by Otto de Kat
“How do you rate Carl Regendorf, Adriaan?”
“A hundred per cent reliable, a good German, the best of his year at the Foreign Office. Not a party member, and yet, miraculously, taken on. Why do you ask?”
“My daughter is in love with him, and he with her, and things are moving rapidly. Regendorf spends all his free time at Fasanenstrasse. Kate isn’t too sure about this. Having a German in the house these days is not exactly the most desirable of farewell gifts. I can see it all go wrong, I mean, I think Emma and he are going to get married.”
At that moment he realised that Wapenaar’s wife was German.
“O.K., Adriaan, I know what I must sound like, but your marriage predates 1933, so that doesn’t count.”
Wapenaar roared with laughter. People at nearby tables smiled: cheery Hollanders, infectious fun.
Then he became serious.
“You’re quite right, Oscar. It’s becoming insupportable here. You’re lucky, you can leave. I can’t, nor do I want to, really, because of Elka and her family. We must keep in touch, you and I. We don’t know when we might need each other. Where will your next posting be?”
“Nowhere for now. We’ll be spending a year or so in The Hague, drifting on the tides of bureaucracy.”
Wapenaar nodded. He raised his glass.
The clink of glasses jogged Verschuur’s attention. He was prone to drifting into daydreams at the most poignant moments. Lifting his glass automatically, he tapped it to that of his neighbour. Skål, Björn. To your good health, David. Zum Wohl, Horst. The echo of sincere fellowship, the heartfelt cheers of like-minded friends. Smith, Henderson, Kelly and the others, united in their loathing of the forces bearing down on them: the Thousand-Year Reich.
Warn the Russians? Oscar repeated the question to himself. How trustworthy were they? Wouldn’t they make enquiries about him among their German embassy friends, and, while they were about it, mention that it was he who had tipped them off about a so-called invasion? Or they might take him for some Dutch boy-scout type. A man with an obscure doctorate in history, whose career was a virtual blank and whose function and mission remained unclear. Get Smith to deliver a letter to Wapenaar, who could then leak the information via Sweden? No, that would mean shifting the onus to Smith while it was his to bear, and besides, Smith would be searched at the border. What about Björn Henderson, couldn’t he share Emma’s news with him? He hesitated. Much as he liked and trusted Henderson, the Swedes were cautious in the extreme. His information would doubtless be dismissed as unconfirmed rumour by the wary ambassador.
No, he would not burden Henderson.
Sending word to his ministry in London was a non-starter. It was the last thing he would do. London was synonymous with bungling, infighting, red tape. The Dutch government-in-exile, established there in 1940, was in his opinion singularly inept. Organising anything whatsoever via that channel was simply not on. The disheartening exchanges with them in the line of duty were bad enough. What he was doing in Switzerland was of his own devising and initiative: activities off the beaten track, operations that would have scandalised the pen-pushers at Stratton House or in Ascot or wherever their desks were nowadays. Had they known, they would have been running to their bosses, clamouring for him to be stopped.
Oscar Martinus Verschuur, Ph.D., having earned his doctorate with a thesis on a pack of Zulu warriors, was an important link in Switzerland for refugees trying to get into the country. Most of the people he helped were French or German, and now and again a few Dutch. And London was not involved in any of that. They had no idea. Wapenaar in Berlin knew, so did the Dutch consul in Lugano. And Kate. But of the hundred or so people of assorted nationalities whom he had managed to smuggle over the border, not a single one knew him, or at least not his name, nor those of his few contacts in Holland and Belgium. He had become the Dutch Foreign Ministry’s consummate cover-up agent. Which was why nobody ever made the connection between him and Morton. Morton was in the know, he was kept informed of developments by Oscar, who acted mainly on Morton’s instructions. Major Desmond Morton, intelligence adviser to Winston Churchill. “Mystery Morton”, as Smith referred to him, but to Oscar there was nothing mysterious about the man whose acquaintance he and Wapenaar had made in Berlin, early in ’38.
