A Train of Powder

by West, Rebecca

  They were tired, poor, brave, and afraid; and they had also a solemn and delicate grief in common. It is not true, by the way, that eels get used to being skinned. There were two robust old parties representing the building trades, one a specialist in the repairing of roofs in the blasted and burned-out houses, a job rather like rick-covering, and the other was forewoman of a squad that cleared up rubble and sorted out what was usable for rebuilding. They were proud of doing such heavy and such valuable work, but for all that a wistfulness fell on them, and they sighed that till now it had not been done by women, and perhaps it was not suitable for them. No, they decided suddenly, looking abashed, it was not at all suitable.

  Supposing, they said, there was a little girl. A nice little German girl. It would be terrible to look at her and think that when she grew up she would have to do all that pushing and pulling and climbing, and handle all that dirty stuff, and be out in all weathers. The young woman who was a woodworker nodded her sympathy. Women were definitely at a disadvantage in her trade, but they liked it. They could not manage the heavy machines and had to fiddle round with odd jobs, often splitting up among several of them a piece of work which could easily be done by one man. “But we can keep clean,” she said, and all the women sitting round the table, the battered, weather-beaten women, murmured, “Ah, very nice that,” and, “Yes, indeed, that is a good kind of job.” Each of them, when it came to her turn to describe her work, discussed hesitantly how far it took her from the traditional sphere of woman, which, thanks to Hitler, she would not have a chance to re-enter before the grave took her. They had been robbed of their birthright, and they were not reconciled to the loss. But they were not bitter, simply they murmured when they heard of an occupation in which a woman need not get filthy, “Ah, very nice that,” and “Yes, indeed, that’s a good kind of job.”

  How many Berlin women were in the building trade? About four thousand, against sixteen thousand men; or so they thought. But all their figures were very uncertain, for when the federated unions fled from their offices in the Russian Sector they had had to leave all their papers behind, even to the membership records. They had had to rebuild the whole organization from the ground up. Fiercely they spoke of the innumerable inconveniences of like sort which they had suffered at the hands of the Russians, nothing to do with ideology, just infernal nuisances. As they regretted the love which had been driven out of their lives manu militari, so they were always regretting the law which they had lost.

  It was not the kidnappings that made them grieve for their vanished order. Then the intoxication of courage lifted them up, for they but put themselves under a spotlight by joining UGO, and they might yet be among the kidnapped. It was the everyday violations of civil rights in the Russian Sector which enraged them. “In every block of flats there is a spy installed, just as there was in the Nazi times,” one said, and another added, “And sometimes it is the very same spy that worked for the Nazis.”

  “And our letters are opened,” another said; “if I want to write to Western Germany and keep what I say my own affair, I go and post my letter in the Western Sector.” They stirred on their chairs, they tapped the table with their fists, they uttered phrases echoing verse that German children learn at school and inscriptions written on monuments, phrases more conventional and less personal than their ordinary language, although they used them to indicate that what they were then saying was more intrepid and more personal than what they ordinarily said. They were declaring that they would never submit to communism and the Russians because they believed in democracy and liberty. Through the open windows came the roar of the airlift, defying the laws of historical gravity, because of the fuel of these women’s preferences.

  To say in this room, “I was at the Nuremberg trial,” would have meant nothing to any of these women, and, indeed, it would have presented them with an argument less developed than their own. There men had made a formal attack on the police state. But here these women had incarnated the argument. They were discussing the matter with their bodies as well as their minds. Because it would not do if the wrong people read the letter to brother Hans in Cologne, the tired legs had to trudge down the tenement steps and up the street and over to the Western Sector and back, the old shoes letting in the water and rubbing the corns. Because the man from the Eastern Zone with a message from Grandmama in Magdeburg could not come to the granddaughter’s home, lest the spy in the tenement should see him, she had to go a long way to meet him in a café where she was not known, and the fare and the price of the coffee left her short of what would have bought sausages for supper.

