Tuesday, 27 May 1947
A week had gone by and Felix had still not hit upon an idea for Fogel. In some obscure way he felt his failure had to do with a growing obsession with Angela Wirth – the de Lempicka lady from the BBC. He had learned her name from the waiter, Fritz, of course – and Fritz had told him that she, too, had been asking questions about him. But that only seemed to make it more difficult for him to approach her – or, apparently, for her to approach him. But perhaps it was also because he had learned that she was a survivor of the Ravensbrück KL – the one for women, north of Berlin; and she must have learned of his imprisonment at Mauthausen, too.
One lunchtime he was sitting at what had now become his table when she passed by on her way to what had always been hers. She half-turned and said, ‘Pea soup?’
He glanced down at his plate. ‘Yes. Why not?’
Now she was flustered. ‘I’m sorry. It was just so—’
‘Not at all. I do understand.’ He rose, wiping his lips. ‘Won’t you join me?’
She hesitated.
He said, ‘You have a more agreeable table, I admit.’
‘No – it’s not that.’ She came back, suddenly very nervous.
He slipped the chair smoothly beneath her, looking down on her silky, blonde hair, the tweed shelf of her breasts, her scarred hands, older than her years. ‘Felix Breit,’ he said as he returned to his side of the table.
‘I know. Angela Worth.’ She pronounced both names as if they were English. She was panting slightly.
They shook hands over the table as he sat down. ‘I know that, too. Fritz is a handy chap, eh? Well . . . Mahlzeit!’
‘No! No German! I will never speak German again.’
‘Oh?’ He hesitated. ‘Do you not think it, too – that beautiful language of Goethe and Schiller and Thomas Mann – do you not think it, too, was a victim of the Nazis?’
‘Gnädiges Fräulein?’ Fritz set the menu down before her and a sideplate with a small slice of bread. No butter or marge.
‘Just a salami and salad,’ she said. Then, to Felix: ‘He’s incorrigible.’ She was recovering her composure quickly.
‘He knows his Schiller. About the peas – I expect Fritz told you? They kept me alive, you know. Peas, beans, lentils . . . I’d be dead but for them.’ He stretched his arm until his tattoo just became visible.
She nodded. Her fingers toyed with her bread. He could see the last digit of her prisoner number, 7, lurking inside her sleeve.
‘Of course I feel guilty now it’s all over,’ he said. ‘The best fed inmate . . .’
‘Is it “all over”? Do we talk about all that?’
He shrugged. ‘Perhaps not now. You work at the BBC, Fritz tells me?’
She nodded. ‘My father was a sound recordist at UFA, before the war. When BASF brought out the first commercial tape, he was the first to learn how to get the best from it. He corresponded with von Braunmühl and Weber about introducing high-frequency bias.’
‘That was him?’ Felix asked in mock surprise. ‘I’ve often wondered.’
She pulled a face and grinned. ‘It was a huge improvement – all right? Anyway . . . my mother died when I was nine, so I spent a lot of time with him, on the set and in the sound studios. By the time I was fifteen, I was as good as any of them, but, of course, I couldn’t get a union card. Until the war.’
She hesitated and he guessed that wasn’t quite true, or all the truth.
‘After the liberation, BFN hired me to “show them the ropes”, because they only had the old wire recorders. Or those little four-minute wax discs, of course. Then the BBC invited me over. HMV wanted me, too, so –’ she shrugged – ‘that was quite good. These days I’m getting more into electronics . . . using valves and capacitors and things to make sounds. Avant garde music. Did you ever hear of a Frenchman called Fourier?’
‘The philosopher? Charles Fourier?’
‘No. Joseph. It doesn’t matter – it’s too complicated. Actually, the reason I moved into this field is I can see the writing on the wall. I was very popular when I was one of the few engineers who knew how to get the best out of tape recordings. Now it’s more common at the BBC, they’re beginning to notice I’m a woman and I really—’
‘I noticed it straight away!’
‘Why, thank yew!’ She pretended to simper. ‘Anyway, they also noticed that I really shouldn’t be paid as much as those gentlemen-engineers. So I went to a crammer – you know what that is?’
He nodded.
