The Dower House

by Malcolm Macdonald

  Grow up! he told himself and unfolded the first letter.

  My dear Son,

  It is now three years since you left Berlin. News reaches me now and then – you are in Prague . . . in Vienna . . . in Paris. Perhaps you are in all three – and more? Back with my brother in America? Otto tells me you are on Goebbels’ list of decadent artists – the ones they threaten to liquidate. Willi agrees you are on the list but very low down. Does this, I wonder, mean you are not a very good decadent artist? Maybe you have a base in England from which you make these visits? I hope so. But where shall I send this letter? Would ‘Felix Breit, Paris’ find you? If you are that famous, then I must eat every word I spoke to you when we parted for what is now, probably, the final time. Anyway, I write in the hope that this will one day, somehow, reach you. The minute I hear of a reliable address for you, I will send it. All Germany’s finest are now scattered to the winds. Europe is quite simply not possible with this Third Reich at its heart.

  If it reaches you – and where it reaches you – will depend mostly, I’m afraid, on how efficient the Nazis are with their racial genealogies. My father was such a Jew-hater that I always suspected we were of Jewish descent, but, for the sake of peace, I never raised the question with him and I never passed on my doubts to you. I was an agnostic with tendencies toward Buddhism; you – when I last knew you – were an ardent atheist. (‘God is a cancer on the face of Reason’ remember?) Why upset ourselves with a past that had no bearing?

  Well, now it most certainly has a bearing. Old Billy Breit’s anti-Semitism was so fierce and so public that all the world (except us) suspected he had been born a Jew. He didn’t look Jewish. Nor do I. Nor do you. But these Nazis are bound to have recorded that suspicion (to put it at its weakest) somewhere. They miss nothing and they follow up everything. They have even persuaded the Catholics to hand over all records of Jews who converted. If there is a war, I hope they will lose it not because of bad generals but because they will be too busy hunting down Jews, communists, poofs, and other subhumans to fight properly. If my suspicions are true, then I am only what these new ‘Nuremberg Laws’ call a Mischling – a half-Jew. I would be permitted to keep a caged bird but not to walk in the state forests and I could only sit out on a balcony over a main street after dark. (I’m inventing these rules but it will be something like that.) Perhaps they will expel all full-Jews before they start on the half-ones. And you would only be a quarter-Jew.

  And I’m certain they mean to expel every last Jew from the Fatherland. They talk of Madagascar as a new Jewish homeland, but if war comes before that gets going, they’ll deport them to the East, among the Slavs, whom they also classify as less than human. Jews and Slavs as neighbours? What does history teach about that! Maybe they mean the Slavs to finish the Jews off this time – which they will do willingly before the Master Race turns on them.

  It’s all our own fault, of course, for voting for the Nazi Ermächtigungsgesetz in ’33 – carte blanche for them. When the Allies took away our colonies after 1918 we smarted. Then the Nazis gave us this vision of becoming the colonial master-race of Europe and, like all colonial masters – the English, the French, the Americans are no different – we liberals believed in democracy and freedom and equality but not for our colonial subjects.

  The one great hopeful sign for me personally is that I’m still a member of the Reichschriftumskammer and so can still continue to write and be published. They’ve expelled all the Jews, who can now only write and sell their work abroad, for a fraction of what they used to earn here in Germany. But what do we write? Tales of Jacob – Mann; something historical about Austria-Hungary – Roth; Nero – Feuchtwanger; Erasmus – Zweig . . . old history. Who dares to write anything about modern Germany?

