PART TWO

11

A MEMOIR OF PLESKOW

FOR MY NIECES AND GRAND CHILDREN,

FROM AUNT ADI

WHEN THE PIGS were slaughtered, the snow was red with their blood. It was a redness of extraordinary intensity in that landscape of dark green and pale violet. As a child I found the slaughter frightening, yet I couldn't resist being present. Other animals died quietly, unaware, but pigs sensed danger. They would struggle and squeal when they were sent for, but the men from the village knew how to hold them in secret embraces that immobilised their slippery bodies. The only place to hold them, said the pig man, was by the ears or by the hocks. I wondered if other animals had handholds. Children think about strange things.

The women came from the village to gather the blood. In those days, just before the Great War, they wore long aprons to the ground covering their tight bodices, which were always grey or black. They carried buckets and enamel basins to catch the blood that was used to make the Blutwurst. Later, when the Jews were so horribly treated, I wondered if there wasn't something in the race memory concerning blood: the real Mecklenburger loved Blutwurst, made from this blood falling on the snow in the forest. We children played in a forest that stretched from the waters of the Baltic to the swamps of Poland. In their seasons, the women made sausage, Mettwurst, the sausage we children loved most. Blood, snow, the squeal of frightened pigs — these are memories I will never forget. And in summer, earth, mushrooms and the blood of wild boars, not so much things as states of mind, of a feeling that our poets and philosophers and generals glorified, the sense that the German soul was forged out of elemental materials. We children were not, as children are now, shielded from death. Far from it: we understood that death could be glorious.

Frau Rickert, the forester's wife, was known as the best sausage-maker in the village. In her cottage, Qual, there was an open fire. A huge pot was suspended over the fire from a tripod and here she boiled the blood down and added thyme, salt, pepper and marjoram so that in my childish imagination the blood that had fallen on the snow and splashed on to the women's aprons was scented and benign. When the priest in church spoke of the blood of Christ and its transformative powers, I would think of how the blood of a pig in Frau Rickert's skilled hands became sausage. She was a wonderful woman, warm and friendly. Whenever we appeared in the village she would call to us and give us a piece of her cake, which she made with cherries in summer and walnuts in winter. We were treated by the villagers with the utmost friendliness, although the children were uneasy with us. I don't think we realised then that life in the Schloss, not in reality a castle but a large Palladian-style house, built by my grandfather, was utterly feudal. We had a coachman, the foresters, an English governess, at least ten women who worked unpaid one week a month in the house doing the cleaning, washing and ironing in the wash-kitchen, as we called it, and a cook with three assistants. There were also four gardeners, grooms and the cow and pig men; some of the foresters were gamekeepers and carried guns. One of these was Werner H, who shot the American airmen in the winter of 1945, the last time I saw blood on the snow. It had stained the snow between their parachutes and seemed to be spreading outwards.

In the early days, as the Great War ground on somewhere far away, I used to take Axel, who was six years younger, out to the forest to see the foresters at work. They were always cutting trees or clearing the rides and we would join them for their lunch in forests so deep that to us children they were enchanted. As a child you marvel at simple things, at the realisation that there is a huge amount to discover and to learn and I think one of the purposes of fairy stories, which we loved, was to teach children about the natural and the supernatural worlds. At Pleskow these worlds did not seem separate to me. The forest was the portal to another world. I tried to make Axel act in my little plays, which were all based on fairy stories, to amuse our parents.

Axel was the dearest small boy. He was extraordinarily bold for someone so young, always wanting to climb on the huge Hanoverian horses that pulled the logs out of the forest. He loved the feel of horses, and would reach up to kiss their huge gentle muzzles. At haymaking he would climb to the highest point on the cart, a tiny excited figure, as the hay was brought in. Out in the fields enormous cases of water sweetened with raspberry juice were brought to the workers and as we rode out we children would sing a song about the harvest that I have never forgotten: Wheat, barley, rye and corn, don't forget our Saviour is born.

Some of the peasants were very superstitious and believed in the spirits of the forest and the streams and the lakes. They had little rituals, like looking for mistletoe growing in a thorn tree, which could point the way to hidden treasure. For a while Axel was obsessed with the idea that he would find treasure, and I would follow him, half believing as he ran wildly about with a switch of mistletoe directing him. It was cut for him by Rickert, who was Axel's hero. Sometimes the women would dance, forming arches with joined hands, through which they would all pass in turn. I now think it was a form of magical protection. When someone died in the village, the bees were the first to be told, a pagan custom that survived. The Mecklenburgers were only freed from serfdom after the Napoleonic wars; they were born to obey. After all, what is a hundred years in the making of a people? We were little princesses and princelings, but as the war progressed, even there at Pleskow I began to notice that not everything was well.

Most Prussian nobles were deeply contemptuous of the ordinary people. They saw them as a lesser species, canon fodder for the Junker ideal. But our mother was famous for her left-wing views. She knew every villager and every servant personally and was loved by them, not because she was the Grafin, but because she was genuinely devoted to their welfare. Your grandfather, Johann-Albrecht, shocked me by declaring one day in 1916 that the war was lost. Up until then we believed it was going well. He said that there was still time for an honourable peace. His brother, my Uncle Berthold, came back from the front severely wounded and never until his dying day offered one word about his experiences. I see now, seventy years later, the themes that were to dominate our lives: the Prussian tradition of service, the idea of the honour of Germany and the importance of men in uniform, who represented a higher duty that women never questioned. Even in 1916 when my father came back to the house exhausted and pale and declared the war lost, it was taken for granted that it fell to our class to secure a just settlement. We were one of the first families in Mecklenburg to have modern central heating and I remember my father lying in a deep bath for nearly two hours that day. His uniform — the uniform of the legendary 19 Potsdam Regiment — was taken away to be cleaned while he soaked away the shame of war. We children waited downstairs in the big hall which looked up the driveway of oaks from one side and down to the lake on the other.

When he emerged, staggering slightly like a man who has been on horseback, he was wearing a suit made before the war in London from the finest Harris tweed. He hugged us all and handed out gifts from Israel's and Wertheim's, shops which had a magical appeal. Axel had never been to them and I had only been once, but I used to make up stories about the Christmas displays with - perhaps I imagined this - live reindeer harnessed to a sleigh and an enormous Christmas tree decorated with lighted candles, nuts and raisins. We children were given gingerbread, our favourite cinnamon biscuits and also picture books with popup castles and medieval towns. There were toys for the younger children. It must have been October, because the potatoes were being lifted, when I heard my father tell my mother he doubted if he would still be alive by Christmas. But in fact the Kaiser called him back to an important job in Berlin on the general staff. After children's supper we went up to the music room and played and sang for my father, before our governess, an Englishwoman called Barty - Miss Bartwill from Harrogate — took us up to bed. Axel wanted to play with his new toys, but Barty turned down the lamps and made us say our prayers. Later Axel crept into my bed. Did Papi kill lots of English? he whispered, thinking no doubt of Barty, whom he loathed.

Soon after my father went back to Berlin a week later, I noticed that there was a change of mood at Pleskow. Now rations were short; almost nothing came up from Berlin or Schwerin any longer and we were increasingly living off the land. Only Rickert and Werner H were left of the foresters, although two young boys were drafted in to help them. I had the feeling that if it were left untended much longer the forest would close around us.

Money had never had any value here as there was nothing to buy, but now we were returning to subsistence farming and gathering. My job was to gather mushrooms, which grew in the deepest parts of the woods around the house. With our terrier, Bolly, I crawled through the thickets, spurred on by a sense of duty. It had been a long, hot summer. The fields were full of cornflowers and poppies, streaming out through the wheat in waves, like spilled paint. The autumn that followed was warm and damp, perfect conditions for mushrooms. In front of the house an old catalpa was a rich russet colour and the leaves of the trees my grandfather planted round the house, which he had collected from all over the world, were turning too. My favourite mushroom was the Steinpilz, which the French call the cepe. You couldn't mistake it for anything else. In certain places that the foresters showed me, you could find clusters of Pfifferling, the chanterelle, which was a light sulphur-yellow in colour. The curious Spitzmorchel, with its cap like a honeycomb, was another favourite.

Bolly couldn't find mushrooms, although I tried to teach him, but he loved our trips into the deepest, dampest thickets. Once he put up a huge wild boar, which apparently couldn't believe that this tiny dog was not intimidated by his uneven, yellowing tusks and turned, crashing into the undergrowth. The woods were full of boar and Rickert would set snares for them and shoot them when he could, to make up the supplies. Foxes were killed and fed to the dogs, but had to be skinned and cured before the dogs would touch them.

After all these years I see myself, just twelve years old, crawling through the undergrowth day after day, and coming back to the house with baskets full of mushrooms, my hair full of pine needles and holly and my apron scented and stained. In reality I probably went out to the woods ten or twelve times, but what I remember so well is the fervour I was in, with Bolly barking excitedly and the rising smell of damp leaf-mould and the mushroomy scent as I used a small knife to lift the mushrooms, their skins as strange and minutely pocked as human flesh, sometimes dry and sometimes moist. Mushrooms are of mysterious origin. I was slightly scared of them because of their brooding, furtive nature. Although I could recognise the amanites and the yellow stainers, all my mushrooms had to be inspected by cook who discarded any that were broken or dog-eared or excessively slimy. Every so often she would find a poisonous mushroom and show me the little sac around the base and ask me to smell it. Her rule was that if a mushroom smelled strongly of mushrooms, it was fine. But by the time I arrived, bedraggled at the wash-kitchen, I was so infused and stained and perfumed by fungus and resin and leaf mould that I could no longer distinguish the smells one from another.

Even now this strange mycological odour transports me back to my childhood in Mecklenburg, when the world still seemed innocent although on the Somme hundreds of thousands of soldiers were dying.

As a child you can't really comprehend the meaning of far-off events; you live more like an animal, in the present world of the senses and within the dimly perceived horizons set by the adults. We children created our own world. By and large we were still allowed to run free when, after the summer of 1916, we were not sent to school, but taught by Barty. My father decreed that we were not allowed to speak English, so Barty had to speak German. Her German was heavily accented and comical to us and sometimes we mocked her. I wondered how we were contributing to the war effort by giving up English, but I still read my English books when I was alone. My favourite was Wind in the Willows, and it seemed to me impossible to imagine that we were at war with Ratty and the industrious Mole: Mole had been working very hard all morning, spring-cleaning his little house. Just that line would set me off into a magical world.

Axel - a little Junker in the making - loved war games and he and Bolly would set out to ambush me as I crawled in the undergrowth. I usually knew when they were coming because Bolly would begin to yap furiously, although I always pretended I was taken by surprise. By the end of that year we were eating swedes at practically every meal. To this day I can't bear the sight or smell of them. The winter, the peasants said, was going to be a hard one and before the end of November ice had formed on the lake, at first tentatively producing a sparkling necklace around the shore and then, one morning, the whole lake was glazed over, the ice so clear that we could see the water-plants beneath. My mother went on a daily round to see the villagers, the bereaved mothers, the sick, the destitute. Nobody starved even when the chickens stopped laying because of the extreme cold, but we had to cut our supplies of sausage and ham so that my mother could distribute food to the worst affected. Strangely, in this deprivation I remember at Christmas that year the foresters cut Christmas trees for each of us, which corresponded in size to our age, and beneath the three trees, beside the Swedish stove, my mother had placed our presents, beautifully wrapped.

Your grandfather came in from the little station at Bobitz, driven by the coachman through the snow. He looked so extraordinarily handsome in the uniform of the 9th Infantry underneath a grey cloak with the gold chain fastening it that I couldn't believe that the country of Ratty and Mole stood a chance. Christmas was a splendid affair; the cellars were raided and a fat goose was served with potatoes roasted in goose fat. It's a strange thing, but at important moments all nations take comfort from their traditional food. Later that winter we were eating squirrels and crows. But what has remained with me is the beauty of the frozen lake, which was green, blue, turquoise and purple, stubbornly beautiful, the product of the deep, deep cold. Your grandfather told us that he had been promoted to the rank of Lieutenant General, on the General Staff. I'll never forget my mother saying, 'We are so proud of Papi, aren't we, children?' When Axel asked, 'Are you going to kill all the English, Papi?' and your grandfather replied, 'I have no quarrel with the English, Axel, I am just trying to save Germany,' Axel and the children did not understand, but I did: we were losing this war.

When the pigs were slaughtered that winter I saw the blood on the snow as the blood of our soldiers at the front, but also the blood of the Tommies. It seemed that blood, snow, mud and the honour of Germany were inseparable.

