THE INVISIBLE VICTORY

by Richard Gordon

  Jeff had to stop. The ends of the bridge, the walls everywhere, were plastered with posters. Hitler had dissolved the Reichstag, there was to be yet another election the following Sunday, March 5. As a foreigner, I found neither significance nor even identity in the dreary gallery of political faces-except Adolf Hitler's, as instantly recognizable today, with his lower middle-class, Austrian 'little man' moustache, which you still see decorating street-cleaners and tram conductors in Vienna. _Deutschland Eswache!_ cried the Nazis' posters. They had stolen the vivid red of their Communist arch-enemies, their message in Gothic type always angry, vituperative and vile, and always highly effective.

  Waiting patiently, I recalled how Cologne had recently shone in the political news. The gentleman showjumper Franz von Papen had craftily made a secret rendezvous there with Hitler behind the back of Chancellor 'Artful Dodger' Kurt von Schleicher-who got wind of it, planted a spy with a camera, and had it over the next morning's newspapers. Hitler anyway regarded the gentleman showjumper as a joke. So absurd a joke that he later planned to provoke his invasion of Austria in 1938 by having Ambassador Papen in Vienna spectacularly murdered.

  'There doesn't seem to be any trouble.' Jeff tapped the steering-wheel with his reflecting gauntlets. 'The Jews keep well out of sight, and the Communists choose their own time and place to trail their coat. I guess everyone else is too cold or too scared, and staying home. This sort of game is played in Berlin every night-you should have seen it when Hitler became Chancellor, the SA in thousands, parading in the Tiergarten and marching in columns through the Brandenburger Tor and along the Unter den Linden. There was nothing of a rabble about it. Everything was very military, bands playing and the marchers singing their heads off.'

  'What was the reaction?'

  'Rapturous. You know how the Germans love a torchlight procession.' He flicked up another Chesterfield. 'And they say old Hindenburg looked down from his window muttering _"Du lieber Gott,_ I never knew we'd taken so many Russian prisoners".'

  We were making for a cabaret called the Sphinx, of which Jeff had heard from some fantastiche girl called Heike in Berlin. It was hardly the famous Parisian Sphinx, where I went-off limits-with the Americans after the Liberation, and where girls did strange things with cigarettes. We discovered a narrow dark doorway, a sequence of white electric bulbs writing Sphinx continually above. It was somewhere in the old town within the elbow of the Rhine between the Hohenzollern Bridge and the suspension bridge to the south, near the Gurzenich, the building where laws were made for the Holy Roman Empire. Through the unhappy propensity of Europeans for blowing up each other's cities, the whole area is now replaced by orderly pedestrian precincts providing all services from supermarkets to sex shops.

  The lobby was flanked with panels of coloured glass depicting palms, pyramids and camels, symbols of greater romance and mystery to the Germans than the British, who policed them. Jeff's brow clouded. It clearly was not a patch on fantastiche Berlin. But I was excited enough, never having been inside a cabaret before.

  Down a narrow staircase hung a crimson plush curtain guarded by a German in fez and tasselled uniform, suggesting an advertisement for Abdullah Turkish cigarettes. The management tired abruptly of Eastern pretence. Beyond was a long brightly-lit basement resembling a teashop, with wall mirrors and small wicker tables under white fringed cloths, each with a numbered card in a bamboo holder and an old-fashioned telephone. At the far end, the curtain was down on a small stage, and two men in tails played _How Deep is the Ocean _on piano and drums as though it were a march. Attendance was thin, the weather and political turmoil not being conducive to carefree nights out.

  'In Berlin, there's men dressed as women and women dressed as men,' complained Jeff.

  The waiter in a floor-sweeping apron suggested champagne. Jeff ordered beer. He sat back in his fragile-looking gilt chair, lighting another cigarette and scowling. His black and white check tweeds came from Savile Row, his silk shirt from Florence, his foulard tie from the Rue de Rivoli. He dressed his part as man of the world. 'If you want a girl, you call up her table number,' he explained, nodding towards some gaudily dressed women sitting alone or in pairs against the walls.

  But my attention was diverted by waiters equipping the patrons at tables near the stage with long bibs of red rubber. I was speculating what fancy dish might be on its way, when the curtain rose to a roll on the drums, revealing a small roped boxing ring, a mirror sloping above, into which a melancholy man in a long white coat was tipping buckets of greenish mud.