‘A maths crammer and made him teach me enough to understand Fourier’s transforms, as they call them. And so now, once again, I’m the queen bee!’ She giggled. ‘That’s what someone introduced me as yesterday – queen bee of the Experimental Audiophonic Unit. English is a funny language, don’t you think? It’s all saying one thing when you mean another. Raining cats and dogs. Changing horses in midstream. Hitting someone into the middle of next week. Lord, love a duck! Pulling the wool over someone’s eyes . . .’
‘Except Betty Grable,’ he pointed out straight-faced. ‘She pulls everyone’s eyes over her wool.’
‘Tskoh!’ She laughed and punched his arm. ‘But what about you? Oh! I know what I wanted to ask.’ She swallowed hard and took a deep breath. ‘Did your grandfather ever own a house on Am Grossen Wannsee? You know the Wannsee – the lake south of Berlin?’
He stared at her.
‘What?’ she asked.
‘Sorry – it’s just that someone else asked me that identical question, only a few weeks ago.’ He nudged his soup plate away and went on to explain about Fogel’s grandfather. Fritz scooped it up in one continuous movement, after laying down her salad.
‘So old Fogel thinks he owns it?’ she mused. ‘There’s an irony!’
‘Why?’
‘Oh . . .’ She stared about her like one trapped. ‘It’s too complicated to explain now.’
‘D’you know “old Fogel”?’ he asked.
‘I’ve only met him here, at Schmidt’s, just to exchange a few words. Who is that young woman who’s usually with him. You know the one I mean?’
‘Miss Bullen-ffitch. She’s the one who introduced me to Fogel. I met her at the V&A once. Now I work for him – one day a week.’
‘She seems very . . . nice. Very . . . strong.’ After a silence she asked, ‘What are you thinking?’
‘Remembering. The Wannsee. A boat. Expensive waterside villas with weeping trees over manicured lawns . . . a pretty girl . . .’
‘Yes?’ She leaned forward. ‘What was her name?’
He shook his head. ‘Gone . . . long gone. She was an ardent Nazi and we didn’t really hit it off . . . very short hair, cut like a boy’s. Very Berlin – you’d be too young to remember all that, I suppose. But I can see her arms still – sturdy as she rowed. Arms as Maillol would have carved them. Why did you ask about that villa?’
She breathed out, leaned back, and smiled. ‘Oh . . . nothing really . . . I was there once – during the war – and I saw a painting of your grandfather’s on one of the walls. Large. A view over the lake from that same villa. It would have taken him quite a while to paint, so I wondered if he lived there once. Billy Breit – that was his name, wasn’t it?’
Felix nodded. ‘He was born Solomon Breit – though I didn’t know that until . . . well, it was . . .’
‘Until January the twentieth, nineteen forty-two.’
Again he stared at her . . . long enough this time to realize that he was holding his breath. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘But how did you know that?’
Her face was unreadable. ‘It’s a long story. Have you anything planned for this afternoon? Could we go for a walk, a long walk, in Regent’s Park? Not near the zoo. Perhaps you’d rather not?’
He smiled. ‘And then again – perhaps I’d rather.’
Fritz brought his meatballs and cabbage – another dish that did not require the surrender of points from his ration book.
‘Ever since that day,’ sh
e went on, ‘when I was in that villa – I was a recording engineer then, with a union card, and the villa was Interpol HQ – I overheard two Nazi officials discussing your grandfather’s painting and one of them said that you – his grandson – were an up-and-coming artist, a sculptor, and he gave your name, Felix Breit. And the other said he knew the name was familiar because you were on a list of Jews to be arrested in Paris that same day – January the twentieth. Often since that day, I wondered about you. The other officer said you probably didn’t even know you were a Jew. He said you’d be in for a shock and they both laughed.’
Felix nodded. ‘They were right. I had no idea my grandfather was a Jew until then. I stood at my window in Paris, watching the round-up and thinking “poor bastards!” And then they came for me! I protested, of course, but they showed me his birth certificate and there it was: Solomon Breit. He must have adopted the name William, or Billy, when he converted to the Protestants. I know nothing about that. But I do know – everybody knows – that he was viciously anti-Semitic. He adored Hitler. He died just before Kristallnacht but he would have approved of all that, too.’ He gave a single, sour laugh. ‘He would have been outraged to have died among all those vile Jews!’