Morton had done his homework. He knew exactly who they were, their backgrounds, their reputation for hard-headedness. He mentioned the names of people both Oscar and Wapenaar trusted. He wanted to know whether they would be willing to work with him in the future. Morton was deeply pessimistic as to what that future held. What they saw happening in Germany was the beginning of a catastrophe on a global scale – oh no, he was not exaggerating. That was why he was assembling a shadow-army all over Europe, men and women Britain could mobilise if the need arose. A mammoth game of chess. They had declared themselves willing. That they would both have risen so high in the ranks by the time the need arose was something Morton had not foreseen, but for the rest his forecasts had come true with chilling accuracy. He had presented them with the scenario as of a family feud, listing one by one the countries that would be occupied by Germany. Only in the case of Sweden, which Germany had left alone, had he got it wrong. Switzerland’s neutrality was just as he had predicted, and quite evident, given the close ties between the Nazis and Europe’s treasure chest. All the better. Both Verschuur and Wapenaar were able to provide him with valuable intelligence. For his sake they were prepared to risk offending their respective ministries. Morton, Churchill’s confidant, was at one with them. Blind faith was the watchword, untarnished until the present.
Morton was his best chance, the only person he could dare to discuss the impending operation with. He should have realised from the first, but now his mind was made up. He could trust the Englishman to ensure that the information would never be traced to him and his daughter. He felt a surge of relief: free at last to join in the conversation.
“Have you heard the news about Bishop von Galen?” Smith said. Oscar had seen the name in the papers. Die Nation had recently devoted a long article to the remarkable churchman, who had shown the temerity to voice his protest in public. Protest, a word the Germans couldn’t even spell anymore.
“All the crucifixes had to be removed from Bavarian classrooms. Orders of one Doctor Meyer, some local bigwig in lederhosen, I presume. Mind you, that von Galen protested to Hitler! Never happened before, someone complaining to Wotan in person. And that was not all, there were people demonstrating in the street, and rumour has it that Hitler was jeered at in Bavaria, although that is something I find hard to believe.”
Henderson broke in: “We heard that story too. But they can carry on hanging crucifixes in the schools, because the order was rescinded. It was a mistake, Goebbels said. Not a good moment to rile the Catholics, probably. So long as they can carry on hanging Jews – now there’s something they should be protesting against, instead of making a fuss about wooden crosses in the classroom!”
Henderson was not Roman Catholic, presumably. Jewish perhaps? Indignant in any case. His anger and sarcasm struck a chord with Oscar, recalling the rage that possessed himself at times, the powerlessness, the anguish over Emma in Berlin. This amicable gathering of diplomats was merely a brief interlude of distraction.
They plied Smith with questions, whose replies were duly commented upon and expanded. He was a messenger from the Underworld, on short leave, witness to events which were taking place just outside the others’ ken and yet almost close enough to touch. An exasperating state of affairs to the diplomatic frame of mind, although they abided by Goethe’s rule: judge by what you see, and respect the unseen. Goethe, the giant whose lifework lay unread, the intellectual locomotive of the old Germany with all those quarrelsome kings and counts and dukes and generals and bishops. That it should come to this, in the land of Goethe … a refrain of lament over the land that once brought forth heroes of such greatness, not that anybody knew what that greatness stood for. People simply parroted one another,
perpetuating the myths. The land of Goethe, what of it? The land of Alfred Rosenberg and Goering more like, the land of stupidity and death. A play in three acts: the rise, the flowering, and the downfall of the Idiot.
Oscar respected the unseen, certainly. It was his lifeblood. But not now.
It was well past midnight by the time he trudged up the Schifflaube on his way home.
Chapter 6
Kate woke up early, as usual: a habit left over from when Emma was a toddler. She had lost the ability to sleep late. London was hushed and still, the light of morning barely perceptible. Wednesday, June 4: Emma’s birthday. The first quarter-hour of the day, when she surfaced from dreams that more often than not were disturbing. She was a dreamer, making up at night for what she missed during the day. Passion and common sense were opposite sides of the same coin in her case, some would say. She herself did not go in for such introspection. Fifteen minutes to recover from sleep, her arms and legs feeling heavy, her musings and sentiments as light as air. Emma, Carl, Oscar. Matteous. The silkiness of the name as pronounced by him, the African tone and lilt of it, were impossible to emulate, but the echo of it rang in her ears. She had left him behind in his lodgings the day before, restraining herself from taking him home with her. The rain pelting down on Earls Court Road had not made for a cheerful scene. The way each of them had kept silent in that small room overlooking the busy street said enough: what am I doing here, is this where you want me to be, I can’t stay forever, nobody knows me, I no longer exist.
