Therefore Choose (24 page)

Some people would talk about their wanderings after the war ended. “I went to stay with my cousin and her husband, but it was too much of a strain for them. They didn't really have room for us.”

Other people could scarcely speak of the bombing. “Our lives were destroyed. We were left with nothing.”

“But when it happened,” George would ask, “or when you looked at the damage, what did you think?”

“I thought, This is our punishment,” said one woman in her fifties, a woman who wore a head scarf, who had lived in Berlin her whole life.

“Punishment. For something you did wrong?”

“Punishment,” said the woman.

George remembered one of his first patients, when he was a medical student on the neurology firm. The patient's wife had said the same thing. Her husband had been diagnosed with a brain tumour. He had not long to live. She had been told there was nothing that could be done for her husband. She took George to one side.

“Can I talk to you, doctor?” she said.

George dreaded this kind of conversation, but he knew enough to avoid saying he was still a student, not yet a doctor. To say that would not help the patient.

“I think it's a punishment,” she said.

“Did he do something wrong?”

“It was both of us.”

“It was?”

“Three months ago. That's when they said it started growing, that thing in his brain. Isn't that right?”

“Yes,” said George. “It could be.”

“I knew it. We shouldn't have done it.”

“What?”

“We had, you know … relations.”

“But why would that —”

“We shouldn't have done it, at our age. I knew at the time that we shouldn't. But I allowed it. It's a punishment.”

Now bombing's a punishment? thought George. How is this such a strong idea? So universal among grown people. Something primitive, something from childhood, something that finds its way into all those religious systems.

“What did you do,” George asked the German woman in the head scarf, “to deserve this?”

“Bombing London,” she said. “We shouldn't have done that. I knew we shouldn't.”

“Don't you think it's the war?” said George. “Revenge, perhaps. But not punishment.”

“Our daughter went to work in London,” the woman said. “Before the war. People were kind to her. She liked it there. We shouldn't have done it. Then there was the other thing.”

“The other thing?”

“The camps,” she said.

In the place George was staying in Berlin, in quite a decent pension that was miraculously undamaged, he came across two Baedekers, the English translations: the 1925 edition of
Northern Germany, excluding the Rhineland
, and the 1891 edition of
Southern Germany and Austria, including Hungary, Dalmatia, and Bosnia
. They had been kept, perhaps, for the benefit of guests, or left by a forgetful British traveller. In
Southern Germany
George turned to page 56, Würzburg. This Baedeker of fifty years ago said there were 60,844 inhabitants at that time. Rather exact. How many now?

The ancient capital of an Episcopal principality…is charmingly situated in the vine-clad valley of the Main.… The inner and older part of the town, of which churches and ecclesiastical buildings form the chief feature, is encircled with well-kept promenades. Würzburg is one of the most venerable cities in Germany.…

Not any more, it isn't. George picked up
Northern Germany
and looked up Bremen, the destruction of which he had seen for himself. Page 85:

Bremen is the oldest seaport in Germany, founded in 787 by Charlemagne … in front (to the SW) of the Rathaus stands the Roland (pl. 9) the largest and most important of the Roland figures, 17 and ¾ ft. high.…

George remembered the Rathaus, some of its walls miraculously still standing after the onslaught. But the statue of Roland? “When wasteful war shall statues overturn …” He did not remember seeing a statue.

George thought that with her name
, von Kleist, he should be able to find Anna in Berlin. Or would she now be Frau Anna Vodn? The thought was still painful to George. He decided he would try both. He started at a large bookshop that, surprisingly, had started to function. From the manager he got names of some publishers in Berlin that were working again. At one of these, he found two people who knew Anna from before the war, but neither of them knew where she was.

George bought newspapers and magazines from a news-agent. Back in his pension, he looked for Anna's name in the lists of editorial staff. Nothing. Then he wrote down editorial addresses of newspapers and magazines. Over several days, he took lunchtime outings to magazine offices. Nothing. Then, after work, late one afternoon, he visited the first newspaper on his list.

At the front desk, he asked, “Does Anna von Kleist work here?”

The woman at the front desk sized him up. George knew that she would recognize his English accent. He saw she was working out that he was with the British Occupation Forces. She decided to be helpful.

“She does work here.”

“May I see her?”

“Who shall I say is asking for her?”

George felt a terrible pounding in his chest. He decided it was time to be forceful.

“Would you mind taking me to her, please?”

He must have spoken authoritatively, because without hesitation the woman said, “Please come with me,” rose from her seat, and indicated a flight of stairs up which she followed him. Then she went ahead, along a corridor to an ill-lit room with half a dozen desks in it. At one of the desks, in a corner, was Anna, with a pencil in her hand. The pounding in George's chest got stronger. His mind was suddenly flooded with the idea that had been fundamental to his very existence, that, in that awful period at the end of the war, he had held her in his heart as a beacon. Now here she was, alive.

