THE INVISIBLE VICTORY

by Richard Gordon

  'This isn't what I intended at all,' muttered Greenparish crossly. 'I honestly felt that tonight would see an achievement of mind over stomach. Look how those cigarettes simply vanished!'_

  I stood in the corner, neither eating nor drinking. In those disordered times in Germany, you developed a suspicious eye for anyone who looked out of place. I had observed aloof from the others a man with the double distinction of being young and having an air about him. He was fair, pallid, sharp faced, with pale blue eyes, in a green high-buttoned sportsman's jacket, check trousers and stylish brown and white shoes. He caught my eye. After a minute or two, he approached and said in English, 'Mr Elgar, I believe?'

  'How did you know my name?'

  'A lot of people in Wupertal know you, Mr Elgar.' He spoke with the singsong precision of a man who has learned a language in a lecture room. 'You were a visitor in an earlier age.'

  I noticed the thin hand which held his cigarette had fair hairs on the back, and I thought his nails were manicured. As the surviving young were all prisoners of war I asked curtly, 'Why aren't you in the Army?'

  'A question which obviously needed asking. I worked for the Ministry of Propaganda, which first afforded exemption from military conscription. Later, I was too valuable for cannon-fodder.'

  I saw that he must have been at least thirty, though he had a boyish look which I suspected he cultivated. But I did not believe him. There were plenty of SS men in Germany who had thrown their uniforms into the nearest ditch. 'May I introduce myself,' he continued. 'Herr von Recklinghausen. It should be "Count", but I dropped it in boyhood, the Hitler Reich not being…well, shall we say, you never knew exactly where you stood with titles. It was most amusing, to see senior members of the Nazi Party exhausting themselves in a struggle between their natural envy and their natural respect for our aristocracy. You noticed perhaps that I did not click my heels when introducing myself? So Teutonic a gesture would, I'm sure, be frowned upon in the state of affairs we now live in. _Autres temps, autres moeurs._ I try to adapt. I'm generally called Rudi.'

  I felt greatly offended by this self-assertive harangue. 'If you worked for the Reichspropagandaministerium, you must be a member of the Nazi Party,' I said accusingly.

  'How could I deny it? My file and party number will be among the others discovered on some country roadside by the Americans. But I have convinced Dr Greenparish that I am harmless. What a charming fellow he is! Most cultured. When I learned I was to be interrogated, I expected to be confronted with a beef-faced man smoking a stinking pipe, with his riding-crop and revolver on the table, the sort who would shoot a dozen Indian natives before breakfast. These national stereotypes! Well, they're the fault of us propagandists, I admit. But propaganda as a weapon of war has at least the virtue that it has killed nobody yet.'

  He offered me his own packet of Lucky Strike, a gesture in the circumstances of nonchalant ostentation. I have never been able to hate anybody for long, even Lamartine and Archie. I began to be amused by Rudi. He was probably a deserter, perhaps a crook, disguising himself in an elaborate but transparent garment of respectability. 'What are you doing in Wuppertal?' I asked in a less unfriendly tone.

  'I escaped from under the very moustaches of Josef Stalin. My home is in Schцnebeck on the river Elbe, which unfortunately is in the Russian Zone. My family is extremely well known there.'

  I noticed Greenparish talking animatedly in German to an elderly couple with a well-scrubbed looking, pink checked, plump daughter of thirty or so, blonde hair in long girlish plaits down her back. He was providing Wuppertal with its first evening party of completely unafraid conversation since the advent of Hitler. But the others were not chattering about the intellectual treat in store, rather about food, cold, queues, transport and poverty, like everyone else.

  'Would you perform for me an act of mercy?' Rudi asked unexpectedly. I noticed he smelt of perfume. I supposed Germany was flooded with it after the fall of France. 'It is to save the life of a sick child.'

  'Can't you get hold of a doctor? Things haven't broken down to that extent in Germany.'

  The greatest doctor in the world could do nothing. She is the little daughter of an old friend of my family's, who lives out in Beyenberg.' That was the eastern district of Wuppertal, where Jeff had taken Gerda and myself in the Cord for cakes and cognac that bright Sunday afternoon.