With a deft twist of her fork she curled a slice of salami into a fragment of lettuce. ‘And your father – did he know?’ She popped it into her mouth, which was deep red – not cadmium red but carmine. The colour of jeweler’s rouge.
Immediately he thought of carnivores but a moment later he realized it was probably Gordon Moore’s toothpaste. ‘They got him, too – or so I assume. He must have known our ancestors were Jewish, though he kept it from me. He was an atheist.’
‘You mean, you don’t know what happened to him?’
He shrugged. ‘I don’t even know where he was living when the war started. We fell out. He didn’t want me to be an artist because . . . well, he fell out with his father, too. We’re each a one-generation family.’
‘And your mother? Sorry – I’m being nosey . . .’
‘No. Not at all.’ A thought struck him. ‘D’you know, there’s no one I know – here in England – no one I can talk to about these things. I mean people who I absolutely know will understand. They listen . . . sort of. But to them it just seems like European politics . . . European history . . . Too complicated and also . . . too unimportant.’
‘Yes!’ Her face suddenly came alive. ‘That’s exactly it! They fought their way across the map, they put in their military governments – very efficient governments – and yet they have no idea, no . . .’ She could not find the word. ‘They know more about Africa, India, America . . . Europe’s twenty-two miles from Dover yet it might as well be half the world. But you were saying – about your mother?’
‘Yes. She and my grandfather both drowned, sailing between Kiel and Denmark.’
She picked up the last speck of lettuce with her fingers and licked it into her mouth. She had good teeth in those Gordon Moore gums. ‘One of those Nazis said your name was starred. On the list of Jews to be rounded up that day – your name had a star beside it. He said it meant there’d probably be a public outcry among—’
‘There was! Derain led a deputation to Gestapo HQ to demand my release. They had a cable from Matisse in Marseille, too, which carried a lot of weight. The same artists had also protested to the French government back in ’thirty-nine, when I was arrested by the French, along with all the other Germans. Back then it took three weeks to get me out. But for some reason, in ’forty-two, the Gestapo gave in at once and released me in a few hours. It was a weird time.’
She made an awkward gesture, an apologetic shrug.
‘What?’
‘It was planned that way,’ she said. ‘They knew there’d be a big protest, so they’d make a gesture . . . get good headlines in the papers . . . meanwhile, all the others would be safely deported with the minimum of public fuss. They knew they could get you anytime. Actually, when did they finally get you?’
‘In Vichy France, March the fifteenth, nineteen forty-four. The Ides of March. I fled to Vichy the day they let me go. By then, of course, all those Americans who helped artists and intellectuals get away – Peggy Guggenheim . . . Varian Fry – they’d all gone. I had a forged exit visa and a forged transit visa to Mexico via Martinique, which might have worked. Excellent forgeries. But I arrived too late. I actually saw the ship sailing out of the harbour.’
‘That must have been dreadful.’
‘Then I was on the run for the best part of two years. I almost made it to the end of the war.’
‘You joined the Resistance then, I suppose?’
He shook his head. ‘It wouldn’t have worked. I was too well known – and already a wanted man.’
‘So what are you doing these days?’
‘Fogel has asked me to be the Führer of a five-volume history of modern art – the Post-Impressionists, Les Fauves, der blaue Reiter, die Brücke . . . Cubism . . . Surrealism . . .’ He stopped in mid-flow and stared at the salt cellar.
‘And?’ she prompted.
‘An egg!’ he exclaimed. ‘Look! It’s like the top half of an egg. That’s it!’
‘What is? I’m sorry . . .’
‘No!’ He laughed as he picked the salt cellar up and turned it round and round in his hand. ‘I’m the one who’s sorry. I’ve just . . . I found the answer to a problem. It’s perfect.’ He placed the salt cellar back on its stand. ‘But we were talking about modern art. Did those names mean something to you?’
She gave a slight shrug. ‘A bit.’
