Gossip From the Forest

by Thomas Keneally

  The Marshal: There is to be another photograph when we leave. Will you travel with me, Lord Wemyss?

  Wemyss flinched. The unwelcome intimacy was not yet finished.

  Wemyss: That would be most generous of you.

  The Marshal: We can both hand over the text to the Tiger.

  Wemyss: You’re too kind.

  The Marshal: No. I have ordered a car for seven-thirty. You mustn’t think me rude. I shall probably doze all the way up.

  Wemyss thanked God that sleep was part of the old man’s performance.

  SAINING

  Now he wanted to clear his head of the static fug of the Marshal’s train. He and George Hope fetched their overcoats and went for a stroll. The mist uncoiling in the forest reminded him of his family’s mythology.

  Wemyss: Did you know, George, that the elm was a resurrection tree with the Druids?

  Hope: Indeed, Rosy? No, I didn’t.

  Wemyss: I wouldn’t know it myself. Except, when we were brought home from London all wrapped up and newly born, an old lady called Meg McLeod used to force her way into the castle and swing a burning elm bough over mother and child three times. I can’t remember it. But old Meg called it “saining.” I wonder what it meant?

  Hope: There’s a lot of that sort of thing goes on even in the home counties.

  Wemyss: Trees are strong magic, George. I was always a bit uneasy in forests. When I was a child.

  The long toe of Hope’s shoe went far ahead and crushed something in the mauve mud ahead of them. The exotic conversation perhaps.

  Hope: You must be very proud, Rosy.

  Wemyss: Oh yes, oh yes.

  Hope: You have every right. Every right.

  Wemyss: I was well supported, George. The mundane things will be harder. Talk about sailors’ Soviets! We’ve got ’em, George. Call them committees if you like, “soviet” is a loaded word. It would be too unfortunate if we had a sailors’ strike.

  Hope: The marines, Rosy.

  Wemyss: Send them in, you mean?

  He thought, if ever I have to, I hope you’re still with me, unflinching in the front office.

  Wemyss: One has to admit, George. One and eightpence a day for seamen. Damn awful pay.

  Hope: We could all complain, sir. Admiral’s pay hasn’t gone up since 1855.

  Wemyss: Imagine George Hope on strike. Imagine.

  Hope: Indeed.

  Wemyss: Still. It would be nice to be able to announce a pay raise on the way. For all hands.

  Hope: Mightn’t that seem to be playing up to them?

  Wemyss: We don’t play up to people, George.

  Hope: It’s just that in the new world, Rosy, I can see trade unions running mad.

  The First Sea Lord found that he himself was grinding away at the mud conclusively with his boot. He thought, I wonder what I understood of the blazing elm circle over my head? Chagrin rose in him.

  Wemyss: Imagine those chaps trying the starving-children line!

  THEIR TALK HAD SOLEMN RHYTHMS

  Long after the generals and the admirals drove away, Matthias sat working on a report for Ebert and at another table von Winterfeldt wrote observations down for his masters. The habits of work protected them in a forest which threatened, on the Marshal’s departure, to become as notional as forests in dreams. You could not help believing that minds trying to dwell on the woods this morning, under the thin sun, would fail to get purchase, would fall out of their accustomed notches. Vanselow and Maiberling evaded this hazard quite well by sleeping. Blauert kept to a deep lounge chair. Chained to his wrist a brief case, and in it the signed document itself as well as maps to illustrate all its terms. He was to be flown to Belgium from a field at Tergnier—Weygand had said that. But it seemed no plane was available for him till noon.

  As for the train, Bourbon-Busset had told them it would be two hours before it was flagged out of the forest.

  While Matthias worked, more staff officers arrived from Spa.

  Somehow they had got passes from Groener’s office and radioed and white-flagged their way through the lines and been treated seriously by the French. Erzberger wished Groener’s office had not been so careless with its travel permits.

  They were very spruce young men. Blauert, who still waited for his plane, introduced them to Erzberger. They carried no particular news but seemed unshaken by their journey. One of them said that they would leave the train and let Herr Erzberger get on with his work. Erzberger said, leave the train and go where? Camp under an elm? No, use that end of the saloon.

  For a minute or so Erzberger watched them all, the young professionals, the men who had come yesterday, this morning’s group. Their talk had solemn rhythms. Occasionally someone laughed, but only briefly. They lacked, to a degree that Erzberger found indecent, any suggestion of belonging to an endangered army.

  Their talk, however restrained, annoyed von Winterfeldt. Erzberger was surprised to see the general get up and begin snorting.

  There may have been an old regular’s envy there for their General Staff carmine-striped pants and golden buttons, so untarnished in these last hours of war.

  In the end he did not speak up to them. Only to Matthias.

  Von Winterfeldt: You see. The General Staff. Yesterday they dropped their potentate. But they’re lasting well, don’t you think? Tomorrow they’ll pick up some other divinity.