12

THE PAIN OF PARTING is itself a pleasure. Mendel thinks that Axel courts the dramatic and the gefühlvoll. He requires the heroic and operatic idea of himself: leaving Oxford for the last time, leaving his friends, rejected by Elizabeth Partridge and now obliged to save Germany, secret sacred Germany. But is he a Nazi. Mendel believes that Axel can't tell the difference between the secret Germany which must rid itself of all alien influences and the Germany of Hitler. Hitler is personally loathsome to him but Hitler may be, in Hegelian fashion, the agent of necessary and inevitable change. Lionel believes he is a Nazi. Lionel has also written to Hamburger, advising caution.

Two weeks later he is having lunch with Elizabeth Partridge in London, and she tells him that Axel is playing a double game. In fact he cares deeply about the treatment of Jews. He took her one day to Sachsenhausen and they sat in his little DKW outside the camp for an hour. This is our shame that the German people will have to bear for ever. Kristallnacht was the turning point. Six thousand Jews are in there. Six thousand. Can you imagine? A group of SS guards came to see what they were doing out on the flat misty plain. Axel spoke to them sharply: I am a German. I am the Count Axel von Gottberg. I will leave when I am ready. The guards mumbled apologetically that it was a restricted area. Do you have something to hide? You must leave in five minutes, Herr Baron.

Mendel is struck by the mention of Kristallnacht, because it was only two weeks ago that Lionel, drunk, shouted at Axel, 'Did you miss Kristallnacht?

Oh God, how sheltered and self-important we are in Oxford. And he tells Elizabeth what Axel said about Israel's Department Store.

'Wilfred Israel was one of Axel's mentors,' she says. 'Axel helped him get people out with false papers from the Auswartiges Amt.'

Mendel is silent now. They are having lunch at Bianchi's in Soho, one of his favourite places. The curious thing is that nobody eats on the ground floor, yet the tables are laid every day. They are upstairs; there are some couples in uniform. The approach of war has produced a strange effect: people talk loudly, they are extravagant, they are excited. The feeling that the world may be at an end is stimulating. Also uniform seems to simplify matters: Look, it has come to this.

Elizabeth is troubled. She is torn by two completely irreconcilable desires, one to do something useful to try to stop what is coming and the other, to go to her little house in Kent and live a quiet life until it is over.

Elya tells her that Axel is in Washington trying to speak to important people. Always, important people.

'Elya, don't be harsh with Axel. He's not really an intellectual like you, but then you're not really a man of action like him.'

'Men of action have always caused trouble.'

'Honestly, Elya, that's unworthy of you. It's glib. I've been in Prague, I've been in Berlin. Terrible things are happening. Axel has seen the pogroms; he's seen the concentration camps and all you've seen is buggering All Souls and a few buffoons like Lionel. Do you know what Axel said Hitler calls Chamberlain? Arschloch. Arsehole. He's taken England for a ride, he said. Axel wants to save Germany from disaster, it's true, and he may be naive, but at least he's doing something. I'm afraid I'm going to have to go, Elya. I'm in no fit state for gossip.'

'Don't go, Elizabeth. I apologise. It's possible I am jealous of Axel because of Rosamund and it's also true that that as a Jew I see things from a partial position.'

There are tears in his eyes. She places a hand over his.

'I'm sorry, Elya. I'm so sorry if I hurt you. We must stick together, come what may. Axel is a great believer in the idea that friendship transcends borders and difficulties and time.'

Mendel still cannot speak. Friendships cannot transcend borders just because Axel says so. As usual he takes refuge in high-minded banality.

After lunch Mendel walks down to Whitehall to be interviewed for a job in intelligence. It is believed on the network that his knowledge of Russian and German will be useful in what is to come. The interview is conducted in the country-house-mated-with-boarding-school fashion that high civil servants favour. Elya agrees, in the event of war, to read and analyse Russian intelligence on Hitler and to write reports for the Foreign Secretary.

On the way back to Oxford he thinks of Axel and Elizabeth outside Sachsenhausen, a few yards from evil, while he is safe in buggering All Souls. Meanwhile Axel is on a steamer heading for New York, leaving his fiancee in Germany, on his mission -from whom? — to talk to FDR, to save Germany from its appalling lapse of taste. Back in Oxford Mendel goes straight from the station to see Lionel in his grand lodging, the Warden's House, and tells him what Elizabeth has said about Axel.

'You're a sentimental chap, Elya. And that is one of the many reasons we love you.'

Lionel offers him a cocktail. He has taken to the whole rigmarole surrounding cocktails. His young men like them and it amuses Lionel that he is the only head of a college who serves them rather than the dreary sherry.

'I'm mixing a Manhattan. Would you like one, Elya?'

'All right.'

'I have to concentrate; you combine the Bourbon, vermouth and Angostura bitters with a few ice cubes. You stir gently. You put a cherry - as pink and round as a choirboy's bottom - like this, into the glass - plop - which of course is chilled, and pour the whisky over it, commega. Rub the rim of the glass with orange peel, that's it. But you must never, never, dear Elya, drop it into the glass. Do you promise me?'

'I promise.'

'Cheers. Or should we say prosit so that we can welcome our new masters when they arrive?'

'Lionel, Axel took Elizabeth to Sachsenhausen. Six thousand Jews are in there.'

'Why did they go to Sachsenhausen? They went because Axel wants to convince Elizabeth that he is not a Nazi. And because he knows that Elizabeth will tell you, and not even God knows how many important people you will tell. I can just imagine him, his beautiful features screwed up with concern for the human spirit, demonstrating to earnest young Elizabeth that he is a sensitive soul in a troubled world.'

'There is another possibility, of course. In logic'

'And that would be?'

'And that would be that he isn't a Nazi and is deeply disturbed by what is happening to the Jews.'

'All those upper-class Germans want a pure, Germanic Germany. Axel may be having trouble now with the reality of achieving this, but that is not the point. They all created the Third Reich with their fucking forests and Wagner and their silly green clothes and their hunting horns and their Teutonic knights and their turgid poets like Stefan George.'

'Are we so different?'

'Are you speaking as an Englishman or as a Jew, Elya?'

'As an English Jew.'

'I believe we are different. Although, of course, when you are led by an ass like Chamberlain, you do find yourself wondering. Do you know why I have taken to mixing cocktails?'

'Tired of buggery, perhaps?'

'No, Elya, I want to be usefully employed when we all run for America.'

13

THERE IS NO word in German for pantomime. A pantomime is peculiarly English. Axel remembers that as children they used to perform fairy stories. Marchenspielen, written at Christmas time by Adelheid, his oldest sister, in the music room on the first floor. This room looked out to the lake from the front, and from the other side out over the tea-house and Grosspapa's arboretum, which merges with the thick forest just beyond the family graveyard. Adelheid also made the sets for which the foresters supplied small Christmas trees. The house was infiltrated by the smell of resin.

Europe is a pantomime. Ridiculous leaders strut about in costumes they have designed. Goering clutches a jewelled baton. In England the absurd old gentlemen who run the country are more interested in shooting grouse than in facing the problem, and everything is on the scale and in the style of Adi's sets, fantastical and irrational.

After a week in New York he see Europe through different eyes: it is a poisonous, superstitious, deluded landscape inhabited by the blind. Here in New York, which is enormous, vibrant and hopeful, it all seems so simple. He is consumed by a sense of shame that his country could have thrown up Adolf Hitler and made him its leader with barely a second thought. He is desperate to demonstrate that this is not the real Germany, but nobody is listening.

In the club car on the train to Washington, a cheerful Negro attendant brings him a Bloody Mary and a club sandwich. This is a place that seems to live life without a need for that stultifying European introspection and snobbery and all those backward glances. Seen from New York, Europe is exactly a pantomime: a mishmash of styles, costume and sentimentality, a farrago of nonsensical and comic dialogue, yet full of menace. Half an hour or so before the train arrives in Union Station, another Negro shines his shoes; he kneels in front of Axel to apply some polish and to brush the shoes, which he buffs with a soft leather. As he works he glances up from time to time, smiling broadly. Axel gives him a big tip.

'Yessuh, thank - you - suh. I hope you have a fine stay in our great capital city, suh.'

The train pulls into Union Station. The attendant helps him with his baggage and summons a red cap.

'This boy is going to find you a cab, suh.'

'Yes, I am, suh.'

If Europe is a pantomime, this is an episode of Amos 'n' Andy. In New York there are plenty of refugees from Europe, but here he seems to have arrived in a plantation where Europe is not just distant but almost unimaginable. The station, however, is a grand place, a temple suggesting that Washington is closely connected to Athens and Rome. As he emerges, he sees the Capitol just a few blocks away. The cab takes him to Dupont Circle past an enormous marble fountain, decorated with classical figures. He tries to imagine Adolf Hitler here in his pantomime costume. Or Hermann Goering, like a gilded barrage balloon, and his imagination fails him. The one good that can come out of this war is the renewal of the old world after it has destroyed itself. The miasma of superstition and hatred and distrust will lift. This sleeping city, stippled with the buds of cherry blossom, is the only real hope Europe has against the threat from the East. His lecture tomorrow night is on Europe and the East, and he wants to alert America to the danger.

He is staying at a club to avoid the embassy, although he will have to pay his respects. The club, on New Hampshire Avenue, has brass spittoons in the lobby, large fans turning slowly on the ceilings, and Negro servants in livery. How they smile, how they make themselves agreeable. The club was once a mansion built for the owner of a brewery. In his room Axel lies down on an enormous bed under a slowly rotating fan. He is soon asleep. In the morning he takes a cab to Michael Hamburger's house near Georgetown University, where he was a professor of law before going back to Harvard in the late twenties. Later he was a visiting professor at Oxford. Now he is back as a Supreme Court judge.

Hamburger is wearing a print shirt and capacious trousers. His house is small, red-brick and clapboard, with dark-green shutters.

'Axel, my boy, how are you? Long time no see.'

He looks like his patron FDR, with his rimless glasses and abundant grey hair. His English is more accented than Axel's although he left Austria when he was ten years old.

'I am very well, sir. I haven't congratulated you on your appointment to the Court, sir.'

'Thank you. And now, how is Elya? I believe you saw him recently?'

'He's very well. He sends you his warmest regards. But he may be a little restless.'

'Aren't we all? Come in, come in.'

His wife, Frieda, comes to greet Axel. She has her hair tied back quite severely, but her face is extraordinarily serene, like a nun's, as if she has had secret revelations.

'We have cake and coffee in our garden room. Come through.'

After coffee she stands up.

'I know you boys have a great deal to discuss and Michael has to get down to the Court by noon.'

Hamburger looks at Axel and shrugs.

'Strange town this, don't you think?'

'I like it. It seems so open.'

'It's just a southern town with some oversized monuments.

Now, Axel, I would like to ask you about how you found Oxford, but perhaps we should get straight to business. You wanted to see me?'

'Sir, I wanted to explain to you firstly how I see the situation in my country and then, secondly, what steps I think the world should take to contain Hitler.'

'Are you not working in the Auswartiges Amt, my boy?'

'I am, sir, but I want to help my country and Europe avoid a disaster.'

'Is it coming?'

'I think it is. Unless Germany is contained.'

'How can that be done?'

Hamburger settles himself into a judicial pose.

'Sir, I think Germany must be hemmed in. At the same time the German people must be given some recognition, some form of recompense for the humiliation of Versailles, but also they must know the limits that the world will impose on any aggression.'

'What is this recompense, Axel?'

It is probable that Hamburger has already been told by Elya, and perhaps Lionel, that Axel proposes that Germany should be allowed to bring all its kindred people under its control. He pauses before he speaks.

'What I believe, sir, is that the German people don't necessarily want Hitler, but Hitler is offering them their pride back. It's a pact with the devil, it's Faustian, but they don't seem to realise it.'

'Do they know about the Jews?'

'To be absolutely honest, most of them think it is a good thing that Jewish influence in the law and in business and in academic life has been lessened.'

'Lessened. What does that mean?'

Hamburger leans forward now and Axel sees that he must tread very carefully.

'It means that they believe that the Jews have had too much influence. They say, for instance, that sixty-five per cent of all lawyers in Berlin were Jewish.'

'And how many Jews do you think are enough?'

'Sir, I have no inclination to, or indeed see no necessity, to think of Jewish Germans in any way as separate from the rest of us.'

'But your countrymen do.'

'I think they do, many of them. But I don't believe they imagined things would go as far as they have.'

'And what is the reward the Germans should be given to get them back on the path of righteousness?'

'All the lost territories should be united under the sovereignty of Germany and the Danzig corridor should be opened.'

Hamburger is sitting in a swivel chair. He turns around and looks out of the window towards the garden for a minute at least, before turning back.

