I was ready to depart when, as if in a rerun movie, the long black limousine again swept towards me, halted, and, not melodramatic, but precisely timed, and, in beige overcoat open, showing well-pressed grey, blue-and-white bow-tie, the Elk Lord, Bear Victor, stepped out. The Herr General, whom I had subliminally expected.
I had envisaged a head bald as a helmet, sunken shoulders, a deposed figure despite association with high-rise Prince Louis-Ferdinand and Hollywood, stooping from errors too shameful.
Though less broad and commanding than I remembered, he at once made me absurdly young and, though the taller, still looking up at him. No Bismarck, he was at least a senior executive, without sag, in command. Beneath carefully set grey hair, his eyes were no longer cobalt blue but keen, fixed above folds only slightly stained by age and now glinting with polite, slightly ironic goodwill.
While we stood silent, appraising, I was aware that though he had lost huntsman’s vigour he retained a measure of youth, that of the lotioned, cold-bath Englishman. The brown, creased face had left its nose isolated, a citadel resisting decay, complementing the eyes. There still lurked amusement at a gullible world. The tie, with its discreet stars and diagonals, his patrician brogues, must contrast with my boots and jacket, as if I were a groom seeking employment. Examining me, he was now the champion golfer assessing a longish putt, then was first to move. He had always been first to do anything.
He extended hands, not to shake mine, or embrace, but as though holding a package as he had done so often, the welcome family intimate, bringing a bottle of Cointreau, epicene box of chocolates, a waisted jar of sprats.
With trained negligence, voice still deep, well oiled, he nodded. ‘They told me you had come. The revalidated mortgage gives me rights of possession.’
They? Father borrowing unwisely? Suddenly, that long-remembered elder-brother smile was unnerving. Confused, I scarcely realized that we were walking not to the house but on the old track into Forest. The ground was frosty but damp, the narrow path manageable despite bramble and sapling. Blurred thoughts solidified into guarded curiosity while he strode ahead, speaking over his shoulder as though no war or crime had interrupted us and giving an uncanny illusion of marching towards horizons, trees dissolving before him. Expertly, intent on his fine clothes, he evaded mole-casts, thorn, branches, nettles, while, lumbering behind, I was already scratched and muddied.
As always, his words rolled as if on castors, like a barrister’s.
‘I enjoy the young, perhaps in what the Viennese conjurors term sadomasochism.’ The path widened, and I was alongside him, being regarded with the hint of malice due to an old friend. He resumed more softly, as it were between parentheses.
‘You were always responsive; your smile must have brought you many friends, though, like myself, you probably doubted whether social converse gave authentic insights. Did not Voltaire or Talleyrand believe that man was given speech in order to conceal his thoughts? You were a handsome boy, shyly unaware of your charm, the gift from your mother. Later…’ he paused, not, as I was intended to believe, to find a way around a pool of mud but surely more carefully to select his words, ‘the vaudeville of wartime life and livelihood deposited me in the USSR, for a while enduring the barely endurable. Until certain of my abilities were commandeered. I soon realized that Marxist disdain of capitalist materialism had not influenced the officialdom. Naturally, I often wondered about you. I had provided you with some refuge from storms.’
He was now the mountain guide, supple, omnipotent, imaginative. Unable to query, ask questions, I nevertheless told myself that his fluency could effortlessly revise his career to fit new circumstances, repel accusations. The small, dry twitch of one edge of his mouth somehow placed me at further disadvantage, the dumb schoolboy. That I was now the physically superior embarrassed me with intimations of disloyalty. Count Pahlen would not have been proud of me.
An observer would see only two leisured greyheads under fresh buds and green hollows. Neither confessing nor boasting but astutely conversational, he answered questions I had not asked, producing a balance sheet impersonal in his exactness. I wondered whether he had read Secret Protocol, its implicit condemnation of so many like himself.
‘The good folk of my own youth, Erich, were unfailingly courteous, well read, seeded in tolerance and breeding, yet toying with a culture virtually extinct, wasting their strength. Pouring it into over-manured soil. Their traditions, their etiquette, made them wish only to preserve. In crisis that they had unwittingly provoked, they were powerless.’
We were stepping over fungi speckled and red, spotty fern, yellow-green points, while, almost audibly, he continued marshalling trim sentences.
‘Who can tell how oft he offendeth? In Soviet Russia, as in National Socialist Germany, and in certain quarters of the United States, I took lessons from the uncultured and primitive. Das russiche Gemüt. I realized the limitations of bookishness, though respecting Mr Emerson’s writ, that prayers are the disease of the will, creeds the sickness of the intellect. Evidence shows me that while human behaviour is flexible human nature, despite the adornments, is not.’
We stopped at a grassy clearing. My images of former times were overtaken by that of Hagen, acquisitive destroyer. The setting itself was Wagnerian or of illustrations in a volume of legend. Trees, birds, sunlight fragmented by branches, many still skeletal and dark, a shrill bird, undergrowth stirrings. No more than at an old-fashioned tutorial would I interrupt. Nor, as yet, had I anything to say.
‘The Spartans, my boy, periodically culled their slaves as our forebears did bears and wolves. It carried danger, in trusting to a subordinate docility that had limits. In sixteenth-century Rajput wars, the men besieged in Chiter, finally, very meekly, marched out, unarmed, in peaceful saffron, to be massacred, their women flocking to indulge in mass widow-burnings. Both examples I found instructive in my military courses. Docility, resignation, meekness were inappropriate for survival beyond 1914.’
Still the man in uniform, he was solicitous, intimate, preparing justification for the unmentioned, which might prove unmentionable. Again on the path, we were reaching a band of heath, grey flecked with yellow, breathing space, before another thick shadow of Forest.
‘Never, Erich, have I been allured by the past. Romance is merely distance. Handfuls of the best forgotten. You will have read Sallust.’ Sarcasm beneath the statement was blatant. ‘I recommend him. He presents authentic, if jaundiced, insights into motives behind cruelty. In Soviet prison I noted the supercilious unconcern of doctors towards babies they judged unsuitable to live, they, themselves, haunted by fear, even terror. As for us Germans, Nietzsche considered they belonged to the day before yesterday, were avid for the day after tomorrow but lacked any today. It will be interesting to encounter the disposition of the Fourth Reich.’
He negotiated a patch of bog, adroitly sidestepping, while I floundered, distracted not by Sallust or Nietzsche but by the assumption that I was still German, I had long thought myself supranational but English in disliking extravagance, in respect for privacy and impatience with those they called busybodies.
His words were very distinct, almost visible, in the sharp air. ‘We must never overlook the compulsions towards rebirth. Wiedergeburt. I had to manoeuvre through disreputable company east and west of the Elbe. We must live, most of us, however meagre the excuses for doing so. One ruler, Marcus Aurelius, wrote that life resembles not dancing but wrestling. Just so. I myself from the start, even in your own house, recognized the importance of blat – words in the right quarter, useful connections, polite influence. Certain smiles, pledges, clothes, the nuance of handshakes.’