by Otto de Kat
Chapter 7
Carl sang her a sweet birthday ditty in German and gave her a hug, then pulled back the curtains and opened the window. The birds would do the rest of the singing, he said. The weather was warm, perfect for a birthday celebration. Friends would be arriving later that evening, as many as twenty. They would all be bringing some food. Drink, too.
Carl left for work later than usual. The previous evening they had stayed up late, going over and over what the Gestapo might and might not know. Emma was sick with worry about her father, while Carl was becoming increasingly nervous on her account. He tried not to show it, but he was besieged by a constant, light form of panic. They had a file on her, they were watching her. Which meant that he too was being watched, as well as Trott. They had fallen asleep holding hands, worn out from all their speculations.
Emma saw him to the garden gate, and watched as he walked down the road, their rural byroad on the outskirts of the violence. His train would take him to the unimaginable amphitheatre of crime: a free performance, all day long. She would not focus on that, it was too overwhelming. The events were beyond her. She inhaled the fragrance of the June gardens all around, and tried to follow Carl in her mind once he was out of sight, boarding the train, leaving Dahlem towards the city centre. She wanted to hang on to his physical presence, the body in which she had nestled herself. But that was a dream, wishful thinking. There he was, walking away from her, without her, thinking ahead to what might await him at his office. He might spare a thought for her now and then, recalling how she had returned his embrace. And had sighed about getting old: “Twenty-nine, Carl, I’m twenty-nine now, don’t you think I’m old?” He had said it was the world that was old, not her.
She had a busy day ahead: tidy up the house, unpack those bags that had been blocking the hall for the past two days, go to the few shops that still had anything left to sell, lay the table for twenty people. As if nothing was the matter, as if it was the most normal thing in the world to celebrate one’s birthday. Come what may. Well, twenty people were coming. Their friends from Dahlem, a few from Zehlendorf, a few from the city centre, and even somebody from Potsdam, who would be staying the night – they might all end up staying the night, if there was an air-raid warning. She had seen the devastation from the car window on the way to Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse. Entire streets lay in ruins. After a while she had lost her bearings, in spite of being quite familiar with the city. She had lived there as a student for close on four years, from August 1931 till 12 June, 1933, the day of her finals, after which she had left immediately. A few weeks before that she had been in the Opernplatz together with some friends, watching transfixed as books were being burned. The S.A. men were in a frenzy, leaping and shouting as they set upon the piles of books and hurled them onto the bonfire. It had felt like a rehearsal for mass murder. Where they burn books, they will end in burning human beings: the lesson of Heinrich Heine, whose work had gone up in smoke with all the rest that evening. Her studies at the university had not posed any problems. “If you want to study history in the making, go to Berlin,” she had been told in Holland. A sound piece of advice. The windows of the lecture halls on Unter den Linden rattled to the noise of demonstrations and parades and police charges and countercharges going on outside. She needed only to glance out of the window to see history unfold. If the professors were to be believed, you could hear the groundwork being laid for a thousand-year empire.
The ride in the car, she had relived it dozens of times. Not a long ride, half an hour at the most, but enough for night after night without sleep. The two Gestapo men, no more than boys really, had sat one in the front and one in the back with her. They paid no attention to her, asked no questions. They looked as if they had just stepped out of a shop selling Gestapo uniforms: shiny coats, shiny shoes, shiny pistols. But the car was old and battered, and reeked of stale cigarette smoke. The driver clearly enjoyed taking corners at speed. Emma kept having to reach out for support, and several times her hand had brushed against the arm of the boy beside her. The roads of Dahlem were excellent for tearing round corners. Falkenried, then left, In der Halde, turn right, Am Hirschsprung, right again up the Dohnenstieg. Had they taken the Dohnenstieg for a particular reason? Did they know Himmler lived there? A spot of racing past the boss’s house? They knew the way by heart; one more short cut and they came to the Lenzeallee. Full speed ahead to their robbers’ den.
