‘Part of the trouble’, I said, ‘was that I didn’t know your maiden name.’
‘It wouldn’t have been much use to you. Schmidt. Now where are those girls?’
It seemed to be a dusk-to-dawn delirium, and of viral force — shallow, semi-conscious nightmares, nightmares of impotence. I strained to lift or shift an endless series of cumbrous and almost immovably heavy objects; then I tried and failed to force my way through thick portals made of gold and lead; in shameful incapacity I fled from or cowered before grinning enemies; naked, and shrivelled to nothing, I was laughed and taunted out of bedrooms, boardrooms, ballrooms. Finally my teeth began to waltz around my jaws, changing places, hiding behind one another, till I spat them all out like a mouthful of rotten nuts and thought, It is done. I cannot eat, talk, smile, or kiss.
Outside the weather was neutral, only exceptionally still.
*
Hannah had told me to meet her at the bandstand behind the Freizeitgelande — the recreation ground. Everyone knows it. She also said that she had an hour. This was stated, simply. I resolved of course to be punctual; and I would be punctual in my leaving, too.
I went downstairs and ordered a breakfast I couldn’t eat. So I went back up and bathed and shaved, and when it was half past ten I took from the sink the bunch of flowers I had bought the evening before, in the Grand, and started off.
Three times I asked the way, and three times I was directed with the same grave attentiveness (as if these passers-by were prepared to accompany me — or even carry me — to my rendezvous). I circled the train station, which was evidently functioning (though you could see in the middle distance a giant’s climbing frame of mangled track), and crossed two block-sized bomb sites, cleared of rubble but still redolent of doused gasoline. All this (according to one of my guides) from the raids of mid April ’45, the last of them on April 21, by which time the Russians were in Berlin and already shelling the Chancellery. The bombers were British — the least hateful and the least hated (and the least anti-Semitic) of all the combatants. Well, I would later think, wars get old; they get grizzled and smelly and rotten and mad; and the bigger they are the faster they age…
Next, the playing field (three teenagers with a soccer ball each, playing keepy-uppy), and the circular pond — a clan of ducks, a lone swan. The great bell of St Kaspar’s, with portentous three-second intervals, was gonging eleven as I settled on a bench in plain sight of the circular bandstand, where a few old bods in worn blue serge with gilt buttons were packing up a few old trumpets and trombones. Against a sky as colourless and as neutral as tracing paper, rather sedately dressed in matching jersey and long skirt, all cotton, all dark blue, here she came — reduced (we were all reduced), but still tall, broad, and full, and still light-footed. I stood up.
‘These of course are for you. To make you feel like a film star.’
‘Amaryllis,’ she said, in sober identification. ‘With stems as thick as leeks. Give me a moment and I’ll wedge them in the water.’
She had to kneel to do it. When she straightened up, and removed a blade of grass from her sleeve, I felt again that complex pleasure, with its strange elements of pity and delight. Doing this, or that, this way, and not that way. Her habits, her choices, her decisions. With sharp desire, and also with a press of dread, I knew that her hold on my senses was intact and entire; it was plangent but also humorous somehow, this hold, making me want to laugh, making me want to cry.
‘Please be assured that my expectations are very low.’ I had my hands face to face as if in prayer, but they moved, too, nodding in time as I said, ‘A correspondence. Perhaps some kind of friendship…’
This was acknowledged. I said,
‘Because it may well be that nothing can be salvaged. That wouldn’t surprise us, I don’t think.’
‘No, it wouldn’t.’ She looked around. ‘Nothing else has lasted, has it, from that time. Not even a building or a statue.’
I produced a pack of Lucky Strike; we both took one, and the flame of my lighter was solid and still (no wind, no weather). ‘Mm, I suspect I know why you were unhappy when I — when I reappeared.’
‘Look, I don’t want to be mean. But what makes you think I’ve stopped being unhappy? I’ve gone on being unhappy. I’m unhappy now.’
This in turn was acknowledged. She said,
‘Don’t think it’s just you. I’ve been living in dread of seeing anyone at all from back then. I don’t think I could even bear seeing little Humilia. Who’s all right, by the way.’
Her tone was untheatrical — flat and straight, like the level address of her eyes. The dense dark brown hair was the same, the wide mouth was the same, the manly squareness of the jawbone was the same. Two vertical furrows had established themselves on either side of the bridge of her nose — and that was all.
‘I have to be in town by three anyway. At noon I’ll be gone.’
‘… If that’s neurotic, or just plain weak, then I’m just plain weak. It was too much for me. I wasn’t up to it.’
My eyebrows continued to undulate sympathetically, but I found that the whole of my being, and not just my heart, resisted this — rejected it; and with a firmness I couldn’t yet understand. I said nothing.
‘I can’t stop imagining I’ll see Doll. That’s how nuts I am. I’d die if I saw him.’ She shuddered, she writhed, and said, ‘I’d certainly die if he touched me.’
‘He can’t touch you.’
There was a long silence. There had been several long silences. And now St Kaspar’s reproachfully sounded the quarter-hour.
‘Can we talk more blandly for a while? Go on about your job. And then I’ll calm down.’
‘Well, it’s not quite a change of subject,’ I said; but I too felt the need to talk more blandly, for a while. So I told her about my job. The eight million completed questionnaires, and the five grades of classification, all the way from Nonincriminated to Major Offender.
‘The fifth one. That’s the one my late husband qualified for.’
‘Sorry. Yes.’ I hesitated. ‘But let me — let me be earnest and tell you about the side of it that really interests me.’
My extracurricular work had little to do with victors’ justice (as if, after a war, there was any other kind). It concerned itself with the Bundesentschadigungsgesetz, or the guidelines on reparations: victims’ justice. In this case indemnities for murdered relatives, for years lost to slavery and terror, and for persisting physical and mental debility (and for the theft of all assets and belongings). My friend David Merlin, a Jewish lawyer and a captain in the US Army (and one of our most brilliant and reviled denazifiers), had recruited me a year earlier; and at first the whole thing felt deeply pertinent and also deeply fanciful — who, at that stage, could imagine a Germany, not only sovereign and solvent, but also sorry? No longer. The new reality — emergent Israel, back in May — was like an injection or an impregnation; and Merlin was already planning an exploratory mission to Tel Aviv. She said,
‘That’s the best thing you could be doing. And all power to you.’
‘Thanks. Thanks. So, anyway, my days are full. I’m busy at least.’
‘Mm. I’m not.’
She said she was having to do more for her folks now — her mother’s hips, her father’s heart.
‘And I teach conversational French for five hours a week. I can’t do any written stuff because of my spelling. You know, the dyslexia. So all I do, really, is raise the girls.’
Who now appeared, drifting into view at the far end of the pond as the half-hour sounded. They came to a halt — and it was clear that they’d been assigned to come and check on their mother. Hannah waved, and they waved back before drifting off again.