by John Lawton
He cut her short.
‘There, do you see? In the cherry tree. The one with the yellow breast.’
‘Boss . . . I’m a Londoner. Born, bred and never been further than Southend. Sparrers is me limit. Just call it a yeller wotsit and listen to me.’
He turned. It was typical of her to be so casual in her dealings with him, untypical of her to find anything so urgent. It was as though she’d seized him by his lapels.
‘Yes?’
‘’Itler’s invaded Austria. It was on the wireless you know. The missis sent me to tell you.’
The missis was his wife. Time there was, and not that long ago, when he would have learnt of such things not by his wife sending in the maid, but by a phone call from his Fleet Street office at whatever time of day or night, deskside or bedside. On his seventy-fifth birthday he had told his editors, ‘History can now wait for me.’ Usually history waited until he had his first cup of coffee in his hand.
‘Do you want me to turn the set on in here, Boss?’
‘Yes, my dear. Please do that.’
It was indeed a yellow day. What other colour has cowardice ever had? It was all too, too predictable. Hitler had signalled his punches like a feinting boxer. He had had his editorial ready for a month now, ever since Hitler and Schuschnigg had met at Berchtesgaden in the middle of February for Schuschnigg’s ritual humiliation – ‘I am the greatest German that ever lived!’ . . . so much for Goethe, so much for Schiller, for Luther and Charlemagne, for Beethoven and Bach. He’d listen to the next bulletin on the wireless, and if nothing forced a change upon him, and he doubted that it would, he’d take the editorial out of his desk drawer and have a cab take it to Fleet Street for the evening edition. All it needed was his signature . . . a rapid flourish of the pen and, in the near-cyrillic of his handwriting, the words ‘Alexei Troy’.
§ 2
14 March
Vienna
The Führer took his triumphant time getting to Vienna. There was his hometown of Linz to be visited, embraced, captured on the road to Vienna. The town from which, as he put it himself, Providence had called him. He drove through streets gaily decked out with the National Socialist flag – red and black can be so striking in its simplicity – past cheering citizens, gaily decked out in green jackets and lederhosen.
In the second car SD Standartenführer Wolfgang Stahl, a fellow Austrian, wondered where they got it all from. As though some wily rag-and-bone man had been round the week before with a job lot of old coats and leather britches. It seemed to him to be parody, to be bad taste, to be Austria’s joke at its own expense. All this, all of it, would be at Austria’s expense. It was simply that Austria didn’t know it.
It was past lunchtime on the following day before the entourage rolled into Vienna. Hitler was in a foul mood. The motorcade had broken down. Not just the one vehicle but dozens had ground to a halt with mechanical failure. It looked half-arsed. And the trick to invading without a shot fired, to taking a country that was all too willing to capitulate, was to look wholly-arsed, as though you could have taken them by force if you so desired. The Wehrmacht was untested in the field. Any failure now sent out the wrong signal to the fair-weather friends of Austria and Czechoslovakia. The world was watching. That nincompoop Chamberlain was watching. Entering Vienna, they crossed a bridge that had been mined. Schellenberg had inspected the device personally, taken a gamble with their lives, thought better of telling this to Hitler, and mentioned it to Stahl only as a problem solved. It was just as well. The bad mood did not lift. Hitler accepted the adulation of the crowds in the Heldenplatz, scowled through the reception at the Hofburg Palace and flew on to Munich the next morning. Country captured, country visited, Secret Police installed. Next.
Stahl stayed. The SS was already rounding up suspects, tormenting Jews and murdering discreetly as a preamble to murdering indiscreetly. Neither was his job. Himmler and Schellenberg had flown in ahead of the convoy at first light. Heydrich, flash as ever, had flown in in his own private plane, meditating on his plans for Austria’s first concentration camp. They had gilded thugs aplenty, thugs in oak leaves, thugs in lightning, thugs in black and silver. Stahl was just an ornament. He’d been invited to Vienna, his native city, merely as part of the Führer’s sense of triumphalism. He’d been presented to the Viennese as a prodigal son, someone not quite called by Providence, which only had room for one, but touched by it. The hand of fate that had grabbed Adolf Hitler, had brushed the sleeve of Wolfgang Stahl. Others stayed on simply because the pickings were too rich – not simply what could be stolen, but what could be bought. The department stores of Vienna were so much better stocked than those in Berlin. Stahl had in his pocket a hand-written note from Hermann Göring – ‘Could you get me a dozen winter woollen underpants from Gerngross’s, waist 130 cm?’
