Carry Me

by Peter Behrens

  Wary of punishment herself, at first Hamilton didn’t mention what had happened to any of the adults. I certainly wasn’t old enough to inform anyone. But after the Weinbrenners went back to Germany, never to return—for this would have been the summer of 1913, and racing was canceled in ’14 because of the European crisis—Anne Hamilton did tell my mother of the little German girl’s wicked waywardness. What a fright it had given her, and the child had boldly insisted that she’d been swimming for America. Only the bitter-tasting sea hadn’t wanted her and kept pushing her back.

  “I told her it wasn’t America it was only bloody old France that way! And if she turned up in France in a sopping wet frock with seaweed for hair, they’d call her a mermaid, the French would, and burn her at the stake.”

  1938

  Letter. Addressed Herr Billy Lange, Übersetzung Abteilung, IG Farben, Hauptsitz Frankfurt A.M., postmarked Frankfurt A.M. 16.9.1938. Lange Family Archive, 11 C-09-1938. Special Collections, McGill Library, McGill University, Montreal.

  TRIERISCHEN GASSE 7*

  16th September 1938

  My dear Billy!

  As your old schoolfellow I write in perfect honesty and sincerity. There is a matter I must bring to your attention. Your attitude to the national and racial developments in our Germany has never been made clear. Some fellows were discussing this yesterday and I will say they were sincerely troubled on your behalf. Your attitude is quite mystifying. We have reports that you claim you are not a German man.

  Billy, old mate, let me say it’s not a matter of what passport a fellow holds. It’s that which is in his heart and his blood which counts. No more pettifoggery and bullshit please! Now you have come of age in Germany, a good German name, a handsome fellow of German blood, and you have a good position with the IG.

  Believe me who wishes you the best. Our branch welcomes you. Consider. Join us in the struggle for a new world. Don’t you think now is time you accept the proud national aspect and the duty of the German man?

  Heil Hitler!

  Günter

  *My translation from German orig!—B.L. 9.2.88

  Telegram, 4 Nov. 1938. Lange Family Archive, 11 C-11-1938. Special Collections, McGill Library, McGill University, Montreal.

  095 TELEGRAMM DEUTSCHE REICHSPOST

  aus 2097 Berlin 04.11.1938

  H. Lange IG Farben Hauptsitz Frankfurt A. M.

  Billy Dear=Drastic News=Komm bitte

  =K. vW +

  A clerk had dropped the telegram onto my desk in the export Sales Department, fifth floor, IG Farben headquarters, Frankfurt. Karin was summoning me to Berlin.

  I wondered what her “drastic news” could be. We were living in a drastic period. Perhaps the emigration bureau where she assisted Jews trying to flee Germany was finally being shut down.

  It was five weeks since my last visit to Berlin. I slipped Karin’s telegram into my briefcase and telephoned to reserve a seat on the next morning’s Berlin express. Then I rang my parents at Bad Homburg and told them I was off for a hiking weekend in the Taunus.

  I had always taken pains to conceal the current and depth of our relationship from Buck and Eilín. They’d only have disapproved. They’d have said in all kinds of ways that Karin von Weinbrenner was too much for me.

  Saturday morning I caught an FD express for Berlin. I intended to persuade her it was time we both left Germany. If she would leave, then I could, too. She was the only reason I hadn’t.

  A few weeks earlier, at the height of the Munich crisis, I’d received the “friendly” note from my old schoolfellow Günter Krebs, now an SS man. Günter had joined the party early, was one of the original sixteen members of the first Schutzstaffel in the Gau Hessen-Nassau, and one of the first men at my firm, IG Farben, to declare himself a Nazi.

  Günter’s note contained an implicit threat: if I stayed in Germany I’d have to accept what the Nazified authorities already considered my German nationality. And that meant military service in the rapidly expanding Heer or arrest and a one-way trip to someplace like Dachau.

  Karin, like me, held a British passport. Our parents had always seen to it that we maintained them. Our passports meant we didn’t need exit visas to leave Germany.

  So many were so desperate to flee that by then it seemed almost obscene that the pair of us had chosen not to.

