News from Berlin

by Otto de Kat

  “To live is to dream, and death, I think, is what awakens us.”

  A line from a poem. Oscar stood where he was, letting his mind wander. Then he set his bag on the floor, went over to the sofa, gathered the newspapers and burned them in the fireplace. Slowly, his soul returned to him. And Lara. She had been with him all along, inseparable from him in mind, locked in soundless, abstract dialogue. He would phone her shortly, tell her he had arrived in Berne and would be going straight on to Fribourg. Fribourg, the name of the town sounded so free, so fresh and unfettered, so like her. This was it, there was no going back now. Love by accident, by fate, without escape or future. He wished he could have stayed with her in the snow of the Berner Oberland – which was what he had wished from the start, a little over three months ago. From Berne to Fribourg was a stone’s throw, so why not pick up his bag and go?

  He had no answer. He left the bag where it stood, and stretched out on the sofa. Dog-tired he was, his legs leaden, even lying down made him ache. The machine ground to a halt. He dozed, though not for long. A dream jolted him awake, something to do with his mother. His first impulse was to telephone her. Old habits – his mother had been dead for a good five years. She had died with the illusion that peace could be maintained, having kept her war resister’s brooch with the broken rifle like a crucifix on her bedside table, next to the photograph of his father, whose early death meant that Oscar had never got to know him properly. His mother, a one-man woman, as she liked to call herself, had not remarried. She remained wedded to an absence that cast a long shadow both forwards and back. The dream that woke him was not new: it was of his mother raising her arm like a drawbridge in an attempt to wave.

  He knew where the image sprang from. “You should get me some poison, Oscar. I cannot, will not go on like this.” It had not been a recommendation, rather a non-negotiable order. The belligerence of a very old, lifelong pacifist. The words did not seem to be her own, just as her voice seemed to rise from unknown depths, dark, imperious, even repellent at times. Week after week saw her intoning her mantra of self-willed death, and him refusing to act on it. His loving, strong, desperate mother, who subsequently threatened to throw herself from the window. The ultimate deed, the rebellion of a life under duress. She meant what she said, of that he had been convinced. His response had been no less adamant: she should stop eating and drinking, he would stay with her, keep vigil, hold her hand to the last. He knew a doctor who would prescribe morphine if the pain grew unbearable. At length she conceded. When the doctor came with his potion for everlasting sleep and Oscar took her hand in his, she said: “I won’t have to jump now.”

  The nights on a mattress beside her bed would stay with him forever. So would the groans and whimpers of her frame, now shrunken to a comma. A night on a mattress, two steps away from death, lasts a long time. The feeble wave of a stray arm, raised at a passing signal, at the moon through the clouds. So much is certain: in the hour of our vanishing all is unknown.

  Chapter 16

  “Kate de Winther?” a courteous voice enquired from below. Her name sounded droll in Italian, she thought. She was sitting on her balcony waiting for Roy, whom she expected any moment. She leaned over the stone balustrade. The man looking up at her wore the Italian railway uniform.

  “Lost your way, have you? The station is miles away,” she retorted laughingly. To her surprise, there was no reply. All he did was motion her to come down. So Kate was left to smile at her own joke as she descended the cool stairs in her bare feet. Her pale yellow dress was almost white in the sunshine, and she remembered thinking how hot the railway man must be feeling. He began to say something she did not understand. She would never understand. He must have caught her as she fell.

  *

  The scene leaping unbidden into her mind was one that had obsessed her a lifetime ago. In the days before Oscar.

  She was on a different balcony now, her lookout post at the beginning and end of each day. Since Oscar turned up out of nowhere, everything that had previously been firmly in place had come loose. Her life with Roy had returned in all its intensity. “Forgetting is the enemy of happiness,” she had read on a calendar somewhere, words of wisdom she had dismissed at the time, thinking you could just as well turn it around and say “Happiness is the ability to forget”, and that had been her solution. But it hadn’t worked. Because this deferred grief, or rather the melting of the frozenness, the exquisite act of remembrance, had been going on for days now. She no longer opposed it. Kate de Winther, that was who she was, the old name she was so comfortable with, the best of names, better even than her maiden name.

