The High Flyer

by Susan Howatch

  “That was taken at our house in eastern Germany.”

  I began to fidget with my telescope as if compelled to pretend the conversation was so mundane that I could still play with my favourite toy. “How did it all end?”

  “In chaos.” Seconds passed before he could speak again. He was shuddering, setting down his half-empty glass of milk. “Frank fled to Germany before the Russian advance in 1944,” he said, “but my father stayed on for a while—the Russians didn’t make their final push into Poland until the January of 1945. When he did leave Poland he was ordered to stay in eastern Germany, and I’m sure he would have sent me and my mother back to Cologne at that point if it had been feasible, but Cologne was rubble and the Allies were advancing on the other front and my mother was frightened, so . . . we stayed on. But naturally my father knew the end was coming and he made his plans for when the time came to escape.”

  “What happened when the time came?”

  “My father had had to go to Berlin, but he had allowed for that in the plan. When my mother got his message to leave she sacked my nurse, turned the dog loose and dragged me onto what must have been one of the last trains out of our town. To shut me up she said the Russians were coming and they killed all children under five. I was still a few months short of my fifth birthday . . . But the worst thing she did was not allowing me to say goodbye to my nurse or my dog.” He hesitated before saying carefully: “My nurse’s name was Helga and my dog’s name was Wotan. I think of them always, every year, on that day.”

  “Maybe Helga was all right. Maybe—”

  “No, you don’t understand. The Russians were coming.”

  I swallowed and said: “Well, at least someone would have looked after the dog.”

  “No, no, you’re not on the same planet, you’ve no idea. Everyone was starving. The dog would have been dead in twenty-four hours.”

  I had ceased to fidget with my telescope. “What happened to you and your mother?”

  “We had to take a succession of trains—my father hadn’t allowed sufficiently for the chaos—but I can’t remember much about the journey now except that I had nothing to eat for three days and the lavatories didn’t work. Finally we reached Italy. There was some sort of Schloss —a castle. We had to wait there for my father. Fortunately he had plenty of money because he’d built up a secret stash in Switzerland.”

  I remembered stories of confiscated wealth. Faintly I repeated: “Secret—” but he did not allow me to finish.

  “When he joined us at the Schloss we all went down to Rome,” he said. “By that time the whole place was seething with refugees—all Europe was a shambles and it was easy to get lost in the crowd. After that we had to wait for a while but by this time we were in the so-called ‘rat-run,’ the pipeline to freedom, so we knew the right papers would turn up in the end. We finally got out of Italy on a ship stuffed with emigrants from every nation in Europe. I remember my mother throwing a tantrum because she had to eat at the same table as Jews. Typical. She never changed. Neither of them ever changed.”

  He suddenly sat down on the arm of the sofa, set his glass on the coffee table and leaned forward, pressing the palms of his hands on his knees. There was a sheen of sweat on his forehead and he was staring down at the carpet as if the neutral colour helped him to concentrate.

  “No,” he was saying, “my parents never changed. There was no remorse, no regret of the Nazi excesses, nothing. They hated Argentina, all they could do was talk of Germany. My father took to drink. My mother . . . well, never mind what my mother got up to. They were hopeless, no use to me whatsoever. Finally my father died of liver trouble. Good news, I thought. But then my mother hooked the Yank to get herself American nationality—everyone wanted to get to America in those days, it was the land of milk and honey and Europe was still a wasteland, but Christ, what a nightmare those years in America were. The Yank was even more of a shit than my father—thank God someone finally blew his brains out . . . Then the Brit showed up. Of course my mother would never normally have considered pulling a Brit—in her eyes the Brits were far lower than the Yanks—but she was desperate because the Yank had spent what remained of the Swiss stash. So we wound up living in England. Big irony. Did Giles know the truth about us when he married her or did she con him by saying, as she always did by that time, that her first husband had been a Jewish refugee? Don’t know. But he was nobody’s fool and I think he probably married her knowing the truth but not giving a damn. She was very decorative . . . He only ever said one thing to me about my early life. He said: ‘I don’t believe the sins of the fathers should be visited on the children. That’s not what we in England call “playing the game.” ’ ”

  He stood up, wiping the sweat from his forehead, and moved to the sideboard. To my horror I saw him add a shot of brandy to his half-empty glass of milk.