Emma felt treated like a criminal, though she acted as if she were being driven to an appointment. These boys were not going to detect the slightest nervousness on her part. She peered out of the window with interest, twisted round for a backward glance, turned her head from side to side, opened her handbag with a casual air. The relaxed gestures of a day out sightseeing. It was imperative that she keep her rising panic under control. How extraordinary that the city was functioning again after the heavy bombardments, as if they had never happened. Traffic was as hectic as ever, with buses, trams, carts, motor cars, pavements milling with people. She saw a clock on the Potsdamer Platz, which was quite near where she used to live. It was still intact, hands pointing to a quarter past eleven. A telling detail. The clocks were right, it was business as usual, trains and trams on time, arrests made on schedule. Gestapo at the ready, motor running. It was clear the orders were for her to be picked up at eleven and brought in at half past.
“Emma Regendorf-Verschuur, where were you yesterday?”
The sombre man questioning her tried his best to be civil. A form of civility that could turn nasty in an instant. He resembled a boxer in a jacket, sleeves bulging with muscles, ready to let fly at any moment.
“In Geneva, with my husband and his head of department, Herr Adam von Trott of the Foreign Office. But why do you ask? And why am I here? I should like to telephone my husband.”
The man facing her said nothing. This could hardly be called an interrogation, it had more of a sequence of silences with the occasional query thrown in, a smirk, a sigh, a cigarette being lit, a weary gesture. And the constant tapping of a shoe on the floor.
Emma looked past the man into a tiny courtyard, or rather a shaft, which admitted some daylight. Such a sad little nook, overlooked by the architect, a hole with no purpose other than to deepen the gloom of the surroundings. The silence and murkiness of the building began to oppress her. She felt the fear welling up again. Everyone in Germany knew about this address, this place where she now was. Everyone avoided this street. The pavements were deserted, the entire premises radiated menace. How in heaven’s name could she make her escape, what kind of attitude should she take? She forced herself to think of her father, which calmed her down somewhat. All this was about him – she had realised that at the first question. Not about Carl or Adam, thank goodness. Not yet. Her father was safe in Switzerland, for the time being anyway. She had not thought of him as someone important enough to be watched by the Gestapo. Her father, whom she looked up to and dearly loved but never felt she really understood. The unusual relationship between her parents perplexed her periodically, but it remained a mystery. Harmonious for the most part, open-minded, alert, witty, but on the edges there was loneliness. They both seemed to have distanced themselves, or else outgrown each other.
“What is your father’s occupation in Switzerland?” the lugubrious man said, his tone making it clear that he did not expect her to tell the truth.
She replied curtly that he worked at the Dutch embassy in Berne and that she didn’t know exactly what his job entailed. “My father didn’t discuss his work much at home.”
The man leered at her. He probably didn’t discuss his work much at home either, Emma thought in a flash of grim amusement. The fear receded. She had to get away from there, and quickly.