  But I couldn’t leave without her. She called me her bodyguard.

  She was living in Berlin, I was in Frankfurt, but by 1938 I was as close to her as I ever was in my life to any other person. I’ll say that now. The sex we had was passionate but also, in a way, cool. It was like people taking a blood oath. Does that sound grim? Well, it wasn’t. It was important, exciting, to be in bed together during those years when the ethical world of Germany was crumbling. But yes, it had a ritual aspect. Bed was wild but safe for both of us at a period when life in Germany (even for those carrying British passports) was becoming more and more precarious.

  Karin was more German than I’d ever be. She was also, at least after the Nuremberg Laws, a Jew. She agreed that life in Germany was impossible, but she was unwilling to leave her father.

  A British passport guaranteed the right to live and work in any of the Dominions. After receiving Günter’s letter, I’d immediately written three of my best Canadian customers, and the day before Karin’s telegram dropped on my desk I was offered a job in Vancouver, selling chlorophenolic compounds and petrochemicals to lumber mills deep in the Canadian forest. It sounded terribly far from Europe. And that was all right with me. I immediately booked two passages for New York aboard a Holland-America liner, the SS Volendam, sailing from Rotterdam in early December.

  Going up to Berlin, I didn’t know if I’d be able to persuade Karin to come to America, but I was determined to try.

  My FD-Zug train arrived at the Anhalter Bahnhof at noon. I went straightaway to her office in a shabby building behind the Wertheim department store, on the Leipziger Platz. When she was fired from UFA after the film studio was commandeered by the Nazis, she’d first gone to work at the Zionist Agency in Berlin. After a few months she’d left them to join a small emigration bureau started by a lawyer, Stefan Koplin, also fired from UFA. “Kop” would help Jews go anywhere, not just to Palestine. He was an expert at bargaining for visas from South American embassies. Karin’s specialty was calculating the “flight tax” that had to be paid before any exit permit was granted. The formula was insanely complex, and if the slightest error was made, exit permits were gleefully withheld. But Karin had her father’s head for figures. She claimed she never made mistakes. Sometimes she even persuaded her father to help her Jews pay their flight tax. Herr Philipp Kaufman, the baron’s lawyer, objected, saying it left Weinbrenner even more vulnerable to the regime, but the baron usually gave his daughter whatever she asked for, though he didn’t approve of ordinary Jews leaving the country any more than he’d approved of the film stars and directors who were her friends quitting Berlin for Hollywood. To him they were all Fahnenflüchtige: deserters.

  Baron von Weinbrenner told my father that if the Nazis wished him to leave they’d have to pick him up, carry him to the frontier, and physically throw him out, and still he would make his way back, because Germany was his country, not theirs.

  Karin’s office was listed as AUSWANDERUNGSBERATER in the lobby directory. Emigration consultants. I rode the elevator cage to the fifth floor, walked down a grimy corridor, and entered a room that had once been a leather shop. A half-dozen clerks sat with anxious clients at desks groaning with files. A program of Viennese music squawked from a radio. More files were stored in dozens of cartons stacked on the floor.

  The previous summer a group of rabbinical students had invaded the office, furious that it remained open on the Jewish Sabbath. As a compromise Kop now shut the doors at 4:00 p.m. on Fridays, always with a herd of anxious clients who had to be pushed out the door. On Saturdays, however, they kept regular German office hours and stayed open until one o’clock.

 
; The room had the harried, fretful atmosphere of a train station. Stale air, blue with cigarette smoke.

  Kop waved at me from his desk. He was a young man, a brilliant lawyer, but overworked and overweight. In August he had lost his villa to the Generalbauinspektorat with zero compensation offered. He’d recently packed his wife and children off to Buenos Aires, but assured Karin he would not “abandon his post.”

  Karin had told me that before any application for an exit permit could be considered, the applicant had to list every item of personal property so the Reichsfluchtsteuer could be assessed.

  “My Jews must pile up their goods, including the last pair of socks. Including the needles that darned the socks, Billy. Including the thread. Then if they drench the pile with kerosene, light it with a match, possibly the gentlemen of the Finanzamt will be satisfied. But perhaps not, perhaps you have forgotten to list those postage stamps your wife kept in the kitchen drawer, that spare can of motor oil in the boot of your car?