'Grossdeutschland. That means they should keep the Sude-tenland and be allowed a free hand in Poland or anywhere else that German is spoken. And that means in practice legitimising this regime.'

'The problem, sir, will come if Hitler moves into the rest of Czechoslovakia and Poland anyway, and France and Holland and even England; then it will be impossible to convince the German people that they don't need him, and that he is a disaster. Then he will be confirmed as the Leader and Superman. I beg you to express clearly to the President that is it only by containing Hitler, by giving him limited gains, which recognise the grievances of the German people, that this disaster can be avoided.'

'Axel, write a paper, if you haven't already, and I will pass it on if I can. Most of the American people don't want to become involved in what they see as another of Europe's wars. They don't want the government to become involved.'

'Sir, can we speak in the garden?' Axel whispers.

Hamburger looks startled. But he stands up.

'Sure.'

He takes Axel's arm as they step down into the garden, which is in an impatient transition from winter: the hostas are beginning to produce spears that look like asparagus and timorous bulbs are poking upwards.

'What is it, Axel?'

'Sir, do you think you could arrange a meeting with the President for me?'

'Why, Axel?'

'I have a message directly from my superiors.'

'From whom?'

'From Weizacker and Haeften.'

'Can I ask you what it contains?'

'I am afraid I can only speak directly to the President.'

'That may be a tall order, but I will try. Axel, lots of Germans pass through Washington these days, people who claim to be speaking for this or that party, the Abwehr or the Council of Churches, or, like you, for the Foreign Office. We have had princes and captains of industry and even openly declared Nazis. So the waters are already muddied. But I will try on your behalf. Very good luck with your speech to the Huntingford Institute. I can't be there, unfortunately.'

As Hamburger turns to go back inside, Axel stands in his way.

'Sir, unless those in Germany who want to get rid of Hitler have your support, they will never succeed.'

'I must get ready now, Axel. I am very grateful that you came and only sorry that we have no time to talk about Oxford, a place, as you know, that I love. I'll give you a ride downtown.'

Axel waits with Frieda while Hamburger dresses; she says that Washington is beastly hot in summer; this, and the fall, are the best seasons. The driver carries the judge's papers to the car. It's a Packard, large, black and covered in chrome, twice as big as Axel's DKW. The passenger section has a cigar lighter and a row of large brown tortoiseshell knobs which open vents to let air in. There is a sunshade over the windscreen like a kind of visor. Hamburger reads his papers as they drive to the Supreme Court. They are sitting on a well-stuffed banquette, almost a sofa, covered in a pale buttoned cream material. The car is trimmed in wood and the door handles are made of what looks like pewter. There is a small cupboard attached to the upholstery just above Hamburger's face.

'You know, Axel,' he says, looking up, 'Elya has never quite trusted you since you wrote to the Manchester Guardian!

'It was a foolish letter. What I should have said was that the court system was trying to be fair under terrible duress, despite the laws. But I was temporarily blinded: I saw a lot of smug people in England who were unsympathetic to our struggles.'

'Where do you wish to be dropped?' asks Hamburger, as they approach the Court.

'I'll walk from here, sir.'

'Good to see you again, my boy. I'll do my best.'

The car glides away. He is standing near the Library of Congress. An Austrian Jew, driven by a Negro, is in the vanishing car. He is one of the most powerful men in America. And Axel sees what Hitler in his madness is doing to Germany: he is drawing down the night. This is the pattern of German history, the periodic retreat into darkness. The courting of the night.

He knows in his heart - Hamburger has expressly warned him — that he will not be allowed to deliver the message that has been entrusted to him. And he can't write it down for delivery. What Hamburger sees is just another Junker full of self-importance; he sees a person who clearly does not understand that it is already too late, after Kristallnacht, with Sachsenhausen and other places of horror full of Jews and opponents of the Nazis, and worse to come.

All around him the secular religion of America reproaches him for his naivety: the rule of law, the will of the people, the equality of all men are celebrated in huge monuments. But in our benighted country Jews are being treated worse than dogs, much worse than dogs. As FDR says, it is barely believable that such things can happen in the twentieth century. Axel knows that, unless he can stop it, Germany will drown in blood.

That night in front of an audience of embassy staff and invited Nazi sympathisers and know-nothing businessmen, he delivers his portentous talk on the threat to Western Europe, and by extension to America, from the East. When an assistant counsellor congratulates him afterwards - very precise, exactly the point - he bows his head and smiles graciously although the man is clearly from the security service of the SS. They have the unmistakable look he has seen in the crowds along the streets, the greedy, vengeful look of the Untermenschen. These people, who have previously inhabited the cesspit of human ignorance and depravity, have now crawled out to inherit their Fatherland. They are the brown plague that must be stopped.

And nobody is listening. Not in Oxford, not in London, not in Washington DC.

He remembers what Elizabeth said and he writes her a letter from the club.

Darling Eliza beth

Here I am in Washington DC, in the land of the free. I went to see an acquaintance from Oxford days, a visiting professor, and he was warm and gracious, but I had the impression that they are sick of us already. We Europeans are up to our usual old-world tricks and they don't want to be involved. They warned your Neville about the consequences of Munich, saying that our man would take no notice of any agreement. On that we are, at least, agreed.

Anyway I delivered my speech, and I am now in my club, a sort of Southern plantation house. It all seems so crazy. What you said may well come true that your country and mine will soon be fighting each other. I am doing what I can, but nobody is listening to me. Shall we make a new life here, darling, before it's too late? Say you want to.

Love ever,

A

That night as he is about to go out to a jazz club with a Rhodes Scholar friend he sees a man sitting downstairs. This man, who is wearing the traditionally boxy suit, gets up as he leaves the club and jumps into a black car and moves into position behind von Gottberg's taxi. He feels shame and despair. They think I am a Nazi.

Mitgegangen mit gehangen, as the phrase is. Roughly translated it means those who travel together hang together.

14

OSRIC HAS GONE back to his wife; he's calmed down and they are going on holiday, the best therapy. If he knows about Emily and Conrad, he says nothing. Emily is sexually avid, although it seems to Conrad that her avidity is a little impersonal. What she likes is a good time, a package deal: wine, a pizza, a joint or two and sex. It's as if she must fill every moment with sensation. She has two young children, and has more or less given up drugs. Not for her own sake, because she can handle it, but because the children have to be taken to school and she has to keep her head straight. They go to an expensive little school in Notting Hill. There's a sort of innocence about Emily, which he finds very appealing. Sometimes a man called Dion rings her and she is downcast for a while. Is he the father? He doesn't ask. Her eyes are a very pale blue, Baltic blue, and her mouth is rather flat, as though overlong use of a dummy as a child had compressed her lips.

Tony is very excited.

'You done orright there, son,' he says. 'She's a cracker.'

'It's not going anywhere.'

He says this even though he has no need to justify himself to Tony. He wonders if Tony is comparing Emily's sexual potential to Francine's. Emily has stayed the night once, when her mother was looking after the children. He finds himself restored in the morning as though the physical closeness has in some mysterious way supplied him with the chemical or biological material he was missing. It certainly isn't going anywhere, but the intimacies of sex, the little details, the excitable, but at the same time matter-of-fact way she has, all these things have topped up his human supplies. In truth it worries him that the process should be so easy. When he sees himself naked next to her, he realises that he has become very thin over the past few months. He loves - and he has missed - the fragility of the female body. On her back just at the base of her spine where it vanishes, she has tiny golden hairs. When they make love, she has a faraway look as though he is only standing in for someone, an ideal that she will never find. He doesn't mind. He thinks that she is a blessing. Moral luck, as the philosophers say.

Francine calls to report that the estate agents said the flat smelled of marijuana. He tells her that Osric came round a bit stressed after Baghdad, and lit a few spliffs.

'Spliffs?' she says with disdain. 'You've gone a bit hippyish.'

'We young people have our own language. Not that you would know. How's John, the medical God?'

'Can we talk?'

'Go ahead. I'm just aimlessly shuffling paper as usual.'

'You know what I mean. Talk properly.'

'About?'

'About us.'

'About you and John?'

'Don't. You know what I mean.'

'Francine, I've got somebody else.'

'Oh. OK. Sorry.'

She sounds so beaten that he says, 'It's not going anywhere.

Just a shag. Let's meet.'

'No. It's all right. I am upset, and I have no right to be. I'm being ridiculous.'

'I'll call you. Are you finished with John?'

'I think so. I've applied for a job at UCH. He thinks it's best.

He knows everyone there.'

'He's given you the push, hasn't he?'

'Yes.'

'Francine, obviously I haven't just been standing around waiting for you, until you decided '

'I'm pregnant.'

'Does he know?'

'No.'

'What are you going to do?'

'Conrad, it could be yours. You remember our last meeting, I hope?'

'Of course.'

'Well the dates are more or less exact.'

'OK.'

'I can get rid of it. Do you want that?'

'Let's talk.'

'When?'

'I could do tomorrow. When are you off?'

'I'm off all the time. Until I get the job at UCH.'

'All right. Not here, though. I'll meet you at Bar Italia. Eleven?'

He sees a moral dilemma now. If it isn't his baby - and how will they know? — he can't encourage her to have an abortion. Even if it is his baby, conceived under these circumstances, what are his responsibilities? Worse, he feels obliged to encourage her to have the baby, just because it is probably not his. And if he says, 'Look let's not discuss whose baby it is ever again, but you just decide if you want it or not,' he can see that it is opening a whole new field of discussion, a can of worms. She can't have a baby on her own without his help. And where will John stand if he discovers she has a baby? The sensible thing would be to abort the baby, but this, too, is difficult. He and Francine wanted children but her career and his inability to earn enough money meant that they could not go ahead. But why was she leaving herself unprotected; was it that she wanted a child by John? If this was her intention, he has no obligation to her whatsoever. Nor does the fact that John has ditched her mean that Conrad is the natural successor. Also he feels resentment: Just at the point when my life is becoming carefree, a heavy hand has been clapped on my shoulder. It's not fair.

They are going out together for the first time. Emily has booked the restaurant. She says she likes restaurants that are fun. Fun means loud and busy and in Chelsea. Everyone knows her at this restaurant and he feels a little foolish — the new boyfriend — yet sadly proud to be out with someone so lovely. She and her friends speak in a dialect known only in Chelsea. If they are not speaking to each other they are keeping their friends informed by mobile. This life demands a kind of upbeat casualness, as though thoughtfulness is only for brainboxes and losers. There can be no quiet moments: life is filled with parties and tequila slammers and dope and sex and dinners and spur-of-the-moment flights to see chums. These people are all wildly happy until they go off to rehab. Emily has a kind of sexual openness, which men recognise instantly. They go back to the flat in Camden much later. She thinks Camden is quaint and exotic, as one might a slum in Mombasa. As soon as they get through the door she starts to roll a joint; she has all the gear, a little box and papers. She finishes the joint neatly and seals it with a lick of saliva. Then she draws deeply and blows the smoke and her moist breath into his mouth and kisses him at the same time. He wonders what she thinks about when she's not busy in this way and he can't imagine. As he inhales he wonders if it is skunk, but he thinks it would be uncool to ask. At five in the morning, she leaves.

When he wakes, he finds a letter from the Bundesarchiv in Berlin. He opens it and reads:

Dear Mr Senior

Enclosed you will find a letter sent to the Archive in response to my enquiries which I posted on a film website for you in relation to the Wochenschau film you must try to locate. This gentleman, Mr Ernst Fritsch, has responded with enclosed letter, which I have sended to you. He is unknown to this department, but it can be a possibility for your research. With good wishes. (Miss) G. Eberhardt (Archiv: Film Assistant)

He reads the enclosed letter, which is typed on an old-fashioned typewriter. He translates as best he can, using his Cassell's dictionary:

I am responding to the request for information required by an English television researcher, Mr Senior, concerning the Wochenschau films made on the orders of the Reichs Director of Film by the Firm Wochenschau in the year of 1944 at the People's Court and Berlin-Plotzensee Prison. I was an assistant cameraman at Wochenschau in those days, and it is possible I may be able to help with the research you have mentioned, concerning Count von Gottberg.

I am unfortunately unwell, so if Mr Senior wishes to speak with me I would advise some haste. Please ask this gentleman to write to this address explaining the nature of his interest in more detail and I will respond when I am able to do so. With all good wishes,

Ernst Fritsch.

Conrad has almost forgotten his enquiry to the archive. Now, six or seven months later, this letter comes from a cameraman. He wants to write to Fritsch immediately but he has to leave for Soho to meet Francine. Events, inexplicably, are gathering force and congesting. (He remembers as a child his disbelief when he was told that thunder and lightning could curdle milk.) How quickly a world can change. He wonders what Ernst Fritsch wants. Probably money. His address is in Prenzlauer Berg, which used to be in the old East Berlin, the territory of the thriller.