  All these thoughts of mine can be boiled down to one sentence: Do not even consider coming home. If you are in France, go to England. If in England, then America. You cannot get far enough away from these swine. I see them every day in the streets – here in our beautiful Berlin where, just a few years ago, life was so vital, so rich – I see them humiliating the Jews, making their lives a misery. Last week an old Jewess – she must have been eighty if not more – she dropped a glass jar of Sauerkraut and it smashed on the pavement, and two of this new breed of policemen made her go down on her hands and knees and eat it up – while they made noises snorting like pigs. And laughing, of course. Even when she cut her tongue on the glass they did not let her stop. And I did nothing! Well, I came back home and I drew their faces, quite good likenesses, and I wrote a full statement and perhaps one day, with a different regime, something will be done. One brave Lutheran pastor told them the old woman had had enough and they should stop; they just took his name and address and went on tormenting her (in the language of Goethe and Schiller, too). Next week, next month, his congregation will be told their pastor has gone for ‘re-education’. And when he comes back, he will no longer obstruct the police.

  When things like this happen – and they happen often – the people just stand and watch, as if it were an opera – yes, something very familiar by Wagner. I’m surprised they don’t bring opera glasses.

  I would leave this miserable country myself except that I cannot desert Tante Uschi. But I’ll explain that later. First, I want to tell you where I believe everything went wrong between us, you and me. It started when your mother drowned in that dreadful accident with Opa; all I wanted for myself was to be dead, too. I know we argued a lot, and quite bitterly, but it was a kind of love, you know. I cannot say I actually hated you but I resented your being there, needing me to take care of you, feed you, buy your clothes, schoolbooks, take you on holidays – I didn’t know your mother did so many things for your welfare and upbringing until she was no longer there. And, like every adolescent boy, you were too absorbed in the rages and passions and miseries of growing up even to notice what sacrifices I was making. (These are the thoughts and feelings of me-then, not me-now.) You grieved for your mother, you grieved often, but you never grieved for very long each time. Grief was something you fitted in between going down to the park with your pals, and bantering with the girls, and doing stunts on your bicycle, and all those other things that took you out of the house while I did the household accounts and answered letters from your teachers and tried to find out from your friends’ mothers where to buy clothes for you and what to do for acne and . . . on and on like that. My grief was day-long and night-long and yours came in such short bursts. Intense, yes, but soon spent. We were as different as Day and Night in our grieving.

  I don’t believe that our father-son friendship – and son-father friendship, too – ever recovered from the absence between us of your mother. What made it worse was that I never spoke of it to you and so you had no way of opening the subject with me. I understand that so clearly now, but back then, since something within me refused to broach the subject, I – what is that word the psychologists use? Transferred? Projected? Displaced? No matter – I did all of that in criticizing, opposing, mocking, belittling you.

  Sometimes nowadays I go off to sleep very quickly and then, quite soon, wake up again, filled with a great unease. And then I know what’s coming next. I will recall, word for word, angry look for angry look, some argument we had in those awful years. But even more shaming to me than the perfect re-enacting of the words and tones of our voices, is the bitterness it brings flooding back into my heart, almost like a taste on my tongue, and the precise texture of my feelings, like a rasp inside my brain. But now there is another self there, too, overlaying all of this. And he, or I, for it is me as I am now, I want to shout, ‘Stop! For the satisfaction of overwhelming your son with clever, bitter words’ – and I could always do that, alas! – ‘you are storing up miseries that will haunt you for the rest of your life!’

  If I were truly clever with words, instead of just smart, I would write a play or a novel about it, and it would be in two parts. In the first part someone would say something quite trivial and no one wou
ld pick up on it and life would go on and at the end of the first act – so, OK, it’s going to be a play – the audience would wonder where it’s going. Then the second act would open in precisely the same situation, same dialogue, as the first. And those quite trivial words would be spoken again but this time someone would pick up on them, and so there’s discussion, and argument, and shouting and . . . murder? Divorce? Father and son who part, never to see each other again?

  And so I would use an art that, sadly, I do not have, to sublimate . . . that’s the word! Sublimate! I would sublimate the guilt I feel and the unhappiness it gives me by producing a work of art. And so that – my own dear son – is what I truly hope for you, now: that my parting words to you – ‘You are not an artist and never will be anything but a pasticheur and you are just hoodwinking yourself into the free life’ – I hope I was never more wrong in all my life. Indeed, I hope you are truly the artist you thought you were and that you have managed what I can not – to sublimate all that bitterness and bad blood into works of art that are pure and serene.