Thinking back, Kate recalled Matteous’s ice-cold hands, and his disconsolate look when she broke the silence at last with some favourable comment on his room.
Fifteen minutes in bed in the quiet of earliest morning, a delicate mechanism affording her a leisurely adjustment to the passing of time. One hand on her stomach, the other under her head: an attitude of surrender to an unknown love, of a lover at a loss. She had no commitments, nothing more to prove, it all lay behind her, youth, marriage, motherhood. All there was now was the war, and a black boy who had unaccountably come into her life. Should she go and see him later on, or should she leave him alone? Matteous was no longer a child, and she not his mother, though it seemed a lot like it at times. Emma had grown up so fast that Kate had hardly had a chance to be a mother. Now, at fifty-four, she wondered what on earth she had spent all that time doing. For some reason everything had seemed to happen at high speed. Like watching the water drain out of a basin when you pulled the plug. The little whirlpool at the plughole, that was where she was now.
Somewhere in the neighbourhood a clock struck six. In Berlin the day would also be beginning. Their clocks were an hour ahead, of course, so Carl would be on the train by now. Matteous would still be asleep, she imagined. And so would Oscar, almost certainly. She did not think about Oscar very much lately. She registered this as a curious state of affairs, not as a cause for concern. They lived their lives much as sparrows perching on the same clothes line: fairly content, fairly tame. Their embrace seemed to have lost its necessity, and the distance between Berne and London did not make them yearn for one another. This suited Kate quite well, it was just fine. Eros had never played a big part in their lives, which was probably true of a lot of people. The years before Oscar did not count, for they lay dormant in her core. Or as good as dormant. Sometimes, rarely, very rarely, they came back to her in a dream or in her fifteen-minute reverie upon waking.
There had been a change over the past months, since she had met Matteous. It happened several times that she was jolted awake by the crash, her heart thumping. The terrifying crash. After the fear came the memory, and with the memory the pain. She was eighteen again and just married. She was back in Rome, holding hands with him as they wandered through the old city. He was working on the Roman Forum excavations, his “never-ending dustpan-and-brush project”, as he called it. One of the most talented archaeologists of his generation, older than her by ten years: Roy de Winther, Winther with an h. Countless times she had spelled it out – Winther with an h after the t – during their years of European travel. Four years to be precise. From Gibraltar to Oslo, from Budapest and Kiev to Rome and Sicily. There were always archaeological finds to be inspected, museums that were not to be missed, conferences and special seminars to be attended. Sometimes they rented a house where Roy could work on his lectures and write articles for international journals and newspapers. Once Schliemann had discovered Troy, archaeological excavations became newsworthy, and archaeologists were much in demand. Roy de Winther was among those in demand. Also from Kate, especially from her. Her wilfulness had taken him by storm, and within half a year they were married. The past was his concern, the future would be hers. Their immediate future consisted of travelling. Having a child did not enter her mind, she felt little more than a child herself. All those trains, cars, ships, all those hotels and pensions, rented accommodations, cultural institutes … It was the carefree time before the Great War, a period of vigour and ambition. They were part of it all, their energy was boundless, they were free spirits, they were mad about each other. The world would never be the same again, no love, no death would ever be the same. No measure of devotion or happiness could compare with the experience they shared during those years.
Kate had covered it all up, stowed everything away in sealed packages wrapped around by the new life she found herself leading after the catastrophe. Four years of undivided devotion should be enough to keep the machines of memory in fuel forever. But the machines had let her down, the memories of those days began to fade, or were quickly pushed out of sight. She had proved able to make his body vanish, and forget his love. Concrete it over.