  “When my mother was dying I did ask the vital questions,” he was saying. “You mustn’t think I chickened out. I said: ‘What exactly did my father do?’ but all she said was: ‘How should I know? He never spoke of his work,’ and when I pressed her she only answered: ‘He was in administration. He was a good German. He loved his country.’ She’d long since closed her mind against the truth, but because of my father’s connections with Reinhard Heydrich I was sure his ‘administration’ concerned the Jews . . . I said to my mother: ‘We wouldn’t have needed false papers to get out of Europe unless he’d been on the wanted list,’ but she just insisted: ‘He was never on any list, he never killed anyone, all he did was paperwork, and who cares now anyway? Only a bunch of Jews!’ She was always in denial, just as so many Germans were . . . Did you know that after the war the Allies forced the Germans into cinemas to watch films of the camps? Did you know that, Carter?”

  I said stiff-lipped: “No, I didn’t.”

  “Well, they did. And the Germans came out of the cinemas and said: ‘That was a propaganda film made in Hollywood.’ I uncovered that story during my researches. I uncovered a lot of facts during my researches, and I never once kidded myself they were fiction. I wasn’t going to be like my parents—and in particular I was never, never going to be anti-Semitic . . . Of course I’m sure now that the Swiss stash was confiscated Jewish money.”

  I whispered: “All your Jewish friends . . . All those Jewish firms you worked for . . .”

  “Well, naturally I’ve always gone out of my way to put my talents, such as they were, at their disposal, and naturally every penny I give to charity goes to their good causes. What the hell else do you expect me to do?” As he turned abruptly to face me I saw his hand tremble as he pushed back his hair. “During that bloody war,” he said, “little kids the same age as I was died in the camps. I saw pictures of their bodies. And those pictures weren’t manufactured in Hollywood.”

  I was on my feet, moving towards him, but he had already turned away. I heard him say: “After my mother died I broke down and told Sophie everything. Big mistake. She couldn’t handle it. We never slept together again.”

  Without hesitation I slipped my arms around him to signal how different I was from my predecessor.

  II

  After we had embraced fiercely he said in the same unemotional voice he had used earlier: “It was the deception which shattered her. Of course she minded about the background but she could forgive me that. What she found impossible to forget was that I had never confided in her.”

  At once I said: “What the lucky people of this world fail to realise is that for those who are less lucky there are some subjects which really are unspeakable.”

  He was so relieved by my understanding that it took him a moment to murmur: “Your father?”

  I nodded, hugging him again.

  “Tell me.”

  “The stupid thing is it won’t seem bad because my father did nothing bestial—he didn’t sexually abuse me or beat me up or lock me in a cupboard. There must be thousands of kids who have to cope with fathers who are gambling addicts, but the point is, isn’t it,
that when one’s a kid the problem seems uniquely frightful because you feel no one else could possibly be going through what you’re going through. It’s a delusion but it’s such a powerful one that it makes the whole subject taboo.”

  He looked more relieved than ever, and at last we sat down together on the couch. “There must be thousands of men today in Germany who had Nazi fathers,” I said, “and those fathers can’t all have been monsters like Hans Frank. Maybe your father really was just a good lawyer who got too deeply entangled with a nightmare regime and then had to conform to stay alive.”

  “No doubt that was the defence he would have offered at Nuremberg.”

  “But you can’t be sure he would have wound up there!”

  “Maybe he wouldn’t have wound up with the big boys at the major trial. But there were many trials at Nuremberg . . . and all the evidence points to the fact that he knew he had to get out of Europe. We took the rat-run; we disappeared into Argentina; it was the classic mode of escape for the Nazis who couldn’t face the Allies.”

