Therefore Choose (9 page)

“You think she considered all this?”

“You think she did not?”

“Perhaps she liked the images.”

“Someone creates these things,” said Anna. “Perhaps not Riefenstahl on her own. Thoughtful people, artists. Men marching with spades on their shoulders — someone thought of that. What does it mean? It overturns habits of thinking, that's what. Assimilates civilian work to the rituals of soldiering. It implies that everyone's in the army.”

This was Anna's intensity.

Werner smirked at her, not unkindly. “Not all life is literature,” he said.

“You tell me,” said Anna, agitated now. “You tell me what these parades mean. The music is corny, ta-ra, ta-ra. People march in step.”

“They mean something important,” said Werner.

On the day after the visit to the cinema, Anna went to her office. George went to meet her there at three o'clock, and they walked together along Unter den Linden, Berlin's grandest and most elegant boulevard. It was after they had turned and walked back along the boulevard, when they had stopped for coffee, that Anna made her startling suggestion.

“Come live with me
. Please don't go back,” she said.

“Right now?” said George. “Decide to stay right now?”

“Why don't you stay with me, and share my bed?”

“You know I've medical school. I can't see how.”

“Do you really think that it will suit you? To be a doctor? I can't imagine it. You think it's something that you ought to do.”

“Something about me? You think I wouldn't fit?”

“It isn't really what you want at all. I know you think I'm mad. Impulsive.”

“It isn't that. To stay, it's too impractical. Not what I want? It's what I have to give. I've no place here, at university.”

“You want to be a writer. You'd have me.”

George had an intuition that what Anna was saying was true. The idea was too strange: to give up his place at medical school, move to Germany, live with her. But what could be more important? He could not grasp it.

It was one of those bright days of a kind that can happen in the summer in Central Europe, with a cloudless sky and a perfect temperature. They had walked up Unter den Linden to the huge arch of the Brandenburg Gate. They had held hands, wordlessly, as they looked up at the famous statue on the top of the arch: four horses pulling the chariot of the Goddess of Victory. Then they had turned, still hand in hand, and walked back to the corner of the three cafés where Friedrichstrasse crosses Unter den Linden.

George felt carefree, as if this was how life ought to be. They had decided to stop at one of the three cafés: the Café Bauer.

The building was solid, five storeys of white stone and large windows, with a steep pitched roof. On the first floor, its name was announced in large letters, CAFÉ BAUER, emphatic but not vulgar. One could imagine the building being constructed. Workmen dug the earth with shovels for the basement, installed foundation stones. They erected scaffolding, climbed up and down ladders, shaped the stones and hauled them up with ropes and pulleys, set them into the facade. Inside, hardwood floors were laid. In window openings, sheets of glass were carefully installed. With the coming of electricity, copper wires were strung behind walls. Many men worked together, orchestrated, to produce this result: reassuring, respectable. Now, waiters awoke each morning, summoned by alarm clocks. They grumbled at their wives, pulled on black trousers, travelled here on the S-Bahn, so that people, in pairs and in groups, could meet and converse and clink spoons in cups as they sat in this grand room, with flowers in great baskets and oil paintings on every wall. Here, matters proceeded with a certain understanding of how to behave. Waiters brought silver coffee pots, placed them politely on marble-topped tables. Customers sipped the coffee and glanced at their companions. Here, with its nerves and sinews intact, a society functioned as it had for decades.

Now, sitting here, suddenly, Anna was asking George to stay and live with her. He'd had no idea that she'd been thinking any such thing, or that she might make such an impractical suggestion. It was like a proposal of marriage. Should it not have been he who would ask anything of this kind?

George looked at the woman he had known for just a few weeks, searched her face as she looked into his, felt a wave of affection, thought he might suddenly burst out: Yes, yes!

How could he waver, when meeting her was the most momentous event of his life?

He wondered about ordering more coffee. He looked around the large room. A waiter hovered a few yards away.

“You could write in Berlin,” Anna said. “I can continue as an editor. Perhaps, as well, I can become a publisher.”

“You're serious.”

“I'm intelligent, not bad looking. Not rich, I agree. But I'm nice to make love with. Do you think you'll get a better offer?”

“I'm not comparing you to some imaginary person.”

“You're thinking we've not known each other very long.”

“Is this the place to live? Some people think there might be a war.”

“You want to risk being on different sides?”

Anna looked downwards, towards the left, and rested her cheek on her hand, with her neck exposed so that he could see the dark baby hairs at her hairline. She looked up again, across the table into his eyes, almost shy.

“I'm being too direct,” she said.

“I'm not due to leave until the weekend.”

“We will be together till then. After that, you can just think that I didn't say anything. I won't be angry.”

“Are you sure?”

“Our souls touched. After this weekend life will change.”

“It sounds as if I have to decide right away.”

“Not that kind of thing at all.”

“If I don't say I'll stay, it sounds as if we'd part forever.”