Emily left at some time in the night without warning; there are mysterious demands on her time. But she left behind for a while the lingering scents of her presence; everyone has their own. When his mother died, he used to go to her wardrobe to smell her clothes. He was surprised to read years later that this is quite common amongst the bereaved.

When he arrives at Bar Italia, he remembers that it was in Frith Street, not twenty metres away, that Elizabeth Partridge and Elya Mendel met, and she told him about her visit to Sachsenhausen. They didn't know then that more than fifty thousand were to be hanged or gassed or that Nazi officials were invited to attend a demonstration of a more efficient killing facility, and watched ninety-six Jews being killed more efficiently to prove it; nor that the camp commander was ordered in 1945 to remove the remaining forty thousand prisoners in barges and sink them in the Baltic. In the event tens of thousands died on a forced march East.

Conrad sits on one of the high stools with a croissant and a cappuccino, the best in London, produced by an old Gaggia. Soon he sees Francine peering in. He stands up and goes to the door and kisses her briefly.

'What would you like?'

'What are you having?'

'A cappuccino and a croissant.'

'I'll have an espresso. Single.'

When he brings over the espresso they sit in silence for a few moments. He looks at her to see if there is any obvious change.

'What do you think?' she asks finally.

'Firstly, I am terribly sorry it didn't work out with John.'

'Not even a little bit pleased?'

'No.'

'That's sweet of you.'

'Do you still love him?'

'I never loved him. I just wanted a better life. Things were getting on top of me.'

'Including John.'

'Ho, ho. Same old Conrad. No, I felt desperate.'

He looks at her face; under the neon it is pale and wary. The familiar face that spent nearly ten years next to his and then positioned itself next to John's. The essence of a relationship is located here, in the face. That is why whores never kiss. It's odd that the sexual organs are the focus of attention in pornography, when kissing is a far more intimate activity. The Romans knew that. When Emily put her tongue in his mouth that first night, he was shocked and thrilled.

'It's not because of you. I was overwhelmed. But it is because of you that John and I have split up. He asked me if I still loved you, and I said yes. I couldn't lie. I realised it that day after all, but I was too stubborn to tell you.'

'Ah, that last, mythical day.'

'Don't mock.'

'Can I say one thing about this baby?'

'Please.'

She looks ready for a blow.

'Nothing should be decided on the basis of who the father is. Is that possible, anyway, to find out?'

'Not really. Not at this stage.'

'Presumably at this stage abortion, termination, is relatively simple?'

'Yes.'

She looks down at the counter.

'Fran, I mean it. Whatever you decide, it's not going to be because it is or isn't mine. One thing is sure, it's yours.'

'OK.'

'And?'

'I can't decide. I so want a baby. But as we know, it's not simple.'

'Because I am a wastrel and you have a career.'

'No, Conrad. I don't think that. Maybe I never did. I just thought you sort of disregarded me. Who is your new girlfriend?'

'She's just someone I met. She's called Emily. Trust me, it's not going to last. It was just a reaction. She thinks I am good-looking and I'm grateful.'

'You are good-looking.'

'And you are beautiful.'

'I am fading fast.'

'Just give me a couple of days to think it over and then we must decide what to do.'

'We?'

'We always wanted to have a child.'

'Oh Conrad.'

She is crying. He holds her hand. She looks so miserable, so crushed, that he feels his own eyes welling.

'What a pair we are,' he says.

There is kickboxing on the giant television screen at the end of the bar. He watches determinedly.

'I could do locum work until the baby is born.'

'Whoa. You're the one with the career path, remember.'

'Conrad, I have to tell you how dreadfully sorry I am for what's happened. All I can say is that it has been a terrible, terrible mistake. I don't expect anything from you. I don't deserve it, but I had to tell you face to face. I've got to go now.'

The colour is rising on her throat.

'Franny, always rushing.'

They walk up Frith Street hand in hand as they used to. But Conrad knows that nothing will ever be truly the same. He stops himself from pointing out the spot where Mendel and Elizabeth met to talk about Axel von Gottberg.

They turn into Greek Street. As she releases his hand, he feels this uncoupling deeply, the feeling you have when sex is finished, a symbolic separation which (the pain of the past minutes has made him extremely sensitive to these emotions) seems to speak of mortality, because each separation, each parting, depletes the material that binds you together. You know that you can never gather up the shards of innocence and blitheness to make something whole. And this, rather than the moment of death itself, is probably the meaning of mortality. He reaches over to kiss her, but she half ducks away from him and his lips just brush her cheek.

She turns suddenly under an arch, and she is gone. Is she going now to talk to John to tell him she is pregnant? It could be John's baby, after all. He can't bear the idea that she may have conceived with John's sperm. But nature is coldly undiscriminating; you can conceive a baby by a rapist or with a whore or in a one-night stand. What Mendel, who was eating lunch just there with Elizabeth sixty-five years ago, knew is that there is no generous intelligence at large in nature or anywhere else. At that time, just a few years before his death, Axel von Gottberg still kept faith with the idea of spirit making its way in the world of beings and things towards some conclusion. The chaste, clear, barbarian eye, as Stefan George the poet put it, could see these things.

As Axel sat with Elizabeth gazing at the electrified fence, the tower, the prison blocks of Sachsenhausen, had he realised at last what he was up against in this world?

Was it possible for them to imagine what was coming? Mendel discovered very early on that awful things were in process, while von Gottberg still chose to believe in the new order that was coming in Germany. But did he lose his faith outside Sachsenhausen? Did he forsake the fable of blood and desire? After Elizabeth rejected him, after his Oxford friends turned away, and after the FBI trailed him in Washington, Axel von Gottberg came back to Germany and later that year, four weeks after war was declared, married Dietlof Goetz's sister, Liselotte, in the Pleskow village church. All the foresters and cowmen still left on the estate, formally dressed, and the village women and children in their Sunday clothes, formed a guard of honour and threw flowers from their gardens in their way as Wicht the coachman drove them from the church to the house in the shooting brake, which was garlanded with flowers. Pulling the brake were the black and grey horses, Donner and Blitz.

In the pictures von Gottberg looks happy enough. Axel's best man is his brother, Berndt, who was to describe him as a traitorous dog less than four years later. Berndt has a duelling scar beside his mouth, which seems comical, even absurd to Conrad. Von Gottberg's father is not present, but in the formal wedding photograph his sisters and his mother sit on either side of the bride and groom, with scores of relatives all around. Upper-class people have extensive family ties, and their members are summoned for these occasions: like tastefully dressed migratory birds, they obey the summons. Within two months Liselotte is pregnant.

Everyone who has children says your life changes, nothing prepares you for the reality. But also having children can be self-centred. Some of Conrad's friends imagine that they have become creators, they have been trusted to keep the sacred flame alight: zeugen, to beget, which was a big idea with the German poets. They would beget a new society.

Later that afternoon before Emily has to go to pick up the children from school, which Conrad imagines is besieged every afternoon by huge four-wheel-drive vehicles until the tiny hostages are released, showered with lavish praise and equipped with their suspiciously accomplished works of art, she comes to the flat above the bakery. She is drunk.

'I had lunch with an old chum,' she explains cheerfully.

She has to take a phone call in the middle of their love-making. She is lying on her side and he is behind her. The shape of her back and thighs seems to be expressly formed for this. The conversation is short and tense. Quickly she gets up and dresses.

'Sorry, got to go. Love ya loads,' she says, fastening her skirt and then running her hands through her hair.

She bangs the door shut. Perhaps one of the children is ill or perhaps the mysterious Dion requires something of her. His penis has responded modestly, by retreating into itself. It's a defensive posture. Very strange how it seems not wholly dependent, like a small country whose foreign affairs are managed by a bigger, more sensible state. Like Andorra or Monaco or San Marino.

Conrad considers his life, so changed in a few days. He is sexually involved with a whacked Chelsea girl (girl-woman would be more accurate); his wife is pregnant and hoping for reconciliation; it is possible he is a father. Also a man called Ernst Fritsch claims to have knowledge of the film of Axel von Gottberg being hanged. There is no obvious link between any of these facts. The flat has been quiet for weeks, just the papers and letters moving and drifting, but now the place is the focus of energy, like those lay lines that new-age folk believe bisect the country at key places.

When he comes back with some milk and stamps, Tony steps out.

'Your bird was in a hurry.'

'She had to pick up her son from school.'

'She weren't properly dressed, you dog.'

'Jesus, Tony. Stick to baking.'

'Hehwah. I've got a nice focaccia for you. You got to keep your stremf up, mate.'

In Tony's eyes he's gone from recluse to dirty dog: Fuck a rat, it's the quiet ones you gotta watch out for.

The Bangladeshi who owns the corner shop is growing a beard. On the early evidence the plan seems to be to grow it straight down and untended in the religious fashion; back in the flat he wonders why it is that people are always looking for the incorrigible proposition. He remembers Mendel telling him that he took great comfort from the idea that life has no meaning. It frees you from irrational practices, like growing a beard as a billboard for your views.

Emily's Holly Golightly behaviour does not trouble him. For the moment the arrangement, unclear though it is, suits him fine. She calls, very cheerful, and suggests they carry on later where they left off.

'OK. I'm just going through the papers. I may have to go to Berlin soon.'

'Cool. They have some great clubs there. They really, really know how to party.'

In her world cities have no historical or artistic resonance; they are simply places to go and get mashed. Having a laugh is an imperative for these people: they fall off ski lifts; they run their jet-skis on to coral after too many rum punches. And they get off their faces in clubs in Berlin. So he imagines.

He starts writing a letter to Mr Fritsch, using his dictionary. He intends to say that he would be very much interested in meeting Mr Fritsch to discuss the filming both of the People's Court and the executions. Could Mr Fritsch suggest a suitable place to meet? He will discuss financial matters when he knows what Mr Fritsch is suggesting. He wants to check his German with a friend, but he decides he must keep his enquiries secret. He writes:

Sehr Geehrter Herrn Fritsch, Ich bedanke ihnen für ihre Brief. Das ist für mir, wie historicher Forscher, sehr bedeutend. Darf ich bei ihnen in Berlin eine Besuch machen? Wenn siefilr mich etwas zeigen kann, dan kann wir uber Finanzen besprechung. Mit freundlichen Grüssen.

Conrad thinks it is important to mention money right away: he imagines Ernst Fritsch in an East Berlin tenement desperate for some cash. As a Nazi he would not have received a pension and life in the new Germany is hard for the Ossis anyway. He seals the envelope and goes out again to post it, hoping it is not too full of errors.

He remembers Mendel writing that to be understood you have to share a common language and have the possibility of intimate communication. By the time war broke out, it seems that the plea von Gottberg had made for trust was misunderstood. But also it became starkly apparent that he and Mendel shared neither a common past nor common feelings.

15

WHEN BRITAIN AND France declared war on Germany on 3 September 1939, Oxford lost colour. It faded like an old carpet. For Elya Mendel the finer points of academic philosophy seemed not only trivial, but even ridiculous now. Other young dons were leaving town as officers, but he was not able to apply because of his foreign birth. He tried to take up the Foreign Office's offer of work, but they seemed to have forgotten him. He waited in Oxford, reporting to the Town Hall to roll bandages and check gas masks while the Foreign Office went through its checks. His birth in Riga was a handicap. He thought of moving to the United States; he was frightened of what might happen to him if the Nazi invasion took place. He wrote to Hamburger suggesting that some institution might be persuaded to employ him.

It was a miserable winter. His rooms were always cold and Oxford, despite Lionel's crazed bonhomie, appeared to be sinking into depression. Then he received a letter from the Foreign Office saying that it did not wish to employ him in any capacity. For a week he remained in bed. But — as Conrad sees so often in the correspondence — some important figure intervened on his behalf and he was asked to go to London after all to advise the Russian section. He wrote to Hamburger that he was scared of bombs, but went to work in London with joy. He had been shaken by his rejection, which was the confirmation of his foreignness even though he was a fellow of All Souls.

My parents saw All Souls as their own acceptance in England. I haven't dared tell them that my first six years in Riga have returned me to the ranks of the alien. Nothing like a war for the noxious gases to seep out of the cracks.

There is no mention of von Gottberg. The start of war was evidently the end of understanding. It may have been convenient, in the same way that families can forget after a bereavement, each member seeing for their own reasons an opportunity for an overdue dissolution of ties, something that happened at high speed when Conrad's mother died. He thinks that for Mendel the threat to the Jews was sufficient reason to forget his old pal. It was a threat that von Gottberg had fostered in a small way with his ill-advised letter. Von Gottberg was aware that he had lost Mendel's cherished esteem and he almost certainly knew that Mendel had briefed against him in Washington.

