A House of Air

by Penelope Fitzgerald

  One of his responses has been to create figures of legend. Abe is only truly himself in Paris, and in Paris at the Crillon and in the Crillon in the penthouse suite. He is bald, he spills his food on the floor, one of his feet is three sizes larger than the other. In a sense, he is treated as a figure of fun, although his success ensures respect for him, and access to high places. Three generations of his students have done well in life, having taken his advice to forget about their families and listen to what he has to tell them about Plato, Maimonides, Machiavelli, Shakespeare, Rousseau and Nietzsche. It sounds a strangely old-fashioned course, but we’re told it wasn’t an academic programme. It was more freewheeling than that.

  Chick wanders in and out of time, but finally makes it clear that the book about writing a book is dated five years after Ravelstein’s death. ‘When I said Kaddish for my parents I had him in mind too.’ During Abe’s lifetime he has often appealed to their common Russian Jewish background—‘we had nothing of greater value than this legacy, which was the vastest and most terrible of legacies’—but Abe has been adamant in believing in this world only. He has studied Jewish history seriously, but what more can he do?

  This does not mean that he is a materialist. ‘You know that he goes for people who have basic passions—who make the tears come into his eyes.’ This interpretation is from Nikki, Ravelstein’s handsome youngish lover from Singapore. Whereas Chick has had two marriages, one wretched, one ideally happy, Abe is homosexual, maintaining that ‘a human soul devoid of longing was a soul deformed, deprived of its highest good, sick unto death.’

  Eventually his friends are reduced to sitting with him or guiding his wheelchair as they watch him die of AIDS.

  You would have thought that [he] would want a solemn ‘last days of Socrates’ atmosphere. He had taught the Apology and the Crito so many times. But this was not the time to be somebody else—not even Socrates.

  Chick is left with a kind of waking vision of his friend in his university apartment, listening to music, putting on his wondrous custom-made boots, then going outside and laughing with pleasure and astonishment because the birds are making too much noise for him to be heard. I started by saying that this book was about illness, but I see that in fact it is about friendship.

  Spectator, 2000

  WITNESSES

  Grandmother’s Footsteps

  Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China, by Jung Chang

  Jung Chang’s grandmother, Yu Fang, walked ‘like a tender young willow in a spring breeze,’ meaning that she could only totter because her feet had been bound and the arches crushed with a stone. If this was not done, a girl would be exposed to the contempt of her husband’s family and she would blame her mother for weakness. Fifty years later, Jung Chang herself was fourteen when the Red Guards were organized in her school. ‘It went without saying that I should join, and I immediately submitted my application to the Red Guard leader in my form.’

  Those in authority could take for granted the habit of obedience and the habit of fear. Jung Chang points out that China never had any need of an equivalent to the KGB. People could always be induced to destroy each other. In an epilogue to her book, she comments on the demonstrations of 1989, not only in Peking but in Sichuan. ‘It struck me that fear had been forgotten to such an extent that few of the millions of demonstrators perceived danger. Most seemed to be taken by surprise when the army opened fire.’ It was this that in fact most impressed Jung Chang. In a country that has no tradition of political opposition except raising a rebel army, the old fear seemed to her to have lost its hold. ‘Yet Mao’s face still stares down on Tiananmen Square.’

  This is a quite exceptional book, whose origins are pity and indignation. In 1988 Jung Chang, living in England, first learned the whole truth about her family, and realized it was necessary to write Wild Swans. It is a woman’s story, told in confidence by one generation to another, by mothers and daughters who acquired the patience and strength to outwit history. It is also, of course, the story of China over the last hundred years, since the country emerged from humiliation by foreign powers anxious to help themselves to territory, to face the Japanese invasion and the civil war. The People’s Republic was created out of poverty and weakness, on the world’s most disastrous model, and worked out in a long series of crazy experiments. The withdrawal of Soviet experts in 1960 meant, as it had to, the Smile Policy Toward the West, ‘winning friends from all over the world,’ and the Middle Kingdom, after two thousand self-regarding years, unsteadily began to look for foreign friends. In 1978 even the Class War was abandoned, but by then Mao (two years dead) had created a moral wasteland. Loyalty and compassion, where they survived, shone by contrast like the pearls that were formerly put in the mouths of corpses.