Stahl stayed because Vienna fixed him, fixed him and transfixed him as surely as if it had struck out, stabbed him and pinned him to the wall. He could not help Vienna in her suffering, and at the same time he could not resist watching as she suffered.
§3
14 March
Berlin
TELEGRAMME : TROYTOWNLON
TO : TROYTOWNBER
ATT: ROD TROY
MY BOY, DO YOU NOT THINK IT TIME YOU CAME HOME?
THIS IS, DARE I SAY, A JACKBOOT TOO FAR.
DO NOT WAIT FOR WAR. COME BACK NOW.
COME BACK TO YOUR WIFE AND YOUR FAMILY.
YOUR LOVING FATHER,
ALEX TROY.
Rod showed the telegramme to Hugh Greene in Kranzler’s restaurant at lunchtime.
‘I can’t say I’m always getting them. But it’s not the first and it won’t be the last. Thing is . . . the old man never wanted me to come out in the first place.’
In 1933, when the Nazis had taken power, Rod had been just short of his twenty-fifth birthday and had been three years a parliamentary correspondent on his father’s Sunday Post. He begged his father for the Berlin posting. In the September the old man had finally agreed and Rod had presented himself to the Press Office of the National Socialist Workers’ Party and the British Embassy as the new Berlin Correspondent for the Troy Press. The Germans had looked askance at his authentication, but said nothing. The embassy had said in one of those subtle walls-have-ears tones, ‘You’re taking one hell of a risk, old boy.’
Greene echoed the line now, ‘Your father has a point. You don’t have the protection I have.’
Greene had come to Berlin, via Munich, for the Daily Telegraph the February after Rod. He was younger than Rod by nearly three years, and taller by more than three inches. They had been ‘absolute beginners’ together, often sharing what they knew. Rod revelled in the languid mischief that Greene seemed to exude, the nascent wickedness of the man. It reminded him more than somewhat of his younger brother. Much as he was loth to admit it, there were times when he missed his brother. Even more he missed his wife. She had joined him a few weeks after the posting and, like the colonial wife in Nigeria or Sierra Leone, she had returned home for the birth of their first child in 1936, and was home now expecting the second.
‘If I have to weigh that one up every time Hitler pushes the country to the brink, I might as well go home and become the gardening columnist reporting on outbreaks of honey fungus and the private life of the roving vole.’
‘Questing vole, surely?’ said Greene. ‘“Something something through the plashy fens goes the questing vole”.’
Rod ignored this.
‘What matters, what matters now is that I should be here. My father doesn’t see that. I should be here. So should you.’
‘Quite. Except, of course, that we should both be in Vienna.’
§4
15 March
Berggasse, Vienna
Martha showed every courtesy to the SS thugs who had burst into her dining room. Gesturing to the table, where she had piled up her housekeeping money, she invited them to ‘help themselves’ as though it were a plate of san
dwiches and they guests for afternoon tea. They stuffed their pockets like beggars at a banquet. Then they stared. They had probably never been in an apartment quite like this in their lives.
Could they feel the burden of dreams?
Martha’s daughter, Anna, sensing that they would not be satisfied with the best part of a week’s housekeeping, knowing that they undoubtedly subscribed to the Nazi notion that all Jews were misers and slept on mattresses stuffed with banknotes, went into the other room, beckoned for them to follow and opened the safe for them. ‘Help yourselves, gentlemen’ – to six thousand schillings.