  By tired feet and leaking shoes, and by the watering of mouths over missed meals, these women had learned with their whole being that justice gives a better climate than hate. Aching, they saw a vision of a state that should think each citizen so precious that it would give him full liberty to be himself, provided only that he did not infringe the liberties of others to be themselves; a government that would love the individual. This is the democratic faith, and it was to this they had learned allegiance. Because the learning had come to them through their whole beings, in the course of their daily lives, their children would grow up with it in their blood. Mother had fair hair. She cooked good liver dumplings. She was a garment worker. She kept us when we were little. She found freedom a necessity. As she got older she got slightly deaf. She died at seventy. So a tradition is established.

  For these women, for all the men of their kind, the occupation of Berlin had been an event which was also an experience. The Nuremberg trials had not changed the Germans; the occupation of Western Germany had not changed the Western Germans; but Berliners were changed by the occupation of the city. The value of an experience does not depend on the number of people who are affected by it. If a man stranded on a desert island should become a saint under the coconut palm but is never rescued, it should not be pretended that what happened to him is of no importance; for if that be conceded, then nothing is important, since humanity is stranded on this desert world and will certainly never be rescued. Had Berlin made its revelation only to Berliners, it would still have had an absolute value. But it cannot have been so limited in its scope. It must also have changed the Russians. It touched them in their special area of wonder. For they were what Lenin and Stalin had made them, and those two had not prepared their charges for all the surprises that were to meet them in Berlin. It was the distinguishing mark of the Bolshevik party in its early days that it repudiated gallantry. That was why it so profoundly shocked Continental Socialists. True, it accumulated the huge funds, which gave it an advantage over all other parties, by the bank hold-ups and highway robberies of the “expropriations”; and it was only showing its good sense (as Cavour had argued long before) in preferring intrigue to fighting on the barricades. When it came to taking the Russian Revolution out of the hands of the Mensheviks who had made it, the Bolsheviks showed daring enough; though the fire that made the civil war came out of the belly of Trotsky, who had been a Menshevik. But once the party had come to power there was no place for courage in the Soviet Union. There was no field in which it could be exercised. No internal force survived which could be resisted without treachery to the state. Obedience was called for, and industry, and fortitude, but not courage. The tracts of course prescribed it, but the words lay dead on the didactic page; and, indeed, the purges that began in 1934 made it dangerous to present the appearance of potential bravery.

  But when Hitler attacked the Soviet Union the Russians found that courage was the primal necessity and that they possessed immense stores of this treasure. It must now have astonished them to recognize it in the Berliners. They cannot have expected to find courage in the vanquished, for they knew better than did them credit what reason such people have to speak softly and do as they are bidden: the rapidity with which their houses might change from homes to smoking ruins, themselves from the quick to the dead. The Russian higher command must have been constantly amazed because Ernst Reuter defie
d them from his mayoral chair. They knew, and they knew that he knew, what would happen to him, a lapsed Communist, if the Western Allies were driven out of Berlin. But eminent men, as all Soviet officials must recognize acutely, are often prevented from obeying the instinct of self-preservation. It must have been amazing to them that obscure Berliners who could have chosen to lie low coolly went into disciplined action against them and looked at them, not in fear, but in anger. They must have asked, “Why are these people putting their names on the priority list for the firing squad? Why are they inviting the flames to revisit their city?”

  They had received answers, not in words; such answers as had been given by these twenty women in their lives. The resistance of Berlin began as a soliloquy, but it must end as a dialogue. It would spread into a debate. In the Eastern Zone and in the satellite states the people were not openly rebellious, but the strikes and demonstrations made it plain what fire lay under the sullen smoke elsewhere. There was enough to make the Russians ask, “Why do these people hate us? What is it that all who are not us feel we have taken away from them?” The crucial political argument of our time will not be carried on in books, it will be lived. Perhaps the debate may continue for decades, for centuries, during which the West and the East may flag and fade, their lifeblood flowing away in armaments. But in the end the obscure millions must establish a truth, by discovering what is necessary for them.