  What would Roy have done if he knew about Barbarossa, she asked herself over and over, until she could think of nothing else. Then she knew. Alright, she would go to Oscar’s bosses, or to the Foreign Ministry, if need be to the Dutch queen herself, she would spread the news, whatever Oscar said. Somebody had to. Why oh why had she left it so late – they couldn’t go on ignoring it, Oscar, that was simply not on. Those poor innocent souls along the borders, they would all die. It was June 19. There was still time.

  Kate caught sight of Matteous on the pavement of Barkston Gardens, coming towards her with the uncertain gait of a fugitive. She felt a pang of misgiving. It was the gait of someone who might retreat at any moment, double back, go home, in any case vanish from there.

  “Mattteous!” She waved. Matteous looked up, and even at that distance she was struck by the whites of his eyes. The black jacket of his uniform suited him.

  “I’ll be right down to let you in.”

  When he entered without his satchel, she knew something was wrong. She had known from the moment she saw him. He had come to say that he was leaving.

  During the few seconds that he stood in her room, not knowing how to begin and what to do with his hands, it became clear to her how dearly she loved him, with a kind of love unlike what she felt for anybody else. Not the possessive kind, nothing to do with jealousy or resentment or self-pity. Matteous had dismantled all her defences, she felt laid bare like an archaeologist’s find. It was beyond comprehension.

  She wanted to tell him about Operation Barbarossa, had to discuss it with him before it was too late, ask him if he thought she was right to go to the Ministry, even if her husband said it would put Emma in danger. Which was just an idea he had got in his head, because who on earth would suspect Emma? You do think I’m right, don’t you Matteous?

  But she forgot to ask him, she forgot it all. She heard only one thing.

  “I cannot live in this city, Miss Kate. I have tried for your sake, but it’s no good.”

  Her eyes caught on a button hanging by a thread from his jacket, a tarnished brass button, of the kind she had seen in her mother’s button box.

  No tears, please. Very briefly, she gripped the back of a chair. She had to pull herself together, suggest making tea, or coffee. Coffee, of course. Africans like their coffee black, with heaps of sugar, he had said to her one day. Come and sit with me, Matteous, at the table where we always sit, face to face, paper and ink at hand, a copybook, two pens. Museum exhibits from the past.

  “Won’t you sit down?”

  He complied with an air of signing his death warrant. Sat ramrod-straight, mute and motionless.

  Gulls circled above the small park, their shrieks echoing in the room.

  *

  In Rome the doors to their balcony had been open practically all the time. Roy often sat there to write or read, quite undisturbed by the bustle of the Corso or the cries of Italian street folk.

  “Tomorrow I’ll be off to Milan for that Forum conference. Afterwards, why don’t we go to Capri? It’s ages since we’ve been there, and Marina Piccola will be wonderfully quiet at this time of year. I could do with a break from all the brushing and scrubbing. And how about having a few babies?”

  Said laughingly. Castles in the air. Kate had lifted the hem of her skirt and perched herself on his knee, asking in a mock-earnest tone: “Doesn’
t having babies give you varicose veins?”

  Matteous and Roy, the dream of return, the return of the dream.

  She asked Matteous when he would leave and how he would travel. He did not know. All he knew was that he would jump in front of a bus if he stayed. This time she made no attempt to persuade him otherwise, unlike in the past. She could hear his sad determination, and his concern for her.

  He asked how they could stay in touch, and repeated what he had said about owing his life to her. Would she like to come to Africa one day? Torn between opposing nostalgias, already. He would not go back to being a soldier, nor would he go down the mines again. He would find a rubber plantation, perhaps. Work in the forest, far away from barracks and mine shafts. Become a rubber tapper.