  Jeff stuck his thumb in his top waistcoat pocket. 'We're going to see a couple of girls wrestling in mud.'

  'Why mud?' I asked in surprise. 'Girls wrestling would be unusual enough for me.'

  'It has to be in mud. The Germans have a genius for the extreme.'

  It was a coy, even lugubrious entertainment. One girl was fresh-faced and solidly-built, good looking in a farmyard way. The other was pale and sad, seeming in need of a square meal. Both were dressed for the beach, in white rubber bathing caps and ankle-length robes of dazzlingly patterned towelling, removed to reveal swimsuits demurely skirted across the tops of their thighs. They climbed into the ring and braced themselves against the ropes, like the prizefighters in the newsreels. The band broke into Franz von Suppй's _Light Cavalry._ They fell upon each other, standing in the mud with their breasts pressed together, slapping each other's buttocks.

  'This election's going to be a walkover for Hitler.' Jeff was affecting intense tedium. 'He's got big business in his pocket-I heard in Berlin how Sacht and Gцring fixed it.'

  The music stopped. The wrestlers separated, standing in their corners glistening with green mud, their heaving breasts decrying any sham in the struggle. Jeff lit another cigarette. 'Hey, have you read Hitler's book, _Mein Kampf?'_ I shook my head. 'This _fantastiche_ girl Heike translated bits for me.'

  'You talk politics with whores, do you?'

  Jeff looked offended. 'She's a student learning English.'

  I have since smelt through its flatulent pages. They expose the author's contempt for the mass of his fellow-Germans and his greatest respect for the English-so much for our Great War Prime Minister, the reader might imagine that Lloyd George knew Hitler's father. It spelt out the Fьhrer's plans with such determined precision, it is unfortunate that it was not translated in bed to an English statesman by some other wayward student of his language.

  The bout restarted, the girls entwined on their floor of mud, flicking the rubber bibs of the nearest spectators. 'Only the Army can stop Hitler now,' Jeff continued.

  'Why should they? He's hardly a pacifist.'

  'But he's an upstart, and the Germans are even worse snobs than the English.' The pale girl grabbed the larger one between the legs, tipping her overhead into the mud then sitting astride her waist. The pair were barely distinguishable, covered with green slime. One of the big girl's breasts plunged free from her slippery bathing-suit. 'That was as rehearsed as the gestures in Hitler's speeches,' observed Jeff.

  I quoted Comte de Mirabeau, 'Other states have an army, in Prussia the army has a state".'

  Jeff countered this with a grin. 'What do you expect, in a country which calls war the continuation of foreign policy by other means?'

  'Clausewitz' remark was irresponsible and immoral.'

  'At least it was logical.'

  The thin girl was acclaimed the winner. Both disappeared for a shower. The waiters began untying the red rubber bibs. Within six months, this entertainment would be banned in Germany, along with the music of Mendelssohn and the novels of Thomas Mann.

  Then I noticed at a table against the wall the dark Slav girl from Professor Domagk's laboratory.

  6

  'She looks a pretty thing, why don't you call her up?' Jeff indicated the telephone.

  'Don't be ridiculous! She'd be dreadfully embarrassed.' I had recounted our meeting in the laboratory at Wuppertal.

  'She's peddling her ass, she isn't in the positi
on to be embarrassed about anything. You're not a sissy, are you?'

  'Of course I'm not!' Jeff was 'kidding', as an Englishman 'chaffed'. But I could never be certain how thick his cushion of amiability was between jest and truth. In the end I thought it wise to invite her. She rose wearily, not recognizing me until about to sit down at our table. I introduced _Herr Beckerman aus Amerika,_ and asked, 'What's your name?'

  'Magda.'

  'You're not from Cologne, surely?'

  'From Vienna.' She crossed her hands modestly in the lap of her mauve shot-silk dress. I noticed how much more heavily made up she was.

  'Don't I G Farben pay enough?'

  She gave an unfriendly look. 'I'm of a large family.' She added, as though she were moonlighting as a respectable waitress or shopgirl, 'Everyone has to take a second job in Germany.'

  'Ask what she wants to drink,' interrupted Jeff in English, impatient at exclusion from the conversation.

  'Champagne,' Magda said automatically.