“That's not it.”

“It sounds as if we'd break off, and not write, not travel to see each other.”

“Of course we'd write and visit. Of course we would.”

“You put me on the spot.”

“You're laughing at me.”

“I'm not. Not at all.”

“I don't say I know what would be best. One can't know how things will turn out.”

“That's not it?”

“Mostly things just happen: events, one after the other, without meaning. But sometimes you can choose. You can say, ‘Now I do this.'”

The morning after
she had asked him to stay, Anna went to her office.

What would it mean to stay in Germany, with its inexorable political undertow? thought George. I can't do that. But it means she loves me. He felt buoyed by the idea, excited.

He paced the long corridor of the flat. So the task, he thought, is to persuade her to come to England. That would be the plan. Even if she couldn't pack up and come immediately, that would be it.

He was too agitated to read until Anna got back. He decided he would be better off walking. He thought he would go to the Museum Island, in the centre of the city, look at some paintings, turn over in his mind how he should approach the problem.

He forgot to bring a guidebook, and confronted by the array of museums, he could not remember which was which. He found himself gazing at a large statue of a man on a horse.

A stocky man stood in front of the statue, alternately looking at it and reading from a guidebook, which George could see from the cover was in English.

“Excuse me,” said George. “Is the Emperor Frederick Museum near here?”

“I think this is it right here,” said the man in an American accent. He pointed. “And this, it says on the plinth, is the very emperor himself, up there on his high horse. It says here that in 1452 he was crowned emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, which, so far as I can tell, was neither holy nor Roman.”

“But it was an empire?”

“Certainly was,” the man said. “The first Reich. Now we're on the third. Are you going in?”

“I think so.”

“I'll stand you a cup of coffee,” the man said. “I could do with something like that before I dive in.”

George was not as shy as he had once been, but he wished he had the kind of affable friendliness that this man had.

“I'd be happy to join you,” said George. “Thank you.”

The man said he was a professor of applied physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

“Cambridge, Massachusetts,” the man said.

“I've just finished a degree in natural sciences at the other Cambridge,” said George. “I'm about to start the clinical part of a medical course, in London.”

“You came for the Olympic Games?” said the man when they were seated in the museum cafeteria.

“I went to some of them,” said George. “I'm visiting a friend … going back to London in a few days. How about you?”

“I'm leaving tomorrow. What do you think of it here?”

“You mean Hitler and the Nazis?”

The man looked at George across his cup of coffee, appraising him.

“They worry me,” said George.

“It looks nice enough at the moment. All brushed and combed, for the Games. I've been visiting colleagues over here.”

“At universities?”

“Things in universities are a mess. Not just vacant posts because everyone Jewish has been fired. They've made going to conferences difficult. The Nazis are taking over the teaching.”

“They are?”

“The Hitler Youth are in there, giving orders about what can be taught and what can't.”

“And they have influence?”

“They've got something called Aryan Physics. Can you imagine? Einstein's a Jewish fraud, quantum mechanics is all rubbish, that sort of thing.”

“I thought they liked the modern.”

“Technology, yes. If you work on anything with a military application, electronics, motors, synthetics, chemicals for a range of purposes. Not so much in universities, but in industry and government research places. In that case, I'm told, the money's unlimited.”

“Industrially they seem to be doing all right now. Isn't that so?” said George.

“If you just dropped in here from the sky and looked around and asked, ‘What are these people up to?' you'd say they're preparing for war.”

“Who do they want to fight?”

“I don't know if they've anyone specific in mind.”

“You think it's anyone who stands in their way?”

George remembered Werner's metaphor of the wolves and the deer. But which were which?

“My parents were German,” said the applied physicist. “Emigrated towards the end of the last century, so I feel a connection. But I can tell you, I'll be glad to be back in Boston.”

“What happened, so far as I can see, is that the moment the Nazis came into power, they got rid of their opponents,” said George. “Not just the Communists, which one can understand. But the Social Democrats and trade unionists, even church people. Beaten up by the Brownshirts, people assassinated, sent to prison.”

“Exactly what I'm saying.”

“People tell each other that Hitler disapproves of the excesses,” said George.

“They don't seem to wonder if Hitler promotes the excesses.”

That evening, George told Anna about the applied physicist.

“You're like a child,” she said. “You shouldn't be talking to strangers like that. You've no idea who he could be.”

“Chairs vacant in departments of physics because people have been thrown out for being Jewish,” George said.

“I know,” said Anna. “You don't have to tell me.”

“Not just at universities. Schools, the civil service, everywhere. Next thing people will be thrown out of their jobs for being Roman Catholic, or for having red hair.”

“Not something to joke about,” she said. “Look at Erich Auerbach. He's written about Dante in the most wonderful way. Everyone should read his book: one of the best things on what literature is all about. He was dismissed from his chair. He had to leave and get a job in Turkey.”