  Yu Fang, Jung Chang’s grandmother, was the daughter of an ambitious small-town policeman, who sold her as a concubine to a warlord, General Hue. (He arranged that the General should have a glimpse, as she knelt in the temple, of her bound feet.) When Hue died, Yu Fang bribed two horsemen to help her escape with her baby daughter, otherwise she would have been at the mercy of his widow, who might have sold her into a brothel. Later she became the wife of the kindly, elderly Dr Xia, and lived with him in Manchuria under the shadow of the Japanese occupation. The daughter, Jung Chang’s mother, Bao Quin, grew up under the Kuomintang. She became a Communist agent, smuggling out messages hidden in green peppers, for the sufficient reason that the Communists were the only party who promised to put an end to injustices against women. She married a high-minded, incorruptible civil servant called Wang, and after the Communist victory she was appointed herself (without any consultation) to the Public Affairs Department. Both of Jung Chang’s parents, then, had joined the ‘high official’ class, which, more than any other, suffered from the incomprehensible campaigns, purges, rehabilitations, and persecutions of the People’s Republic.

  Bao Quin worked ceaselessly, although in forty years she never qualified for a ‘soft seat’ on the railway—these could be bought only by officials of Grade 14 and above. In the ‘January Storm’ of 1966, when Mao decided to disrupt the party structure, she was denounced and made to kneel on broken glass. Three years later she was arrested and imprisoned in the local cinema, where she could hear her children’s voices in the street but never see them. Meanwhile Wang, after years of irreproachable service to the Party, had come to the conclusion that the Chairman could not know what was happening. He carefully composed and wrote a letter to Mao. As a result he was taken into custody, and came back to his family insane. These two were only cleared of guilt at the end of the Seventies, when the old incriminating records were taken out and burned. ‘In every organization across China, bonfires were lit to consume these flimsy pieces of paper that had ruined countless lives.’

  Jung Chang, born ‘a high official’s child,’ writes of herself with an irony that she never uses about her parents. As small children, she remembers, called upon to do good deeds like the hero Lei Feng, ‘we went down to the railway station to try and help old ladies with their luggage as Lei Feng had done. We sometimes had to grab their bundles from them forcibly, because some countrywomen thought we were thieves.’ In 1968, sent with the fifty million ‘down-to-the-country’ contingent to learn from peasants, she found talking to them, after a hard day in the rice fields, ‘almost unbearable.’ She was taken on as a barefoot doctor, or rather as a barefoot receptionist in a clinic in Deyang, without any training whatsoever, and worked as an electrician although she had never even changed a fuse. When the universities reopened after the Cultural Revolution, she was entitled to enter as a former peasant and worker, to study English. She can look at these discrepancies with a certain dryness. But she never sees her country’s history in the twentieth century as anything less than a tragedy.

  Wild Swans is a book of a thousand stories about men and women, some of them unimaginably powerful, some of them so unimportant that they are commemorated here and nowhere else. In 1941, when the Japane
se had reserved the rice supplies for themselves and their collaborators, Dr Xia was treating a railway coolie for emaciation and stomach pains.

  Most of the local population had to subsist on a diet of acorn meal and sorghum, which was difficult to digest. Dr Xia gave the man some medicine free of charge and asked my grandmother to give him a small bag of rice which she had bought illegally on the black market.

  Not long afterward, Dr Xia heard that the man had died in a forced labour camp. After leaving the surgery he had eaten the rice, gone back to work, and then vomited at the railway yard. A Japanese guard had spotted rice in his vomit and he had been arrested as an ‘economic criminal’ and hauled off to camp. In his weakened state he survived only a few days. When his wife heard what had happened to him, she drowned herself with her baby.

  The incident plunged Dr Xia and my grandmother into deep grief.

  Even this one passage shows the calm and rational style of Wild Swans, and the absence of ‘speak-bitterness.’ Jung Chang is the classic storyteller, describing in measured tones the almost unbelievable. As a historian explaining the political and economic background, she uses the same voice.

