Secret Protocols

by Peter Vansittart

  Father said we could only wait.With Britain’s surrender, things might stabilize. Throughout the long days he read incessantly, as though he might be allowed insufficient time to finish. Uncertain, desiring the warmth he could never give, engulfed in Rising Tide, I, too, read, choosing books by chance, Ernst von Salomon’s The Outlaws only for its autographed dedication to the Herr General, the author a fellow campaigner in Baltic fights with the Bolsheviks, 1919. One passage was underlined in red ink:

  To force a way through the prison of existence, to march over burning fields, to stamp on ruins and scattered ashes, to storm recklessly through wild forests, over lightning-struck heaths, to thrust, conquer, devour our way east, was that what we craved? The truth I do not know, but this all of us did know. And the quest for the truth, the reason, was lost in the chaos of unremitting fighting.

  Knights could still move me, exultant brotherhoods wresting themselves free of crafty menials, insidious clerks, from nothingness. I could only gaze dully from a narrow window. Forest was forbidden, the barbed wire implacable.

  The inevitable, the Herr General enjoyed saying, often refuses to occur, but now it did. I awoke to disturbances below, scurried down, found uniformed Russians under the staircase, military police ringing the house. Father waited for me, holding two suitcases, the servants concerned only with holding the intruders’ caps.

  Nothing was said. The Russians glanced at me indifferently, a hand jerked at the door, Father shook my hand and was gone.

  Abandoned, I realized at once that the servants were spies, shedding kindliness like coats, supervised by a new Hetman, surely butcher or hangman, with red, scornful face, hands too large for his arms. I had stepped into history: rifle butts at the door, unseen tumbrels and sheds, silence.

  Meals ceased to be served; instead, I must sit with Hetman, Tiv, Estonian quisling, and the last maids, Kersti and Maria Jaakson, in a dirty, flea-ridden scullery. My activities would be reported, by Tiv or the Russian sentry at the gates. Chunky, raw-eyed, this youth was friendly and knew some German. ‘They wanted to promote me. I wasn’t having it. Promotion!’ He spat, then winked. Sometimes, laying aside his gun, removing boots, he played clumsy tennis with me. Anxious to appease, I always let him win. Afterwards, we shared wine he had stolen from the cellars. Then he might stiffen into frowns and taciturnity. He, too, was watched.

  A dislodged book, a missing coat or shoes, showed that the Turret, my last privacy, was no longer inviolate. One wing was now sealed up. Massive cupboards, oak chairs and table, a magisterial clock, were hacked into firewood, electricity no longer working. Most portraits followed. Never again would I salute Count Pahlen. The Rose Room was used for storage, its secret intact, Mother’s bedroom was pillaged, her skirts and underclothes flourished in drunken charades, Russians and Estonians hopping in ludicrous dances. Only the library was left undisturbed, still allowed that awesome hush, though by midwinter it must surely feed the stoves. My watch and expensive green pen were taken by Tiv.

  Russian militia tramped in from searching Forest with bloodhounds. Also local conscripts; amongst them was Joones, our former timber contractor, always avoiding me.

  Existing in melodrama, I was a Hamlet, menaced by worse than Rising Tide, thinking of myself as ‘He’, muttering, ‘Let him live.’

  Mother’s letters ceased. She would be dancing with most interesting people, the Herr General riding with General Halder and the Reichsmarschall. A quivering bag of nerves, I cringed at threats of Soviet children’s homes, Arctic slavery, sale of my eyes to Moscow surgeries. The Reich was unconcerned. I was the property of the Father of the Russian People.

  Winter approached, with outriders of sharp snow and icicles. Tiv ordered me to attend a Cultural Fraternal Exchange in the church, itself defaced by the Spontaneous Anger of the Workers. With him inscrutable beside me, I heard a wireless report of Hitler’s latest speech:

  Militarily speaking, the war is over. Without allies, completely alone, England will be driven bit by bit into the ground. The American ambassador, Mr Joseph Kennedy, has already left London, acknowledging with thanks, the victory of National Socialism.

  An expert followed, praising Stalin, the Glorious Friend, partner in the Pact, solid as steel. Bombs had destroyed a British troop ship, drowning thousands, applauded in the Soviet broadcasts.

  My German roots and outlaw sympathies were ravaged by the Pact and I had few hopes of rescue; marvellous victories would not shower me with the benefits. England would be sterile for a century.

