The Dower House

by Malcolm Macdonald

  ‘What?’

  ‘I don’t know if I should tell you.’ After a pause he continued, ‘Well, why not. It’s nothing shameful.’

  Birgit took over. ‘She stayed with us – not in this house – where we were before. But she went through a bad time when Willard threw her over and went back to America . . . didn’t eat . . . drank too much. But Hermann knew just what to say.’ She grinned at him.

  Like one confessing to a mean trick he said, ‘I told her we were sure Willard would come back. And he’d look for her – he’d go straight to her old lodgings. Of course, I didn’t believe it. But she did. She pulled herself together and went back there. But instead of living on her father’s allowance she started this pavement-artist thing, which just about kept body and soul together. Then she wrote to us from London – thankyou-thankyou-thankyou! So my lie was the truth.’ He shook his head at the strangeness of life. ‘I don’t think she touched her allowance since ’forty-three. It must have been a tidy sum by ’forty-seven – a wonderful dowry for Willard!’

  ‘Willard has just opened an office in Mayfair,’ Felix said quickly – for he had seen Angela draw breath, presumably to say that they knew nothing of this ‘dowry’ (and doubted Willard knew about it, either).

  ‘Willard always fell on his feet,’ Hermann said admiringly.

  ‘He’s not the only one,’ Birgit said. Then, glancing at her watch – a primly elegant Philippe Patek – she added, ‘Our table is waiting. We can walk – it’s just down the road.’

  Jacob’s in 1947 was like Jacob’s in 1937 except that the few uniforms on display were ‘best blues’ or khaki rather than Feldgrau. An elderly trio played selections from Johan Strauss, Millöcker, von Suppé, and Lehár . . . with an occasional soaring up to Mozart. And a booking in the name of Treite evidently commanded a table at the centre of the enormous bow window, with a view through the linden terrace to the Elbe. And a bottle of Sekt on ice in a silver cooler.

  ‘Hard to believe there’s a war on,’ Angela said as they took their seats.

  The Treites looked at her in surprise.

  ‘It’s a joke in England.’

  The sommelier filled their glasses and it was Prosit all round.

  The maître-d’ took their orders – or, rather, recommended the turbot, which they all accepted. Angela and Felix wanted Aalsuppe, Birgit and Hermann melon.

  When the man withdrew, Hermann said, ‘We have Erhard, who says, “Let the people make the choices and make the money.” You have Attlee, who says, “We’ll take your money and spend it on making all your choices for you.” Can it be true that they’re forcing industry to go where unemployment is high?’

  ‘What’s wrong with that?’ Angela asked.

  Hermann glanced at Birgit and spread his hands in a gesture of jocular hopelessness. ‘What’s right with it?’ he countered as four commis waiters brought their entrées. ‘Do they ask why there’s high unemployment there? Perhaps the factory site is on the far side of some mountain in Wales? Or the telephone exchange is the same as it was in nineteen twenty-seven? Or all the people with technical training have gone to Coventry, where business is booming despite Mister Attlee? Or the workers are split among thirty different trade unions and negotiations are a nightmare?’ He grinned. ‘I read the English papers, you see. England spent eighteen million pounds a day throughout the war and now they’re so deep in the hole they can’t see the way out. Also . . .’ He hesitated.

  ‘What?’ Angela asked. ‘And this is not the Hermann Treite that Marianne once knew.’

  ‘War destroys more than the physical world. I was going to say – Germany has so many advantages, not just American aid. We will never try to develop atomic weapons. Big saving. We have had our illusions of empire taken away. More big savings. Poor France. Poor Britain. Old-fashioned industries mostly intact. Old-fashioned thinking . . . absolutely intact! Give us ten years and we’ll be the powerhouse of Europe.’

  The empty Sekt bottle was replaced by a Mosel from the Bruderschaft vineyard in Klüsserath – not chilled, as it would have been in London, but cool. Deliciously cool.

  ‘Did Hermann mention your papers?’ Birgit asked Angela.

  She, in turn, glanced at Felix and then let out a brief, explosive sigh at the impossibility of explaining – or justifying – what she was about to say. ‘The thing is . . . the thing is . . . Felix and I . . . I mean, when we started this journey at Victoria Station –’ she glanced at him – ‘how many months ago?’

