I turned to see what Gerda had made of it. She was in tears, biting her knuckles, shaking with anger. 'Oh! The swine,' she cried in disappointment. 'The swine, spoiling my evening.'
'Perhaps we can get our money back,' I suggested, taking the practical view.
'Why did they want to do that? _Why did they? _I was so enjoying it.'
'Let's go and have some coffee instead.'
'It was all so innocent, so nice. Why did they want to spoil it?' she repeated furiously.
'The film doesn't fit in with their politics, I suppose.'
'What have politics to do with going to the cinema?' she demanded. 'I've been looking forward to this evening, ever since I first thought you were trying to ask me.'
We had a cup of coffee and went home. Naturally, we never got our money back. But Gerda remembered the evening. She laughed when I reminded her last summer, in the little gravel and shrub garden of her house near the Zoo at Wuppertal, a town now as bright and glittering in the smokeless air as Wordsworth's London, the Wupper between banks of well clipped municipal grass beneath the Schwebebahn as sweetly flowing as Edmund Spenser's Thames. Wuppertal has become so clean and odourless she says it is like living in a convalescent hospital.
5
The big black dog became a monster with eyes of firelit emeralds, the white steep-roofed cottage which it guarded dazzled us for a second then reeled into the darkness. We sped through a cramped village with an angular, elegantly spired church and past farmhouses cheerlessly black, countrymen the world over turning their backs on the night. On a hill I caught the turreted outline of a schloss, ahead wet bare trees, snow falling thinly between them and swirling on the ground as it never did in England, broad sheaves of telephone wires undulating gently from post to post as far as we could see. It was about eight in the evening of Monday February 27, a fortnight after my excursion with Gerda. Jeff Beckerman was taking me for a night out in Cologne. The distance was about thirty miles, the road running south along the River Wupper through Solingen, a town famous like Sheffield for scissors and knives. The autobahn still lay in the mind of Germany's new ruler, with a lot of other things.
Jeff Beckerman laughed. 'You're scared.'
'I'm not used to motoring,' I said shortly. My father could never have owned a car, even when Mr Morris of Oxford was putting wheels under the British masses.
'She could do a hundred miles an hour, if the road was good.'
I watched uneasily as the speedometer needle hovered round sixty. Jeff drove a car which I had never heard of before nor seen since, a Cord L29 Phaeton which he had shipped extravagantly from America in contempt for the Bugattis and Bentleys, the Delahayes and Alfas, which fulfilled the need for mobility and cutting a dash among Europe's young bloods. It was long and white, its silvery headlights a foot across, its running boards merging into a pair of front mudguards as elegant as an actress's eyebrows. I am a mechanical ignoramus, but I gathered that it was designed by a man called Erret Lobban Cord to be propelled through the front wheels, and that our whitewall-tyred spares were strapped either side of the enormous flat bonnet because these front wheels had a tendency to fall off.
'Berlin was _fantastiche, _utterly _fantastiche.'_ The word had just superseded _wunderbar_ in Jeff Beckerman's conversation. 'Berlin's nothing like Wuppertal. It's nothing like the rest of Germany. It's like America, only more like America than America could ever dare-you get me? Berlin's _real. _The skin's torn off, you can see the raw flesh and nerves underneath. I had the feeling that no one was playing a part, not the girls in the cabarets, the pimps and the crooks, they _revel_ in what they're doing. Even the whores put their heart and soul into their job.'
My employer did not spend much time in Wuppertal. He preferred leaving his brewery to Herr Fritsch, the grey-faced elderly manager in his pince-nez and 'butterfly', as the Germans called a wing collar. Jeff was interested in Germany, in the bouncy way he was interested in women or his car. He regarded his exile as an educative jaunt before returning to New York and getting down to the serious business of making a million. 'What about our brown-shifted friends?' I asked. 'Didn't they spoil your fun?'
'Why should they, old man?' Jeff often used this expression which is sprinkled on English conversation like salt, but always getting it a little wrong by putting the emphasis on the end, sounding slightly sneering. 'You don't have to walk into trouble, neither in Berlin nor Chicago.'
'You don't rate Adolf Hitler's gangsters more dangerous than Al Capone's?'
'I don't. Capone runs a gang of crooks, Hitler's are disciplined like the Army.' With his teeth, he pulled off his leather gauntlet, a reflector of chiselled red glass on the back-the latest thing for displaying driving signals. From the pocket of his ankle-length black leather motoring coat, a trophy from Berlin, he produced a packet of Chesterfields. 'What are the newspapers saying about Hitler in England?'
'I don't know. My mother sends me the _Sunday Graphic_ every week, but it seems filled with pictures of the Royal Family.'
I lit the cigarette jutting from his full lips. Jeff was five or six years older than me, red faced and too fleshy, but still giving the impression of an athlete. He wore his brown hair _en brosse,_ his heavy eyebrows transecting his face as a single bar. He enjoyed a long-standing intimacy with money, which reduced it to a reckoning in his daily plans no more intrusive than breathing. Like many Americans, his life was a tropical sea of hedonism traversed by occasional icebergs of puritanism. His father owned chemical companies in New York State-but of course he was making a fortune from bootlegging. The Beckermans brewed beer long before dropping their final 'n' en route from Hamburg to Ellis Island, and would brew it again when American thirsts might be legally slaked.
Jeff enjoyed a simultaneous reverence and contempt for academics with First Class degrees like myself. He respected me as the only man in Wuppertal with whom he could hold an intelligent conversation. But he would have offhandedly packed me home with barely the fare in my pocket. He could be very simple or very shrewd, equally infuriatingly. He might have inhabited the America of Scott Fitzgerald, which vanished in a similar puff of misunderstanding, ridicule, nostalgia and shame as the British Empire. _The Great Gatsby_ had been on bookshelves for seven years, but I doubt if he had read it. Jeff only read books which helped him to get on.
The journey was bone-shaking, snow seeping round the celluloid side-screen. Jeff had lent me his raccoon coat, and I still wore my Trinity scarf. The road ran close to the huge pharmaceutical works at Leverkusen, a blue circle in the sky as tall as the factory chimneys which supported it proclaiming twice BAYER, the words crossed at the Y.
Kцln glittered in the diamonds of a road sign. I had not returned there since New Year's Eve, when I had changed trains at the Hauptbahnhof in the shadow of its dazzling skyscraper of a cathedral. Jeff took the Hohenzollern Bridge across the Rhine, the river which flows through the German soul.
He cursed. The far end of the bridge was blocked by another of the uniformed processions which crawled like worms over the body of Germany. This one presented 'the torchlight red on sweaty faces'. The Brown Shirts were stamping between the Cathedral and the Tankgasse, small knots of spectators in the falling snow raising arms through enthusiasm or prudence, while flankers pressed pamphlets upon them.
Jeff had to stop. The ends of the bridge, the walls everywhere, were plastered with posters. Hitler had dissolved the Reichstag, there was to be yet another election the following Sunday, March 5. As a foreigner, I found neither significance nor even identity in the dreary gallery of political faces-except Adolf Hitler's, as instantly recognizable today, with his lower middle-class, Austrian 'little man' moustache, which you still see decorating street-cleaners and tram conductors in Vienna. _Deutschland Eswache!_ cried the Nazis' posters. They had stolen the vivid red of their Communist arch-enemies, their message in Gothic type always angry, vituperative and vile, and always highly effective.