Anna looked up to see who'd come into the room.

George thanked the receptionist and walked over to Anna's desk.

“How have you been? I'm sorry. That's a stupid thing to say.”

She looked older. She did not look well. Was it the same Anna? Intelligent, shrewd. She appraised him.

“George. What a surprise.”

Whatever is she thinking? thought George. Does she want to see me? Will she be angry?

There was the flash of a shy smile — it lasted just a moment as Anna's eyes met his — a recognition, something shared. It was enough.

“I'm working in Berlin. Administration. My German is useful. I've been trying to find you.”

“Still elusive?”

“I found Werner. He said you were in Berlin. I've been going round publishing houses.”

“You find me doing the lowly job of copy editing.”

“Can you leave the office for a few minutes, is that allowed?”

“I can't be too long, but it's amazing what is now allowed.”

They walked along a street in the ravaged city. Although he wanted to take her arm, she seemed surrounded by an invisible barrier.

“Why copy editing?” he asked.

“I deal with words. That's what I can manage. Not facts or thoughts. The newspaper gives me a certain access to facts and thoughts. I make small collections. I might do something with them. It is not useful in the present time. It's a private occupation.”

“‘Do something' — you mean to publish them, about things that happened during the war and after?”

“That's what I thought at first. It's not how things work. Many of the same people are in power now as before. The Americans seem interested in facing down the Russians. They want to try people like Göring and Hess for war crimes. Are these facts, or thoughts, or personal opinions?”

“Werner's in a sanatorium, in Geneva.”

“I've not seen him for a long time.”

“It didn't work out between you, after the war.”

“Our experience was too different. Our minds could no longer meet.”

“He seems changed. Being in combat.”

“He is not a bad person. He believed in Germany.”

“It's the defeat that crushed him?” said George.

“He was born in the wrong century. He would have been good when Bismarck was chancellor. Things were more expansive.”

“People felt they needed to show their greatness by winning.”

“He wasn't in the SS, just the army. He was here in Berlin to start with. Working on military plans.”

They had some time together, here in Berlin at the beginning of the war, thought George.

“Then on the Eastern Front,” said Anna. “He had a very bad time with the Russians, when his unit was in retreat. He came to hate them. I suppose one should not hate.”

“When I saw him, he seemed very distant. I couldn't reach him.”

“Having to fight like that, to kill people, to have one's men killed. It is not only when you lose an arm that you suffer damage. Incomprehensible from before or after.”

“Can we meet? Can I take you to dinner?”

“Not so many restaurants since the war.”

“I can pick you up here after work tomorrow. Or from where you live.”

On the way back to his pension
, George saw a flower seller, a woman in clothes that, once expensive, had become shabby. Who would be selling flowers, he thought, in a time and place like this? He approached her. All the flowers were red roses. Perhaps throughout the war, she had tended a garden in the middle of Berlin, of roses she loved, and her garden had not been bombed. Now she went into it, with her secateurs, and came out onto the streets to make a little money.

“How much?” George said.

She told him, and he gave her double. He took the flowers back to his room in the pension where he was staying, then went downstairs with the jug from his washstand, filled it with water, came back up to his room, and put the roses in it. Red roses: emblematic flowers.

Next day, when George returned to his pension from the office at which he worked, there was a letter for him, with an English stamp.

Dear George,

Just a little note: a very good joke I heard today. I bumped into a chap I knew in the History Department. He's Indian, and he's living in Islington now. I don't think you knew him, he was at St. Catharine's, I think. Anyway, emerging as we both did from the Angel tube station this evening, we went for a swift drink before reuniting with our respective spouses. He's very interested in Indo-European languages, knows Sanskrit and all that, and we were talking about this, and I said, “But then the Indo and the European split up, so what do you think of European civilization?” Quick as a flash he said, “I think it would be a very good idea.”

Peter

George folded Peter's letter and regarded the roses he'd bought. He took one out of the jug, broke off its thorns, wrapped its stem in some tissue paper, and took it with him when he left the pension.

Anna came out from the building in which she was living, and he gave her the rose. For a moment there appeared that smile with which he had fallen in love. The smile said that she knew that he had thought about her.

“Thank you,” she said. “Vielen Dank.”

They found a small restaurant, and she laid the rose on the table, then picked it up, looked at it, removed a petal, which she laid on the table, and glanced at him.

“My mother died,” said Anna. “You know that. My brother was killed at Stalingrad. My father continued to live in Dresden. He died when it was bombed by the RAF. That was less than three months before the end of the war. That's my entire family, all except me.”

“I'm sorry.”

“C'est la guerre.”

She laid the rose back on the table, next to its detached petal.

“What about you?” he said.

“I was in Berlin for most of the war. We were bombed, then shelled. There were shortages. No water, no electricity.”