Conrad, living in the mouse-nibbled margins of London just a few minutes from great wealth and imposing solidity, sees the city not as home, but as a huge agglomeration of human frailty and greed, held in uneasy suspension. We live by assumptions which in reality we know nothing of, but our faith is as firm as that of religious fundamentalists. War demonstrates - perhaps it's designed to demonstrate - that we should not take any assumptions for granted. Elya Mendel was particularly sensitive to the terrible possibilities of history, while for von Gottberg six hundred uninterrupted years in Pleskow must have suggested something entirely different. For a Jew, six hundred settled years are an eternity.

Conrad has never felt settled in London. Wherever his home is, it is not here. London is too big, too burdened, to be held in the mind whole. He doesn't really know how planets work, but he sees London as a gaseous body bound together in some mysterious fashion like a planet.

The mystery of Emily's life is being revealed: Dion, who calls menacingly, is her drugs counsellor. He is himself a recovering addict. Crack was his downfall, apparently. Emily thinks of drug addictions as somehow honourable, a sign of higher striving. Dion has become a zealot for living clean, as he puts it. He has a hold over Emily, established when she was in rehab. She probably had sex with him; she seems to have had a lot of sex. In theory it doesn't worry him, but in practice he finds he wants to know not how many she has slept with, but on what basis she makes her choices. Their first encounter suggests that she doesn't need much evidence at all. What was it she saw, or glimpsed, in him? Whacked though she is, he has become very fond of her. Her calm, practical sexual expertise is at odds with her girlish, upbeat manner. It's as though all the categories in her world have blurred, so that life is now one long, looped film containing sex, drink, marijuana, ex-boyfriends, music, inchoate creative impulses -poetry, screenplays, painting are mentioned - all these melding into a whole that keeps revolving seamlessly.

And sometimes at night Conrad finds that his picture of the People's Court is like that too, played endlessly, as von Gottberg stands with his hands crossed speaking calmly and quietly, crossing his hands again, then speaking calmly again. These few minutes go round and round and they are unbearable because Conrad knows and von Gottberg knows that if the film stops he will be slowly hanged from a meat-hook, whatever he says, however considerate his demeanour. But something sustains von Gottberg and makes him calm. Even though he has small children and a young wife, and despite the fact that he has been tortured. And this is a mystery.

While von Gottberg was establishing himself in Berlin, his new wife stayed at Pleskow. She was welcomed by the family, especially warmly by von Gottberg's older sister, Adelheid, whose first marriage ended when her Jewish husband went insane in New York. He had been taken to Bellevue one night after he set their apartment on the Upper East Side alight. Adelheid told her new sister-in-law that the sight of her husband in handcuffs being pushed into a Black Maria had broken her heart. A financial blunder had unhinged him. At least he wasn't going to come back to Germany to face another kind of madness. Adi had visited him in Bellevue where he sat silent. Axel had visited him more recently in New York and reported that he did not recognise him. The doctors had given him a new treatment, electro-convulsive therapy.

Von Gottberg took a small flat near the zoo and sometimes, when he had to go to the main building in Wilhelmstrasse, walked the whole length of the Tiergarten, passing at last beneath the quadriga on the Brandenburg Gate. He went back to Pleskow when he could, taking the train to Schwerin to be met by the coachman; or sometimes he drove up in his car. His spirits always lifted as the house came into view, firstly across the lake, and then as they turned into the drive, by the oaks and the huge barns. The first thing he did when it was not too cold was to swim in the lake. The water had a unique taste and smelled of gently decomposing vegetable matter and aquatic plants, a scent that took him instantly to his childhood. Lake water, his own lake too. Next to the bathing hut was a wooden tea-house and there he and Liselotte, his mother and his sisters would meet over English tea. Liselotte said that there was always laughter and music although Axel was gloomy about the war. The panzer rush through Belgium and into France would make it more difficult to remove Hitler, he said.

Von Gottberg's life in Berlin was increasingly dangerous as he sought out others — there were many — who thought that Hitler was steering the beloved country to disaster. But he enjoyed the danger; he was a young man, plotting to save his country; he found the late-night discussions with like-minded colleagues in the Foreign Office and the Army and his meetings with Helmuth James von Moltke and his circle, his Krets, exhilarating. He was forming the idea of an alternative Germany of spiritually conscious people, enlightened Germany, which would inherit when Hitler was gone. His friends in England did not understand; they wished to crush Nazi Germany into the dust. But they didn't realise that by saying this they were offering the German people no option but to stick with Hitler. He couldn't tell his family the details, but he was travelling to Sweden and Switzerland to pass on to the governments of Britain and America the information that there was an opposition that should be encouraged. He also passed on plans of annexations and invasions. Meanwhile, more and more reports of brutal killings by Einsatzgruppen were coming out and these too were passed on. In the spring von Gottberg went again to Sweden to met an English bishop, with details of the opposition in the Army and the Foreign Office, for onward transmission to Churchill. Soon after he met a young officer called Claus von Stauffenberg and reported to Liselotte that he had at last found a true friend.

The two cities, London and Berlin, where the old friends now found themselves, were sexually charged by war. With death in the air, sex scuttles in to fill the vacuum. Women stopped wearing hats all of a sudden, as if hats were keeping them down. Hair and sex became synonymous. Von Gottberg believed that casual sex with other men's wives or with girls he picked up in nightclubs or with waitresses in Kurfürstendamm did not count as adultery. And in London, Mendel found that he could translate his charm and urbanity into sexual activity. Women were liberated by the sense that the old world, for better or for worse, was finished. Kaputt.

Von Gottberg was working under enormous danger right from the beginning. He was never able to write a letter or use the phone or tell the names of his closest friends to other friends, for fear that when the reckoning came they would tell all. It was quite different in Whitehall, where Mendel treated his fortnightly digest of Russian intelligence as an essay. Very soon colleagues were talking of the brilliance and wit of his observations about Russian intentions; without demonstrating too much learning -never a good idea - he was able to suggest from his deep knowledge of Russian literature and history how the Russians would react.

In the Kreisau Circle there were endless arguments on matters of principle about whether Hitler could legitimately be killed, and about the attitude of the members to the threat from the East and the composition of the new government. Von Gottberg warned of the dangers of trying to restore a monarchy, or of allowing the proposed putsch to be the property of the Alte Herren of the Army and the aristocracy. England would not be keen on such a thing, he said. He was probably remembering Mendel's warning about the high-handed member of the Prussian aristocracy who had visited Oxford and caused outrage. Von Gottberg tended to see England and Oxford as the same thing.

Conrad sits above the bakery waiting for Fritsch. If Fritsch has anything for him he will go immediately to Berlin. What happens next depends on Fritsch. This old man - he pictures Fritsch as a sickly, shabby figure, trying to make a few euros out of his sordid past - may have the film or may know where it is. If he has been harbouring it for all these years it is probably only because of a sense of shame that he has not tried to sell it before. After all, he saw men being hanged. Or perhaps Fritsch is finding that his old mind is like a shallow boat, mostly gliding undisturbed, but occasionally touching on something submerged. Germany is full of people who would rather not remember. But then, Conrad's father was one of those too. Forgetting the unpleasant is a natural defence, probably Darwinian, and the belief of Freud's bastard children in recovering memory is utterly contrary to nature.

For more than a week he has rushed down for the post, but still there is no word from Fritsch. Meanwhile a child is growing within Francine, and it may be his child. Von Gottberg had three very young children when he was hanged. They were three, two and nine months old. It must have occurred to Mendel when he knew all the facts and when he met Liselotte for the first time in the seventies that nobody sacrifices himself recklessly if he has children. And now Conrad tries to imagine himself as a father.

He leaves the flat, hoping to avoid Tony, who has an unnatural interest in his new sex life. He can see him in his white coat, with his back turned, and tries stealthily opening the door to the street, which they share. The door has an electric buzzer attached, which makes secrecy impossible.

'You look a bit pale. Keeping your stremf up?'

'Tony, you have turned from the king of Camden's artisan bakers, maybe the only one, a legend in the field of farinaceous products, to a pervert. For Christ sakes keep out of it.'

'Orright, orright. Keep your 'air on, mate. I'm just joshing. You're a lucky bunny, that's all I'm saying, no more. That's it, bast a. No offence?'

'I didn't take offence, it's just that I am beginning to feel persecuted. I can't go out of my own fucking front door without you or your little pal leering at me.'

'We're just jealous. Good luck to yer. And if you need some more fuel when you come home, there's loads of olive bread left over.'

'Oh Jesus. Bye-bye, Tony. Don't wait up.'

He is off to meet Emily. But passing the decrepit church on the corner just past the minicab office and the shop selling rubber-foam shapes - do-it-yourself furniture - he turns into the overgrown churchyard and towards the Victorian church. It has a tall steeple, not soaring but workmanlike, the sort of job you got for limited money in 1862. The porch smells of urine. Inside it is vast and unseasonably cold. He kneels on the floor and folds his hands across his face, in case anybody should be watching. There is some movement over to the right beyond a pillar and he sees between his fingers a man sitting on a pew eating something quickly and surreptitiously, like a dog picking up rubbish in the park. He hasn't been in a church on his own for years, although of course he's been to a few weddings and christenings. Guiltily he remembers his two god-children, who he has neglected criminally. He has never sent either of them a single present.

Mendel, who was an atheist, believed that religion should stick to its guns: the precepts of religion could not be altered at will.

And me? What do I believe?

He closes his eyes and tries to re-create the feeling of his few religious years at boarding school in Cape Town. The feeling was genuine, but was it, in any meaningful way, real? And, to his surprise, he finds he can re-create the feeling in part, through the physical: the pew against his buttocks (which Emily described, gratifyingly, as 'lovely tight buns') and the feel of stone under his knees and the sense that above his head there is a lot of unused, significant space. Religious space. The essence of religion is thought to live up there somewhere, although it can be lured into the heart by the bait of good behaviour.

And he thinks of fucking Emily. He can't bring himself in the privacy of his own head to use any other word. He counts the number of times they have fucked and at the same time he keeps his head buried in his hands in deference to the location. Fourteen. He is now very familiar with the topography of her body. In restaurants she encourages him to put his hand under her skirt; she parts her thighs briefly. She is always smoking or drinking or licking the paper on a joint. She doesn't eat much although she always orders a large plate of fries. She needs to fiddle, to handle, to taste, to suck. She is thin, but - he remembers a phrase in a Hemingway novel — made for sex. Tony and his lightly powdered chum recognise it. But now he must break it off. He's not sure she will mind; she'll move on fast and probably without regret; after all he remembers how they met. But he can't be having sex with her and deal fairly and squarely with Francine at the same time.

He says the words of the Lord's Prayer to his atheist self and remembers just how beautiful they are. Most of the hanged in Plotzensee were able to have last messages smuggled out. All these messages had a religious tone. Von Gottberg's, if he wrote one, was lost, to his wife's great distress. This need to believe, this need to profess some faith in something - God or decency or asceticism or conscience or homeopathy or country or the special qualities of animals or the Prophet's Night Ride or the imminence of a new order — is a curse. As he kneels there he sees that to confess to believing in nothing ultimately is to accept mortality unreservedly, which very few people are really prepared to do, although they know that the tide of death can only rise.

The man who was eating stops in front of the altar and crosses himself. Perhaps he was not eating but self-administering the host. He scowls competitively at Conrad as he passes. Conrad is now completely alone in this huge dark space. Water has seeped into the stone over the years, so that the pews and the hymnbooks feel musty. There is the whiff of mushrooms in the air. He stands up and walks towards the entrance. He sees a table with candles, none of them lit. You may light a candle to bear witness if you make a voluntary donation. He puts a pound in the box. It lands with a wooden noise that suggests that not many people have been bearing witness. Matches are provided, which could be seen as an invitation to an arsonist, although it would be hard to start a fire in this dampness. He lights a candle. The word witness, which the Church finds exciting, is puzzling. The way the Church intends it, it means to profess your faith openly. But it can mean to sacrifice yourself. His candle is in remembrance of his father. Love cools, friendship falls off, brothers divide: in cities mutinies; in countries discord, in palaces treason; and the bond cracked 'twixt son and father . . .

And he tells himself as he leaves the church that his cheap candle flickering in the dark is to restore the bond between son and father, even at this late hour.

