about to become one. Do I intrude?”

  “You are very kind, Herr Doktor.”

  An uneasy silence followed and finally Conrad broke it. “Have you been long in America?”

  “Two years,” the old lady said. “We have a son there.”

  “I have not been in Germany for quite a long time, but I read the newspapers. I am curious why you should be returning?”

  The old man shrugged. “It is necessary for business reasons. Also, two of our sons and our daughter and our grandchildren are there.”

  The waiter came with the drinks, set them down with a truculent air, and Conrad paid him.

  “If I need you again,” he said to the waiter, “I will call you.”

  Turning to the elderly couple he said, “I am not a Nazi and you may talk freely. I am engaged to a German-Jewish girl who is now in England.”

  “It is better that you should not become conspicuous by talking with us,” the woman said.

  He realized that she meant it; realized also that his sitting there made them conspicuous, so after downing his cognac he rose, said good night, and went out on deck.

  The ship was now steaming in the twilight through the Straits, England hazy to the north, France a little clearer to the south, and as they passed the lights of Calais, Conrad saw a passenger spit in the direction of France.

  He paced the deck until darkness fell, saw the lights flickering from many other ships, and smiled ruefully as he remembered that this very expanse of water had not so long ago been known in England as “the German ocean.” As they steered deeper into the North Sea a wind rose and the ship began to heave violently in the shallow waters. He went down to his cabin and heard somebody vomiting in the stateroom next to his own and though he was not seasick himself it was long past midnight before he finally fell asleep.

  The next day they were in the Bight and the sea was calm again and the only white water he saw was the foam of quick swells breaking against the rock of Heligoland. Soon afterwards his short voyage ended at Cuxhaven with the band playing “Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles” and several hundred passengers standing at attention while they roared out the chorus of the Teutonic hymn. Then they jostled each other against the railing, waving down at a sea of relatives who were waving back from the dock.

  It took him more than two hours to clear customs and immigration. There must have been a hundred expressionless men in black uniforms and helmets and he wondered what would be the fate of the Jewish couple he had spoken to the day before. Probably nothing more than rudeness and harassing delays. When his own turn came the immigration official greeted him cordially.

  “Congratulations, Herr Doktor, on coming home. Germany needs men like you.”

  Customs took longer and his trunks and boxes of books were searched carefully. Then the tops of the packing cases containing the books were smartly nailed back into place and he was through. But still more time had to be spent putting the trunks and packing cases into storage until he could find an address in Berlin to which they could be sent.

  By the time the boat train reached Hamburg it was late in the afternoon and when he came out of the station carrying his two suitcases he saw the streets filled with burly men in brown shirts and breeches. There had been a big Nazi rally that day and it had just broken up. Banners were stretched across the streets from lamppost to lamppost bearing political slogans in huge gothic letters. Pictures of Hitler stared like ikons out of the shop windows. Sitting in a taxi on his way to a hotel he thought there must be great fear in the city because only a few years ago Hamburg had been the chief communist stronghold in Germany. He registered in the hotel and after dinner he walked for an hour without seeing anything important.

  The next afternoon the train that took him to Berlin had three cars packed with soldiers, strong young men in the old field-gray. They were having a happy time, their faces were flushed, and their singing was like thunder. He reached Berlin just before sunset, registered in a small hotel in a side street, and after dinner again went out to walk the streets. He did not wish to go to his parents’ until he had sensed the atmosphere by himself.

  The last time he had been in Berlin the city was a mirror of despair. There were many beggars and in Germany begging was the ultimate disgrace. But it was not these he had noticed, it was the prostitutes. Swarms of them along the sidewalks of the Friedrich-strasse, females on one side of the street and young males on the other with painted lips and mascaraed eyes. On that evening he had been walking with a student friend who was an economist and his friend had remarked that the surest test of a nation’s economic condition was the price of a whore. He spoke to one of the girls and asked her price.

  “Four marks,” she had replied.

  Now there was not a whore in sight and he wondered where they were. He passed a cabaret that seemed vaguely familiar and on an impulse he turned back and went up the stairs to see what it was like now. There wasn’t much to see: a few middle-aged men sipping drinks and talking little, three entertainers idle in front of their instruments on a tiny stage in a corner, some semi-private booths called séparés where men could take girls for two marks and they could rub one another. Tonight the booths were empty but there were three hard-faced blondes at the bar who seemed to be waiting for customers.