  Erzberger: But now a republic! No more divinities.

  Von Winterfeldt: Can you believe, Herr Erzberger, that you’re truly going home to a republic?

  And Matthias tried the tension in his belief and found it slack.

  Von Winterfeldt: I see these things. I see them with an outsider’s eyes because my wife is French and an intelligent woman. They used to make her drink beer on Wednesday mess nights. Like any fat frau.

  At half past eleven sentries boarded the train, sealed all windows and pulled the blinds down. The engine, which Erzberger could hear sighing steam half the morning, dragged them away in an instant. Erzberger, who disliked haphazard departures and thought that you only truly saw a place when you were leaving it, peeped out of the half-inch aperture between blind and pane and saw Blauert step into a French army vehicle, his black case strapped to his wrist. He seemed to carry it without sense of onus.

  No quick journey. There was much traffic on the line. The stations crowded. Behind the windows the pallid delegates did not care to peep out and see whether it was soldiers or refugees cheering and singing and baying threats; or sightseers drawn by rumor to view this train amongst all the others. In some places they could hear sentries ordering people back.

  By early afternoon it had become so wearing that Matthias and the others sat all together in a knot.

  MATTHIAS ERZBERGER’S FINAL FOREST

  It is against all feeling to leave Matthias without conducting him to his final forest. The journey is quickly fulfilled.

  He reached the capital on Wednesday. The republic eked its existence daily forward between poles. For one pole the conservative wing, swelled by thousands of inveterate ex-officers. For another, the deep socialists and authentic Reds.

  Politics wasn’t a remote art as in stable government. You didn’t practice it through memoranda, secretaries, and public officials. It was an act of immediate and hourly contrivance. Most of all, you went yourself and talked with people. You were a sort of transcendental shop steward or dry-goods salesman.

  This style of work appealed to Matthias Erzberger, gave him a sense of forcing a mold upon time, instead of being himself molded by it. So the fatalism was soothed which he had suffered from during the armistice days. And might suffer again any day he was left idle.

  Maiberling had fewer demands on his time. He stayed in the country and when he came to Berlin was escorted by two large young men, former sergeants in the Bavarian infantry. Flinching, he would call them his Praetorians.

  In the summer of 1919 Erzberger became Vice-Chancellor and, more fatally, a reforming finance minister. He denie
d all the old kingdoms: Bavaria, Saxony, Prussia, and the others, by taxing Germans directly from Berlin. As a means of freezing army pay he froze army promotion. He enacted other reforms that are best inquired of from historians.

  All at once he was the darling target of respectable conservatives and their bastard brothers of the secret parties, the private armies.

  Karl Helferrich, who had once been a finance minister, began tearing at him in articles published by Kreuzzietung. Each article was headed Away with Erzberger. Later the articles were gathered into a booklet of the same title. In the vicious journals of the north Erzberger and the others were called “the November criminals.” When Matthias first heard the term his predestinarian guts said, there it is, a stage in a process that can’t be begged off.

  Helferrich’s people stole his tax returns. Helferrich indicated irregularities; said that while a director of Thyssen’s Matthias had warned a shipping and engineering subsidiary of some government intention; accused him of perjury.

  On such grounds a priest giving consecrated bread in a parish church in Weimar came to Erzberger, recognized him from his photograph in maligning papers, refused him the Eucharist.

  Paula Erzberger: You can’t sue a priest. My love.

  Erzberger: You can sue Helferrich.

  The trial began in the new year. The galleries in the dim courtroom in Berlin-Moabit were full of those young men who called themselves “the disinherited of 1918.” They cheered Helferrich, his counsel and his witnesses. They catcalled and yowled at Erzberger and his counsel. The judge threatened to clear the galleries if the noise continued. The noise continued. He never cleared the galleries. Similarly, when Helferrich called old members of the imperial cabinet they were fetched by clerks and bowed into court. When Erzberger called ministers of the republic they were bawled for by ushers.

  On 26 January it was like midnight when the court adjourned. Erzberger went to his car, stepped in, and sat by his secretary. His lawyer talked to him through the lowered window. All their speculation went up in vapor.

  One of the young men from the galleries stepped to the lawyer’s side, bent past the wound-down pane, had a Mauser in his hands and fired twice. The noise horrified Matthias. There was no other keen pain. A bullet went into his right shoulder but the one that would have killed him was deflected into the upholstery by his big rustic watch chain.

  The boy’s name was Hirschfeld. Yes, a former subaltern. At his trial his defense lawyer compared him to Cicero gunning for Catiline. He got eighteen months.

  In March Helferrich was found guilty of making false accusations and fined the nothing sum of 300 marks. Erzberger, it was found, was guilty of impropriety, perjury, the mixing of business and politics. There, the court said. He deserves to be denied sacraments and to have Mausers pointed at him.