  Lacking a mirror, I yet knew that I was pallid and tired, my hair uncropped and ragged, my expression permanently fixed, a captive’s.

  However, unlike the inevitable, there occurred the unexpected. Wheels crunched the gravel, a door banged, an impatient voice thrilled the Manor, feet echoed. Executioners, a Tsarevitch oozing in a cellar. But no. Behind, a large shadow, in black and silver, was the Herr General.

  My surge of delight was immediately blighted. No elder brother, he was severe as a cromlech, barely greeting me but, beckoning me to the front door, indicated a dark, polished limousine, a tiny flag on its bonnet, then gave me five minutes to pack a case.

  At the wheel, he was forbidding, only saying that Mother sent greetings but was too unwell to write. Her sympathies he left unknown, though I was certain that, like Father, she would never return.

  We drove south into a moonlit night and, for most of the next day, over flat, almost treeless landscapes, periodically halting at small-town hotels and impoverished inns, the landlords scared or uneasy. While I ate, he telephoned, peremptory, sometimes angry. Silence lay between us like a brick. Once we were stopped by Red soldiers, whom he addressed in Russian, from a height. Powerful, inflexible, he overcame objections and we resumed, very fast, slackening only towards the frontier. He remained intent, brooding, distant, though I was glad of the gun at his belt. During that tense, mute journey through heath, dunes and hamlets, swerving from towns, I kept glancing at him: hard, older, glinting with authority that carried us into the Reich, a curt gesture and inaudible exchange dismissing officials.

  From rough pasture edged with marsh and thin woodlands, we reached a ramshackle farmstead, yellowy, peeling, rain-stained, drab without the consolations of melancholy.

  Painfully stiff, I alighted. The Herr General followed, still moving with the smoothness unexpected from his stature, tall and metallic against the low, misty sky.

  ‘You must remain here. For how long it’s not yet possible to say. It may not be the Heimat you’ve envisaged. The people are good … at least …’ pausing, he suddenly recovered that familiar, boyish complicity, ‘they are … good enough.’

  For the first time ever, he bent and kissed my forehead, before a man and woman joined us, leathery, stolid, and as if sexless, deferential but not obsequious, almost immediately escorting me inside, not to a turret but to a raftered attic smelling of age and sacking, with an immense bed quilted with heavy coats. Little else. I heard the car departing at speed.

  The world turned over, into flame, steel, high explosive. Operation Barbarossa, shattering the Nazi–Soviet Pact. Nach dem Osten woll’n wir reiten. Daily the sky was thunderous, black with planes, the air shaken by unseen torments, though this dull, even region of pine, rye, scrub remained motionless.

  Greg and Trudi did not qualify for the Ten Per Cent. Childless, their youth unimaginable, they were slow, barely literate, narrow in speech, treating me as a strong, though unskilled farmhand. Neighbours were few, peasants with chests like rugs, stomachs like barrels, saying little. Mother, with her furs, rings, rippling laughter, would have dazed, then perhaps aggrieved them.

  I questioned little in relief at escaping the Reds, though wondering why, with German triumph, I had been deposited here like a parcel instead of with Mother amongst Berlin’s interesting coteries. Only on Sundays, workless, monotonous, empty, I relapsed into sullen self-pity, raging for my dues, for lavish meals, respect, words. The only book here was a Lutheran Bible, r
endered insipid by sectarian editing. No letters came. Mother must be very ill or had forgotten me. Awaiting the Wolf’s entry into the Bear’s den, I learnt to cut pine, tend cattle, plough, muck fields. I was often hungry for, though sour, almost-rancid beer was plentiful, food, despite titanic victories in Russia, was depleted by the requisition of eggs, butter, game, poultry, beef, under SS supervision. Almost weeping, I remembered thick roasted slabs with glistening dabs of Meerretich, the honeycombs, cream, the sumptuous plum and apricot puddings.

  Survival here was tugged from north winds and small harvests from poor, rather sandy earth. We mostly subsisted on cabbage and potato, shreds of pork, horseradish leaves, bruised apples, occasional pumpkins. I learnt to treasure a hunk of coarse rye bread, porridge boiled with wild mushroom, thickly salted herring, woody carp, tough cheese whose identity would have puzzled Herr Max and outraged even Father. He had told me of Balzac, mighty storyteller, poor and almost starving, writing down his favourite dishes, then rising, convinced that he had dined well. Experimenting, I failed.

