Therefore Choose (13 page)

Peter's work had taken him to the East End, and he'd been introduced there to Chinese restaurants. They weren't expensive. He and George learned how to eat with chopsticks. They made a hobby of sampling the restaurants and trying to understand what the waiters were saying.

They were in a restaurant on Commercial Road, and George said, “Is the civil service pretty much what you expected? I was always impressed that you knew what you wanted to do.”

“The Whitehall system's not bad. Civil servants know how stuff works, and we tell ignorant ministers what to do. The next project is to work out how to get them to listen.”

“I wonder what medicine will be like. Being in a hospital is all right. But I still have hankerings to write.”

“A lot of writers do something to earn a crust.”

“You once thought of going on at Cambridge, getting a history fellowship.”

“I don't have something from the past that I'm burning to do research on, so I'm doing my bit to try to construct the future.”

“Not utopian communities?”

“The next round of that will be dystopian communities: the Soviet Union, Italy, Germany …”

“D'you remember that chap Werner Vodn? He went back to Germany after he'd spent a year at Cambridge, and now he's at Freiburg. He's become very keen on a philosopher called Heidegger. I went to the library and tried to read something of his,
Being and Time.
I could understand the words, but the sentences rather defeated me.”

“That's because in England the idea of philosophy is to be clear, and on the Continent it's to be obscure because that will make you think harder.”

“No, really …”

“I'm serious.”

“But you've heard of Heidegger?”

“He's one of the few members of the German professoriate of whom the Nazis are fond. They've installed him as head of a university there.”

“At Freiburg.”

“You've got it.”

In December of 1937, Anna travelled again to visit George.

In March 1938, Austria was annexed, and Greater Germany was declared.

In the summer George again travelled to Berlin, to stay with Anna. He took the train to Freiburg to spend two days with Werner, who had changed the topic of his thesis to the question of authenticity and its relation to being in the world. He was as immersed as ever in ideas, eager to explain them to George. Once again George felt a sense of intellectual excitement with him, quite different from anything he experienced in medicine. Had their relationship not changed when George and Anna had got together, George could almost have believed they were undergraduates again.

In September of 1938, with George back in London again, the newspapers were full of the Munich Crisis. The German-speaking people of the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia objected to the policies of the nationalist Czech government, and Hitler demanded annexation of the region to Germany. Czechoslovakia had treaties with the French and the Russians. War seemed inevitable. But government leaders met in Munich, and, to the surprise of everyone, an agreement was reached: Britain and France acceded to Hitler's demands. “The last territorial claim which I have to make in Europe,” said Hitler. The Czechs felt betrayed and, at the beginning of October, the German army marched into the Sudetenland.

The threat of war in Europe had receded. George thought that, perhaps, he might surprise Anna. It would not be long now before he'd be finished. He could just arrive, with his qualification in his pocket. He would then need only to complete his house jobs to become a fully independent medical practitioner.

On November 10, the following appeared in
The Times
:

NAZI ATTACKS ON JEWS

ORGY OF HITLER YOUTH

SYNAGOGUES BURNT

DESTRUCTION AND PLUNDER

The Jews in Germany and Austria were subjected yesterday, by way of reprisal for the death of Herr vom Rath, to an organized campaign of plunder, destruction, and violence.

Most of the Berlin synagogues were destroyed by fire and the Jewish shops were wrecked and looted. In Vienna the synagogues were blown up with bombs and thousands of Jews were arrested. The Jews in Munich, which was the scene of similar systematic rioting, were ordered to leave within 48 hours.

George wrote immediately to Anna to say he had read of these terrible events.

Civilized society is being torn apart
, he wrote.
You must leave immediately, come to England. As soon as you arrive, we'll get married.

George wondered, What does Werner think? Appalling, in a civilized country. Innocent people. A state vendetta. He thought of the discussions at Cambridge, about the nature of dictatorships, about how every political purpose needs to overcome mere scruples. Perhaps Werner would organize protests. His hero Wittgenstein was Jewish; he suddenly remembered Werner telling him so. Why did he know that?

In the days that followed, articles appeared about how Jews were being forced out of their businesses and out of their homes. No one need doubt now the extent of the violence of which the Nazis were capable, even towards their own citizens. No one need doubt now that Jews had no place in Germany. No one need doubt now that the kind of civil society that once existed there had been abolished.

In her reply to his urgent letter
, Anna said her magazine's office had been ransacked. The raid occurred in the middle of the night. She was unharmed, she said, and Judit and Odile were both safe. The magazine had been closed by the authorities.

George wanted to go to Berlin to be with her, but he had final exams. Without waiting for her replies, he wrote a stream of letters to Anna.

Ten days later, Anna wrote to say she was to start work at a large publisher of medical books. She said she made her decision partly because she thought she would meet medical people, from whom she could get advice about her mother, who had become ill again and was finding it difficult to breathe.

George had started to acquire some clinical sense of cancer. He read about breast cancer. He read that, not infrequently after a radical mastectomy, there would be a recurrence, sometimes a spread to the lungs or bones. When that happened there was little that could be done. He decided he could not write this to Anna. When she came over to see him in December, if she asked, he could tell her.