  “I’ll visit their mean apartments on Schweidnitzerstraße, Billy dear, I’ll stop by their beautiful houses in Dahlem, I don’t allow my Jews to overlook a single thing. I have them list the box of matches in their pocket. I feel the urge sometimes, I can hardly stifle it, I want to make them list their thoughts. ‘Have you ideas, valuable or not, list on page seven, section three, bitte. Do you have desires, Jews? List. Do you have memories? Aufzählen, bitte. All the meals you have consumed. Every single one, bitte. Please write down the number of candles that no longer exist in Germany because you have lit them. List the volume of air sucked in since birth, in liters, please.’ ”

  That Saturday she waved at me across the crowded room before turning her attention back to files on her desk, which also held an enormous gray typewriter and a Burroughs adding machine. She looked terribly thin. Whenever I came up to Berlin there was never much food in her apartment, maybe a packet of rye crusts, a scrap of butter, coffee. She’d stopped buying from the grocers on her street, ardent Nazis. Some days she consumed only apples, nuts, and black coffee.

  I hadn’t had anything to eat myself since buying a sausage roll at a stall at Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof. On our Berlin Saturdays, we usually had lunch at one of the cafés on Unter den Linden, then meandered through the city, wending our way back to her flat in Charlottenburg. An important newspaper editor—a party member—wanted that flat for his in-laws. Since late summer the threat of eviction had been hanging over Karin’s Berlin existence. The building’s Hausmeister, who was loyal to her, had warned that management was going to pitch her belongings out on the street one day.

  “And then, I’ll be a Wandering Jew,” she said. “But not before.”

  I sat on a bench beside a man in a business suit tapping a malacca cane nervously against his alligator shoes. I watched Karin shuffling papers into a neat pile that she tied up with yellow string. Standing up, she put on her hat and started pulling on gloves. I headed for the elevator cage, and she met me there. We hardly spoke.

  Coming together, especially in public, was usually like that for us. At first we needed silence.

  She wore her gray-green Harris Tweed overcoat with a velvet collar, very smart. Waiting for the elevator, I could feel the vibration of the lift machinery and hear the rattle of the iron cage. She pouted her lips and applied fresh lipstick. At the Zionist agency, some of the people were radical socialists, some were very religious, but they’d all objected to her wearing lipstick. So of course she had responded with ever-more-flamboyant shades. And she’d worn sandals in summer and painted her toenails maroon.

  We walked out into the bright, cold fall afternoon. I had my Taunus hiker’s knapsack slung over one shoulder. Crowds seethed in and out of the great department stores. On Unter den Linden there was a chill wind. Patrons on the café terrace were swaddled in their overcoats. We ordered soup and venison and glasses of beer, and I handed her Günter Krebs’s friendly little note and watched her face as she read it.

  When she finished reading she looked up.

  “I’m pregnant, dear Billy,” she said.

  THE NAVAL SPY

  Hardboard notebook/journal. Holograph inside cover: Arten von Licht Buch [Kinds of Light Book], Karin v Weinbrenner. Unpaginated. In English and occ. German. Lange Family Archive, 11 C-12-1988. Special Collections, McGill Library, McGill University, Montreal.

  Remembered light of summers at Shanklin on I of W)

  Blues von cyan zu azur and greens are chief components. This is a complex light but soft. With the air which is tonic, my early scents of freedom. I only speak of summer, we only were there for summers. Not many, the war stopped us coming. This light, isle light, is actually quite changeable even in summer there is restlessness to it. When you suppose you know it white, heavy, blank, cool—the herring scent of the north, Wikingerluft—then the wind comes ’round, brokers the mist and the light sharpens and becomes focused and powerful. Clear. The rim appears on the horizon, floating—“why my dear, So ist Frankreich.” The air in which I was born surrounded was a loving air. Saline briny tangy promising. Windows-banging light. Gusting 20 knots. A surround of excited light. A storm light. Suffusion. Powerful in the afternoons. Lay of sunlight across the garden at my Sanssouci and beyond it the navy sea…

  Karin and her parents spent the month of August on the isle. Each year, after the Weinbrenners returned to Germany, my parents and I would settle back into our beloved Sanssouci. The house wasn’t handsome or old or very dignified, but it was an airy, lucky seaside villa. On clear days we could see the blue coast of France. Much later, during the war, Eilín and I listened to the rumble of guns from over there. There were gardens and a great spread of lawn and nothing to interfere with the sprawling, questing presence of the sea. We could watch ships entering and leaving Portsmouth Harbour.