  “And for a lot of refugees, surely, who just wanted to start a new life overseas?” I argued, but he was no longer listening.

  “After Sophie had rejected me,” he was saying, “I had a—well, no, it wasn’t a breakdown, high flyers don’t have breakdowns, but I became a workaholic to try to stop myself thinking of the past, and when I couldn’t stop thinking about it I found I had to start researching, it was compulsive—in the end I wound up researching that whole bloody war . . . But I never found out exactly what my father had done, and I reckon he seized the chance to burn the worst of his ‘paperwork’ after Frank left Krakow in 1944. God, how much I wanted to uncover the truth! At one stage I was so desperate that I even visited Auschwitz to see if it produced a memory of my parents talking about the death-camps . . . but it didn’t. Have you ever been there?”

  “No.”

  “It was appalling but in some way which defies rational analysis it was also spiritual, it spoke to the spirit—and then I got interested in God and tried to research him too, but I wasn’t impressed by what I turned up, I couldn’t relate to it. But I could relate to the idea that there were Principalities and Powers of Darkness—I could relate to the whole concept of demonic levels of reality—because I knew I had experienced them in my early life. In fact all my life I seem to have been struggling with the demons—wrestling with the Powers—”

  “Darling, don’t say any more—you don’t have to talk about this stuff—”

  “But that was my problem, can’t you see? I couldn’t talk about it! I just went on and on researching until my back hurt so much I had to stop—it was my body telling my mind to rest, I can see that now, but at the time I couldn’t rest, couldn’t, I was obsessed. God, I was so afraid of breaking down—I was literally living from one day to the next—and that was where I was when I saw Mrs. Mayfield’s advertisement. Of course I’d never have gone near her if I’d been well, but I was drinking in the last-chance saloon, absolutely on my uppers—”

  “Yes, I understand now—it all makes sense—”

  “—and she helped me, she fixed the pain, she knew what to do. She was a psychic healer and she healed my psyche—and that should have been the end of the matter, but it wasn’t. It wasn’t the end of the matter at all.”

  “I’m not sure I follow.”

  “Well, if you go to a doctor and he cures you, you don’t hang around his office afterwards, do you? You get on with your life and the doctor gets on with his. But it’s not like that once you’ve supped with Mrs. Mayfield. You’re expected to make a regular habit of turning up for dinner, and then one day you find you’re clean out of all your long spoons.”

  “Clean out of . . . sorry, I’m still not following this—”

  “Forget it, let’s just say it’s not so easy to shake off Mrs. Mayfield as I thought it would be. For instance, I’m sure she’s now decided the time’s right to use Mandy to try to draw me back into the group.”

  I was appalled. “But why can’t you just tell Mrs. Mayfield to get lost?”

  “I wish I could but I have to tread carefully.”

  “For God’s sake, why?”

  “Because she knows too much about me,” said Kim, “and having been blackmailed once in my life I can tell you it’s not an experience I’d care to repeat.”

  III

  I was too shocked to speak. I was hardly even aware of him kissing the top of my head as he hauled himself to his feet. I just continued to sit on the couch as if paralysed.

  “It’s okay,” said Kim wryly over his shoulder from the kitchen threshold. “No need to panic—I’m not being blackmailed at the moment! All I’m saying is that I’m sensitive to the possibility of a recurrence.”

  I finally managed to follow him.

  “I’m going to make some more coffee,” he said. “Want some?”

  “The only thing I want is more information. What the hell happened when you were blackmailed?”

  “What do you think? Someone found out who I was and threatened to tell my Jewish colleagues that I was the son of a Nazi war criminal.”

