Therefore Choose (10 page)

“Your magazine? Don't you worry about it getting into trouble?”

“You're trying to come at me sideways, to see if I won't come to England instead of what I proposed.”

“Well?”

“People didn't want the kind of government we had before, compromises and lack of direction. People want Germany to be strong, pick up where Bismarck left off. That's what's happening. It's vulgar, and I hope it's temporary.”

“But what if it isn't? Why not think of coming to England?”

“You've met Judit and Odile,” said Anna. “And what about my mother?”

“I know they're important,” said George.

Anna looked at him, and seemed, for a moment, abstracted.

“People want to achieve strength in our nation,” she said. “If the Communists had taken over, they would have got rid of a different set of people.”

“There was a parliament. Now it's gone.”

“When I say I hope it's temporary, I mean political squabbling is incessant. The particulars are ephemeral. Look at Dante. There was terrible fighting in those days. He was exiled from Florence. No one but a historian could tell you what the Black Guelphs or the White Guelphs or the Ghibellines were fighting about. Everyone's heard of Dante's vision, of the
Inferno
.”

“But when people are thrown out of their jobs because of their religion …”

What will happen to foreigners in the new Germany? George wondered. First the Communists, then the Social Democrats, sent to prison, or off to one of those camps, Dachau or Sachsenhausen. Next it will be the British, the Dutch, the French … Not just me, he thought. That would be two-thirds of Anna's editorial staff.

“I try to make sense of it,” said Anna. “Europe is out of joint. Mussolini in Italy. Communists against the Nationalists in Spain. The result, which Dante saw in his time, is destruction and confusion. The best I can make of it is that the literature that you and I talk about is different from politics.”

“But you can't ignore this.”

“Literature is on a different plane. If you ask me what I believe, it's that art takes us out of ourselves. Above all this.”

“Not everyone is concerned with art.”

“This picture, this piece of music, this novel,” said Anna, holding out her right hand, open as if it were the thing she was speaking about. “This thing that a human being has made with their mind. That's what it's about.”

“But people here have shown what they want.”

“Ephemeral,” said Anna. “It's in art that human beings become real. The Nazis are hooligans who brawl in the school playground.”

Although George had travelled, in many ways he was limited. He was of his time, an Englishman who could not quite believe what was happening. Huge changes had taken place, and he could not see that people in Germany were reacting in their own way, rather than in the way he would react. He wanted to distance himself from how the German people had behaved, how they continued to behave. It was foreign to him. It was taking place in a foreign country.

Neither did George comprehend the influence of Anna's aristocratic background. He had only the faintest sense that she felt herself above the arbitrariness that had marked Nazi rule. When she said that the political situation was vulgar, he thought she was being dismissive. He did not realize that she felt herself immune from it.

“What I want, with the magazine, is different,” said Anna. “What you want with your writing. Your idea of a novel as a kind of dream that the writer offers and the reader creates, a partnership. Utterly different.”

“You could come to London,” George said. “Do it there.”

“It's not a matter of an alternative proposal,” she said. “Of course you can ask, but my answer to moving to London is ‘No.' I met Judit when we were at university. She was here to study German literature. Then we met Odile. You think they are not important to me, and to what we are doing together?”

“I didn't mean that.”

Anna took George's head in her hands, sought his mouth with hers, kissed him.

“You've become especially important,” she said. “I asked you to consider. Choose to stay here. That's the idea.”

George felt alienated by the imprisonments, by people losing their livelihoods. I'm not German, he thought. If I were, I suppose I would set these against the improvements: more people with jobs, the sense of purpose, hope for the future. After the war ended so badly for them in 1918, the German people felt betrayed. There was the terrible period in the 1920s when inflation was so bad that if you waited two days after you were paid to buy food, prices would have doubled. People went hungry. The economic engine was broken. Stories went round about how people would put banknotes in their stoves because they provided more fuel than the firewood they could buy with them. Perhaps I would feel, thought George, that after such a humiliating beginning to the century, Germany was coming into her own.

Or was it Anna's small centre of reserve? Is that what held George back? Did he fear that he might disappoint her, and that then, however polite and however reasonable, she would no longer be there? Just no longer there. It would be irrevocable.

Anna was shrewd enough to know that by asking him to stay she was taking some responsibility for what would happen to them both. For her, thought George, it would be a kind of experiment, which might come out this way or that. I know about myself that if I were to stay, he thought, I would need to feel committed. The commitment makes me vulnerable. Would that mean commitment to Germany? And if she were suddenly to vanish, decide it was a mistake, what then? Am I strong enough for that?

Three days before
George was due to return to England, it was his turn to go out and buy the bread. When he returned to the top-floor flat, Anna was in the kitchen and had made coffee. He tried again to discuss the idea of her joining him in London. He tried again to explain that he had to begin the clinical part of his medical degree, and that to be accepted into medical school with a scholarship was not so easy.

“If it's medicine,” she said, “you could think about doing it here. You said the other day that all the faculties at the universities are being reduced, but medicine is expanding. You're perfectly qualified: a degree from Cambridge. They would love to have you.”

“It's not just that.”