When he meets Emily she is already drunk. She is with three friends, a young man and two girls, which makes him uneasy. She is sitting on a stool with a cigarette in one hand. Her denim skirt is halfway up her thighs. She introduces him to her friends and they pour him a glass of wine. The friends are like amiable Labradors. They are simply waiting to see where the drink and the dope and the night will take them. They make noises that he can't fully understand. They whoop and laugh. He can in fact get the words, but he finds it hard to discern any sentences. They talk about friends who got mashed or arrested or crashed their cars - whoop, whoop - but it is never clear where or in what order these things have happened. They are unnaturally loud. The two girls have flat, bare stomachs and their breasts demand attention, not by being buxom or womanly, but by having a kind of life of their own, small lascivious creatures, barely under control.

'Emily?'

'Yuh?'

'Can I talk to you for a moment?'

'Go ahead.'

'Just you and me. Outside.'

'OK.'

She places a hand on his shoulder and slides off the bar stool, unsure of the whereabouts of the floor. He can see that she is wearing red knickers. When they are standing outside she kisses him.

'I can't stay, Em. I've got a problem. I'm going now.'

She isn't taking it in.

'Give me a bell when you're free. I don't know where we will be.'

'OK.'

'Love you a bunch.'

She stands on the pavement unsteadily. She's like a mountaineer at very high altitude: the air outside is too thin to sustain her. There is a tragic lapse before she gathers herself and goes happily back into the pub.

He walks down to the river and phones Francine. It is just dark enough for the lights on the embankment to show on the water, which is running full and dark. Francine doesn't answer, but he leaves a message.

'Fran, I would like you to come back, if that's what you want. And I think we should have the baby. I've told Emily I am not seeing her again, whatever.'

Although, of course, Emily has no idea.

16

FRANCINE, HE HAS realised, doesn't fully believe him. She thinks that this is just another of the delusions he has lived by for so long. She thinks, despite everything, despite the scale of her betrayal, that he is the unreliable one. Let's take it one step at a time, she says. She will do locum work and stay where she is until she is sure he is sure. She would also like to know if there is going to be an end to his work on Mendel's papers.

'Do you mean you would like to see me employed?'

'If we have the baby, I won't be able to work for six months and when I do go back to work, you won't want to be sitting at home all day looking after a baby and working on your papers at the same time. So yes, it would be better if you had a job and we could afford a nanny.'

Over this conversation hangs a conditional, which he can't contemplate: the existence or non-existence of a baby.

'Fran, we are going to have the baby. As for Mendel and his papers, I am going to follow this right through. I'm waiting now for a man called Fritsch to contact me. He may have some vital information. I know what you are thinking. But I can't tell you the nature of the information, it's not secret or anything, but I just feel I have to explore it myself. And then I'll know where this is leading.'

'Conrad, you must do whatever it is you think you have to. I've learned that lesson. All I am concerned with is the practical arrangements.'

It's not true of course. She's concerned with far more; even now, chastened, almost embarrassingly humbled, she is weighing up his reliability. She has had her hair cut, as if to suggest that she is shriven; although he said how much he liked it and how young it made her look, he was shocked. In fact she looks older and gaunt, even slightly potty. He remembers her walking hand in hand with John near the hospital, her hair incandescent - her hair was in love — and he sees this act of contrition as a realisation that she has to accept her lot: he is part of her climb-down. She must accept the unreliable, useless husband, indulging himself as usual. He sees the simulacrum of their relationship increasingly often amongst friends and acquaintances: the wife whose success and determination license the husband for a life of futility. It is a phenomenon of the new century. And often these house husbands drink or say they are writing a novel or profess to love children or they make furniture or sleep with the nanny. Has Mendel given me these papers to unman me? But then he thinks of Mendel in old age, with those small dark eyes, which appeared to consist only of irises, sitting in his collapsed chair, dressed in a three-piece suit, talking about Conrad's thesis and gently suggesting books he should read and opening his mind — how banal but how literal a phrase — to something extraordinary, a very personal but also wide-ranging understanding of human aspirations and longings. He remembers, as if it were spoken five minutes before, Mendel telling him that mankind's greatest delusion is the belief that one day the world will arrive at an ideal state of affairs, a heaven on earth where all values will be in harmony and all problems will be solved. Not only does he remember the words, he hears the way Mendel spoke them, with just a trace of his immigrant origins - a sort of East European warble in the vowels lingered in the oddly patrician English.

He had told Mendel that day that he had learned about his father taking money from the National Party to print stories about Mandela and the ANC that were untrue.

Conrad, in times of great stress, of historic upheaval, people react in unpredictable ways. All I can say to you is that, in my experience, people under these circumstances are desperate to share the possibility of intimate communications. From what you have told me about your father, I would guess that he was expressing his understanding of the nature of truth. However personally disadvantageous, he seems to have decided that he could not subscribe to the idea that a heaven on earth was about to be ushered in.

Conrad did not ask him to be more precise. He took this to mean that Mendel was suggesting that his father wanted to be true to something irreducible. He couldn't embrace another myth, another set of lies. And that was more or less exactly what his father, mad-eyed in the empty cottage, told Conrad a few years later. He sitting alone beneath his blue-and-red Balliol blade, Bumped Ch Ch, Trinity, Pembroke, Wadham, 1959. Conrad noted the names and weights of the crew, all recorded reverentially on the blade. His father asked Conrad not to contact him again under any circumstances. Conrad boarded the small train at Clovelly Station, the first step on his journey back to England, his heart broken.

No, Mendel wanted to draw him fully into the understanding of how things really work in history, among humans: what it means to be one of these creatures in a time of confusion and moral turmoil. And Mendel wanted him to try to understand what von Gottberg had done, which perhaps he hadn't fully understood himself. He wasn't expecting an answer, of course, only requiring that Conrad never cease from exploring this and other mysteries.

Shelley wrote in his Defence of Poetry that poets are hierophants — he had to look the word up — priests who carry the sacred knowledge from one generation to another. If he told Francine that he was carrying some sacred spark, she might have him sectioned. Doctors are entitled to do this.

He's waiting for Fritsch. In the meanwhile on a large chart attached to a wall with Blu-tack, he is filling in von Gottberg's known movements. He sees patterns: he is in Berlin, meeting friends at the Romanisches Café, the Adlon and the Foreign Press Association, as he establishes himself in the Auswartiges Amt at 137 Kurfürstendamm, which is the information and research department, as an expert on England. There he finds many like-minded people, who believe that Germany is being led to disaster. Increasingly often he has meetings with Helmuth James von Moltke; there are reports that they argue fiercely. He also finds that the generals, who have it in their power to end this madness, are unable to act decisively, although after the Russian campaign and more than a million German deaths they all see that the writing is on the wall. All except for the C-in-C, the Führer. He is living in a Wagnerian world.

Von Gottberg feels an overwhelming desire to tell the English the true story, that Germany is chaotic and that there is another Germany, which needs encouragement to forsake Hitler. Claus von Stauffenberg, who at the beginning came back from France exalted by military success, has returned from the East with 10 Panzer Division saying that the time has come for the secret Germany to assert itself. The generals have failed the people: the colonels must act. According to von Stauffenberg, the secret Germany is a nobler place with its roots deep in the past, deep in the forests. Its prophet is the poet Stefan George; von Stauffenberg and his brothers see themselves even now as carrying on George's task. He recites George's poem, 'The Antichrist', to von Gottberg in a flat liturgical way, the way the Master ordained:

You will hang out your tongues, but the trough will be drained 

You will stampede like cattle whose barn is on fire 

And dreadful will be the blast of the last trumpet.

The last trumpet had sounded at Stalingrad. Our armies, he said, were like a puff of wind on the steppes.

To his sister Adelheid, von Gottberg describes von Stauffenberg as a classical hero. He tells her that von Stauffenberg had once thought that, after winning the Russian campaign, the Army would be able to turn its attention to the SS. For the German nobility, Himmler is in many ways worse than Hitler. It is Himmler's Einsatzgruppen that have turned the people of Eastern Europe, potential allies in the war with Russia, against Germany.

As the war progressed von Gottberg travelled to Switzerland and to Sweden four or five times. But nobody listened. The Allies had already decided that anything less than unconditional surrender could not be contemplated. And, anyway, after his visit to Washington and his meeting with Hamburger, he was not taken seriously. Mendel had destroyed his credibility.

Mendel may occasionally have heard of von Gottberg's doomed efforts, or read his messages sent via the World Council of Churches and Swedish clerics and American journalists. Von Gottberg had a meeting with Allen Dulles in Berne, and a meeting with a British agent in Stockholm who advised him that the British Government would take the resistance more seriously if it produced results. Although von Gottberg wrote from Geneva and Stockholm to Elizabeth Partridge, there are no letters to Mendel.

By the end of 1943 von Gottberg has a son and a daughter and his wife is pregnant again, but he is unable to spend much time at Pleskow where his wife and children are kept company by his sister Adelheid and his mother. The effects of war have finally reached Pleskow, where the estate is neglected and the medieval reverie is over.

The conspirators are a loose band, diplomats, army officers, religious leaders. They meet and they drink and they argue, but their plans come to nothing, until, with the arrival of von Stauffenberg, there is a new determination. Von Stauffenberg is fearless and utterly convinced. Unlike the generals, he has no qualms about repudiating his oath to the Führer. In his mind, the Führer is the Antichrist. He is tireless in recruiting, and he relies heavily on von Gottberg and others for advice about how to order the new Germany that is to follow the removal of Hitler. By the beginning of 1944, soon after von Stauffenberg is appointed to the General Staff, a plan is drawn up to use the Reserve Army's emergency plan, Valkyrie, designed to mobilise Berlin in the event of an insurrection, as the starting point of a putsch.

In April 1944, Elizabeth receives a letter from von Gottberg, suggesting a meeting in Stockholm. Her husband has been killed in a plane crash in West Africa, but it is not certain if von Gottberg knows this; he makes no mention of it. The letter is postmarked Geneva:

Elizabeth darling Please let us meet. I will be in Sweden for a few days in May.

Can you find a way of meeting me there? Leave a message addressed to the concierge of the Grand Hotel. Ask him to hold it for Mr Axel arriving May 4th. Our love will survive. But I fear unless you can come to Stockholm, we won't meet in this world.

A

Elizabeth has written No! on the letter and underlined it. As he waits for Fritsch and fills in his chart Conrad sees where this life is leading: to the gallows. Meanwhile Mendel is having a fine time - often in Washington, close to the seat of power, his reports read by Churchill, his advice valued and sought. He has even met the woman he is to marry some years later.

Conrad and Francine go to the cinema together as they used to, to see a French film. It is not a good choice under the circumstances, the enigmatic story of a woman in her thirties who has an affair with a total stranger; they never exchange their names and meet once a month in one of those small French hotels that appear to have been made entirely of gloomy lacquered wood with darkly atmospheric corridors on time switches. Once they make love at excruciating length, for a film, in one of the corridors when the lights go out. He glances at Francine to see if she is suffering any painful recall, but her face is set, resigned, although in the gloom it is hard to tell exactly what her expression indicates. Eventually the lover fails to turn up for a rendezvous and the woman wanders around Paris, chic even in her despondency. At the end of the film the woman is seen eating lunch on the He de Re with her husband and two silent children. Seafood, in abundance. Nothing is resolved.

'Bit of a downer,' he says over dinner at a Vietnamese restaurant.

'Yes, not a good choice. Sorry.'

'No personal resonances, I hope?'

'Don't go there. You know I feel utterly ashamed and foolish.'

'Will you move back in?'

'I want to, but I don't think it's right or fair. Although I am longing to put everything back. It's not fair on you. We must be sure.'

'How long have we got?'

'Oh, some weeks.'

Conrad hears the sound of a clock ticking loudly. It's the West-clox in his grandmother's kitchen, on the window ledge beneath the flypaper. His grandmother looked after him and his sister when his mother died and his father was so busy with the newspaper. Often in that house the sound of the clock ticking and the flies battering themselves futilely on the windowpanes or struggling in the flypaper was amplified unbearably by the heavy afternoon stillness. The clock is now ticking for his — or John's - child. The ticking is entering the silences he and Francine cannot fill.

She won't come back to the flat. She takes a bus and he sets off walking to Camden. He wonders if they can be truly reconciled with this business of the child hanging over them. If they have the child, will he look out for physical resemblances or demand a test? It's easy for him to be magnanimous now, because he has found himself on the high ground. She is waiting for him to make some decisive movement, but it is not clear to him what more he can do than to ask her to come back without conditions. She is the one who needs to convince herself, but characteristically she is transferring her doubts to him. He walks past King's Cross where there is always a thin stream of human activity of the marginal variety; here it is possible for illegal immigrants to pick up fares in their clapped-out cars, for touts from cheap hotels to look for custom, for prostitutes, whose shoes and clothes and hair reek of despair, to linger. In dog kennels selling fried chicken and cut-price burgers, pimps and drug dealers gather. In all cities railway stations have an allure for the desperate: with their massive anonymity and twenty-four-hour life they are power-stations providing the wattage these people need to survive.