They had made her wait for two hours in a sort of kitchen-cum-cloakroom, without anybody looking at her twice. People went in and out, fetched coffee, hung their coats up and generally ignored her. And there, in that poky space, she had been overwhelmed by thoughts of Watse, her
dearest friend in Holland. Watse Hepkema, the boy she grew up with, the boy executed a few months ago by these people’s partners in crime. Watse, shot without trial for resisting. There, between those walls, she felt his death as if it were taking place in the next room. The news had left her stunned for days, unable to take it in. He had urged her so many times to get out of “that rotten city, that rotten country”, as soon as possible, and to tell Carl he had no business being there either. Watse had been her closest tie with Holland, and now he was dead. The images came back to her. Watse, arrested and shot, allegedly while trying to escape, not long after the Tour of 1941, which he had done on ice-hockey skates because his speed skates had been stolen – the blades on which no-one could touch him. When the wind was against them he would skate in front of her, he was as strong as a bear. Her memory of their last expeditions over the Sneekermeer was as fresh as yesterday, and his question continued to gnaw at the back of her mind: “Is Carl still working for those gangsters?” Yes, he was. Slowly, far too slowly, she had begun to realise that they were trapped. It was impossible for Carl to leave. There was no way he could emigrate, let alone switch sides. Every person on German soil was lost. Marriage to a German meant that she was German too, someone regarded with suspicion, someone who had to queue endlessly with a coupon for this and a coupon for that. Emma’s love of Carl was undiminished, but her sense of isolation weighed more heavily by the day. Friends from Holland stopped writing, relatives fell silent, only within Carl’s circle was there any respite. Germans, pigs? Not Trott, not Langbehn, not Haeften, but so many others: yes. Was it true about the German Foreign Office being a breeding ground of resistance, as Carl and Trott maintained? She found it hard to believe. Watse’s opinion was probably closer to the truth. He was a Frisian, and a skater beyond compare. She treasured her memory of skating with him over the frozen lakes of Sneek and Gaastmeer back in the winter of 1938, when they were practising for the Eleven Cities Tour. Not a soul ahead of them, clear ice as hard as marble. She had made the trip especially from Berlin. Carl had sputtered a little, but she had appealed to their bond of childhood friendship. The kind of bond that whenever little Emma was asked who her friends were, Watse’s was always the first name to come up. It was late in December that she received a telegram from him saying “ELEVEN CITIES TOUR, YOUR PRESENCE URGENTLY REQUIRED”. She couldn’t let Watse skate the whole course on his own, it wouldn’t be fair.
And so she went, three months after the phoney Munich Agreement, which professed peace, but which stank of war. It was a wrench leaving Carl behind, but Emma was delighted to escape the menaced and menacing city for a while.
They skated side by side through the polders towards the frozen Sneekermeer, Watse on speed skates, Emma wearing the traditional strap-on type, on which she was as graceful as she was swift. The low sun in their eyes, frosted reeds in tufts on the banks, a bridge here, a hole hacked in the ice for ducks there, they danced their way to Sneek. Same rhythm, same strokes, same style, although Watse slowed down a fraction. The first goal was reached without any pause or hesitation: the Pavilion on the edge of the Sneekermeer. They had gone to sit by the window overlooking the lake, with skating figures in the distance silhouetted against a cloudless sky: a frozen landscape resembling a painting by Avercamp or the meticulous Schelfhout, masters of the Dutch winter scene. Watse had looked at her searchingly, it was such a long time since they had spoken.
“How are things over there, Emma, are you coping alright? Is Carl still working for those gangsters?”
Subtlety was not his trademark. Honesty was. A man of few words, but when he did say something it was usually worth hearing.
His question sounded like a pistol shot. Emma knew he liked Carl well enough; he had come to visit them once in Dahlem, and they had agreed on many issues. Carl had told him about the efforts he and Trott were making to get in touch with whoever was against the Nazis. Watse had left, taciturn as ever, and downcast.
“Do you remember us playing in the park, when a boy got hold of me and threw me over? You were there in a trice. You grabbed him and pushed him in the pond. And fished him out again. I believe I considered that quite normal at the time, but from then on I knew I had nothing to fear as long as I was with you. If worst comes to worst, Carl and I will come and hide at your place, alright?” Emma laughed, putting her hand on his arm. “So stay right where you are, Watse, and don’t look so serious.”
In retrospect, their skating trip on the frozen Sneekermeer had been one of the most glowing, light-hearted days of her life. They had skated as never before, nimbly and fast, Watse and she close together, hands clasped behind their backs, the sun just above the reeds, the sky like a dome over the countryside. The world was cast in ice, and it was theirs, theirs alone. Legs, feet, and wide, gliding strokes, nothing more. There was hardly any wind, the ice was hard and dry, no cracks or ridges. Late in the afternoon, when the sun had almost gone and darkness began to fall over the landscape, they stopped. Carrying their skates in their hands, they set off towards a bus stop. Half past four, and they could hear the bus approaching from a kilometre’s distance. Fields stretched away in dark, chessboard squares as the brightly lit vehicle floated towards them. Watse waved; they got on. But it felt as if they were on the bus in body only, not in mind, for they were children again playing on the embankment until Mrs Hepkema called for them to come indoors.