  He shook his head. ‘I don’t remember. I think it was in another lifetime.’

  Birgit cottoned on before her man, who seemed bewildered. ‘You fell in love!’ she cried, clapping her hands and then resting them in an attitude of prayer below her open mouth; her eyes begged them to go on.

  ‘We fell in love . . . oh . . . lo-o-ong ago . . .’

  ‘The first day we met,’ Felix said. ‘We only found the courage . . . I only found the courage to admit it when we were in Paris.’

  ‘Nowhere better,’ Hermann put in.

  ‘Meanwhile he’s started living with another woman.’

  Birgit made a strange little indrawn scream and turned great searching eyes on Felix. He laid a demonstrative hand over Angela’s wine glass and said, ‘With a woman who has never said she loves me – which she doesn’t – and whom I’ve never told I love – which I don’t. It is an arrangement that suited her career and my career at a particular time.’

  ‘And the sex is good,’ Angela assured Birgit with all the wide-eyed enthusiasm of an ingénue.

  ‘To sex – prosit!’ Hermann said with all the shifty-eyed enthusiasm of the embarrassed. ‘All sex is good.’

  ‘You asked Angela about those papers,’ Felix reminded Birgit.

  Angela cut in: ‘The thing I was going to say was that . . . well, life is very different now from the way it was. Even from the way it was last week.’ She smiled at Felix. ‘I did what I could back in ’forty-five. I gave it to the British, who say they can’t now find it.’

  ‘But they found what they say is the true protocol of that same meeting,’ Hermann said. ‘A fake, in my opinion.’

  ‘Not entirely,’ Birgit said with quiet insistence.

  ‘You’ve read it?’ Felix asked.

  ‘I’ve read them both – the protocol they dug up for the von Weizsäcker trial—’

  ‘He wasn’t even at the Wannsee meeting,’ Angela said.

  ‘But Luther, who reported to him, was,’ Hermann pointed out.

  One waiter removed their dishes, four others served their turbot.

  ‘None of your fancy Frenchified sauces,’ Hermann pointed out.

  ‘Anyway,’ Birgit continued after an interval of appreciative chewing, ‘when Hermann showed me the British protocol, at first I agreed with him that it was a fake – especially the covering letter, which is in very poor German. But when I read your transcript of what was actually said that day, I changed my mind.’

  ‘This is her theory,’ Hermann said dismissively.

  ‘You think the protocol the British found is genuine?’ Angela asked.

  ‘I think it’s a genuine Nazi document,’ she replied, ‘but it was written – or, rather, concocted – sometime in ’forty-four and then backdated . . . and for very good reasons.’

  ‘What she thinks happened . . .’ Hermann said impatiently.

  ‘I can tell it,’ she insisted, turning to Angela. ‘Did anyone at that meeting – apart from you, of course – make any kind of record of what was said?’

  She shook her head. ‘Heydrich said Eichmann would circulate a summary but I don’t know if he ever did. I do know that he collected every bit of paper on which anyone had scribbled any sort of note. And burned them. They were certainly determined at that time to make sure there was nothing on paper. He even came back that evening to break up all the ashes. Caught me dismantling the equipment! I told him I was assembling it for an Interpol conference the next week but he knew I was lying, even though Heydr
ich backed me up. And when Heydrich was gone . . . pffft – wiedersehen Angela!’ She turned to Birgit. ‘But what is your theory about this fake protocol?’

  ‘Not fake. Concocted.’ She leaped in ahead of Hermann. ‘I think that at some point in ’forty-four, when it became clear even to the blindest Nazi that we were going to lose the war, some of the people at that conference, and dozens more to whom they had reported, suddenly realized that the absence of a proper protocol would look highly suspicious – as if what was said and decided there was just too shocking to record, which, of course, it was. So they concocted a protocol that was much milder in tone. They knew they couldn’t deny the Vernichtung, but even so, no prosecutor could rely on that protocol to prove that those present – that’s all they were worried about “those present” – knew or were told anything about the actual workings of the Vernichtung. The worst they heard, according to that so-called “official” protocol, was that the Jews would be marched around eastern Europe building roads and factories and railways and a lot of them would die under harsh conditions. But the same was true of German soldiers on the Eastern Front . . . so what? It was very clever.’