  Winter sky, unshaken by the wind, resembled grey, damp wool; birds were shrill and famished, pecking at frozen soil. I feared degenerating and was sustained by fragments of news from Greg’s battered wireless. Britain, despite destruction of London and most cities, still survived. Mr Chatterbox still chattered, the Palace was not yet scuppered, the King had failed to reach Canada or had been drowned.

  Greg grumbled that Churchill-pig would pay his Jews to trap America into betraying us. Then our Great Asiatic Ally struck, and the Cripple in the White House wheeled himself down the warpath. There were hints of Italian treachery.

  My stories were merely unpleasant visions: saurian eggs straining from a filthy nest, swollen butterflies stinking on the edge of a poisoned year: childhood sickening like a diseased plant. Months were becoming years, though seasons were starkly distinct, winter gripped the bone, green awoke the spring, summer meant prolonged work, autumn mostly Rising Tide.

  From exhaustion I slept well, and in dreams the past returned unsullied. The lost domain of racquets and straw hats, games on summer islands, Forest in calm June, gracious lawns, the Turret kingdom of lamplight. Legends, wondrous secrets. Imagination could now seek release only in this dreary scrap of landscape, though, I had to admit, it yet gave clues, not to the marvellous but at least to forgotten peoples and archaic rituals. Place names grazed old memories: Castle-Land, Moon Hound Tye, Frey’s Camp. The terrain, if not godless, was barely Christian. Christmas passed like a felon, a wreath of entwined ivy and holly laid at a crossroads, was tribute, but to what? I recalled flowers to the Lady, to Forest Uncle.When, after days in rainy fields, I began a feverish cough, Trudi bound my throat with mangy fur, assuring me that this, and some incomprehensible rhyme, would cure me.

  Slowly, the land began revealing its own stories. Two women, two years, two centuries ago, barred the door on a corpse, against the widow; lately, a rich lady, a Gräfin, had chosen to starve rather than accept the indignity of a ration card. In Soviet-dominated Estonia every peasant now owned one-third of a horse.

  Despite privations, I could enjoy not only suggestive place-names and tales but snatches of beauty: a flooded stream coiling with pewter-coloured patterns; fields, dark brown, strictly ploughed, sprinkled with pearls dropped from a Buckingham’s cloak; huge suns, cold and yellow, hovering behind spindrift branches, outflying on the bitter sky. Necessity sharpened memory. Deposed Emperor Earth, while sawing and digging, I strengthened it like a muscle by memorizing passages from lost books, powerful as swords. Then I found a damp, warped notebook and began a story: ‘For many months, whispers abounded throughout the province that, after so many years, a train might come.’

  From unexpected angles more memories reappeared: a girl’s face at an ‘Ogygia’ picnic, now older, harsher, scornful at a boy’s hesitation before diving; a smile between Mother and an officer enlarged into what I could not precisely name. All these were strangely important, while a Grand Hunt, a New Year Ball, shrivelled to insignificance. Legendary heroes – Kalev, Kostchei the Deathless, Baldur – remained, though weakened; even Pahlen was less vivid than a black scarf always worn by a cousin, perhaps concealing a monstrous blemish or criminal scar. I ruminated over stories by Pär Lagerkvist, one beginning with the dead talking together in low tones, another describing a lift that went down to Hell. Father’s chosen poems – Heine, Goethe, Trakl, Stefan George – returned.Wrinkles of time.

  But nearer the stream in a palace of reed,

  On by the tide of our lust we were swirled,

  Singing an anthem that no one could read,

  We were masters and lords of the world.

  This transcended stony fields and tedium. For me, exiled, brimming with desire for nakedness, a blank page, however discoloured, was restoration of the fitting and needful, all else gaunt as a scarecrow.

  Local girls had long been conscripted for military brothels and, I was to learn, SS stud farms. Those I had once avoided revenged themselves in dreams, taunting, undressing, but beyond reach, so that I awoke wet and frustrated.

  Spade in hand, I would stare up at the sky. Clouds were now lean and dark, now white, billowing sails, bergs, continents or fleeting red sores. More remembered words descended:

  Co Besoso Pasoje Ptoros.