  'He is a good man, not a Nazi, who was congratulating himself on coming alive through both the war and the Hitler Reich. Though of course like all of us he is penniless. His daughter has the meningitis.' Rudi tapped his forehead. 'She is infected with the Staphylokokken. You will understand, I think, Mr Elgar? You were not sent to Wuppertal to interrogate Professor Dr Domagk for nothing.' I wondered how he had nosed out information about my duties. 'The disease cannot be touched with sulpha drugs. She must have some penicillin.'

  'How did you get to hear about penicillin?'

  'Everyone knows about penicillin, conversation buzzes about it in the food-queues. People have always grown excited over wonderful cures since the days of Christ and his miracles. But as you know, we Germans have no penicillin at all, no more than we have chocolates or new shoes,' he ended in a tone of self-pity.

  I supposed this Anglo-American achievement had been paraded in the German newspapers before my arrival. It did not occur to me then that penicillin would become one of the most valuable goods in the German black market. I thought of it as a rare drug, with a rare use outside the battlefield. But I had the sagacity to reply, 'I have formed the opinion, mein Herr, that you are not wholly honest.'

  He seemed to take no affront. 'Honesty in present conditions has become a little hard to define. So many day to day transactions necessary to remain alive are unlawful. Your soldiers don't mind going without a wash or a smoke to exchange soap and cigarettes for a bottle of brandy or half an hour with a pretty girl. The Woodbines so kindly provided by Dr Greenparish this evening will in the morning be bartered for turnips or sewing-needles or tooth-powder, or with luck a little butter. How bizarre our times, when cigarettes are far too valuable to smoke! But without the black market we should have no hope of the most meagre comforts and many essentials, and the problems of you people would be much greater.'

  'I don't believe for one moment your sentimental story of the ill child.'

  'I hardly expected you to,' he replied blandly. 'I wished to afford you an excuse for selling me some penicillin. I don't care for commercial affairs. I'm a writer, formerly an engineer. But _on doit travailler pour vivre._ I perform a useful function as middleman in various transactions. If you let me have some penicillin, I give you my word it would go only to the most deserving of sick persons. I shouldn't like to make a pfennig out of such a commodity.'

  'I can obtain penicillin no more easily than you. But let me assure you that had I a kilo at my disposal, not a milligram of it would get into your hands. You can also take it from me that the rest of the British personnel would tell you exactly the same thing.'

  'Are the Allies to continue their practice of killing German children into peacetime?'

  I do not think Rudi calculated this as an insult. That would have been against his interest. But rather a way of shaming me somehow into scrounging some penicillin. I replied by turning my back. Undaunted, he said, 'In case you should change your mind, Mr Elgar

  He thrust a slip of pasteboard into the neck of my battle-dress. It was an embossed visiting card with Count Rudolf Ernst von Recklinghausen in Gothic print, an address somewhere in Barmen, and in the corner Ьbersetzer, translator. I wondered how he had acquired it. Getting printing done in Germany was as difficult as getting a watch repaired or finding new bicycle tyres. Though for 100,000 marks a German could buy a new identity card, a new employment book and ration cards, an Army leave pass or even discharge papers, a Hungarian or Italian passport. In short, a new existence for a frightened Nazi. I suspected that Rudi knew his way to a forger's.

  The don lectured apologetically about English Liter
ature, ending by seeming to apologize for winning the war, and even for starting it. Afterwards, he sat with Greenparish and myself in the mess, apologizing for drinking our whisky.

  'It went very well,' Greenparish said with self-satisfaction. 'I can even see this evening as the beginning of an entirely new phase in Anglo-German relations. Though next time I shall take care not to bring in the food before I've finished.'

  I mentioned Rudi. 'Oh, yes. A most interesting young man. He was one of Goebbels' bright boys, you know. And however ruthless that mendacious propaganda machine, one must admit it was tremendously effective. Your German was still believing it while his roof was being blown off by advancing troops. And perhaps even his head.' Greenparish was amused at the joke. 'He's an interesting educational background. Before joining the Goebbels outfit, he took a degree in engineering at the University of Wittenberg.'

