Therefore Choose (23 page)

Werner gestured again with his hand, in the same configuration, once, twice, three times, four times, each time he extended his arm farther, each gesture with the announcement of each nationality.

“If you English had come to your senses, we could have reached this very same point in 1940. Europe could have stayed Europe, the Germans, the French, the English, instead of being invaded from the East. Why couldn't you see that? Arrogance, that's why. But you see it now, right? Stares you in the face.”

“In 1940 there were people in England who agreed with you,” George said.

“Condescension and arrogance,” said Werner. “Couldn't allow others their rights. Now you've got the Russians. The Iron Curtain. You can see it now. Right?”

“The Russians,” George said.

“Exactly,” said Werner. “Churchill said you had to win at any price. Did he know the price?”

“‘Any price'?”

“Here's the price. I'll tell you the price. Not just the loss of the British Empire. What about the loss in Europe? Not just Germany and England, all of us. Half of Europe gone to the East.”

“The Russians,” George said again.

“You could have seen it coming. Coming home to roost. Pigeons coming home to roost, isn't that the phrase? Or is it chickens coming home to roost?”

Werner became abstracted again, as if engaged in a pressing mental occupation.

Next morning, George went for a walk
on his own, along the city wall on the lower side, vaguely thinking of trying to retrieve the music book Werner had dropped. There were the famous statues of Calvin and Knox and those other Puritans who told us that by no will of our own, by no choice, no action, we are saved or damned. This is the city of Rousseau too, thought George, who told us that a person can be a political leader by embodying the will of the people. Leader, thought George. Führer.

He went back to his hotel room. He tried reading. He went out again. He tried walking again.

Werner was the first person in his life to whom George had felt really close, connected. Now …

What would I have done, George wondered, had I been in his place, a member of a nation that felt on the edge of greatness after long frustration, with the idea of being strong, with the conviction that one must stand up and make sacrifices for one's country?

People are individuals. They make choices. That was what Anna had asked of George. But most of the time, thought George, most of us go along with what seems to be the thing to do, what the society requires. That's it. Like an orchestra. We have a score and we have a conductor. What do we get? The sense of doing something together. We are creatures rather than creators. Wouldn't I have done what he did? And if it came to being ruthless? With a company of gunners I was ruthless enough.

Why then, thought George, do I object to what he says? If I would have done what he did, he must be saying what I would have said. But what if it was the other way round? If he were in my place, would he now think what I am thinking?

When he arrived at the clinic, he went to find the matron to ask her about the piano. She showed it to him. It was in a large room, framed landscapes on the walls, used for meetings, she said. It had once been used for recitals, but not recently.

“Do you think my friend, Werner Vodn, could come in here and play it sometimes? He used to be a fine pianist.”

“I give my permission.”

George lifted the lid of the keyboard, played some notes as the matron looked on. He couldn't play, but he knew some chords to try out …

“It seems to be in tune.”

“It is kept in tune.”

When George found Werner, he said, “I asked the matron, and she says you can play the piano.”

“Already she has told me so,” said Werner.

“Tell me about yourself,” George said. “How have you been? Not the fighting, but since the war finished?”

“Prison camp.”

Another wrong direction: George knew about the terrible conditions that the Allies had maintained, with hundreds of thousands of prisoners of war.

“Where?” said George.

“The Americans,” said Werner. “We were not even animals, potatoes left in the field to rot. Nothing. Nowhere to sleep. Nowhere to take a piss.”

“But it came to an end, and you were released. Did you go home to Konstanz or come straight here?”

“I don't know if it came to an end.”

“I'm sorry.”

“You're sorry?”

“I can't seem to find the right things to talk about. I wanted to see you. You were my closest friend.”

They sat together in silence for five minutes, maybe more.

“It's too soon,” said George. “Perhaps it's too soon. Can I bring you something from the town, a book perhaps?”

“This is what I've got at the moment.”

From his pocket he produced a small booklet.

“D'you know this?
Instructions for British Servicemen in Germany 1944
.”

“I know it.”

Werner started reading. “‘You may also find that many Germans, on the surface at least, seem pleasant enough and they even try to welcome you as friends. All this may make you think they have learned their lesson, but they have much to unlearn. They also have much to atone for.'”

“Someone had to write something for the troops.”

Werner turned some pages. “‘Numbers of German women will be willing, if they can get the chance, to make themselves cheap for what they can get out of you … most of them will be infected.'”

George did not know what to say.

“Here's a good bit. ‘The Mind of the German' — that's a heading. ‘The Germans adore military uniforms …'”

Werner flipped over some pages, from the back towards the beginning of the booklet. “Here's another good bit. ‘Taken as a whole the German is brutal when he is winning, and is sorry for himself and whines for sympathy when he is beaten.'”

“It's of no importance. You know it isn't. What do you expect?”

“What do I expect? What do I expect?”

They were both silent. Then Werner reached into his pocket again and drew out a folded piece of paper.

“Here,” he said. “You'll like this. Direct from your own government, the royal coat of arms at the top, see.”

Werner waved the piece of paper at George.