  We held a three-cornered conversation in English and German over the bottle. Jeff never learned German, partly from impatience and partly because he feared the natives could outsmart him in their own language. Magda smiled as I translated his gallantries, but she struck me as acting badly the _fine de joie._ 'How much does she charge?' Jeff enquired abruptly.

  Magda told me fifty marks, about four pounds.

  'Why don't you go with her?' asked Jeff amiably. He took out his wallet and fluttered a fifty-mark note on the table. 'I'll grub-stake you-if that's the correct expression.'

  'Don't be ridiculous! I couldn't possibly pick up a girl so blatantly.'

  'A man who goes off with a whore in secret is like a man who goes off drinking in secret. If I kept either from my friends, I'd be ashamed of myself.'

  Jeff's tone had become abrasive, but I was more frightened of the girl than of him. Two years ago, incited by the easygoing tales of fellow-undergraduates at Trinity who were richer and worldlier than myself, I had shopped along the gaudy pavements of London's West End and picked up a tart near Marble Arch. Though I had saved for three months, I could not afford the best, and in my subsequent remorse feared that I had picked the worst. I had sponged the parts involved with dilute hydrochloric acid, which suggested itself to a chemistry student as a promising antiseptic. The result was a raw redness for which I dared invoke neither medical advice nor friendly sympathy, and I had no wish to find myself repeating the experiment. But Jeff pressed me, with the amiable wickedness of a man watching another slide into his own sins. I gave in.

  Magda told us that she lived beyond the Hohenstaufen-ring, the first arc of boulevards and squares which spread round old Cologne like the ripples from a stone. Jeff offered us a lift. Magda suddenly became animated as she climbed into the Cord, lightly touching the steering-wheel, the shiny instruments, the gear lever and brake in open-mouthed reverence. It struck me that she had never before been in a car at all.

  _'Ein wunderbarer Auto,' _she breathed.

  'Fantastiche,' Jeff corrected her, glowing with satisfaction as he pulled on his gauntlets.

  Magda stopped us at the corner of Mozartstrasse, a broad and prosperous street, saying we could walk the rest. She clearly did not wish to arrive in such grandeur. Jeff said he would find a bar, and call Heike in Berlin. He had an extravagance towards tile telephone which I thought admirably American. 'I'll be back in half an hour-have a good time,' he called, roaring away and leaving a smell of high-grade petrol.

  I self-consciously took Magda's arm, in equal parts aroused and ashamed. Without speaking a word, she led me towards a narrow side-street lying in the glow of a sickly gas-lamp. I had imagined our destination some disreputable small hotel or bug-infested lodging-house. As she opened the green door in a four-storied narrow terrace dwelling, I realized with alarm that I was being taken home.

  The tiny hallway was unlit. I followed her towards a narrow flight of stairs with broken banisters. In gaslight seeping from a door above, a small boy and girl were grinning at me

  I stopped. Desire fled. Vice in such domestic surroundings was ridiculous. 'I don't want to,' I said.

  Magda turned. 'You'll still have to pay me.'

  I pushed at her Jeff's fifty-mark note, which she folded carefully and put in her large brown handbag. I turned to the door, eager to be out of the place. Then I imagined myself standing half an hour on a freezing street corner. 'Could I have some coffee?' I asked plaintively.

  Silently, Magda led me to a kitchen downstairs at the back, stone-floored and lit by the glow of the stove. An old man smoking his pipe rose and left at once, bowing to me with a deference which doubled my feelings of guilt. Magda removed her imitation leather overcoat and lit the gas-mantle. I heard scuffling upstairs. The house was as crammed with humans as a warren with rabbits. 'You've a large family, you said?'

  'Four brothers.' She added sourly, 'All out of work.'

  'Was that your father?'

  'Yes.' She moved a saucepan of coffee on to the black iron stove. 'He's an engineer, but he lost everything when the mark fell to zero. So did everyone else, of course.' She spoke as if describing a bad summer which had ruined their holidays.

  I sat at a small, rough wooden table which smelt of onions. 'How long have you been at I G Farben?'

  'Since the summer. I should have been a chemist, you know. I'm well educated. But in Germany today, nobody can achieve what they deserve. All I do is keep the place clean and look after the laboratory animals.'

  'What's Professor Dr Domagk like to work for?'