Even this was not enough. They hesitated at the door to her father’s study – she would have little choice but to step between them and block the way with her own body – when the door opened and a diminutive, white-haired, white-bearded man appeared before them, glaring at them silently with the eyes of Moses, the eyes of Isaiah, the eyes of Elijah. Behind him they could see row upon row of books, wall to wall and floor to ceiling, more books than they had ever thought existed. The old man said nothing. He was a good foot shorter than the biggest of the SS men, and still he stared at them. Did they know these eyes saw into the depths of man?
‘We’ll be back,’ they said. And left.
Could they feel the burden of dreams?
§5
The next day Professor Nicholas Lockett, of King’s College, London, a lanky Englishman so English his furled umbrella remained furled in the worst of weathers, a man possessed of size 12 and a half feet, a man passionate about his subject, arrived in Berggasse expressly charged by the Psychoanalytic Society of Great Britain to impress upon Sigmund the necessity of leaving. Sigmund needed impressing.
He stretched back on the wide, red chenille-covered couch reserved for his patients, stared at the ceiling and said.
‘My dear Lockett, I am too . . . old.’
‘Nonsense . . . you are . . .’
‘. . . Incapable of kicking my leg high enough to get into bed in a wagon-lit!’
‘You are Psychoanalysis. Where you are . . . it is. The Society is a moveable feast.’
‘Alas, Vienna is not. It is quite securely fixed to the banks of the Danube. I’ve lived here since I was four. If at all possible, I’d like to die here. To leave now would be . . . like a soldier deserting from the ranks.’
Lockett did not hesitate to be blunt. Perhaps it was the prone, patient-like position that Sigmund had adopted.
‘More aptly . . . to remain would be like being the last officer on the Titanic. If you stay, that end may come quicker than you might think.’
‘Quicker than I desire?’
‘I don’t know. How fondly do you desire death?’
‘One does not need to desire what is inevitable. It is a waste of desire. Desire what is possible, desire what is merely likely,’
‘Very neat. Is that original or is it Marcus Aurelius?’
‘Need you ask? I am desire’s biographer.’
‘But you’ll come?’
‘Where? The French will admit me, as long as I agree not to be a burden on the state and starve to death. The English . . .’
‘. . . Will let you in.’
‘The English have closed their gates on Europe.’
‘No we haven’t. It’s not at all like that.’
‘What are you saying, Lockett? That the indifference of the English is an aberration, a temporary aberration?’
‘Yes. That’s exactly what I’m saying.’
‘Fine. Get me out. Get us all out.’
A dismissive wave of a hand in the air.
Now Lockett had cause to hesitate. It was not simply that the old man’s assertion was unconvincing – he was far from impressed yet – there were the flaws in his own insistence too.
‘It’s not entirely straightforward. It’s possible. It’s most certainly possible. I’d even say it was likely. It’s really a matter of who you know.’
‘Was it not ever thus? When was it not thus?’
‘I mean – who you know in England. Who you know who might be . . . well, who . . . who . . . who might be in Who’s Who?’
‘My dear Lockett, you sound like an owl.’
‘A few names I could approach on your behalf, perhaps?’
‘Do you know Alexei Troy?’
‘You mean Sir Alex Troy – the newspaper chap?’
‘The same.’
‘Where on earth did you –’
‘A patient. You will understand, Lockett, that this is strictly between ourselves. You have read my ‘The Case of the Immaculate Thief’?’
‘Naturally.’
‘That was Alex Troy.’
Lockett was silent – all he could think was ‘Good Bloody Grief!’
‘The Alex Troy of 1907–8. He had not been long in Vienna. He had landed up here after his flight from Russia. Or, to be exact, from the 1907 Anarchist Conference in The Hague. He turned up on my doorstep the day after it finished. I treated him all that winter. Indeed, he lay on this very couch. Shortly afterwards he moved to Paris, and I believe from Paris to London, where, as they say at the end of tuppenny novellettes, he prospered.’
Prospered, Lockett thought, was hardly precise. Troy was, and there was no other phrase for it, filthy rich. But then he had begun as a thief, as Freud would have it, an immaculate and far from filthy thief. One to whom not a speck of dirt could stick, either to the clothing or the conscience, it would seem.