  Buck kept a pair of German naval binoculars close at hand. He wasn’t interested in watching the great liners from Southampton or gray warships moving in and out of the naval base—only yachts, especially gaff-rigged racing schooners. The household was under instructions to sound an alert whenever a tall gaff rig was spotted. Buck had a professional interest in how efficiently a sailboat was handled, what speed she could make, in what sort of weather. Races were not casual affairs at the Royal Yacht Squadron. All skippers and crews were professionals, the only amateurs on board were owners and guests, and owners, if they hoped to win, never took the helm. There was always money riding on the race, private wagers breathlessly reported in London newspapers.

  Baron Hermann Weinbrenner has wagered a thousand pounds that his Hermione II will beat the Glaswegian biscuit manufacturer Mr. Beezlebub’s Snapcrack on the annual Round the Island race.

  In blazers, white flannels, and yachting caps, the baron and the biscuit manufacturer would puff cigars on their respective decks while professional skippers like my father handled the boats.

  My mother and I only went out on Hermione at the beginning and end of the season.

  I’ll offer you one hard blue day.

  Everything blue: sea, sky. Eilín wearing a white dress and a cream flannel blazer, trimmed with blue ribbon. She is smiling, her teeth gleaming white in a face dark from the summer’s worth of sun. She had never sailed before meeting my father. The Irish are born with their backs to the sea, my grandmother Con used to say.

  But Con was herself an exception to the rule; and my mother was certainly another. Sailing delighted Eilín. I think my parents felt more free of care and worry on a good hard sail than any other time.

  We’re on Hermione, but the baron is not aboard, so it’s July before his arrival, or September, after he’s gone back to Germany. We’re on a broad reach, boom sheeted way out. A helmsman must be at the wheel because Buck holds me in his arms. I sense pressure singing off canvas sails, that electric thrum of physical sound. My father wears a blue cap and blue blazer with gold buttons. At some point he must have brought me forward because I’ve a vision of our bow wave curling, its crest gleaming white like a bone b
etween our schooner’s teeth.

  We’ll go like this for hours, no one saying a word except the helmsman occasionally calling out “Jibe ho!” or “Hard a’ lee!”

  This is where my father longed to be all his life. Everything taut, tuned, everything perfect, weather fair. Everything alive and electric with spirit and speed. Everything moving.

  When the baroness, Lady Maire, chose to visit her relations in London or Ireland, my mother was expected to manage the household and act as hostess to the baron’s weekend parties, a role she did not enjoy.

  Eilín wore white all summer, skin radiant, eyes blue as the sea on a fair day.

  The baron had packs of guests down for Cowes Week, English and Germans. Hired coaches arrived from Ryde, disgorging blustery men in straw hats, with noxious cigars and mountains of leather baggage.

  My mother would sit at one end of the dinner table and manage conversations between supercilious young aristocrats from the German embassy and millionaire yachtsmen from the British Midlands. The guests were distracted by her Irish charm and her beauty, which allowed the baron—bored by dinner parties, even his own—to slip away whenever he chose, to his library, or to Hermione.

  One night Weinbrenner elected to sleep aboard his yacht and left my mother to entertain twelve houseguests. It was Cowes Week, so August. It was nearly midnight when Eilín bid good night to the staff and left the gentlemen playing whist in the library, with whiskey and a plate of freshly cut sandwiches. She started back to the village and the Crab Inn, and one of the guests, Sir Ernest Dalton, slipped out of the house, caught up with her in a dark stretch of lane, and assaulted her.