  Kate felt the rough sleeve of the uniform against her cheek, opened her eyes, and found herself slumped in the arms of the railway man lowering her gently to the ground. People came running, cries of dottore, dottore!, a neighbour rushed forward with a jug of water and a towel. She saw the distraught face of the Italian, the unwilling messenger of doom, the upright citizen doing his duty by sowing death and destruction. The brass buttons on his uniform caught her eye, as they had in a photograph in the accident dossier. Tokens of impending loss.

  She faced Matteous, who noticed how pale she was.

  “Shall I get you a glass of water?”

  Kate shook her head, she did not need anything, all she wanted was to sit and wait for the reflux of the tide that had been washing over her for days: the hours with Roy and their great life together, which she had buried and banished, and which had started anew in the dark shape of Matteous.

  Marina Piccola in May, which you could reach on foot over the newly constructed Via Krupp, a miraculous road with tier upon tier of hairpin bends seeming to spill from the cliffs. The Faraglioni rose high from the sea, three great spurs of black rock with seagulls wheeling above. Roy and she had seen them at close quarters from a dinghy. “Kate-ate-ate!” Roy shouted upwards, outshouting the gulls. The sound came back again and again, louder each time.

  Capri in early spring, almost empty of tourists. Roy supervised excavations, and she wandered around the island, or took a boat tour to the blue grotto. Roy needed only to thrust a stick in the soil to be transported to Antiquity. They had stayed for several weeks at a stretch. Kate knew the island like the back of her hand, from the Emperor Tiberius’s Villa Jovis up to Monte Barbarossa.

  She told Matteous of her fears for the impending invasion. She hid nothing, relating all Oscar’s objections and describing his concerns over Emma’s safety. She explained her own reservations, and that she had overcome them, and that she had decided to go to the authorities before it was too late.

  Matteous shook his head. “Don’t do it, Miss Kate, don’t do it.”

  She had been so confident of his approval. He knew the meaning of war, he would tell her she should go, would accompany her even. But what he said was: “You must think of your daughter, Miss.”

  Perhaps she had spoken too quickly for him to understand, she would explain all over again, and would continue explaining until he finally said yes. But again he said no. No, no, she was not to go there, she was not to betray her daughter. They would find out, and there was nothing she or anybody else could do about the war, which was a massive force taking possession of the world, of limitless momentum and impossible to stop. Matteous expressed it otherwise, but that was what she understood him to say. He had seen the war and been unable to escape. There was no escape.

  Of the funeral she had no memory, none at all but for one thing. Among the scores of mourners at the Cimitero degli Inglesi in Rome, she had seen her father holding hands with a little girl in a black hat. Who she was she did not know – a niece? the daughter of a friend? – yet it seemed to her that the child was leading him by the hand rather than the other way round. She saw herself standing at the graveside while the coffin was lowered, her eyes fixed on her mute father and the little girl in the hat. That was the only image that had stayed with her.

  “Matteous, all those people will get shot and burned and blown to smithereens, they’ll crush everything in their path with their tanks. They have done it before and they will do it again. We must give all those innocent folk some warning.”

  Matteous looked away, his hand on his heart. He was no longer listening. She was afraid he would leave without a further word. But he moved his hand from his heart to her arm, touched her wrist, and slipped her a folded scrap of paper.

  *

  Darkness fell slowly, the street lamps of Barkston Gardens remaining unlit. Time for blackout, time to stand up and shut the windows and the doors to the balcony. It was as though she had fallen ill. Her head was ablaze, she could feel the fever rising, her feet were as cold as ice. Time for blackout.

  Chapter 17

  The train to Fribourg departed on the dot. Oscar was often irritated by the never-ending quest for precision. The Swiss were maniacs, watchmakers, disciplinarians of strict regularity. Today he did not care one way or another, all he wished was for time to be abolished altogether, no clocks, no calendars, no appointments. It was Thursday, 19 June, and the train departing from Berne at 9.32 a.m. would arrive in Fribourg at 10.17. By 10.28 a.m. he would be with Lara.