  He resigned his portfolio. Friends and doctors told him to rest and let the psychopaths forget him. It was a tender, wistful summer for Matthias Erzberger. He scarcely campaigned but was returned in the June elections for the Swabian constituency of Biberach. He thought, at least down there in my home valleys there’s still a sort of political temperate zone.

  In the House he kept his silence. At home he was most tender with fragile Paula. Their infant Gabrielle played on the beach at Swinemünde that hazy summer. (Erzberger: Thank God she’s got your hips.) His damaged shoulder foretold thunderstorms. His elder daughter Maria wanted to go to Holland and become a Carmelite. They argued about it. He had always taken nuns for granted. They were other people’s lost children. There was so much ripeness in her that he hated her to go as a tithe.

  By the summer there were a few hints in political columns that he might be seeking a place in the cabinet. He found reasons to feed to Paula but thought it best not to tell her as well that working short hours disgruntled him. He told her, and seems to have four-fifths believed himself, that he would not be further menaced. The assassins of Walter Rathenau at midsummer had said that they shot him because he was part of the Jewish industrial and cultural plot. There, Matthias said, they have moved on from fantasies of November criminals to Jews.

  There was time, he said, to think about it. He had them booked into three Black Forest hotels for July and August. First, Jordanbad. Firs and sharp air and apolitical locals in braided shirts.

  On 8 August onto Beuron by village taxi. A dear old yokel at the wheel. On 19 August to the Sisters of Charity pension at Bad Greisach and nut-brown people in peasant knickers.

  The Mother-Superior asked to see his watch chain.

  Mother Superior: A miracle.

  Erzberger: Perhaps not in the strict sense.

  Mother Superior: How do you know?

  Erzberger: Indeed. How do I?

  Mother Superior: And all because you simply wanted taxes collected.

  She made his policies seem the sunny apex of good sense.

  He walked every day, often with Paula. But there were many wild thunderstorms.

  On 25 August, for example, a falling conifer broke down power lines, and candles had to be lit in the pension lounge. A guest began playing old mountain songs on the piano and everyone, the nuns too, began singing in the dusk. Erzberger sang in baritone, Gabrielle on his knee. Candlelight sat bland on her baby-broad face and on her father’s.

  That evening a friend called Herr Diez arrived in Bad Greisach by train from Freudenstadt. Herr Diez was also in the Reichstag. He and Matthias went to a tavern and got mildly tipsy.

  The next morning Matthias and Diez planned to go walking up the mountain road toward Kneibis.

  Paula made him take an umbrella because there would be more thunderstorms.

  Paula: Admit it. You can feel it in your shoulder.

  Halfway up the hill they could see the Kinzig flowing cobalt between the lazy clockwork towns.

  They got to the top, sat a while, talking politics. No one was on the road except two young climbers.

  Who, when they got to Diez and Erzberger, called greetings, put their packs down and took army pistols from them.

  Erzberger had forgotten his dream of 1918. All he had was the normal sense of déjà vu. Impelled by it he opened his umbrella. Diez hit them with his. But Erzberger yielded to his supine nub and blotted them out with black silk.

  Through this false hemisphere he was shot in the chest and forehead. He walked the little way to the edge of the road and fell ten meters down the embankment. They slid after him and shot him in the lung, the stomach, the thigh. He was still quite conscious and, while they loaded again, tried to hide behind a fir tree. Here they came and put into him the last three of the eight shots he suffered.

  Then they mounted the embankment, picked up their haversacks and disappeared in the wood.

  Diez, bleeding from the chest, took the news to Bad Greisach.

  The body was left in situ all night to enable senior police to determine the circumstances of the crime. That, anyhow, was the reason police gave for leaving Matthias’s corpse all the high-summer night in the forest. Not that they caught the killers. It was twenty-seven years later, in a season of retribution, that they were caught and tried and sentenced.

  The autopsy in Oppenau showed that the victim’s heart and kidneys were gravely enlarged and that he would not have had long, in any case, to live.

  About the Author

  Thomas Keneally (b. 1935) is an Australian author of fiction, nonfiction, and plays, best known for his novel Schindler’s List. Inspired by the true story of Oskar Schindler’s courageous rescue of more than one thousand Jews during the Holocaust, the book was adapted into a film directed by Steven Spielberg, which won the 1993 Academy Award for Best Picture. Keneallywas included on the Man Booker Prize shortlist three times—for his novels The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, Gossip from the Forest, and Confederates—before winning the award for Schindler’s List in 1982. Keneally is active in Australian politics and is a founding member of the Australian Republican Movement, a group advocating for the nation to change its governance from
a constitutional monarchy to a republic. In 1983 he was named an Officer of the Order of Australia for his achievements.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1975 by Thomas Keneally

  Cover design by Drew Padrutt

  ISBN: 978-1-5040-2674-1

  This edition published in 2015 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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