“You wonder what it will be like, here in Germany. You wonder whether you could do anything here?”

“You mean if I wanted to write a novel?”

“I understand perfectly,” she said. “I don't want you to do anything you don't want to do. I don't. Being with you has affected me completely.”

When Anna said such things, George felt suddenly reassured.

“It's not even a matter to discuss,” she said. “It is more basic than that. Something you could choose. Remember when you came to visit our magazine office? We told you about the French writer we met, who had come to study in Berlin, Jean-Paul Sartre. He talked a lot about contingency.”

“Contingency.”

“For the most part things just happen: not because of anything that is much to do with us. They are accidents, contingent. They affect us. That's all. But if you want — not always, but sometimes — you can make a small bit of the world your own by making a choice.”

“And we could do that?”

“Only if you want to. I understand you're committed to go to London. I like commitment. Depending on what we choose, our world will be different. If you choose to go to London, we'll have to visit each other instead of being together.”

“You seem distant.”

“I don't think so.”

“Mmm.”

“I think it's you. Since I asked you to stay, you have felt awkward in yourself. So you see me as distant. It is called projection.”

“It is?”

“A theory of Sigmund Freud. When you are unconscious of what you feel, you experience it as coming from someone else.”

“I worry we are too far apart, with you being German and me English.”

“There are the usual differences. As an English, you are too self-satisfied. As a Prussian of good family, I am too haughty. But I do not think the national difference is too serious. A difference of social class, perhaps. Exaggerated, perhaps, because I'm a few years older than you.”

“Well.”

“You have not been brought up to the same confidence that I have. You don't have parents who stand in a room and are noticed, whom people acknowledge by a click of their heels.”

“That's how you can ask for things and usually get them?”

“That's how I can ask you to choose. But will you do what I ask? I don't know.”

Is she angry? thought George.

“I'm going now,” she said. “Going to the office.”

George had not thought that she would go this morning. “Will you be long?” he said.

“Don't forget projection,” she said. “See you when I get back.”

He heard her footsteps down the carpeted hallway, heard the door of the flat close.

He sat on the sofa, suddenly in despair. This was impossible.

Three or four minutes later, Anna returned.

“I'm sorry,” she said. “I am being unfair.”

“You're angry with me.”

“I don't get angry very easily. Instead, I withdraw.”

“That's what you're doing?”

“You think I would not be disappointed? You think it makes no difference to me?”

“I don't think that. You seem so … I don't know. So calm.”

“I'm not calm,” she said. “I am trying my best to be calm.”

George suddenly realized they were having a row. The first they'd had. He felt isolated. She was there, he was here, a gulf in between.

“I've been very careful,” she said, “not to let Judit and Odile think my mind was straying because I am involved with a man.”

Something in Anna's tone sounded like an accusation. It made the gulf seem wider.

“I have a mother about whom I worry,” she said. “She says her arm on that side is painful, and she can't carry anything, but she won't go to see her doctor.”

“You're worried that it's come back.”

“She says it's the operation. She says her arm has never been right since then.”

“She's probably right.”

They sat and looked at each other.

Two nights before he was due
to return to London, George lay awake beside Anna as she slept. It was as if she had set him a riddle he could not answer. He thought he was in love, but how does one know? And if he was in love, was that a basis for such a decision?

She made it pre-emptive, he thought. That's what she did. If I'd asked her to marry me and move to England, then I would have got in first, and she would have to think what to do. Was I ever going to ask her that? Of course not. She's right: I've not been brought up with the same kind of confidence. I could ask her now, but it didn't occur to me before.

Mentally, George tried out a different alternative. He tried to imagine living with Anna in Berlin. Although they could not possibly stay in Dagmar's flat, it was the flat that came to mind. An image of a red carpet extended along the hallway, then an image, rather insubstantial, of the bedroom as one looked into it from the door towards where he lay now, and then, not so much an image, but an idea, the balustrade outside the bedroom window. Then, to try to make the comparison with London, he tried to imagine himself going to medical school here. That caused a wave of anxiety. Would he be accepted? Why should he be accepted? In England he had a scholarship. Here he had no money. Even if he had, he couldn't be accepted at this time of year. Then he tried to imagine the political situation. Scenes came to him from the Riefenstahl film, troops lined up by the thousand, troops marching.

But love … wasn't that supposed to be more important than anything? That was what Anna seemed to be saying.

But to live in Germany! How could I decide to do that? George thought. Far better to get on with my clinical training. The Germans aren't friendly to foreigners. That's what I would be: a foreigner. I'd say something wrong and be sent off to a camp as an undesirable. Even if I wanted to leave, what about all that marching and shouting? Ghastly!

The Nazis could make life intolerable here. Anna would realize. They're hostile to the kinds of things her magazine represents. They could make it difficult for her. She would see that she would be better off in London.

At first, when Anna asked him if he would stay with her in Berlin, he thought she was demanding an immediate response. What she said seemed to be an ultimatum. At first he thought he must either say yes or otherwise they would break up, but as they talked they came to something that seemed to be a compromise.

“Just two days and we shall part,” said Anna when they had breakfast next morning.