  He sat down at a table and ordered a beer. The girls at the bar turned around on their stools and one of them beckoned him to join them. He paid no attention and after a few minutes the biggest blonde came over, planted herself on a chair at his table, and asked if he was alone.

  “Do you see anyone else with me?” he said.

  “It’s still early. The show hasn’t begun yet. If you stay till eleven o’clock you can see us all naked. Lebende Bilder. In public we’re not allowed to move our hips. We stand like statues. But you should see how we can move in private. Will you stay till midnight?”

  “No.”

  She shrugged. “I can get off for a little while so long as I’m back here before eleven o’clock. I have a place near here. Why don’t you come? I can give you a good time.”

  She named her price and said she was very good because he could see for himself she was a big girl and a lot of woman. She said she was unusual because she could adjust herself to all sizes. Not many girls could do that, but she had always been able to do it. It came naturally to her because she liked it so much. She would do anything he wanted but for some of the things the price would naturally be higher.

  A waiter had come over and was standing by the table and he asked him to bring the girl a beer. The man came back with an opened bottle of bad champagne, filled two glasses, and put the bottle in an ice bucket on the table between them.

  “I ordered a beer,” Conrad said.

  The waiter smiled. “But this is a lady. She drinks only champagne.”

  “So that’s how it is. All right, how much?”

  He named the price; Conrad paid him and noted that the markup was only a hundred percent. In a place like this he had expected it to be more. Business must be bad, and looking about at the nearly empty cabaret, he guessed that it was very bad. He asked the girl where she came from and she said from Breslau.

  “You’re English, aren’t you?” she said next.

  “Why do you think that?”

  “I can always tell an Englishman. An Englishman’s clothes are always so chic. We like Englishmen here. How do you speak such good German? If it wasn’t for your clothes I’d have thought you were a born German.”

  “I made my studies at a Ge
rman university.”

  A small-time political informer, of course. What revolution no matter how noble had ever neglected to enlist the whores? He left her with the champagne and walked for another half-hour. Berlin was hard and naked under a full moon and there were few people on the streets near his hotel. Suddenly he heard loud voices and just ahead of him some big men in brown shirts and breeches were erupting onto the sidewalk from an underground ratskeller. They were all in early middle age, thick through the chest and hips, and the bellies of three of them bulged out over their belts. He smelled stale beer and they stared at him with stupid and automatic hostility as he passed. The original wave of the movement, he thought, the first of the bully boys, the beefsteaks brown outside and red inside. Suddenly he was seeing history instead of reading about it. Smelling it, too. Unseen behind these goons would be the young ones coming up, lean, hard, cold, and trained.

  The hotel lobby was empty except for the night porter. Conrad said good night and asked for his key. Only then did he notice behind the desk a colored photograph of the Leader and under it was printed a jingle:

  Trittst du als Deutscher hier hinein

  Soll stets dein Gruss Heil Hitler sein.

  The porter was bigger than any one of the Brown Shirts he had passed on his way here: a brutal body, an ex-bouncer for sure, in the last war probably a corporal and now a Blockwart. He must have weighed at least 110 kilograms and Conrad took in the beetling eyebrows, the thick-fleshed face creased into a permanent scowl, the square moustache, the shaven head the color of cement with a few veins showing livid between the skin and the bone. A single spike of pepper-and-salt hair jutted up from his scalp just over the center of the forehead. With the key in his hand he stared at Conrad.

  “Heil Hitler!” he barked.

  “Danke, gute Nacht.”

  The porter’s mouth opened so wide that Conrad saw its red roof. His thick thumb jerked backwards over his shoulder in the direction of the Leader’s picture and he bellowed, “Heil Hitler!”

  Conrad looked back at him levelly, but he felt the fear of the civilized man in the presence of the barbarian. Before Hitler had taken charge, it would have been inconceivable that a man like this porter could have talked like this to a gentleman. But Conrad was also his father’s son. I, who had no father I ever knew, could I ever have responded to a man like this as he did?