  ‘But why did they then fake a covering letter in such poor German?’ Hermann asked, as if it were his trump card.

  ‘Because,’ she replied with weary patience, ‘the British and the Yanks are too lazy to learn any foreign language. They wouldn’t recognize how poor it is. And that makes it possible for surviving Nazis to discredit the made-up protocol itself. Not every Nazi will be hanged or imprisoned. There are thousands of true believers out there who will pounce on that letter and show it is an obvious forgery, which isn’t difficult. And, as I say, that will discredit the protocol itself, as well. The Nazis were thorough. They thought of everything from every angle, you see. I’m sure Eichmann was one of those who concocted the fake Wannsee protocol, because the population figures for Jews in various European countries – as you recorded them on the actual day, Angela – are repeated precisely in the ersatz protocol. So that’s why I say it’s the work of a fiendishly clever Nazi, or group of Nazis, who realized the trap was closing around them. It gives the Allies the faintest hint that the Vernichtung was planned from ’forty-one onwards and it allows true believers to deny there ever was a Vernichtung at all. And by the way – it’s not just poor German language that gives it away as a fake. In fact, the biggest giveaway is the typewriter they used for the covering letter. It doesn’t use the Runenschrift SS – you know, like two lightning strokes.’ She drewon the tablecloth with her finger.

  Felix laughed. ‘I think we can just about remember what it looked like!’

  ‘Of course!’ She grinned guiltily. ‘Anyway, the covering letter uses the ordinary, standard double S throughout.’

  Angela was shocked. ‘But that’s unthinkable in any Nazi document. Every official typewriter was modified to be able to type the SS in Runenschrift.’

  ‘So you see why I call it fiendishly clever! To the Allies it says “genuine” because they have no idea how significant the Runenschrift-SS was – and to those in the know it shouts “fake”!’Angela turned to Hermann. ‘And why don’t you believe this?’

  ‘I believe half of it – why the alleged protocol was concocted in ’forty-four or even later. But I think the covering letter was a hasty and badly executed forgery by the British, who needed some sort of document to “give it provenance”, as the art dealers say. It’s the simplest theory that fits all the known facts. But from your point of view it doesn’t really matter whether Birgit is right or I am right. That conference – where you recorded every word, every nuance of speech, right down to that spine-chilling “funny story” Lange tells Heydrich at the end – when they’re standing outside the villa and watching everybody go . . .’

  ‘What’s that?’ Felix asked. ‘You’ve never mentioned—’

  Angela shook her head violently. ‘You’ll have to read it. I couldn’t possibly tell it without being sick. Again. If there was one single moment when I became anti-Nazi, that was it – when I heard Lange say that.’

  ‘Anyway,’ Hermann insisted, ‘you are the one person now alive and free with incontrovertible proof of what was actually revealed at that conference. If you don’t speak out, then a concocted protocol and its fake covering letter are what history will record as what happened there that day. And it may be convenient for the Allies to rely on them today, but they won’t stand the scrutiny of time. So I don’t think you have any choice.’

  ‘Aren’t you angry with me?’ Angela asked Felix when they were alone in their room again.

  ‘Because of Faith – what you said about her and me? No. You have every right. I should never have let her move in. Or I should have insisted on separate rooms.’

  She folded her dress neatly over the back of her chair and stood facing him, uncertain and awkward, reaching behind her for her bra hook but not slipping it loose. ‘How long would that have lasted?’ she asked.

  ‘You have beautiful breasts.’ He turned out the light as he crossed the room to her. On the way he shed the last of his underclothes.

  A dim orange light seeped out from the bathroom; she stood like a rabbit caught in a distant headlamp, alert but not yet anxious.

  When he took her in his arms, pressing her hard against the wall beside their bed, she slipped the catch of her bra. But he stopped her shrugging it off, insinuating his fingers up underneath the material and playing upon her nipples. His erection found its goal but he did not press home just yet. Passionate kiss followed passionate kiss as his hands strayed all over her nakedness, raking the long muscles of her back and the firmness of her buttocks, feeling every curve with a sculptor’s relish, which was masterful, and a lover’s passion, which was soon impossible to contain. They broke their kiss for breath and her muscles yielded; she would have slid to the floor if he had not forced his broad, strong hands beneath her buttocks and lifted her up and – finally – onto him. She let out a gasp and then clung to him, shivering. Two or three thrusts and he came, not copiously. She bit his shoulder. Tears, reflecting orange light, wet her cheeks.