It takes him twenty minutes to walk home. When he gets there he sees a brown Manila envelope propped up against his door. He opens it cautiously, to find some printed papers with a note from a friend, Karin. He has forgotten that he asked her to do a translation for him from German.

Dearest Conrad, I am so sorry this has taken me so long. I have been travelling. Hope it's not too late. You owe me one - well, dinner, anyway. Love Karin.

He takes the manuscript up to the flat and places it on the bed. Then he showers in the unpredictable shower, which stands in the corner of the bathroom, a cheap little construction they had planned to get rid of. The doors of the shower don't close properly - they are of Perspex - and the water is barely warm. When he comes out of the shower he looks at himself closely in the mirror. Since Emily - crazed, sexy, Emily - told him he was good-looking, he has taken to inspecting himself. What he sees is that his hair is no longer vibrant. In fact it looks like von Gottberg's at his trial, resigned. As to whether he is good-looking, he reserves judgement. He imagines a stranger looking at him and Francine silently eating sizzling prawns and trying to decide who they are or what they stand for or what they do, he with his thinning hair and she with her Lenten haircut. What would the verdict be? Two people who have taken a few knocks, certainly, but beyond that probably nothing remarkable: he sees that they have joined the mass of Londoners, who have had the edges knocked off them and have adapted to the anonymity that the city prefers; it's a wary city, not cynical, but without expectations.

He starts to read. Karin, it is soon clear, has taken the job seriously.

17

FOR MY CHILDREN AND THEIR CHILDREN,

A MEMOIR. LISELOTTE, GRÄFIN VON

GOTTBERG, JUNE, 1982

I MAY BE imagining it, but the sun was always shining that last spring and summer. In my memory every day was beautiful. Sunlight fell silver on the lake soon after dawn and before you woke I would stand by the window in the music room - the best view - looking across the water. The light reminded me of my parents' summer house on the island of Poel, a Baltic light, still misty and indistinct in the early hours. It's the light of northern Europe, magical and mysterious. I always loved this view of the lake, looking over the boat-house, the bathing hut and the tea-house, across to the village, the church and the windmill.

Your father was so busy that last year, those last terrible months. One day in May he telephoned to say that he had a few days' leave and that an important visitor would be staying for the night. It was your second birthday, Angela, which he had promised he would not miss. Knowing that he would enjoy driving in the dark-green shooting brake, I asked Wicht - do you remember him? - to take it to the station. He harnessed the black and grey horses, Donner and Blitz, and put on his best cap, the one he kept especially for your father and your grandfather before him. He raised his whip in salute to me and to your Aunt Adi and trotted off towards the station. I wanted to go with them but we were preparing a welcome for your father as well as his important guest. Also I knew that he would enjoy the ride back from the station and a chat with Wicht, the chance to breathe in his beloved landscape, and revel in the sense of arriving back home [Karin has put a note here: She uses the word Heimat, which is of course for more evocative than 'home'], catching sight of the house just before the road dips and you are lost in the trees for the final run to the park gates. There are certain places and certain sights in a life that raise one's spirits. For forty years I have thought about this place every day. And I know that never a day went by without your father dreaming about the lake and the house and the woods. He once said that as soon as he entered the avenue of oaks, planted by your great-grandfather, he felt true peace. In fact I think he felt that peace as soon as he plunged into the lake, which was the first thing he usually did, preferably naked.

It was nearly eleven when we heard the sound of the brake outside. Robert was in his sailor suit from Wertheim's and Angela, you were in your best frock. Puppi, you were still in Grandma's christening robe, I'm afraid. Aunt Adi was holding you. When they took the Jewish children away from the orphanage I burned the sailor suit. It was unbearable.

Suddenly there he was, so tall, so elegant in his grey suit, his hat pulled down and a brown travelling cape loosely over his shoulders, looking every inch [Zoll für Zoll — not an exact translation, K] the diplomat. He jumped from the brake and ran towards us. Robert began to cry: it was all too much for him. Dear Robert. Papi gathered us all in his arms.

'Swim, swim, let's swim,' he shouted. 'Wicht, bring the presents to the tea-room. Is tea laid?'

'Of course,' said Adi.

Your father and I pulled on our bathing suits. Babette held on to Robert and Angela, and your father carried Puppi into the water. How he loved you children. The air was soon ringing with laughter. We played hide and seek, with me carrying you, Puppi, and Robert and Angela stumbling around and trying to hide behind trees.

The tea was ready on the balcony in front of the tea-house. Although we had very little help now and supplies were short, we had made a special effort. Wrapped in a towel, his body white as a sheet, his face tired, so tired, still your father sang and told jokes and kissed you children. He was as gay and natural as ever, full of life and fun. I think it is true that this was the quality he possessed above all else that nobody could resist: the life-force ran so strongly in him. He shouted, 'What do we need for a harvest?' and you called out, Rye, barley, wheat and oats, rye, barley and oats, and then you sang one of your favourites, I went through a grass green wood! He had brought small gifts for all of us from Wertheim's and Israel's, beautifully wrapped as only they could in those days. Our friend, Wilfred Israel, had left the country before it was too late.

In the afternoon we had a small party for you, Angela, which you slept through. When you were all in bed your father said to me, 'Our guest tonight is Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg.' I had met Stauffenberg the year before in Berlin where he was regarded as a hero. At the time I thought he was a little naive and vain in the old style, with his Iron Cross First Class and his cavalry uniform, but there was no denying his wonderful good looks.

'Don't be startled, he has lost an eye and a hand with Rommel in Tunisia since you last saw him. After we have given him something to eat, he and I must talk.'

And I knew then that it couldn't be long now.

When von Stauffenberg arrived at about ten, driven by his chauffeur (who had once been a professional magician), he came forward to greet me with so much charm and warmth that I was immediately won over. He had a black patch over his left eye, which increased his already considerable presence. We ate together and he talked of Shakespeare and Stefan George and Holderlin. He seemed not to have a care on his mind. He had such enormous charm, such confidence that I really believed the great work could not fail. Your father and he had become very close friends. The right arm of his jacket was pinned to the pocket. The maids competed to cut up his food for him. In the kitchen the chauffeur was baffling Cook with card tricks. Von Stauffenberg called him in for our benefit. We, too, were baffled.

After dinner, although I longed to be alone with him, your father kissed me goodnight and said they would be talking very late. In fact they talked all night. They were planning the composition of the new government that was to take over when Hitler was killed, although I only discovered this much later. In the morning they swam and continued to talk in the tea-house and it was here that Werner H, the forester, who was later executed by the Allies, spied on them and reported to the Gauleiter in Schwerin. Werner's father and his father before him had worked on the estate, but loyalty counted for nothing in the madness of that time.

Von Stauffenberg did not come back into the house, but I saw him in the early dawn walking off to his car with your father round the side of the stables past the estate manager's house. This house was unoccupied then because so many of our people both from the estate and the village were at the front. I kept you children in the house until your father came in. We all had breakfast together and then, just before he set off again for the station, your father said something that put a chill on my heart: 'Whatever happens, you must always remember that you and the children have produced the greatest happiness I could imagine or hope for. What we are doing, we are doing for our beloved country and for them. You must never forget that. Particularly explain to Robert when he is able to understand. The time is coming.'

He looked so tired, so thin, that I wanted to beg him to stay and rest. He seemed too frail to be taking on the Third Reich. Part of me still believed that Hitler was invincible. It was only later that I fully understood that after Stalingrad all was delusion. And now the Allies were advancing across France.

I wanted to ask your father why he, especially, the father of three young children, had to do it, but I could not. Men, we all understood, had to do their duty, and women were not supposed to question them, quaint though that sounds to you now.

We spent the next few weeks keeping ourselves busy. Your Aunt Adi was so wonderful. She had a new plan for every day, from making toy theatres, collecting cornflowers to tie into circlets for your heads, or playing songs on her guitar to sing by the lake. Often we took one of the carts for picnics by the small secret lake in a remote part of the forest, and sometimes we would go over to our cousins at Schwerin and sail in their boats or take the ferry. And of course we swam. The water was, in my memory, always wonderfully warm. And somehow Cook always managed to find enough flour and butter to make a Baumkuchen.

On the 18th of July the stationmaster rang at about nine o'clock at night and he said that the Count had arrived on the Berlin train. He had set out on foot. The stationmaster said that your father had asked that the children be woken up as he could only stay until the early morning. I set off by car, while Babette got you out of bed. It was not completely dark, a warm, northern evening. About two kilometres from the station I found him, Axel, your beloved father, striding down the road in his suit without a tie. We embraced and he took the wheel. 'It's going to happen now,' he said. I knew what he meant, of course, but none of the details in case the plan failed. He had left Berlin to see us, although he was needed day and night. 'But I had to see you, just in case.' And what he meant was just in case the plan failed. There would be no mercy.

Back at the house a birthday table had been prepared and you were in your nightclothes in the hall by the big Swedish stove. There was no electricity but the table looked beautiful, with the red candles in the silver candlesticks, which I saved from Treskow. It was my birthday on the 20th and while I was on my way to find your father, Aunt Adi had prepared the table on which she laid little gifts: she added the gifts your father had brought with him, new editions of books I had wanted from Kiepert and some delicacies he had managed to get his hands on. I opened my presents: we sang, we perhaps shed a tear or two, but we were very jolly, and then you children were taken back to bed and he came in to kiss you before we were finally alone together, for the last time, in our room in the tower. He told me that he believed a new future for us and our country was coming.

In the morning you children were waiting at breakfast. Immediately after breakfast your father and I climbed into the brake and we waved goodbye to you, assembled with Aunt Adi and Babette on the front steps. We held hands all the way to the station: we were young then. As we approached the station, your father asked me if I loved him. 'Of course, my darling, I love you and I support you in everything you have to do.'

'It is only fifty-fifty, you know.'

He used the English phrase, 'fifty-fifty': at times he was happier speaking English than German. I think it reminded him of his Oxford days and his Oxford friends, who were very dear to him. He made no secret of the fact that he had been in love there and I felt no jealousy. He believed that if you had once loved someone, you should always maintain that love in some way.

He jumped out of the brake, seized me in his arms, thin and frail though he was, and swung me down. He said goodbye to Wicht, kissed one of the horses - 'I love their smell and the feel of their muzzles,' he said — and we ran hand in hand to the platform. We embraced and he jumped into the train. As it pulled away, a dark cloud fell on my soul that has never completely lifted.

The 20th of July was my thirty-second birthday. What a terrible, terrible irony. By nightfall we knew that the Führer had survived. In the morning we heard on the radio that a small clique of renegade officers, led by the traitor Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg, had been executed. But we did not know what had happened to your father. We could obviously not ask anyone. Your aunt made a wonderful show of keeping things as normal as possible, but she and I went up to my bedroom to listen to the radio for news.

Conrad cannot sleep. He sees Axel von Gottberg desperate to hold his wife and his children for the last time. He sees the tall, romantic figure striding through the fading light for home; he sees the intensity of that evening, the startled children in their nightdresses, the poignant journey behind the horses back to the station and on to ruined Berlin, where the twilight of the gods has descended. He sees Axel von Gottberg exactly as he is in the trial footage, tall, hollow-eyed, agonisingly thin, but resolved.

And now, deeply moved by the memoir, Conrad wonders, as Liselotte did, how he could have done it. Was it courage or was it a kind of delusion, afolie de grandeur, that he, Axel, Graf von Gottberg, was destined to save Germany alongside his grand friend, Claus Schenk, Graf von Stauffenberg? But also Conrad sees the puzzled children, innocent, confused, their lives for ever blighted, the children of a traitor — or a hero. He has met one of the daughters; the son Robert died of diphtheria a few months after the Gestapo took them away to an orphanage in Bavaria in accordance with Hitler's policy of Sippenhaft, kindred seizure. The two girls stayed there, mute, until Christmas.

In those last days von Gottberg was gripped by a belief that, once von Stauffenberg had killed Hitler, he would be vital in establishing Germany back in the civilised world: he might even be able to secure a government for Germany by decent Germans, a government that would avoid humiliation and ruin and Soviet annexation.

There is only a paper-thin divide between idealism and delusion.