  Co Es On Hama Pasoje, Boan.

  Meaningless? Certainly not. Essence of privacy, exclamation of soul, resounding like a rattle, making life limitless, creating alternative language for eye and ear, like Forest stored with apparitions, real or shadowy, or ships, faint question-marks, far out on unknown missions.

  Greg’s rough features had inescapably worsened, grimly perplexed. America, he grumbled, was a bastard nation dunged by a bullock. He cursed the Bear People, adding that it did his heart good to think of Churchill crucified on a tree. Bulletins were less exultant as the Wehrmacht, with Moscow within range, now made strategic retreat.

  Though immobile, I was simultaneously being driven towards a fate likely to be ugly. Death in Africa, Russia, Italy. Many contemporaries must have perished or run off the edge of the world. I was nothing in nowhere. The SS, under their prim, bespectacled Grand Master, must soon round me up: Berlin had crowed that many Baltic volunteers were gloriously fighting in Russia. Estonia was hailed as the Ostland Protectorate.

  I understood, from neighbours’ cautious exchanges, that the Baltic peoples had initially welcomed the Germans. I would have been with them, recovering my rights. But forebodings increased. From strangers on roads, from awesome speeches and music on Berlin radio, we heard of disaster at Stalingrad, which could not be shrugged off as a strategic feint to straighten the line or as Jewish conspiracy. Nor could we be comforted by the promise of Final Victory. The Führer’s personal word.

  Folk-tales and Chaplin deceived. No giant was felled by the dwarf, the princess was diseased, happy endings mocked. Fate commanded. With hands chapped and swollen, my mind feeble, I saw a faint glow in the east, behind skeleton trees; then thoughts of Stalin-grad, and, back with my notebook, I attempted the rich and strange.

  Now black glitter of wind-drenched trees,

  Cold from tears of a tormented age.

  Ice threats from a lifeless world.

  Before, curtains pulled aside.

  Wild bursts of white flower and sun.

  But the pencil stammered, imagination fluttered, folded wings, subsided into mud and ditch. Nevertheless, I must strain towards something else, runic with undiscovered messages, strong as basalt.

  More often, sleepless from cold, I recognized more painfully the gap between impulse and words. At seventeen, I had changed to stone, failing the riddle at crossroads. In Soviet slavery, my tools would be not words but hoe and shovel.

  By Easter 1944, with Mussolini punctured, Americans and British bloodily converging on Rome, we could hear guns, still distant but with the horizon closer, green and yellow flashes splitting the night. Greg discovered, nailed to a barn, a proclamation, badly printed but
legible, signed Die Weisser Rose, the White Rose, thanking Herr Adolf Hitler for the sacrifice of 330,000 at Stalingrad. ‘They are hunting us.’

  Greg’s mouth was tight as a hyphen. ‘Burn it.’

  The SS had withdrawn and would never come back.Whatever the straightness of fronts, Ragnarok was near, giants blazing and roaring vengeance, savage women castrating the fallen.

  The Allies landed in France. No, Dr Goebbels insisted, they had not landed, they were quarrelling, they no longer existed. Roosevelt had killed himself. Perhaps, but German eagles drooped, we were allowed to hear of massed bombing in Saxony, Westphalia, even Berlin. Of Mother, I could think no more, deadened by an uncensored account of the destruction of Münster Zoo. The fanged and tusked adrift. A sentence heard long ago, lurched back, The asp and the dromedary shall be about the streets. I heard Pastor Ulrich tolling:

  The wild beasts of the island shall cry in their desolate houses,

  And dragons in their pleasing palaces:

  And her time of passing is near.

  In prophetic trance, Stefan George had wondered if he heard the last uprising of gods above a silent town.

  Trudi’s boar-like uncle uttered some antique refrain, ‘May earth cover you lightly, so that dogs can tear you more easily.’ The imprecation discharged at an undisclosed target.

  Distant rumbles could no longer be dismissed as thunder. Night skies reddened.Where knights ride, famine grows.

  Illegal radio stations were fearless, perhaps manned by the White Rose. Valga, Estonian border town, had surrendered to inflamed, uncontrolled Russians. Reval partisans had captured Parliament Hill and hoisted red flags above government offices, the Germans in desperate flight. Meanwhile, hoping to escape notice in my isolated farm, I watched new leaf, occasionally prayed.