  Mr. Setty and Mr. Hume

  1

  The murder of Mr. Setty was important, because he was so unlike the man who found his headless and legless body. It was news, after the pattern which was established when the Wise Men came out of the East and questioned their way to the stable where the King of the Jews had been born; for they were of course neither kings nor philosophers, as has often been pretended, but newspapermen, and they had seen no star, but had received the call not heard by the ear but felt by the nerves, which announces that somewhere there is news. For news is always an incarnation. Interest comes when people start to act out an idea, to show what a thought is worth when it is worked out in flesh and blood; and both Mr. Stanley Setty and his discoverer, Mr. Tiffen, were engaged in such dramatization.

  Mr. Setty had no apparent connection with ideas. He was one of those cases of abnormally unlucky precocity followed by abnormally lucky maturity, which, though the good luck adds up to nothing impressive, nevertheless present modern England with a disquieting problem. He was born Sulman Seti in Baghdad in 1903. He was brought to England by his parents when he was four, and at fourteen was working in a Manchester cotton mill, as the law then permitted. Two years later he and his brother set up in business as shipping merchants with a registered capital of something like three thousand pounds. After two years a receiving order was granted against the little lads, who owed about twenty-five thousand pounds and had only five pounds’ assets. As Mr. Setty was still only eighteen he could not be made a bankrupt, a status reserved for adults. Four years later, in 1926, he had saved five hundred pounds and started up in business again, calling himself a shipping merchant, but dealing in every kind of merchandise on which he could lay his hands. A year later he had run up twelve hundred pounds’ debts, and he ran away with two hundred pounds he had abstracted from the till to Italy, where his father lived, in hope of getting help from him. But blood ran thinner than water, and he was back in Manchester in the following spring without a penny. He rapidly tried to mend his fortunes by gambling on horses and dogs, but soon acquired another three thousand pounds of debts.

  Meanwhile a receiving order had been made against him, and in August 1928, at the age of twenty-four, he was sentenced by a Manchester court to eighteen months’ imprisonment, having pleaded guilty to twenty-three offences against the Debtors’ and Bankruptcy Acts, such as having kept no proper accounts, left his place of business with the intention of defeating or delaying his creditors, and having used the two hundred pounds with which he went to Italy for his own purposes instead of handing them over to his creditors. His counsel made a moving plea for Mr. Setty, putting the blame for his misadventures on the community, which should never have allowed him to be a master or employer—he had “evidently not the mentality to deal with sums of money or large quantities of goods.”

  Ten years later, in 1938, just before the war, he appeared before another court, still, according to his own account, a shabby and woeful figure. He applied for his discharge from bankruptcy, explaining that he was working as a dealer on commission and that his earnings were pitiful, amounting to two or three pounds a week, and that he wanted to raise some capital and start up in business again. This ambition he could, of course, not gratify until he got his discharge, since as an undischarged bankrupt he could not have a banking account and could not obtain goods on credit without disclosing that he was an undischarged bankrupt. Now it is not difficult for an English bankrupt to get his discharge. He has to submit to an inquisition concerning his means and his character, which he is likely to remember with a smart of shame for the rest of his life, but the findings of the inquisitors are not unmerciful. If a man seems to have failed through ill luck or a local or historical crisis, or if he has worked really hard to pay off his creditors, he can usually get his discharge long before he has paid his debts in full. A percentage of thirty to sixty is often accepted. But the judge to whom Mr. Setty made his application evidently found reason to harden his heart beyond the habit of his kind. He gave him a blank refusal, remarking grimly that Mr. Setty appeared to be planning to set up business “in a way which might or might not be for the benefit of the business community.” It would be interesting to learn the present income of the counsel who pleaded that Mr. Setty had “evidently not the mentality to deal with sums of money or large quantities of goods,” or of the judge who refused him his discharge. There is not a chance in the world that the judge, anyway, could enjoy anything but a fraction of the lordly income which, when the clouds of war cleared away, Mr. Setty was seen to be enjoying. His address was now impressive. He was not so grand in this respect as his brother, Mr. Max Setty, owner of the most fashionable night club in London, The Orchid Room, who lived in an apartment close to the American Embassy in Grosvenor Square, which, fifty years ago, was inhabited exclusively by peers of the realm and bankers. There was perhaps more restraint in his choice of the apartment, which Mr. Setty shared with his sister and her husband, Mr. Ali Ouri, who is one of the wealthiest Arab landowners in Israel. It is soberly distant from the West End, in the grey stucco district north of Hyde Park. He did nothing to disturb the sedate atmosphere. He did not drink, he gave few parties, he dressed quietly but expensively. He could afford it. He never carried less than one thousand pounds on him, and it was known that, if he was given an hour or two of notice, he could produce five times that sum.