‘I’m trying to build a bridge back to them. The war . . . the whole Nazi . . . abomination . . . is like a vast sterile desert that divides the century. Before it we had absurd hopes and monstrous naïveté . . . but the art was great. If we can build a bridge – not just me but all of us – a bridge back across the Nazi desert, and let the power of all that pre-war greatness put down new roots on this side of it, where the hopes are despairing and only the cynicism is monstrous, then there’s a chance.’
While speaking he had watched her lick a fingertip and mop up every last crumb – dab, lick, dab, lick, dab, lick . . . with compulsive monotony. ‘Are you going to have any pudding?’ he asked.
She shook her head.
‘I don’t think I will, either. What luxury – to say no to food! Let’s take that walk?’
On the way up Charlotte Street, beyond where he had ever walked before, he noted an art shop – Tiranti – worth a visit perhaps. On through Fitzroy Square and into the Euston Road they commented on the architecture, the bomb damage, the post-war scruffiness, the static water tanks; in their minds lay images of the total devastation they had left behind in Germany – all façades, and the blind windows thronged with ghosts. Here, even the most recent bombsites were greened over with rosebay willowherb and London pride, for no V-bomb had fallen in this part of town.
Narrow little Euston Road, lined on both sides with closed or rundown shops and greasy cafés, was a surprise after the relative opulence of Fitzroy Square, where just one building had been destroyed.
‘I miss Paris,’ he said. ‘The Paris that has gone forever. They tell me London will be the new art capital of the world but it can’t hold a candle to the Paris that was.’
‘Hold a candle?’
‘Sorry. Can’t hope to equal. You’ve no idea—’
‘Hold a candle!’ she repeated approvingly. ‘I like these things in English.’
‘You’ve no idea how vibrant . . . alive . . . gay . . . Paris was in the thirties. That’s why I stayed on, even after my first arrest – which is when I should have got out.’
‘I have digs just across there in Robert Street,’ she said.
He told her about the Dower House but did not mention Faith.
They entered Regent’s Park, past one of the two vast static water tanks that flanked the road.
‘EWS?’ she asked, looking at the huge, now-faded letters.
‘Emerg
ency Water Supply?’ he guessed. ‘You were going to tell me about that villa in Wannsee – Interpol HQ? Were you employed to record proceedings there?’
There was a long pause before she replied, ‘I was an officer in the SS.’
He was too stunned to make any response. Then it dawned on him that he had been rather naïve. She’d been a recording engineer at Interpol HQ. They’d never have trusted that work to a civilian. But then . . . that Ravensbrück tattoo on her arm . . .
‘D’you still want to hear?’ she asked.
‘Of course.’ He recovered swiftly. ‘You ended the war in Ravensbrück. Of course I want to hear. More than ever, now.’
Did she have a prisoner’s tattoo added after the liberation? Many SS guards had done that.
The buzz of traffic receded as they penetrated farther into the park.
She drew breath and took the plunge. ‘Have you heard of Heydrich? Reinhard Heydrich – he was Number Two in the SS.’
‘Assassinated in—’
‘Yes. May the seven-and-twentieth – I mean twenty-seventh – nineteen forty-two. In Prague. They liquidated Lidice in reprisal. The whole village. He was also head of the German branch of Interpol. He was one of the most evil men I ever met but it was the sort of evil a young girl might take many years to understand, because he was also most charming. And to see him with his wife and children – as I did, many times – was . . .’
‘But he was also one of the architects of the Vernichtung. Pardon my German.’
‘I met him through recording, of course. He was – you may find this hard to believe – he was a virtuoso on the violin. If the war—’
‘No, I knew that.’
‘It was true. If the war had never been, I think we might now be buying Heydrich playing the Beethoven violin concerto with the Berlin Philharmonic – truly. Anyway . . . he formed a string quartet of fellow SS officers and . . . they weren’t up to his standard, of course, but they weren’t bad. And he came down to UFA with Goebbels one day to borrow some recording equipment and my father wouldn’t let it out of his sight so he went with them to manage the recording. And that happened many times. But then, one day, he was too busy doing some editing and so he sent me along. And –’ she swallowed heavily – ‘I fell completely under his spell. I thought he must have the most sensitive soul because he played so exquisitely . . .’
The Dower House Page 10