But nothing vanishes for good. Not the train journey, which was Roy’s last. From Milan to Rome and her. The crash had to have been horrific, the newspapers carried pictures of great mounds of twisted steel, of flames and chaos and passengers trapped in the wreckage. Sixty dead. Roy was mentioned by name in the reports. She still had the newspaper somewhere. Stored away, like all the rest.
Time to get up: she was due at the hospital, the boys would be waiting for her, including Matteous, perhaps. She had to move her arms and legs, get away from the old, dead, illusory world of her dreams. Roy’s world, her husband’s.
June 4: Emma’s twenty-ninth birthday. Kate wondered briefly if her daughter would be celebrating it, and if so how. She opened the blackout curtains. The sun was rising, and soon the rumble of traffic would be heard on Earls Court Road, where the buses went past Matteous’s lodgings. Birds began to sing, a gardener began to rake the gravel in the square nearby. Without much thought, Kate reckoned with the possibility of an air raid, although it had been quiet for a fortnight now. She kept a bucket filled with water in the kitchen. Symbolic instance of preparedness: a midge’s tiny fist raised against a leviathan.
When she rang at his bedsit there was no answer. No footfalls, no throat-clearing, not even a whisper. Not a sound. She rang again, longer and more insistently. Again silence; the door remained closed. She took a few steps back to the edge of the pavement and looked up. He was standing in the shadows, as far away from the window as possible, almost like a statue, with a streak of sunlight falling across his dark head. That was how she had seen him when she came to collect him from the hospital ward. He appeared not to notice her, he was not at home, the bell had not rung, the unmistakable, alarming shrill had gone unheard. Kate wanted to call out to him and wave, but then thought better of it. She regretted having disturbed him by coming to his door. He was practising not being there, adopting the stance of a soldier who has been killed, but doesn’t know it yet. The final seconds before falling, the bullets lodged already in the body. Nonsense of course, she was just imagining things, going over the top, like a bad film. What she was seeing was impossible. He just stood there. Standing had become second nature to him. Standing ready, standing on guard, standing in the never-ending drill of the platoon, forever in formation. That was all it was, she was not to jump to any conc
lusions. She would not disturb him.
Kate began to walk away, in the direction of the bus stop for Richmond Royal Hospital, when a shout from above reached her ears.
“Miss!”
The urgency was unmistakable. She stopped, spun round and waved at Matteous, who was leaning out of the window, beckoning her.
Inside, the wicker suitcase was still in exactly the same place. Nothing in the room had changed since she had left him there the day before. As if that day had not passed into night and then day again, as if he had not moved from where he stood. No need for blackout if you don’t switch the light on. All safe, all right and proper, the room in complete darkness and invisible to the enemy. Kate asked no questions. She sat down on the only chair. Matteous remained standing. His eyes were darker than ever, the whites almost grey. Inclining his head, he struggled to frame a sentence. And another. His English sounded as if he were groping his way across a rope bridge. His hands supported his words, his shoulders leaned from side to side. Did Miss think he would be going home to the Congo? They had obviously forgotten about him in the army, and the Belgian government-in-exile couldn’t care less about an injured Congolese stranded in London. He wanted to find his mother. His mother. The big word his life had orbited around for months, for years. His mother, who had been captured and who might not be dead. The mother he had been forced to leave behind when his father told him to run for his life. Quick as a flash he had run, as fast as an antelope.
Kate put her hand on his sleeve, saying, “Of course,” although she had no idea if such a thing was possible. A soldier being discharged from hospital to free up much-needed space – would that mean he was discharged from the army, too? Probably not, but she didn’t even want to consider the question. Matteous’s enemy was completely different from everybody else’s. He had fought without any idea of who he was fighting against. Caught up in a war of strangers against strangers, in a conflict whose causes and aims were beyond his ken. He had drifted into the army because he had lost his family, because he had to go somewhere, anywhere, to avoid dying of heartache. And he had rescued that officer to avoid having to flee into the jungle all over again. Strong enough at last to hoist a man on his shoulders, away from the frontline and the bloodshed, without fear. In the jumble of French, English and Swahili, Kate could hear his grief about his mother. She took his hand, enclosed it in both of hers, and lifted the three hands to her chest for a moment, the way he always did in greeting. The dark hand, the dark face so close to hers.