  “But how did this person—”

  “It was sheer bad luck. I met this German-American who was working in the London office of his New York firm. It turned out not only that he’d lived in Argentina after the war but that he’d actually travelled out there on that same ship in 1947. I’d been seven then and he’d been twelve, so it was hardly surprising we failed to recognise each other when we met again, and in fact at first we thought we’d never met at all; as I told you, there’d been hundreds of people aboard. Then he said: ‘What did you say your name was?’ and when I told him he said: ‘No, I didn’t mean Betz—what was your first name?’ I explained that I called myself Kim nowadays because English-speakers found ‘Joachim’ tricky to pronounce, and at once he said: ‘Were you the little kid who called himself Joachim Lange once by mistake and got slapped by his mother?’ Well, I didn’t hesitate. He’d never mentioned he was Jewish. He’d never mentioned that he’d spent most of the war in hiding. So I said: ‘Yes, Betz was the name on our new papers, but I was born Joachim Lange. No doubt you had a new name too.’Then to my horror he answered: ‘I didn’t change my name till later. My name then was Goldfarb and I well remember the fuss when your mother refused to eat with Jews.’ ”

  “Oh my God—”

  “Well, he would have had no concrete proof if I’d later denied the story, but of course his word would have been enough to the Nazi-hunters. They’d have unmasked me to my Jewish friends and colleagues without any hesitation at all, and we both knew that.”

  “But how in God’s name did it all end?”

  “I wound up paying him for three years. That was an additional source of stress and the whole disaster made a big dent in my capital, which is the real reason why I don’t have as much money today as I should have. But finally, just when I was at my wits’ end, he fell under a train—and before you start to remember your favourite Hitchcock movies, let me assure you that I was in a meeting with eight other people at the time he died, and he wasn’t murdered anyway; numerous witnesses saw him fling himself onto the line. It turned out his mistress had just ditched him.”

  “Did the police—”

  “Yes, they did question me as I had an appointment with him later that day, but I just said he was a business acquaintance.”

  “You didn’t tell them about—”

  “No, of course not, and as the death was a suicide there was no need for them to pry into his financial affairs once they found out about the mistress.”

  “But Kim . . .” I was so shattered by this time that I had to struggle to find the right words. “With that kind of incident in your past, why on earth did you disclose the truth about your early life to Mrs. Mayfield and make yourself vulnerable all over again?”

  “I told you. I had to talk to someone. And I trusted Mrs. Mayfield.”

  “But that group—”

  �
��I wasn’t worried about the members because she controlled them, and as we all made disclosures to each other in the name of group therapy we knew nobody would break ranks for fear of reprisals.”

  “But what happens if you now refuse to rejoin the group? Look how Mandy spewed out your secret when she knew I was listening in!”

  “She’ll claim she had no idea you could hear what was being said, but don’t worry about Mandy, I’ll fix her. I’ll talk to Mrs. Mayfield.”

  “I don’t want you talking to Mrs. Mayfield!” I cried, unable to control myself any longer, and running all the way down the corridor to the bedroom I shed my robe and took refuge beneath the duvet.

  IV

  I was dry-eyed but aching with tension. Curling myself into a foetal ball I pulled the duvet over my head and shuddered in the darkness.

  He slid into bed beside me. He too had shed his robe, and when he pulled me into his arms I uncurled myself and pressed my face against his chest, a move I often made when I wanted to escape deep feelings of insecurity. But this time the insecurity stayed with me. I rubbed my clammy palms against his dry back and drew his face to mine so that I could blot out the horror by kissing him, but I was too aware of his unshaved skin and the repellent reek of brandy.

  I drew back.

  “My darling,” he said, “sweetheart—”

  Shoving the duvet aside I sat up. “Let’s get dressed,” I said abruptly. “Let’s get everything under control. Let’s get ourselves in order.”

  He laughed and pulled me back on the pillows. “You sound like a German!” he said amused, trying to kiss me, but again I drew back.

  Violently I said: “What I can’t stand here is you being so damn casual and jokey. I was okay when you were talking of your parents and your researches and the sheer bloody hell you went through trying to come to terms with the past. You were real then. But once you started talking about Mrs. Mayfield you seemed to become someone phoney, someone I don’t know, someone—”