  'Which is in the Russian Zone, like his home town of Schцnebeck. And so neither can be checked.'

  'He's perfectly above board, I assure you. He's far too intelligent ever to have been a wholehearted Nazi.' I was aware of Greenparish looking uncomfortably at the don, who immediately apologized for keeping us up and went to bed. When the pair of us were alone, Greenparish took my sleeve and whispered, 'That Recklinghausen chap is hot stuff. You've heard of Operation Backfire?'

  'These ridiculous names only confuse me.'

  'That's the show at Cuxhaven with the V2 rocket engineers. You must have heard of a man called von Braun?'

  'Never.'

  'He was the top scientist at Peenemьnde, and was captured with about four hundred others on the launching site. He's been in the United States since summer, doing something important with their guided missile research at a place called Fort Bliss, which appears to be somewhere in the middle of Texas. Our Count was sent to Peenemьnde by Goebbels himself, to handle the propaganda side. He knows absolutely everything about the place. The Americans are very interested in the Count.'

  'I suppose there's no chance the man's telling a pack of lies?'

  Greenparish looked offended. 'Of course not. He has the fullest documentation to back him up.'

  I decided to go to bed, letting Greenparrish make his own mistakes. At the door, I asked, 'But why should the Americans continue to be the slightest interested in missile research? They've won the war.'

  'Dear boy,' Greenparish sighed. 'You don't imagine the Russians think they've won their war yet, do you?'

  34

  I was to go home before Christmas. My nose had smelt enough of the putrefying corpse of Nazi Germany. I had a career and a divorce to resume. I was delighted with last minute orders to travel by way of FIAT HQ in Paris. The pulse of Paris, I learned from American officers, had missed a beat or two during the occupation but was now bounding as joyfully as ever.

  Two days before my departure in mid-December, I found a pair of familiar faces on the front page of the British Forces newspaper. Fleming, Florey and Chain were in Stockholm. The Karolinska Institute had been suffering the same confusion as many old-established bodies gazing across the rubble of the postwar world. Penicillin was eminently worthy of a Nobel Prize, particularly as its discoverers, unlike Professor Domagk, were on the winning side. The Swedes' intention to award it to Fleming got into the London newspapers, raising so much academic dust the Institute had to think again. They gave half the Prize to Fleming and shared the other between Florey and Chain. This raised the dust chokingly, so they ended by splitting it three ways. The trio were in tails and white waistcoats, Fleming looking like President Truman, Chain with a Groucho Marx moustache, and Florey resembling the then vanished band-leader more than ever.

  'You know those fellows, I suppose?' asked Greenparish, reading the paper over my shoulder in the mess.

  'I know Fleming and Florey quite well. I was wondering how they were enjoying each other's company in Stockholm. They've never worked in the same lab, nor collaborated in anything, nor even shared the same lecture platform. They're strange bedfellows in the cradle of success. People say they're enormously jealous of each other, though of course under a conscientious politeness.'

  'It is a sad failing of us academics to gossip with the well-rehearsed and well-relished maliciousness of beautiful actresses.'

  'I suppose Fleming was the discoverer of penicillin, like a shiek who discovers oil in the desert and uses it to light his camp fires. Florey was the prospector who extracted it.'

  'Then how do the Americans come into it?'

  'They made the money.'

  'With both products,' Greenparish observed. 'Elgar, I had a message to give you last night.' Spotting a new issue of Lilliput, he grabbed it and took the armchair opposite. 'It came in a roundabout way from an ancient medico I was interrogating-he's a perfectly clean record, now the poor old thing's trying to cope single-handed in what's left of the local hospital. Apparently he's got a patient in there, he said someone you'd remember, one Gerda Dieffenbach-'

  I dropped the paper. 'What's the matter with her?'

  'A very common feminine complaint, I fear. She's had a baby.'

  I exclaimed, 'But she must be at least thirty-five-'

  'Really? I had the impression she was a young girl. Like a lot of people in Wuppertal, she knows you're here, and what you're about. She'd like to see you. It's up to you, of course, if you want to risk disobeying standing orders.'