  Half of me wants you to read these words tomorrow and, heedless of my advice, to come post-haste back here and allow us to indulge in an orgy of reconciliation and a healing of so many old wounds. The other half hopes that will never happen – so that I can chastise myself and heap miseries upon my head in endless atonement. So it’s true – you can take the man out of Jewry but not the Jew out of the man!

  At least I may truly sign myself . . .

  Your ever-loving

  Vati

  PS: It was Tante Uschi, your second mother, who rescued both of us from total collapse into barbarism. I know I should take my own advice and get out of Germany as fast as I can but she needs me and, as she did not desert us, even when we were at our worst, so I cannot leave her now. I must take my chance and sing the old song quietly: ‘Berlin – halt ein! Dein Tänzer ist der Tod!’

  PPS: Someone in the Konditorei down on the corner left this on one of the tables yesterday. I thought it quite clever:

  MUSSOLINI

  HITLER

  FRANCO

  DALADIER

  BRITANNIA

  MENSCHHEIT

  Cui bono?

  (To discover who wins, look at the third letter in each name, starting at the top. It’s right, too, I fear.)

  Felix opened the folds of the second letter but instead of reading it from the top he let his eyes wander down the page, picking words and phrases at random, among them: ‘Gestapo . . . Vichy . . . living in the shadows . . . hundreds of thousands of corpses . . .’

  He could not face it.

  ‘That was quick,’ Faith said when he came back downstairs.

  Nicole, forewarned by her own reading, was more perceptive. ‘I thought you might read just one and then stop.’

  ‘Does it show whether your father survived?’ Faith asked.

  He spread empty hands; Nicole shook her head.

  ‘For sure?’ Faith persisted.

  Felix held his breath.

  Nicole shrugged. ‘It would be a miracle. I’m sorry, Felix. Of course, you know him better than anyone. When you read the second letter, maybe you will think it’s a chance and I am pessimist.’

  Faith realized that if Nicole was merely pessimistic, Felix would opt for triple-proof denial. ‘I’ll just go and say night-night to Jupiter,’ she said.

  ‘You want me to tell you?’ Nicole asked when they were alone.

  ‘That’s why she’s popped out, I’m sure. She won’t speak of it unless I do but she will fret and fret until she knows everything.’

  Nicole shook her head in wonder. ‘You think only of her!’

  ‘Not only but a lot.’

  So she told him as much as she thought he should know, but to certain of his questions she answered that he should read that for himself.

  ‘So?’ Faith asked after she had gone home.

  ‘I’ll read the other letter tomorrow. You can look at the first one if you like. I need to . . . to readjust to him. It’s on my bedside table.’

  He thought she would go upstairs immediately but instead she asked, ‘What about that transcript business – the transcript Angela made of that conference? Is she going to go back to Germany to try to find it?’

  ‘She’s been in touch with the man who had it from Marianne – Herr Hermann Treite – and he still has it. And he’s still living in Hamburg. So that’s one big worry lifted. She doesn’t want him to send it by ordinary post, though. She says the BBC is still riddled with Secret Service people.’

  ‘Do you believe that?’

  ‘I believe it’s possible. I’m going to have a Scotch. You?’

  ‘Yes, why not!’

  He continued as he poured their drinks, ‘I believe it’s possible but I also know how easy it is for us ex-citizens of the Third Reich to see agents of the state under every stone.’ He splashed a little soda in hers and brought it to her. ‘Doesn’t it put you off wanting to work there?’

  ‘Television won’t be in Broadcasting House. A little dicky bird told me that when they go nationwide they’ll—’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘It’s BBC-speak for achieving full national coverage, except for a million or so people who will insist on living in valleys. Anyway, they’re close to it now and this little bird also tells me they’re negotiating to take over the old film studios in Lime Grove, near Shepherds Bush. But I didn’t want to talk about television. The thing is—’

  ‘These “little birds”,’ he said. ‘You have lots of them?’