‘We did not keep in touch. Merely the odd letter from time to time – more often than not when an English translation of something or other of mine came out. His German was never good, after all. But I think I can safely say he is unlikely to have forgotten me.’
‘Quite,’ said Lockett.
‘Will he do?’
‘Well, he knows everyone. That’s undeniable. I doubt there’s a politician in England that would not take a telephone call from Alex Troy.’
§6
19 March
Leopoldstadt, Vienna
Krugstrasse was a street of tailors. Beckermann’s shop stood next to Bemmelmann’s, Bemmelmann’s stood next to Hirschel’s, Hirschel’s next to Hummel’s. The shop beyond Hummel’s had stood empty for nearly a year now. Ever since old Schuster had packed his bag and caught a train to Paris. He’d tried to sell the shop, but the offers were derisory. From Paris he wrote to Hummel: ‘Take the stock, Joe, take all you want. Take the shop, it’s yours. I’d rather see it burn than sell it to some Jew-hating usurer for a pittance.’
Not that he knew it but Schuster would almost have his way. It would be Hummel who watched the shop burn.
The following week Schuster wrote, ‘Forget the shop, Joe. Leave Leopoldstadt. Leave Vienna. Leave Austria. How long can it be safe for any Jew?’
The day before the German annexation the local Austrian SA had rampaged carelessly down the street of tailors, smashed Hirschel’s windows and beaten up Beckermann’s grandson, who was unfortunate enough or stupid enough to be out in the street at the time. Most people had more sense. Had the SA been less than careless they could have taken out every window in the street and looted what they wished. No one would have stopped them, but the rampage had its own momentum and, once it had gathered speed, roared on from one target to the next, glancing off whatever was in the way. Hummel and Beckermann’s grandson helped Hirschel board up his window.
‘Is there any point?’ Hirschel had said. ‘They’ll be back.’
But a week had passed, a week in which many Jews had been robbed of all they possessed, some Jews had fled the city and some Jews had taken their own lives, but the mob had not returned.
At first light on the morning of the 19th, a German infantryman banged on the doors all along the street with his rifle butt.
Bemmelmann was first to answer.
‘You want a suit?’ he said blearily.
‘Don’t get comical with me grandad! How many people live here?’
‘Just me and my wife.’
‘Then
get a bucket and a scrubbing brush and follow me.’
Then he came up to Hummel, shadowed in the doorway of his shop. Hummel had not been able to sleep and was already dressed in his best black suit.
‘Going somewhere, were we?’
Hummel said, ‘It’s the Sabbath.’
‘No – it’s just another Saturday. Get a bucket, follow me!’
By the time he got back from the scullery every tailor in the street was standing with a bucket of water in his hand. Old men, and most of them were; not-so-young men, and Hummel was most certainly the youngest at thirty-one; men in their best suits, pressed and pristine; men in their working suits, waistcoats shiny with pinheads, smeared with chalk; men with their trousers hastily pulled on, and their nightshirts tucked into the waistband.
The German lined them up like soldiers on parade. He strutted up and down in mock-inspection, smirking and grinning and then laughing irrepressibly.
‘What a shower, what a fuckin’ shower. The long and the short and the tall. The fat, the ugly and the kike! Left turn!’
Most of the older men had seen service in one war or another and knew how to drill. Beckermann had even pinned his 1914–18 campaign medals to his coat as though trying to make a point. Those that knew turned methodically. Those that didn’t bumped into one another, dropped buckets, spilt water and reduced the German to hysterics. Well, Hummel thought, at least he’s laughing. Not punching, not kicking. Laughing.
He led them to the end of the street, to a five-point crossroads, where the side streets met the main thoroughfare, Wilhelminastrasse. In the middle of the star was a long-parched water fountain, topped by a statue of a long-forgotten eighteenth-century burgomaster. Someone had painted a toothbrush moustache on the statue – it was unfortunate that the burgomaster had been represented in the first place with his right arm upraised – and around the base in red paint were the words ‘Hitler has a dinky dick!’
‘Right, you Jew-boys. Start scrubbin’!’