  'Do you know anything of the husband?'

  'Alas, she has no such encumbrance. She was raped by some SS man, when things began to break up earlier in the year. I wouldn't go near her if I were you, she obviously wants to get something out of you.' Greenparish started reading his Lilliput._

  I was appalled at this casual revelation. I knew that in Nazi Germany, where personal feelings were as irrelevant as leaves blowing across a battlefield, SS men who made any Nordic type of female pregnant faced nothing but the congratulations of the State. But a woman of Gerda's sensitivity and intelligence, and with her whole family killed…

  'I might warn you that we arrested her,' added Greenparish, without looking up from his magazine. 'Someone denounced her because she was a Nazi schoolmistress. But in the end we let her out. She claimed she had to strike a compromise with her conscience under Hitler. Don't all the women? I expect even those blonde maidens who scattered rose-petals before the tyres of Hitler's Mercedes, when he came home from the surrender of France. So dreadfully vulgar, the Nazis.'

  I stood up and walked in the fresh air of the small garden. I could not face Greenparish a second longer. But he was right. Why should I go against my country's orders and risk seeing Gerda? She was cared for in hospital, better off than the millions of Germans living on bomb sites. She had been raped, but millions more had been killed. But she had asked to see me. And the war had left me perhaps the person nearest to her in the whole world. That evening I put on my duffle-coat and walked to the same hospital where the earliest cases had been treated with Domagk's sulphonamide.

  It had been bombed, its windows replaced by boarding. Inside was dim and cold, and you could see the marks on the wall where Hitler's portraits had been removed.

  'I'm from the Control Commission,' I said to the middle-aged woman in an old-fashioned folded nurse's cap, who was sitting at a table with neatly arranged piles of forms in the hall. She gave me a hard look when I asked to see the doctor attending Frдulein Dieffenbach. She clearly did not approve of unmarried mothers.

  The doctor was wizened, bent, white-haired, in a patched white coat with a stethoscope sticking from the pocket. I explained briefly who I was, and what I knew.

  'Yes, Frдulein Dieffenbach was delivered safely of a daughter four days ago.' He clasped his bony hands together. 'You knew about her parents? That was terrible, terrible. Dr Dieffenbach was one of our most esteemed practitioners, and did enormous good here in Wuppertal.'

  'May I see her?'

  'I think that would be inadvisable. She is very, very ill.'

  I asked in alarm, 'What's the matter?'
>
  'Puerperal fever,' he told me starkly. 'We try to keep infection down as much as we can, but it is difficult with the sterilizing plant worn out like everything else.'

  'You're treating her with sulphonamides?' I asked at once.

  'Unfortunately not with the effect I should have hoped,' he replied wearily. 'She may be infected with the staphylococcus-we cannot tell, with our restricted facilities. Culturing pus to identify the infecting germ is a luxury we must forgo. And of course the sulpha drugs don't touch the staphylococcus. I have to use my clinical nose-' He tapped his nostril.

  'What about penicillin?'

  He sighed. 'Ah! That is not for us Germans.'

  'Her life's in danger?'

  'That's undeniable. Of course, much depends on her natural strength. But none of us is bursting with health these days.'

  'I must see her. I knew her family well before the war. It might put heart into her, to fight the illness off.'

  I went up an ill-lit stone staircase in the company of the doctor and the memory of Rosie. Gerda lay in a bed at the end of a small ward, separated from her neighbour by a white screen. She had not changed as much as I had feared. Her hair was two long plaits of pale gold, tied by the nurses with a pair of bows made from bandages. She was flushed with fever, thin, her face lined. Her mouth was a little open, and looked as soft as ever.

  'Oh…!' She lay against a pile of pillows staring at me, no expression on her face at all.

  I smiled. 'Remember how we went to work together on the Schwebebahn?' I asked in German.

  'Herr Elgar…'

  She stretched out her hand. I clasped it, hot and damp. I suddenly recalled _Blondie of the Follies._

  'You know why I'm here?' she said in a whisper.