  ‘No more than I need. The thing is – will Angela go over and collect this transcript?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I just wondered. Does your Tante Uschi live near Hamburg?’

  He sat beside her and hugged an arm around her. ‘Are you worried I might go over there with her? Is that what all this is about?’

  She handed him her empty glass. ‘A bird never flew on one wing – as the Irishman said.’

  He gave her the refill. She went on, ‘I think it would be a good thing if you and she went over there together.’

  Monday, 29 September 1947

  Thanks to some nifty work by Corvo and an intervention by the Arts Council, Felix had a princely allowance of thirty pounds to take him to Hamburg, Kiel, and back. He had no intention of spending it all but he had had enough experience of being stranded and penniless in post-war Germany for one lifetime. He and Angela had arranged to meet at Victoria and take the Southern Railway’s Golden Arrow service to Paris. There they would spend one or two nights with relations of Nicole’s at Ville d’Avray, and, on the Thursday night, catch a through sleeper to Cologne via Brussels. A connection from there would get them to Hamburg around five on the Friday afternoon. Fortunately for their travel allowance, they had been able to pay the fares for the entire journey, including Felix’s onward trip to Kiel, in sterling and in advance.

  There had been a delicate moment when it came to agreeing the night-sleeper portion of the journey; each had hung back, waiting for the other to say, ‘Look, we’re both grown up . . . not awkward teenagers . . . should be perfectly possible . . . share . . . without . . . you know . . .’ but then Felix had said, ‘Dammit! We’re neither of us paupers now. Don’t we deserve a little luxury? I don’t want to share with some petit bourgeois travelling salesman. Let’s go first class and have a compartment each to ourselves!’ And so it was.

  But that long, delicate moment had been interesting, all the same.

  His train to Kings Cross had been delayed, so she was at Victoria well before him. He saw her first, standing just inside the ticket barrier, looking toward the arch that opened into the concourse directly from the Tube exit – whereas he had deviated via the newspaper kiosk to buy The Economist – something meaty and magisterial to while away the hours. He paused a moment, set down his suitcase, and considered her.

  She had fleshed out since he first saw her and was even more like a de Lempicka. When he saw the Do
wer House babies growing at the speed of light, and felt a strong desire for some of his own – a feeling he had never had before – he always pictured them in the strong embrace of de Lempicka arms, not Faith’s.

  He hefted his suitcase, resettled his trenchcoat over his shoulder, and stepped out into the concourse where she would be bound to see him. The radiant excitement of her recognition took his breath away.

  The concourse beneath his feet was tired and stained, another war victim, still convalescent. He had a vision of khaki trousers, green-blancoed gaiters, once-shiny boots tramping . . . to the trains, from the trains . . . singing ‘Bless ’em All’. The chummy, carry-on-smoking-chaps war that Europe had not known. It faded like a cliché from the silent cinema.

  ‘Coach C is up near the front,’ she said. ‘Oh – I was getting so worried.’

  ‘Your bags?’

  ‘I put them over our seats. It really is a de-luxe carriage. The porter said it wouldn’t be too crowded but there’s only one non-smoking Pullman in the whole train. Eee – aren’t you excited?’

  ‘Paris, yes. Germany?’ He seesawed his free hand.

  ‘Oh, it’s not so bad there now. Even before the Marshall Plan, everything was a lot better already.’

  They passed a solo engine, parked by the adjoining platform, hissing and pinging like a kettle rising to the boil.

  ‘The heat off those things!’ he said. ‘You’re going to have to speak German over there.’

  ‘Of course – when I have to. There’s no need to start now. Anyway, I’ve been thinking about what you said – the language of Goethe and Schiller . . . all that.’

  ‘That was a good day,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, it was! Here we are. I do like the way English platforms are the same level as the floors of the carriages, almost.’

  One step – this one of wood.