*
At long last, the lugubrious man led her via a double-doored lock-chamber into a slightly larger space, as sparsely furnished as the changing room of a public swimming bath. A few uniforms hung from the pegs on the walls, in the middle stood a grey metal desk with a wooden chair on either side. It was deathly quiet; the double doors were soundproof.
Once the dumb play and trivial opening questions were over, Emma felt her throat tighten, as if all the air were being sucked out of the room. She had to get out of there, do something. She stood up, looked the boxer in the eye and said: “I have nothing more to say. I should like to go now, if you don’t mind, or else please make a telephone call to Herr von Trott at the foreign office.”
Her tone was clear, almost casual, self-possessed.
The shoe-tapping ceased, the cigarette was stubbed out in the metal ashtray, the jacket given a tug, the chair pushed back.
“Your mother …”
Of the few sentences uttered by the ghoul this was the one that kept coming back to her. A dirty-minded little man being provocative. Or was there more to it? It had sounded almost accusing, about her mother being quite a looker. In the Gestapo’s eyes, of course, the same eyes that had been ogling her breasts during their cosy exchange.
When she finally stood outside again, her bag slung over her shoulder, she noticed how chilled she felt in the warm air. The June light and the summer heat had been abruptly cut off upon entering the building. A few hours of isolation and bewilderment and exposure to insulting manners were enough to turn her world upside down. She set off along Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse, then broke into a run, only to slow down after a few paces because it would attract too much attention: nobody ran like that. She paused to catch her breath, leaning against the wall of a shop with tears running down her face as she wept over Watse, over Carl, over everything. A man passing by eyed her with concern and asked if she needed help, but she waved him off. The show of kindness was exceptional: people tended to shun one another in the street, at least until the next bombing raid, when they would rally together and help each other to their feet.
*
Carl would be on his train by now, Emma reflected. She was still leaning against the garden gate, absorbed in what she now thought of as her kidnapping. Kidnapped in broad daylight by a couple of upstarts, and subjected to questioning by a loathsome thug. She had made out to Carl that she had slept well. She had not told him how undone she was over the arrest and interrogation, how worried about her father, how Watse’s death had hit her all over again. She did not wish to burden him unnecessarily. She had to think ahea
d to that evening. Would she manage to get hold of wine for her birthday dinner? And what on earth should she cook, she didn’t have near enough ration cards. Slowly, Emma bestirred herself. Household concerns took over, such as shopping – especially shopping. She wondered how her mother would have dealt with providing a meal for twenty guests. Her mother was experienced in such matters, her parents were always having people to dinner: mixed parties of diplomats, journalists, with some figures from the art world thrown in. She had never seen her mother truly enjoying herself in the role of hostess; even as a child she had felt that it was her father who was behind all the entertaining. Her mother did her bit, but with a certain reserve. Her mother, who was considered quite a looker by the Gestapi, as Carl always referred to them. That her father was involved in clandestine dealings was not surprising, though it had never occurred to her that the Nazis were having him followed everywhere. But her mother, what could she have to do with anything? Her mother lived in London, and surely the Germans weren’t cracked enough to have a spy reporting on her appearance. So it had to be a report from a while back, the time they had gone skiing together. But that was more than a year ago. Were they already watching him then? Everything worried her, her thoughts flying in all directions. And she didn’t even want to think, all she wanted was to go and do her shopping, stand in some endless queue, say hello to the next-door neighbour, sweep the doorstep if need be.