  Oscar had asked her not to pick him up at the station, preferring to find his own way to her house in the event of him being followed. On previous occasions he had known by the time he reached Ensingerstrasse whether this was the case, but apparently today it was not. The arbitrariness of whether or not one was targeted by those sorry types was confounding. A matter of nobody being available, most likely.

  Once more he found himself in the company of sleeping soldiers. Wherever he went – Portugal, England, Switzerland – there were soldiers lounging in doorways or huddled in corners fast asleep. War was tiring.

  Fribourg. He had gone past it so often, without ever asking himself who lived in the medieval toy city. Now he had been there repeatedly, within a short space of time. Lara lived in the very centre, near the wall tied like a ribbon around the old streets. His wish for the abolition of time appeared to have been granted in Fribourg: there was hardly any town in Europe quite so redolent of the Middle Ages.

  The muffled throbbing of the wheels over the track held the cadence of reunion. He longed to see her, touch her, brush the hair from her eyes, have her hand covering his. And yet, for the first time, he also felt uneasy. A vague sense of foreboding, a gathering apprehension. She would ask him why he had gone off to London so suddenly, and he would have to give her a straight answer. He had to be straight with her now.

  Down the platform, across the hall to the exit, up the steep hill to the old city, it was a matter of ten minutes. Straining at a taut leash, animated by desire.

  “Oscar!”

  She stood in the open window of the first floor, the sun shining on her laughing face.

  Under her spell again, yet conscious of that strange sliver of desolation. Lara opened the door, out of breath from running down the stairs.

  “The chamois of Fribourg! How quick you are, Lara.”

  He clasped her hand with both of his, and leaned over to lay his cheek against their hands in humble greeting, as though bowing before some fragile enigma. With equal solemnity, Lara placed her free hand on his nape. During the second that they stood thus, all was in dreamed-of balance. Their lives touched. It was a gesture of tranquil awaiting, the rapprochement of those who know not where they are going, what they are doing, or how to move ahead.

  She led him up the stairs to her room, into her arms and into the sun streaming in through the open window; he heard the carefree sounds of the street and how they fell away, leaving only her arms and her mouth and their surrender.

  Afterwards, having got up from the bed, Oscar found himself standing very still by the window, reflexively on the lookout for a spy. As though there were two of him, as though his soul were moving from the one to the other as a precautionary sa
fe haven. A Thursday morning in Switzerland, a sun-drenched hour of innocence and peace. Nothing untoward, you would think. The river flowed past, clouds sailed across the sky. He wondered what the time was, and what the date.

  “Why did you need to go to London at such short notice?”

  Geneva, Lausanne, Berne, Lisbon, London, Fribourg – the trajectory of a single word, whispered in confidence, then the terrifying ramifications, the biting of the tongue. Never in his life had he felt so torn. He had the ability to juggle with veracity, to don disguise and shed it at will, to roam free without leaving traces, to be the player in a casino of his own devising, but for the past weeks it was the case that Oscar Verschuur harboured a secret that was too important to keep to himself, and yet impossible to share with anybody else. He knew that hundreds of thousands of people would be butchered three days hence, before daybreak even, and he also knew that his information was worthless. It would not be credited. There was a complete lack of trust on every side, so that Emma’s sacrifice would be pointless, supposing he were mad enough to say anything.

  Both Lara’s hands rested gently on his wrist, as an intimate entreaty for an explanation, for the truth.

  “It’s Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of Russia. June 22nd, three days from now. Emma told me, that time in Geneva. She knew from Carl.”

  “So you relayed that to London. Thank goodness they’ll be prepared, to some extent at least.” Her tone was pragmatic, without a trace of naivety.

  No, Lara, he had changed his mind, he had turned tail at the last moment. They would not have believed him for any number of reasons, such as that the intelligence came from a German source, which made it corrupt by definition. The exact date was meaningless, the attack would be launched anyway sooner or later. His version. His last resort, because of Emma. Everything else was ruled out by the unthinkable likelihood of Emma being charged with treason. Oscar could hear his own voice accounting for himself, using all the arguments and explanations he had learned by rote.