  Although she had been disillusioned with the regime ever since her days as a Red Guard, Jung Chang never felt, or permitted herself to feel, critical of the Chairman himself until the autumn of 1974, when she read her first foreign magazine (a copy of Newsweek) and experienced ‘the thrill of challenging Mao openly in my mind.’ This book is not a record of heroic dissidence but of endurance and the gradual opening of the eyes. And while it is a personal record, she is not calling for sympathy, or even for attention, on her own behalf. Her book is dedicated to the grandmother and the father who did not live to see it, while the mother’s undemanding presence is felt on every page. She came, in 1978, to see her daughter off at Chengdu airport, perhaps for ever, ‘almost casually,’ Jung Chang writes, ‘with no trace of tears, as though my going half a globe away was just one more episode in our eventful lives.’

  London Review of Books, 1992

  A Fortunate Man

  I Shall Bear Witness: The Diaries of Victor Klemperer, translated from the German by Martin Chalmers

  VOLUME I: 1933—1941

  These diaries begin eight days after the Reichstag fire, with Hitler elected as Chancellor ‘and all opposition forces as if banished from the face of the earth.’

  Victor Klemperer has set himself to bear witness, however, not so much to history on the grand scale—‘I am not writing a history of the times here’—but to its impact on himself, a middle-aged Jew, Professor of Romance Languages at Dresden Technical University (not a very distinguished job), married to an Aryan, Eva Schlemmer, a musician who hasn’t fulfilled her ambitions.

  They are childless, and their illnesses, together with their cherished cats (also frequently ill), seem almost an occupation in themselves. But it is a story of true devotion. Klemperer’s story of his eight days in prison for a blackout offence ends: ‘I stepped out to the street. The sun was shining. My wife was waiting.’ This is the quiet language of the heart.

  Klemperer’s status depended largely on his certificate of service as a volunteer with the Bavarian field artillery in 1915. On 2 May 1935 he was dismissed from his post, not, however, as a Jew, but because Romance languages were no longer to be studied. This meant he could at least claim a pension, although it was only 400 marks per month, ‘a quite undignified lack of money.’

  He made applications to London, New York, and Switzerland. All failed and time was running out. His friends were departing yet one gets the impression Klemperer did not really want to leave. He was no Zionist, regarding himself, sincerely and unquestionably, as a German European, and it took him a long time to realize the nightmare would never end of its own accord. ‘Weariness of life and fear of death.’ However, there were also moments of obstinate happiness. The Klemperers had a plot of land at Dölzchen, southwest of Dresden, and, after excruciating negotiations for a loan, they built themselves a small wooden house and planted seven cherry trees and ten gooseberry bushes.

  Klemperer learned to drive, if not well, and bought an old unreliable car in which they ventured out to see their relations.

  His great resource (after he had cleaned the stoves and the cat boxes) was his work: first, on his history of eighteenth-century French literature, then, when as a Jew he was no longer allowed to borrow books from the college, on his autobiography. To risk writing these journals and to keep them hidden was heroic—a scholar’s heroism.

  Meantime, by 1936, his own books were removed from the Dresden lending libraries and French was relegated to a school subject. Who would want to publish a history of French literature? Rejected by his publishers, Klemperer toiled on, a decent, faulty human being, irritable, embittered, harassed, keeping a flame alight in the surrounding disgraceful darkness: ‘27 March 1937. My suit is fraying, our home is thick with dirt, neither house nor garden is finished and I count every penny.’ But when visitors came to stay he gallantly kept up appearances and even in the hottest weather put on his worn collar and boots.

  In August 1937 the persecution was stepped up. The important date—as Martin Chalmers, the translator, points out in his introduction—was not the declaration of war but Kristallnacht, 9 November 1938, the first step towards the Final Solution.

  Jewish doctors were struck off the medical register, Jewish driving licences were withdrawn, Jews were not allowed to enter libraries or cinemas or the passenger steamers on the Elbe. They were not allowed tobacco coupons, typewriters, or pets.

