The Invisible Victory

'Of course I'm not!' Jeff was 'kidding', as an Englishman 'chaffed'. But I could never be certain how thick his cushion of amiability was between jest and truth. In the end I thought it wise to invite her. She rose wearily, not recognizing me until about to sit down at our table. I introduced _Herr Beckerman aus Amerika,_ and asked, 'What's your name?'

'Magda.'

'You're not from Cologne, surely?'

'From Vienna.' She crossed her hands modestly in the lap of her mauve shot-silk dress. I noticed how much more heavily made up she was.

'Don't I G Farben pay enough?'

She gave an unfriendly look. 'I'm of a large family.' She added, as though she were moonlighting as a respectable waitress or shopgirl, 'Everyone has to take a second job in Germany.'

'Ask what she wants to drink,' interrupted Jeff in English, impatient at exclusion from the conversation.

'Champagne,' Magda said automatically.

We held a three-cornered conversation in English and German over the bottle. Jeff never learned German, partly from impatience and partly because he feared the natives could outsmart him in their own language. Magda smiled as I translated his gallantries, but she struck me as acting badly the _fine de joie._ 'How much does she charge?' Jeff enquired abruptly.

Magda told me fifty marks, about four pounds.

'Why don't you go with her?' asked Jeff amiably. He took out his wallet and fluttered a fifty-mark note on the table. 'I'll grub-stake you-if that's the correct expression.'

'Don't be ridiculous! I couldn't possibly pick up a girl so blatantly.'

'A man who goes off with a whore in secret is like a man who goes off drinking in secret. If I kept either from my friends, I'd be ashamed of myself.'

Jeff's tone had become abrasive, but I was more frightened of the girl than of him. Two years ago, incited by the easygoing tales of fellow-undergraduates at Trinity who were richer and worldlier than myself, I had shopped along the gaudy pavements of London's West End and picked up a tart near Marble Arch. Though I had saved for three months, I could not afford the best, and in my subsequent remorse feared that I had picked the worst. I had sponged the parts involved with dilute hydrochloric acid, which suggested itself to a chemistry student as a promising antiseptic. The result was a raw redness for which I dared invoke neither medical advice nor friendly sympathy, and I had no wish to find myself repeating the experiment. But Jeff pressed me, with the amiable wickedness of a man watching another slide into his own sins. I gave in.

Magda told us that she lived beyond the Hohenstaufen-ring, the first arc of boulevards and squares which spread round old Cologne like the ripples from a stone. Jeff offered us a lift. Magda suddenly became animated as she climbed into the Cord, lightly touching the steering-wheel, the shiny instruments, the gear lever and brake in open-mouthed reverence. It struck me that she had never before been in a car at all.

_'Ein wunderbarer Auto,' _she breathed.

'Fantastiche,' Jeff corrected her, glowing with satisfaction as he pulled on his gauntlets.

Magda stopped us at the corner of Mozartstrasse, a broad and prosperous street, saying we could walk the rest. She clearly did not wish to arrive in such grandeur. Jeff said he would find a bar, and call Heike in Berlin. He had an extravagance towards tile telephone which I thought admirably American. 'I'll be back in half an hour-have a good time,' he called, roaring away and leaving a smell of high-grade petrol.

I self-consciously took Magda's arm, in equal parts aroused and ashamed. Without speaking a word, she led me towards a narrow side-street lying in the glow of a sickly gas-lamp. I had imagined our destination some disreputable small hotel or bug-infested lodging-house. As she opened the green door in a four-storied narrow terrace dwelling, I realized with alarm that I was being taken home.

The tiny hallway was unlit. I followed her towards a narrow flight of stairs with broken banisters. In gaslight seeping from a door above, a small boy and girl were grinning at me

I stopped. Desire fled. Vice in such domestic surroundings was ridiculous. 'I don't want to,' I said.

Magda turned. 'You'll still have to pay me.'

I pushed at her Jeff's fifty-mark note, which she folded carefully and put in her large brown handbag. I turned to the door, eager to be out of the place. Then I imagined myself standing half an hour on a freezing street corner. 'Could I have some coffee?' I asked plaintively.

Silently, Magda led me to a kitchen downstairs at the back, stone-floored and lit by the glow of the stove. An old man smoking his pipe rose and left at once, bowing to me with a deference which doubled my feelings of guilt. Magda removed her imitation leather overcoat and lit the gas-mantle. I heard scuffling upstairs. The house was as crammed with humans as a warren with rabbits. 'You've a large family, you said?'

'Four brothers.' She added sourly, 'All out of work.'

'Was that your father?'

'Yes.' She moved a saucepan of coffee on to the black iron stove. 'He's an engineer, but he lost everything when the mark fell to zero. So did everyone else, of course.' She spoke as if describing a bad summer which had ruined their holidays.

I sat at a small, rough wooden table which smelt of onions. 'How long have you been at I G Farben?'

'Since the summer. I should have been a chemist, you know. I'm well educated. But in Germany today, nobody can achieve what they deserve. All I do is keep the place clean and look after the laboratory animals.'

'What's Professor Dr Domagk like to work for?'

'He likes to keep himself to himself. He's all right, except when anyone makes a mistake. Not just me, one of the other doctors or chemists. Then he just blows up.' She screwed a finger-tip against her temple. 'His mind works so fast, he's always a jump ahead.'

'What sort of dyes is the professor trying to turn into medicines?' I asked, partly from curiosity, partly from mischievousness over their secrecy.

She replied in her dull way, 'How should I know? Almost every day another compound comes to be tested from Dr Mietzsch and Dr Klarer.'

I had the feeling of meeting an acquaintance in a foreign land. I had heard at Cambridge of Dr Fritz Mietzsch, the chemist who in 1930 had synthesized a drug for the treatment of malaria. The disease had formerly been dosed with quinine, Nature's product from cinchona bark in Peru-the 'Jesuit's bark', which the ague-racked Oliver Cromwell stoutly refused to let stick in his throat. Sitting in Magda's kitchen, I remembered that the name of Mietzsch's new anti-malarial chemical was mepacrine hydrochloride, but that I G Farben had dressed it in the fancy title of 'Atebrin'. I also recalled that mepacrine hydrochloride was an acridine derivative, a bright yellow synthetic dye. Was Domagk trying to cure other tropical infections? I wondered. But Domagk had spoken to me of using dyes against 'various bacteria', which to the precise scientist did not mean the parasites causing malaria or other tropical diseases, but the streptococcus and staphylococcus and tubercule bacillus which swarmed so richly round mankind everywhere. I repeated, 'What dyes?'

'Why are you so interested? Were you sent to Germany as a spy?' She poured the coffee into a pair of enamel mugs.

'Secrets and cheese go bad with keeping, Frдulein. People begin to smell them. Are they yellow acridine dyes?' I persisted as she sat beside me. 'Remember, I've given you fifty marks tonight.'

'It makes no difference to me if I spend half an hour with you down here or upstairs.' She jerked her head upwards. 'I'm forced into it by the system,' she continued bitterly. 'By what's happening in Germany. Everyone at each other's throats and the politicians in Berlin squabbling like washerwomen. Perhaps everything will change with Hitler. He certainly seems to know what's wanted.'

'But I admire you. Doing that to provide for your family.'