  ‘Let’s go to bed and do it properly,’ he suggested. ‘Oh – and let’s get married as soon as possible after we get back home?’

  ‘Home,’ she murmured, kissing his face all over, sharing her tears. ‘Yes.’

  Friday, 3 October 1947

  As Felix had explained, Tante Uschi lived not in Kiel but in Laboe, a village at the mouth of Kiel Bay. ‘It’s the smallest house in Rosenstrasse,’ she told Felix on the phone that morning. ‘And it’s a very short street, so we’re easy to find. You should be with us in time for lunch.’

  ‘We?’ he queried.

  ‘Me and . . . Max.’ There was an awkward pause, broken by her laugh. ‘My dog!’

  Felix decided he wanted to walk the last hundred metres, so the taxi dropped them at the end of the street – or, rather, at the beginning, for the end was a cul-de-sac. After no more than ten paces he halted. ‘There’s no doubt which is the smallest house,’ he said. ‘But . . . well, maybe Max isn’t a dog.’ He pointed out the man standing at the gate.

  She clutched at his arm. ‘Oh . . . Felix . . .’

  ‘What now?’

  ‘D’you think that could be . . . oh, my God . . .’

  Felix looked again at the man and whispered, ‘Ach, du liebe Zeit!’

  ‘I had a feeling when I read . . .’ Angela began, and then, looking at Felix, thought better of it.

  He dropped their suitcases and broke into a run, not halting until he was a few paces short of the man at the gate, at which he stopped dead.

  ‘Felix!’ The man smiled and stretched out his arms.

  ‘Why?’ Felix asked.

  ‘Those letters . . . they were genuine.’

  Felix shook his head, in bewilderment rather than denial.

  ‘Otherwise . . .’

  ‘Otherwise what?’

  ‘I was afraid you wouldn’t come.’

&nbs
p; ‘Oh . . . Vati!’

  With tears brimming at her eyelids Angela watched as a suddenly awkward Felix lumbered forward and drowned his father in a tight embrace – a gesture made even more awkward by the gate between them.

  She hefted the suitcases and set out to join them, knowing he would welcome the intrusion. A ragged lilac tree obscured all but the roof of the house until she was almost there; she took her eyes off the two men long enough to see . . .

  ‘Tante Uschi!’ she murmured, and waved at the woman who was watching them from an upstairs window.

  ‘It’s not her fault.’ Vati broke from his son and turned toward Angela. ‘Blame me. I asked her to write those letters. She was against it.’ Then, to Felix: ‘And she’s no longer Tante, by the way. She’s Mutti – your new stepmother.’ Then, with a nod toward Angela: ‘Am I not to be introduced?’

  ‘May I present my father, Herr Willi Breit. Late of the grave. Also known as Max the dog. Vati, this is Angela Worth, soon to be yet another Mrs Breit.’

  ‘Ach so-o-o!’ He shook her hand and then raised it to kiss.

  Angela could see no resemblance whatever between father and son. The old man was slightly built, wiry, fair-haired, restless; his son – tall, stocky, powerful, dark, and, at times, infuriatingly taciturn. Neither looked remotely like the Jewish stereotypes Goebbels had propagandized.

  Tante – now Mutti – Uschi appeared in the doorway.

  Vati offered Angela his arm and they strolled side by side up the path. Felix now hefted the bags and followed them. ‘Were you going to say you suspected something like this?’ he asked Angela.

  ‘“Suspected” is a bit strong. But I did wonder why – in the second letter – she said she hoped you reached Sweden safely but didn’t exactly describe how and when you left here. Actually, I suspected that might have been because you really intended going back to Berlin and that Sweden via Denmark was a bluff.’

  Vati gave her a swift, penetrating glance and then turned to Felix. ‘Always listen to this lady,’ he said. ‘She’s no fool. When I wrote that letter I did intend returning to Berlin, but then I thought if the letter ever got intercepted, the Gestapo might see through it. So I did exactly what it said. And yes, I did escape. And I did reach Sweden.’