  The Klemperers lost the little house they had built at Dölzchen and had to move to a ‘Jews’ house in the city. There they had two rooms—‘tangled chaos in both—Muschel’s box, garden peat, crockery, beds, suitcases, furniture’—and the torment of over-helpful next-door neighbors. But ‘how can it be compared with what is experienced by thousands upon thousands?’ Klemperer asked himself. ‘We two have got so used to our poverty and troubles.’ And he turned to his journal of witness: ‘No half measure, a fearfully whole thing I think I called it at the beginning.’

  And that is what it is—a frighteningly absorbing book to read, a difficult one to review because it depends on the patient record of detail from day to day, from the moment when Klemperer first noticed a swastika on a tube of toothpaste at the chemist’s to the day (19 September 1941) when he was issued with the compulsory yellow star. Every Jew had to pay 10 pfennig for his yellow star. This, however, is only the first volume. The title of the complete diaries, published in Germany in 1995, was Ich will Zeugnis ablegen bis zum letzten—‘I shall bear witness unto the last.’

  Evening Standard, 1998

  VOLUME II: 1942—1945

  Victor Klemperer was born in 1881 in East Prussia, the son of a rabbi, and in 1921 became Professor of Romance Languages at Dresden’s Technical University. In 1906 he had married a Protestant, Eva Schlemmer, a pianist. In 1935 he was dismissed from his post, not (officially at least) because he was a Jew but because French literature was considered a waste of time at a technical university. Some concessions were made for his service in World War I and the fact that he was married to an ‘Aryan.’ For example, he received a pension. He even bought a car and learned to drive it, although not very well. Eva and he could make little Sunday expeditions. He might even consider himself lucky. That is one of the most frightening things about these diaries—that they are, in a sense, the records of a fortunate man.

  All this we learned from the first volume of Klemperer’s diaries, which took us up to 1941. This second volume covers the remaining war years, as Klemperer dutifully continues to keep a day-to-day record of his life in Dresden as the Nazi regime grows ever more malignant towards its Jewish citizens.

  For the three years following Kristallnacht, the Nazis had put pressure on the Jewish community to emigrate. Klemperer, perhaps thinking himself too old to make a new life, did not take the opportunity to leave. We see him now, in 1942, cooped up with Eva i
n one of the crowded communal ‘Jews’ houses. In June, he lists thirty-one emergency decrees, including a ban on Jews using the telephone, going to concerts, buying newspapers or cigarettes, possessing a car, a typewriter, a radio, a blanket, a fur coat—or any kind of pet.

  Thus the Klemperers take their beloved little tom cat to the vet, who disposes of him. ‘But all together they [i.e., the decrees] are as nothing against the constant threat of house searches, of ill-treatment, of prison, concentration camp, and violent death.’ A few days later, he writes: ‘Of the five men in the house, Ernst Kreidl, Paul Kreidl, Dr Friedmann, Richard Katz, myself, I am now the only one left: Katz dead of cancer, Ernst Kreidl shot, Paul Kreidl deported, Friedmann imprisoned without hope.’ Klemperer himself has to wear the yellow star, which he tries to conceal under his coat. ‘No animal can be so hounded, so timid.’ The Final Solution has begun.

  One of a thousand incidents is the death of Frau Pick. She was a ‘great lady,’ defying her seventy-eight years, who, after hearing she was to be deported to Theresienstadt, killed herself with a dose of veronal. She left a letter of thanks to the inmates of the ‘Jews’ House for their courtesy. But Klemperer also registers his own coldness of heart. His first thought was: We shall come into her store of potatoes.

  In April 1943, he is conscripted as an herbal-tea packer and later as a worker in an envelope factory. He is, he admits, not at all handy at either job, nor can he find any philosophical consolation. ‘It is only a matter of maintaining one’s dignity until the very end.’ After fourteen months he is released on a medical certificate, but he knows he is marked out for deportation, probably in a matter of weeks.

  Then, in February 1943, comes, as a kind of miracle, the first Allied bombing of Dresden. The diary opens out in terror, bewilderment, and relief as, in the confusion, the Klemperers escape onto the crowded roads and make their way, mostly on foot, to the south. As Martin Chalmers points out in his preface, there is an indescribable atmosphere about this spring and summer flight, in spite of all its hardships. It is, for a few weeks, a kind of idyll.