Therefore Choose (7 page)

“Foreign opinion …”

“Is it so bad to be German?”

“Would you like to meet my mother?”
said Anna.

“I'd be nervous.”

“I have told her about you. She has made only one disapproving comment.”

“She has?”

“I told her you're a bit younger than me, and she said that boys of your age are still very unformed.”

George looked at Anna suspiciously. Was she picking up the English way of teasing?

Anna had told George about her mother, about how she played the piano rather well and was fond of biographies. She and Anna exchanged letters each week. Once a fortnight Anna would take the train to Dresden, where her parents lived, and stay the weekend. Occasionally Frau von Kleist would travel to Berlin, when she would visit Anna, and also see friends.

Anna had told George, too, about how a year previously her mother had contracted breast cancer.

“It's only because you are going to be a doctor that I can tell you this,” said Anna to George.

“It was caught in time?”

“I hope so. My mother had a breast removed.”

“I'm very sorry.”

“It was difficult for her,” said Anna. “She has got over it physically, for the most part. But not mentally. It was a severe blow. She is an elegant person, rather proud. She says that now she feels lopsided. It's her way of saying something about it, but not too much.”

When Anna and her mother arrived at the flat, George was dressed in his best shirt and jacket, his shoes very clean.

Anna had been to collect her mother from the hotel in which she always stayed when she came to Berlin.

“Mother,” she said. “May I introduce Mr. George Smith.”

Frau von Kleist held out a hand, which George took.

“How do you do,” he said.

“Please sit down, Mr. Smith,” she said. “Do you mind if we speak German? Anna says your German is very good. My English is very bad.”

George listened and answered questions. He studied Frau von Kleist carefully, to see what he could pick up about the daughter from the mother. The first thing that struck him was Frau von Kleist's poise. There was the same confidence as Anna's, the same warmth. George was taken by the way in which, when she talked to him, Anna's mother concentrated on him completely. It made him feel she was interested in him. George knew he was being inspected, but Frau von Kleist was able to do this without seeming inquisitive.

“Anna says that although you plan to be a doctor, you write short stories.”

“I would like to write,” said George. “But there is a difficult apprenticeship, and I have a long way to go.”

“Anna has told me some of your very interesting ideas about novels and plays.”

“They are only half ideas, really,” said George. “I don't think they will be real ideas until I can put them into practice.”

Frau von Kleist took tea with Anna and George, and then went with her daughter to the Kurfürstendamm.

“Well,” said Anna when she returned. “What did you think?”

“I liked her very much. I can see her in you. But that's not nearly as important as what she thought of me.”

“She doesn't mind you being foreign, but she is concerned about your ambition to enter the questionable occupation of medicine.”

“She looks well.”

“I hope so. I worry about her.”

George did not know how to reply.

“She's gone back to her hotel now. I shall have dinner with her, this evening, with a friend of our family. You will have to occupy yourself.”

As the Olympic Games approached
, most ordinary Germans felt more secure than they had a few years earlier. The Games in Berlin meant a return to international respect, visitors to the city. Unemployment was no longer prominent in the newspapers. Instead, there were columns of print on prosperity, growth, strength.

When Anna was at her office, George would read from Dagmar's library, sometimes write. Sometimes he would visit a gallery. Berlin was full of them. Sometimes he would walk to the Kurfürstendamm, look at the shops, and walk towards the west. Sometimes he would walk east along Budapester Strasse to Potsdamer Platz, then take a bus or the U-Bahn back to the Zoologischer Garten, from where he could walk to the flat.

In England, of course, policemen didn't carry guns. You never saw a gun. Here, men in uniform were everywhere, and plenty of guns. They made George uneasy. It was difficult to get used to these Germans.

At the end of July, Werner returned from his visit to his parents in Konstanz. George and he had exchanged letters and had arranged to meet at the recently opened Pergamon Museum.

