“So he’s a Leftie?”
“He’s dead.”
“I meant the son.”
“Well not really, not that he’s said. He’s just catching up on his education. He’s uncommitted.”
Brotherhood pressed his eyebrows together and penciled “Thälmann” on his choir list. Axel’s mother was Catholic but his father had been a member of the anti-Catholic Los von Rom movement, which was Lutheran, Pym said. His mother lost her right to confession because she had married a Protestant.
“And a Socialist,” Brotherhood reminded Pym, under his breath, as he wrote.
At the Gymnasium Axel’s friends all wanted to fly planes against England but Axel was persuaded by the visiting recruiting teams to volunteer for the army. He was posted to Russia, taken prisoner and escaped, but when the Allies invaded France he was pulled out to fight in Normandy where he was wounded in the spine and hip.
“Did he tell you how he escaped from the Russians?” Brotherhood cut in.
“He said he walked.”
“Like he walked to Switzerland,” said Brotherhood with a hard smile and Pym began to see a pattern that he had not thought of until Brotherhood suggested it.
“How long was he there?”
“I don’t know. But long enough to learn Russian anyway. He’s got books in Cyrillic in his room.”
Back in Germany he went ill from his wounds but as soon as he was well enough to walk he was sent to fight the Americans. He was wounded again and sent back to Carlsbad where his mother was laid up with jaundice, so he put her on a cart with her possessions and pushed her to Dresden, a beautiful city that the Allies had recently bombed flat. He took his mother to the district where the Silesian refugees had gathered but she died soon after he got her there, so he was alone. By now Pym’s head was swimming. The colours on the wall behind Brotherhood’s head were merging and sliding. It’s not me. It’s me. I’m doing my duty for my country. Axel, help me.
“Right-ho, now it’s peacetime. Forty-five. What does he do?”
“Gets out of the Soviet Zone.”
“Why?”
“He was scared the Russians would find him and put him back in prison. He didn’t like them and he didn’t like prison and he didn’t like the way the Communists were taking over Eastern Germany.”
“Good story so far. What does he do about it?”
“He burns his paybook and buys another one.”
“Where from?”
“A soldier he met in Carlsbad. Somebody who came from Munich who looked fairly like him. He said that in 1945 nobody in Germany looked like their photograph anyway.”
“Why didn’t this accommodating soldier want his papers?”
“He wanted to stay in the East.”
“Why?”
“Axel didn’t know.”
“Bit thin, isn’t it?”
“I suppose it is.”
“On we go.”
“He boarded the repatriation train to Munich and everything worked fine till he got to the other end, when the Americans pulled him straight off the train and put him into prison and beat him up.”
“Why’d they do a thing like that?”
“It was because of his papers. He’d bought the papers of a wanted man. He’d just walked completely into a trap.”
“Unless of course they were his own papers in the first place and he never bought them from anybody,” Brotherhood suggested, writing again. “Sorry, old boy. Didn’t mean to shatter your illusions. Way of the world, I’m afraid. How long did he do?”
“I don’t know. He got ill again and they put him into hospital and he escaped from hospital.”
“Pretty good at escaping, I must say. You say he walked here?”
“Well, walked and bummed rides on trains. They had to shorten one of his legs. The Germans did. After he came back from Russia. That’s why he limps. I should have said that earlier. So I mean even with trains it was quite a walk. Munich to Austria, then Austria over the border at night to Switzerland. Then to Ostermundigen.”
“To where?”
“That’s where Herr Ollinger has his factory.” Pym heard himself trying to make excuses. “He hasn’t any papers at all, you see. He destroyed his own in Carlsbad. The Americans kept the ones he bought and he can’t find anyone to give him a new set. Meanwhile he’s still on the Allied wanted list. He says he’d have confessed everything the Americans asked if only he’d known what he was supposed to have done wrong. But he didn’t, so they went on beating him.”
“Heard that one before too,” said Brotherhood under his breath, once more writing. “How does he spend his days here, Magnus? Who are his buddies?”
Far, far too late, voices were whispering Pym caution.
“He’s afraid to go out in case the Fremdenpolizei arrest him. If he goes into town he borrows a big hat. It isn’t only the Fremdenpolizei. If the ordinary Swissies knew about him they’d inform against him too. He says they do that. It’s a national sport. He says they do it out of envy and call it civic-mindedness. It’s just household gossip I’m telling you.”
“Pity you didn’t tell it to us earlier.”
“It didn’t mean anything. It wasn’t anything you were interested in. Herr Ollinger told me most of it. He gossips all the time.”
Brotherhood had his car outside. Man and boy were sitting in it but Brotherhood didn’t drive anywhere. Wendy had gone home. Brotherhood asked about Axel’s politics. Pym said Axel despised established attitudes. Brotherhood said, “Describe.” He wasn’t writing any more and his head was very still in the window frame. Pym said Axel had once remarked that pain was democratic.
“Reading habits?” said Brotherhood.
“Well, everything really. Everything he’s missed from the war. He types a lot. Mostly at night.”
“What does he type?”
“He says it’s a book.”
“What does he read?”
“Well, everything. Sometimes when he’s ill I get books out of the library for him.”
“In your own name?”
“Yes.”
“That’s a bit rash. What do you get?”
“The whole spectrum.”
“Describe.”
Pym described and came inevitably to Marx and Engels and the bad bears, and Brotherhood wrote all of them down, asking him who Dühring was when he was at home.
Brotherhood asked about Axel’s habits. Pym said he liked cigars and vodka and sometimes kirsch. He didn’t mention whisky.
Brotherhood asked about Axel’s sex-life. Sweeping aside his own limitations in this respect, Pym declared it mixed.
“Describe,” said Brotherhood again.
Pym did his best, though he knew even less about Axel’s sexuality than his own, except that whatever form it took, unlike Pym he was on terms with it.
“He does sometimes have women,” said Pym deprecatingly, as if that were something all of us did. “Usually she’s some token beauty from the Cosmo, cooking for him or polishing his room. He calls them his Marthas. I thought at first he meant martyr.”
“Dearest Father”—Pym wrote that night, alone and miserable in his attic—“I am absolutely fine and my head is buzzing from all the seminars and lectures, though I miss you terribly as ever. One bad thing however is that I had a pal who recently let me down.”