“Leaflets addressed to the civilian population of Germany,” said Werner. “Dropped in millions all over the country, perhaps when the RAF was bored with dropping bombs. ‘All industrial cities in Germany represent a theatre of war.' That's what it says. ‘Every civilian in this theatre of war is obviously at risk of losing his or her life, as does every civilian who trespasses without authorization onto a battlefield.' What do you think of that?”

“I don't know what to think.”

“It is in German,” he said. “That was the literal translation. Now I'll tell you the deep translation. It's this. You think wars are between soldiers? We have a better idea. We have airplanes, more than you can imagine, and we have bombs, and we have incendiaries that can set a whole city on fire in minutes, and we will bomb and burn every church where you go on Sundays, every school, every hospital, every bedroom where your children sleep each night, obliterate every city, every town. And not just the buildings, every civilian, every woman, every child, every one of your civilian lives.”

The RAF raids on German towns and cities were seen in Britain as a triumph. To the BBC, to the British people, they were sources of satisfaction. Not much fellow feeling there, not much feeling of one civilian population for another.

The two sat silently, perhaps for five minutes.

“Did you finish your thesis on how minds can meet, and on authenticity and being?” said George.

Werner did not reply. He looked at George with an expression that was bleak. But it was direct. George wanted to hold him in his arms. Was that when — wordless — in the course of this journey, they actually met for a moment?

Then the moment was past. Werner looked abstracted again. George started thinking again of how he should think of Werner as a patient. Three thousand years of Western medicine, and we have not the faintest idea of how to deal with people in straits of this kind. It was not just that Werner was a member of a defeated nation, not just that he had been a prisoner of war; the connection that the two of them had made, which George had once thought was strong, which he thought perhaps he had glimpsed again for an instant, was no more.

“I find it difficult to know what I shall do myself,” George said. “The war has defeated everyone. I spent all that time training to be a doctor. Now it feels as if I'd sooner be a fishmonger.”

Werner remained immobile. George talked more about himself, hoping perhaps that if he took the focus off Werner, he would feel better.

“Are you sure there's nothing I can bring you from the town?”

“If I wanted something, I could go myself.”

“I'm sorry. I came to see you because you're my friend. I wanted to see you.”

Werner shrugged his shoulders.

“Tomorrow's my last day here. I have to catch the train in the afternoon.”

“To administer Berlin. No doubt I'll see you tomorrow, before you go.”

In Berlin, George was back to his job
. In the British sector they were still restoring services, still arranging administration. He went to the American sector to try to find his opposite number, but there was no such person. The Americans, perhaps with their idea of democracy, seemed to think the Germans should get on with it themselves.

In the British sector hundreds of people had come out as administrators, people like George, people recently demobbed. Among the people he encountered was Douglas Hinton. It was good to catch up with him.

“You finished your Ph.D.”

“Just before the war started.”

“Were you in it, in the war, I mean?”

“Not in the usual way. I worked on codes, in Buckinghamshire.”

“Better than me,” George said. “First I was up a mountain in Scotland, then I slogged it across Germany, in an artillery regiment.”

Douglas looked at him. Did his face register a certain pity? Was that facial expression a code, George wondered? What did it mean?

“Sorry,” he said. “I can't say any more about what I did. I shouldn't have said anything. It was incredibly interesting; I met some really good people. It's still hush-hush. I can't quite see why. I suppose they think they'll need it against the Russians.”

“You're here now because you speak German?”

“That's one of the reasons. I'm only here for a short time.”

“What you were working on, for your Ph.D.? That was interrupted?”

“Not really. It's been rather helpful, actually. I'm going to the National Physical Laboratory, to work with someone I met during the war. They're building an automatic computing engine. Fantastic.”

“How do you mean?”

“It will be able to do things that previously only human beings could do, solve problems; it'll be exactly like thinking.”

“Have you been back to Würzburg since the war?”

“I've just come back from there. It was demolished. I could scarcely recognize anything. I did find a couple of places I knew, completely smashed. There wasn't a single roof left on any building.”

“There are parts like that here.”

“In Berlin there's parts that survived. In Würzburg, nothing.”

George saw Douglas a couple of times. He seemed embarrassed that his war had not put him in danger, or required him to fight, embarrassed that he couldn't say what he had been working on. Then he was off back to England.

George sometimes met Germans who would talk to him. Some who had stayed in Berlin, some who had come from places that had been destroyed by the bombing, and who had then set off for somewhere else, as if the stages of civilization had reversed themselves, as if after the progression to agriculture and settlement, with the cities destroyed, people reverted to being nomads again, moving without possessions from place to place. What had their lives been like? George with his artillery unit had seen the planes coming in from across the North Sea, hundreds of thousands of bombs.

Here in Berlin, George asked people how they managed to escape the destruction. One woman whom he met had been badly crippled by a bomb. She had been sheltering with her family in a cellar when a raid occurred. The cellar door was blown off, beams and bricks came down. She was holding her five-year-old daughter close to her. Another blast flung her against a wall, knocked her unconscious. When she came round, hours later, she found that she had been carried out of the cellar by her brother, and that her daughter and mother were dead. George felt very disturbed by this woman and could not escape the idea that he was talking to someone he had shelled with his guns, whose daughter and mother he had killed.