The centrepiece of the museum was the Altar of Zeus, which filled a space larger than a concert hall, and even then was only a third of the original altar. Its massive staircase and extraordinary frieze of sculptures had been transported stone by stone from Turkey.

“German archaeology,” said Werner.

“Astonishing,” said George.

“Pergamon overlooks a valley,” said Werner. “I've not been there, but from what I've read the city is impressive. The Greco-Roman world, Alexander's empire, one of the foundations of our society today.”

“It must have been a huge feat to take all that apart and load it onto ox-carts or whatever they were and onto ships and bring it here.”

“We've protected it. This altar used to be in one of the world's great centres of civilization. Civilization moved on, and now this is at the centre again, where everyone can see it.”

George looked at Werner. “This is the mission of archaeology?” he said.

“It's difficult to travel to where this was. Is it not more fitting that it is here rather than being left to decay on the side of a hill where goats climb on it and shit on it?”

“Let's go up the steps,” said George.

After the museum they walked by the river.

“I think it's good to have this material in Berlin,” said Werner. “Of course we know hardly anything about Greek music, but in the other arts — architecture, painting, sculpture, literature, and philosophy of course — the last century in Germany has been a second Renaissance. The refashioning, the modernization, of Greek ideas. That's where this museum comes in. It's stirring, don't you think?”

“The museum's pretty impressive.”

“It's not just that. The German language is the real inheritor of the Greek language from classical times, and of Greek ideas. In German you can formulate thoughts that you can't even think, let's say, in French.”

“I got interested in the role of Asclepius in medicine,” said George. “The only thing I knew about Pergamon before coming here was that there was an Asclepieion, a sort of clinic-cum-temple-cum-theatre at Pergamon. I wrote an essay on Greek medicine last year, so I had to read up on it.”

“This clinic was interesting?”

“Asclepian medicine had the idea that dreams formed a bridge between a person's illness and the healer, a kind of forerunner of psychoanalysis, I suppose.”

“My point again. Ancient Greek learning taken to a new level by German science.”

“If people were sick in those times, in Pergamon, the idea was that they would go to spend some days at the Asclepieion, sleep on special beds, then wake, and be tended very gently. They would proceed slowly along mysterious underground passages where they would hear thought-provoking suggestions of unknown provenance.”

“Wonderful,” said Werner.

“They would have dreams,” said George. “The thing I like about dreams is that they have two parts. One part is what is given, suggestions that start the dream off. The other is the dreamer — the one who makes the dream — and what the dreamer brings to it.”

“I must read about it.”

“You won't find that bit. That's my idea. In those days they would receive ministrations, attend the theatre. It was a place of transformation.”

“Like a spa but with more to it. It encouraged the meeting of minds. Not just like Marienbad, where people laze about.”

“I haven't heard of Marienbad.”

“It's in the Sudetenland.”

“Where's that?”

“It used to be in the Austrian Empire. Now it's just over the border, on the way to Prague.”

“You've been there?”

“Once, with my parents, when my father was taking a cure.”

“And it's beautiful?”

“Charming in its way, but the atmosphere of a sanatorium. I thought I might never escape.”

“Too many sick people?”

“We shall found a modern Asclepieion. It will have the beauty of Marienbad, but it will be about health rather than disease, more scope for the soul. I know just the place.”

“Near Marienbad.”

“To the west, in Württemberg. You look after the medical side. I'll arrange music and philosophy. And it will be about the communication between minds.”

“And theatre?”

“We'll do the theatre together, a partnership. I hereby make you an honorary German, and we are full partners.”

“A modern Asclepieion.”

“I take it you found somewhere to stay,” said Werner.

“Yes,” said George. “And you?”

“I'm at my cousin's,” said Werner. “In the Mitte District. He and his wife are in Bavaria just now. If your place isn't any good, you could come and stay too.”

“I've got something to tell you,” George said, feeling suddenly too hot.