  'He likes to keep himself to himself. He's all right, except when anyone makes a mistake. Not just me, one of the other doctors or chemists. Then he just blows up.' She screwed a finger-tip against her temple. 'His mind works so fast, he's always a jump ahead.'

  'What sort of dyes is the professor trying to turn into medicines?' I asked, partly from curiosity, partly from mischievousness over their secrecy.

  She replied in her dull way, 'How should I know? Almost every day another compound comes to be tested from Dr Mietzsch and Dr Klarer.'

  I had the feeling of meeting an acquaintance in a foreign land. I had heard at Cambridge of Dr Fritz Mietzsch, the chemist who in 1930 had synthesized a drug for the treatment of malaria. The disease had formerly been dosed with quinine, Nature's product from cinchona bark in Peru-the 'Jesuit's bark', which the ague-racked Oliver Cromwell stoutly refused to let stick in his throat. Sitting in Magda's kitchen, I remembered that the name of Mietzsch's new anti-malarial chemical was mepacrine hydrochloride, but that I G Farben had dressed it in the fancy title of 'Atebrin'. I also recalled that mepacrine hydrochloride was an acridine derivative, a bright yellow synthetic dye. Was Domagk trying to cure other tropical infections? I wondered. But Domagk had spoken to me of using dyes against 'various bacteria', which to the precise scientist did not mean the parasites causing malaria or other tropical diseases, but the streptococcus and staphylococcus and tubercule bacillus which swarmed so richly round mankind everywhere. I repeated, 'What dyes?'

  'Why are you so interested? Were you sent to Germany as a spy?' She poured the coffee into a pair of enamel mugs.

  'Secrets and cheese go bad with keeping, Frдulein. People begin to smell them. Are they yellow acridine dyes?' I persisted as she sat beside me. 'Remember, I've given you fifty marks tonight.'

  'It makes no difference to me if I spend half an hour with you down here or upstairs.' She jerked her head upwards. 'I'm forced into it by the system,' she continued bitterly. 'By what's happening in Germany. Everyone at each other's throats and the politicians in Berlin squabbling like washerwomen. Perhaps everything will change with Hitler. He certainly seems to know what's wanted.'

  'But I admire you. Doing that to provide for your family.'

  'What's admirable in degradation?'

  'It's a matter of motives, _nicht water?_ Killing people was widely advertised as highly admirable during the war.'

  She sipped her coffee for some t
ime in silence. 'Well, Mister Englishman, sympathy's not something I enjoy every day, I assure you. I don't suppose it makes much difference if I tell you they're red azo-sulphonamide dyes.'

  That was interesting. I was familiar enough with sulphonamide, but I had never heard of its use for killing bacteria. 'They don't work like ordinary disinfectants,' she said. 'They're not like carbolic or formalin. Professor Domagk injects them into infected mice.'

  'Do the mice live or die?'

  'Die. Have you got a cigarette?'

  'I don't smoke.'

  As she felt in her handbag for a packet of cigarettes, she produced a folded sheet of paper. 'Have that, if you like. The mice don't always die. There was a lot of excitement in the lab just before Christmas. One of the dyes which Dr Mietzsch and Dr Klarer sent up to be tested was very successful. That chit will tell you all you want. Don't let anyone see it. I should never have taken it.'

  She lit a cigarette. We talked for some time about the coming election, German politics, Lloyd George. She rose, and thrust into the stove a piece of jagged wood from a pile apparently scrounged from fences or dilapidated buildings. I had a moment to open the paper and observe a printed list of different bacteria down one side, scrawled writing down the other. 'I was intending to sell it,' Magda said frankly, 'but I should never meet anyone who might be interested. The American will be back,' she added, reaching for her coat.

  Magda turned out the gas. As we left I could see the two children again, eyeing us from the stairs and whispering excitedly over our parade of wickedness. We walked arm and arm to the street corner. The snow had stopped. 'You are a chemist, mein Herr?' I nodded. She made a circular gesture round her face. 'You have the look of an English lord.' I laughed. 'Where do you live? In London?'

  'Yes, in a big house in Harley Street. You've heard of that?' She shook her head. 'You travel to Wuppertal every day?'

  'On the train. It makes a hole in my pocket.'

  'Couldn't you find a job nearer home?'