  But he still had no banking account. He was still an undischarged bankrupt. He still had no office. Because his ostensible business was dealing in second-hand automobiles, he had a garage in Cambridge Terrace mews, a dead end of old coach houses converted into garages, hidden away behind the stately houses that look on Regents Park. But chiefly he carried on his trade on the pavements and in the public houses and snack bars of Warren Street, that warm, active, robust, morally unfastidious area which has a smack of Dickens’ London. This meant, of course, that he was hard to tax. The Inland Revenue must have found it very hard to find out what his profits were and assess him; which meant that the assessment of all other British subjects had to go up. But it meant more than that. This is the centre of the secondhand automobile market, and there, at that time, flourished a curious medley of the legitimate and the illegitimate. Countless automobiles were bought and sold here without blame in the sight of God and man; but there was also a trade in English automobiles designed for export and banned in the home market, in foreign automobiles which had been illegally imported, in new automobiles which were not allowed to be resold under the twelve months’ covenant, in stolen automobiles, and in petrol which was drastically rationed. />
  Mr. Setty was active in the purely legitimate trade, but even there something strange was suggested. He was said, by those who knew him only as an automobile dealer, to do business on a scale suggesting that he had capital to the amount of about fifty thousand pounds. He bought many cars, and he often paid large prices for automobiles which used a high amount of petrol at times when the ration of petrol was still small, and would have to keep them for a considerable time before he could resell them. Yet, in 1938, when he had asked for his discharge from bankruptcy, he had represented that he was earning from two to three pounds a week, and a court which was scrutinizing his affairs with a hostile eye made no suggestion that it disbelieved this story and that he could afford to pay out a dividend to his creditors. It is hard to imagine how in the intervening eleven years he could have accumulated fifty thousand pounds’ capital. Taxation alone would have made that impossible, no matter what gifts he might have developed in the meantime. But there was no registered company behind him, and he seemed to have no associates.

  He was also a curbside banker. Anybody who wanted to cash a cheque without passing it through a bank came to him and he gave them money for it with a discount, which he never made unreasonable, and passed it on to an associate who had a banking account. Here again is a field where the legitimate and the illegitimate are mingled. The most honest of undischarged bankrupts may like to have some means of cashing the cheques he receives in the way of business other than by explaining his state over the counter of his customer’s bank; and we also have a legacy handed down from Tsardom. Up till the first five years of this century Great Britain took in countless immigrants from Russia and Poland, and many of these, partly from the inferiority complex the alien feels before the native, and partly from a peasant fear of being swindled by lettered men, never learned to use a bank. Survivors of that generation, and even some of their children, go on cashing their cheques with the man who has never let them down yet and is always to be found outside the Three Feathers between five and seven, even when those cheques run into thousands of pounds. But after the Second World War the curbside banker was used more and more by people who wanted to evade taxes or cover up illegal transactions, such as currency frauds or payments for illegal imports supped in on false invoices. Nobody can tell now what branches of the profession were cultivated by Mr. Setty, since he had no papers. The figures were all in his head, which is perhaps why in the end it was cut off. But certainly every day he handled thousands of pounds.