“Well …”

“About Anna … Can we all have dinner this evening? The three of us.”

“You're sleeping with her?”

George felt as if he had come to a dance with one person, and was now with someone else.

“We're sharing a flat, near the Tiergarten Station.”

“You've got yourself comfortably installed.”

“The flat came up, a friend of Anna's is away for six weeks.”

“The cousin from the country is invited now to dinner.”

George bought a bottle
of chateau-bottled Burgundy that was more expensive than he could afford. He made careful squares of toast with pâté, and Anna prepared a casserole.

“I can't do this,” she said.

“What?”

“Make a dinner party.”

“Scarcely a dinner party.”

“I can manage breakfast, even lunch. After five o'clock, there's a cook to do this kind of thing.”

“It looks fine.”

“It's not what it looks like that counts. It's good that Dagmar has books of recipes.”

Werner arrived.

“Sorry to be late,” he said. “Here's a bottle of wine. My contribution.”

George was going to show Werner round the flat, but Werner started to walk through of his own accord. He opened each door, entered each room, made an inspection as if he were wondering whether to buy the place. George followed. In the bedroom that George and Anna shared, Werner walked to the window, drew a curtain aside, and regarded the prospect. He opened the cupboards, lay on the bed, and bounced on it a couple of times.

Back in the drawing room, he said, “Conveniently situated. Not elegant but comfortable.”

“You approve?” said George.

“It is a matter neither of approval nor disapproval,” he said.

George had not seen Werner in this mood. Suddenly, he had a thought: Werner and Anna had been lovers. Why had it not occurred to him? A hot shameful flush spread up his neck, which he tried to cover with a hand.

“You're not feeling well,” said Werner. “Why don't you sit down?”

“I'm fine. A dizzy spell. I get them sometimes.”

“Very debilitating.”

“They only last a second.”

George went to a sideboard so that he could turn his back. On the sideboard was the bottle of Burgundy, opened to let it breathe. He fiddled with the glasses, then poured.

“A glass of wine,” he said.

Werner took the glass that George offered and turned to Anna.

“I do not suppose you are paying too much.”

“We are looking after it,” said Anna. “Caring for the cats.”

“Has everyone wine?” said Werner. “Very well. To your health … to the health of us all.”

“You're angry,” said Anna. “You think it is not right that we are together?”

“Right?” he said. “What right have I to say what is right?”

“But you are angry.”

“The difference between the English and the German,” said Werner, “is that the code of the English, which must be carefully observed, is first to say what he will do and then to do it. The German is the opposite. He acts and then says what he is doing.”

“And you?” said Anna.

“I am happy for you, and now I say that I am happy.”

“That is sweet of you,” said Anna.

With one of her outbursts of warmth she went to kiss him on the cheek. Was this what he had wanted? Acknowledgment? A token of affection? Suddenly the atmosphere was less tense. They sat to eat the pâté. Werner, who was near the bottle, poured more wine. In a while, they started on the casserole, and chatted about Konstanz, about Anna's magazine, about the Pergamon Museum.

Halfway through the meal, Werner got up and said, “You know what? I shall now behave in the English way. First I say what I shall do. I shall open that bottle of wine that I brought. Then I shall do it. You have a corkscrew?”

George fetched the corkscrew and a napkin. Werner mimed a waiter, displayed the bottle, then opened it. He pulled the cork with a flourish. Then, with the napkin over his left arm, he approached Anna.

“For you, Fräulein?”

“No, thanks, really.”

The bottle of Burgundy, which George had bought, was empty. Anna had not even finished her first glass. It occurred to George that he himself was only on his second.

“But, Fräulein, this is very good. It is generally thought that the Germans cannot make red wine, only white. I do not wish to contradict that opinion, instead I change the subject. I offer a Hungarian wine, against which there can be no argument. Egri Bikavér. In English, Bull's Blood, to give courage. It's a blend of course. The harvest of the East, brought to the German homeland.”