If George shut his eyes, he could almost produce an image of Anna, but not quite. Is that why we need photographs? When they were living together in the flat in Berlin, Anna had brought a camera home from her office one weekend, and they'd taken photos of each other. He kept one inside the cover of a notebook. He had taken it as Anna sat reading, with a glow of light that slanted through an open window … But without the photo, if he tried to remember her, the image was so insubstantial as scarcely to exist.

At the end of November, Anna said that, with her new job, she could not come to London in December. She could not take time off.

In the middle of December, George travelled to Berlin.

George found Anna distressed about her mother, who was now quite ill. She had gone at last to a doctor, who told her that the cancer had come back and had affected a lung. George decided it would be best to be noncommittal about her prospects.

Anna was distressed, too, about her magazine. Judit had gone immediately back to Amsterdam, and a few weeks later Odile returned to Paris.

It was difficult for George and Anna to feel close.

George had written to Werner, who was still in Freiburg, but he said he was unable to come to Berlin.

“I thought Werner might come while I was here,” George said to Anna. “But he says not. He says he was here in November.”

“To visit libraries,” said Anna.

“Did you see much of him?”

“November was a terrible month,” said Anna.

“Your other friends?”

“Since the magazine closed, I've not seen many people. I saw Odile only twice before she left.”

Over Christmas, Anna travelled to Dresden to see her mother and father. She asked George not to come because it would make her mother anxious if there was a guest to look after. He stayed in her flat until she returned.

George felt he understood himself better than when he first met Anna. He felt he was more in charge of himself. He thought he did love her.

On New Year's Day of 1939, he said, “You remember you talked of a bridge, that one person can see, and can ask the other to cross, together. I didn't cross when you saw it. Now there is another bridge, which I can see. Things have become unendurable here. Please move to England. We can marry straight away.”

She looked at him, kindly, for a long time.

“You are still regretting the decision you made,” she said.

“Perhaps. But it is past. This is now.”

“For you it's a continuation of then.”

“Well?”

“You know you touched something in me, otherwise I would not have been able to see you with such huge intervals.”

“You're prevaricating.”

“I can't do it, George. On your part, you're asking me out of guilt, or regret perhaps. On my part, I can't leave. You know I can't.”

“It's not guilt or regret. It's because I want to be with you.”

She regarded him with melancholy.

“You should leave,” he said. “Your father will look after your mother. You are more at risk than they are. The Nazis already took offence at your magazine. They don't tolerate the kind of person you are, or what you want to do. You no longer have the magazine to be responsible for.”

“I can't,” she said.

“Look what's happening. Everyone can see what's happening. Huge armaments are being built. Hitler did not become more moderate after the Munich Agreement. Everyone feels there will be a war.”

“It would be cowardly to leave.”

“You have joined a political opposition?”

“I can't leave,” she said.

George thought of the conversation with Anna in the Café Bauer. Should he have accepted? No, he thought. I was right. There was a certain calm in Europe in 1936 and some of 1937. But during that time Germany had been rearming, the Wehrmacht had been growing. Then came annexation of sovereign countries. Then came Kristallnacht. It may not have been so clear before. Now everyone could see what was happening. Thousands were leaving Germany, not just Jews. They realized this was no longer a society in which it was decent to live. Why does Anna not realize it? thought George. She has a passport. She could leave now, more easily than before. If we married she would immediately become British.

George thought repeatedly about what they should have done, and what they should do.

Despite her magazine having closed, Anna would make remarks, still, to assert that everything was literature.

“You should read this,” she would say. “There's a new movement taking place, about being, about becoming. It's very important.”

Does she still mean it? George would wonder. He thought that perhaps she was saying these things mechanically now, going through the motions still, not because she was involved with them, but as if to reassure herself.

She said she would not move to England. How can I object? thought George. I didn't accept her offer. Now she does the same to me. Tit for tat? Or is she stubborn? Does she want things only on her terms? She asked me to choose, to go along this path rather than that one. Sometimes one has to do that, without knowing where the path will lead. Does one ever know?

With her he had felt in touch with someone, another soul, completely engaged: as if that connection was the very centre of purpose for us human beings. He was distressed that they no longer felt so close. People say you can never really know another person. Is that true? It's irrelevant. We don't even know ourselves. But being mentally in touch with another person is possible. With Anna it had been palpable.

At the beginning of June 1939
, a letter in its foreign-looking envelope with its German stamps waited in the hall of the Leytonstone house when George returned from the hospital. Anna's letter was always something he looked forward to. He called “hello” to his mother, ran up the stairs, and sat at his desk. He switched on his desk light, opened the letter, and spread its two pages of thin paper in front of him.

Dearest George,

I know this will shock and upset you, but please do not be upset. Werner and I are married.

What you and I were doing, going back and forth between Berlin and London, had become too difficult, and things here are too much changed. People think there will soon be a war, and Werner has joined the Wehrmacht.

We wondered about inviting you to the wedding, but we thought that would be unkind. It was a very small event …

George continued to read. She wrote about their conversation in the Café Bauer, in 1936. She wrote that she believed that George thought she was too romantic when she asked him to stay in Berlin while she knew he was due to start his clinical training, and that is why he didn't trust that something decided in that way could last. But, she said, he had misunderstood her. One does not make decisions and wait to see what will happen, or whether the decision would be better than some other decision one might make. It is the other way round. One makes a choice to live one's life in a certain way, and throws oneself into it. One becomes the person who has acted and chosen in that way.