18

19 JULY 1944

VON GOTTBERG ARRIVES back in Berlin at Friedrich-strasse Station. He takes the U-Bahn to the office. The U-Bahn is still running although Berlin is being reduced to rubble by the bombing raids. If anyone doubts the madness of Hitler, they have only to look about. The great military genius is in his Wolf's Lair in East Prussia, his personal escape from the chaos he has caused to be rained down on the people of Berlin. Von Gottberg feels a kind of dull pain that constricts his chest. Perhaps he should see a doctor.

But as he emerges from the U-Bahn near the office, he is filled with the elation of knowing that the day is coming. He has work to do, preparing for the installation of the new government. The bad news is that Rommel has been injured when his car is strafed; he will not be at hand to lend his great authority to the putsch. But the Auswartiges Amt is strongly anti-Nazi still, apart from von Gottberg's boss Dr Six, an SS appointee, and even he sees which way the wind is blowing.

He lunches with some friends including his brother-in-law, Dietlof Goetz; they don't talk about the putsch. But all afternoon he is busy co-ordinating the Foreign Office's reaction to the coup. Of course, they are in the hands of the military at the Bendlerblock, who will put the Valkyrie plan into operation as soon as news comes through of the assassination. It is the military's task to make sure that key locations in Berlin, Paris and Prague are secured. He also writes a letter to his wife, which she is to memorise and destroy: In the next few weeks, you may not hear from me. Do not be afraid.

That night he has a brief meeting with von Stauffenberg, who is calm, smoking one of his Brazilian cigars. On the way home von Stauffenberg stops at Martin Niemöller's church in Dahlem to bear witness. Nobody knows what von Stauffenberg and von Gottberg discussed, but it is probable that it was the nature of the announcement to be broadcast from the captured radio stations and transmitters. Late that evening von Stauffenberg returns to No 8 Tristanstrasse, and he and Berthold read their brother, Alexander's, latest poems.

19

20 JULY 1944

KARL SCHWEIZER, THE former magician and von Stauf-fenberg's chauffeur, pulls up outside No 8 Tristanstrasse. The house stands on the Wannsee, one of the lakes that lie on the flat northern plain around Berlin. No 8 is built in the vernacular style popular in the prosperous and leafy suburbs: it has elements of the chalet, with a steeply pitched roof and a wooden balcony on the first floor. Part of the front of the house is faced in wood and most of the windows on three floors have shutters.

It has been a very hot summer and the garden, although untended, is flowering heavily, drooping lilacs scenting the air. Beyond the house is the lake, Wannsee, invisible from the street, but providing a wonderfully natural view from the back of the house through birch trees to the gently undulating water. Proximity to a lake is highly prized. In summer the beaches on the lakes are crowded with bathers, soldiers on leave with their girlfriends and wives, and children in family groups or with mothers only, all those in fact who want to get away from the ruin that is Berlin. The U-Bahn trains to Wannsee and Nikolassee from Alexanderplatz and Unter den Linden are packed at weekends. Unter den Linden no longer has any Linden - limes - because they have been replaced by triumphal Roman columns on the orders of Reichsmarschall Goering.

At exactly 7 a.m. von Stauffenberg appears at the door in the uniform of 10 Panzer Division with the light-grey summer jacket, the collar patches and shoulder flashes with two crowns that identify his rank and regiment. The piping around the sleeves of the jacket indicates that he is on the Army's general staff. He wears cavalry boots. With him is his brother Berthold, in his dark naval uniform. Berthold hands Schweizer his brother's briefcase, which contains two lumps of explosive, each weighing nine hundred and seventy-five grams, with two British primer charges and two thirty-minute fuses, also British. A shirt covers the explosive, a timing device and a pair of pliers which have been adapted for use with his brother's left hand. He wears a black patch over his left eye, also lost in North Africa. A colleague, Major-General Henning von Tresckow from Army Group Centre, has procured the explosives.

Claus von Stauffenberg and his brother settle in the back of the car for the drive to Rangsdorf Airfield. There is light fog, which looks as though it will soon clear. Von Stauffenberg clasps his brother's hand for a moment and then recites. His brother joins him in a whisper:

When this generation has cleansed its shame 

And thrown the serfs yoke from its neck 

And feels in its entrails the pure hunger for honour, 

Then, from battlefields covered with endless graves, 

A bloody signal will flash through the clouds, 

Then roaring armies will rush through the fields; 

And the horror of horrors will rage, the third storm, 

The return of the dead.

Claus says quietly, 'For honour and secret Germany.'

Berthold repeats, 'For secret Germany.'

The car pulls in to the airfield, saluted by guards. The fog is thicker. Lieutenant Werner von Haeften, von Stauffenberg's adjutant, is waiting.

He speaks to the driver, Schweizer: 'Go to Spandau and get yourself a new suit.'

'Why do I need one, sir?'

'You will be needing many new things.'

Von Haeften and the brothers stand outside the low airport building until they hear the drone of the engines of the courier plane. It appears suddenly from the murk and lands with a bump, before taxiing to the buildings. It is 8 a.m. when von Stauffenberg and von Haeften climb up the short flight of steps and wave goodbye to Berthold before settling down for the flight to Rasten-burg in East Prussia. Berthold is driven back to his office in the Naval High Command. The fog has cleared and below them Brandenburg and Mecklenburg, a patchwork of forests and lakes and fields, unrolls. Even from this height you can see fields of wheat and barley shot through with the red of poppies and the blue of cornflowers.

The plane lands at 10.15 a.m. A staff car is waiting. Von Haeften carries the briefcase containing the bomb and von Stauffenberg carries his briefing notes which concern the use of troops on leave in Berlin as an emergency defence force. The car pauses briefly at the gates that lead to the eastern command centre, Wolfschanze — Wolf's Lair — a compound ringed by two perimeter fences. Within the compound is the Führer compound, which contains Hitler's quarters, a casino, and houses and bunkers for leading ministers. Gorlitz station is beside this compound; the line separates the Führer compound from the rest of the Wolfschanze. To the north of the Führer compound are swamps, which provide a natural defence before the outer perimeter is reached.

Von Stauffenberg is invited to have breakfast with the Headquarters Commandant's staff. He is greatly admired; the Commandant himself has invited him to lunch after the briefing. The breakfast is lavish, with the best Westphalian ham and a variety of cheeses and freshly baked bread. A special delicacy is the local Blutwurst. After breakfast, at about 11 a.m., von Stauffenberg is driven to a meeting with the Chief of Army Staff, Lieutenant General Buhle. They discuss the divisions - the blocking divisions - that will be drawn up from somewhere to prevent a rout when the front-line troops in the East withdraw, which they must. Von Haeften rejoins von Stauffenberg outside Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel's office for preparatory briefing before von Stauffenberg is summoned to the Führer's presence. Von Haeften is still holding the briefcase containing the explosives. He is not required in this briefing and stands in the corridor.

At noon Hitler's valet, Linge, phones Keitel to tell him that the morning briefing is delayed until 12.30, because Mussolini, who is due to arrive at Gorlitz station in his special train, is late. At 12.25 Field Marshal Keitel is informed that his General Staffs chief of operations has arrived by train and the Führer briefing can begin. Von Stauffenberg wants to be sure that the Führer is going to be present. He is told that the Führer will indeed be there. He asks permission to change his shirt. Von Stauffenberg and von Haeften are shown to a sitting room, where, with von Haeften's help, von Stauffenberg changes his shirt. Keitel, Buhle and Keitel's adjutant stand outside the hut in the sunshine waiting for them. Von Stauffenberg puts his back against the door and starts to prime the bomb with the special pliers, using his three remaining fingers. Only he may do it: he is the assassin.

He has to remove the fuses from the primer charges and squeeze the copper casing with the pliers to break the glass phials inside. The acid must seep out on the cotton around the retaining wires. Too much pressure might break the wire; it has to corrode gently for the delay, a maximum of thirty minutes, to be effective. Then he has to look through an inspection hole to make sure that the firing pin is still compressed, remove a safety bolt, and finally put the fuses back into the primer charges. Eventually one bomb is primed. But as von Stauffenberg starts on the second, the door is pushed against his back by a staff sergeant who has been sent by Keitel. He calls through the door to say that there is a phone call for him and that the Field Marshal requests that he come immediately to the briefing. Then the Field Marshal's adjutant himself shouts down the corridor: Stauffenberg, come along. The Field Marshal is agitated. Von Stauffenberg decides that there is no time to prime the second bomb. He gestures to von Haeften, who closes the briefcase and hands it to him and they hurry out past the staff sergeant. Keitel's adjutant reaches for the case, but von Stauffenberg pulls it away impatiently. His unwillingness to accept help, despite his injury, impresses itself on the adjutant.

Von Haeften stuffs the second lump of explosive in a brown-paper parcel and slips it into his own attache case. His task now is to make sure that the car that is to take them back to the airfield is standing by. He slips out of Keitel's office complex and makes his way to the drivers' pool.

Von Stauffenberg is animated as he walks to the briefing complex where the Führer is already at work planning for the impossible, how to save the Fatherland. Outside the wooden building, von Stauffenberg hands his briefcase to the adjutant and asks for a place as close to the Führer as possible, as he has charts and maps to show him.

As von Stauffenberg enters the room, Hitler breaks off and looks at him. Keitel announces Colonel Claus Schenk, Graf von Stauffenberg, who will report on the new arrangements for the defence of Berlin. Von Stauffenberg, with his eye patch and uniform with one empty arm, looks directly back at Hitler. It is reported later that von Stauffenberg, six foot three inches and extraordinarily good-looking, is a proud figure, the image of a warrior of classical times and the picture of a general staff officer. Hitler allows von Stauffenberg to shake him by the hand, an honour. Keitel's adjutant asks one of the officers at the map table to move in order to allow von Stauffenberg to stand as close to the Führer as possible. Only Major-General Heusinger, who has been briefing the Führer on the situation in the East, now stands between him and von Stauffenberg. Von Stauffenberg pushes the briefcase as close to the Führer's legs as he can. It rests against the massive legs of the table support. After a few minutes, von Stauffenberg motions to the adjutant and asks him to get Lieutenant General Fellgiebel on the phone. The adjutant gives the order to the operator in a side office, hands the phone to von Stauffenberg, and returns to the briefing. As arranged, von Stauffenberg leaves the briefing room and walks to find von Haeften and Fellgiebel. They wait. At some time between 12.40 and 12.50, they hear an enormous explosion. Debris and a body fly out of the windows of the briefing room. They see another body being carried out, covered in the Führer's velvet cloak.

Von Stauffenberg and von Haeften walk calmly to their car and direct it to the airstrip where a plane is waiting for them. It is the Heinkel HE 111 of the Quarter Master General, Lieutenant General Wagner. At the first perimeter fence a guard stops the car. Von Stauffenberg, with icy calm, tells him that he is a member of the General Staff acting on urgent orders. They are waved through. At the second checkpoint, the outer perimeter, there is an absolute ban on anyone leaving the Wolfschanze. Von Stauffenberg has a lunch appointment with the Commandant, but nonetheless he tells the guard sergeant to call Captain von Mollendorf, the Commandant's adjutant, for permission to let him pass. He lights one of his black Brazilian cigars as he waits for the sergeant to make the call: the sergeant soon waves them through and salutes. As they pass through a stand of trees, von Haeften throws the second lump of explosive out of the car window. Fellgiebel, meanwhile, orders that all outgoing signal traffic must be stopped.

The Heinkel takes off for Berlin-Rangsdorf. An order is given that fighters should be scrambled and that the Heinkel should be shot down, but it is not passed to the Luftwaffe by the major on duty, who is the son-in-law of one of the conspirators, General Olbricht, who is himself waiting at the Bendlerblock, General Army Office, for von Stauffenberg's return to Berlin to take over the government of Germany and end the war. But already, by the time the Heinkel lands at 4 p.m., there is uncertainty and confusion. Karl Schweizer, the chauffeur, goes to the wrong airport. Von Stauffenberg and von Haeften have to borrow a car from a Luftwaffe officer. At 4.05 p.m. communication with the Wolfschanze is restored. Reports are coming in that there has been an explosion at the Wolfschanze and that some officers have been wounded.

Before von Stauffenberg's car arrives at the Reserve Army Headquarters in Bendlerstrasse, there is already uncertainty. There has been a fatal delay in implementing the Valkyrie plans, drawn up to take over the key installations of Berlin in an emergency. The Guard Battalion, the armoured troops from the Officers' School at Krampnitz and the infantry regiments at Dobnitz and Potsdam, should, according to the plan, already have entered the administrative sector of Berlin and occupied all the main government buildings, SS and Party headquarters. The Berlin Radio Tower, all newspapers, and the radio transmitter at Tegel were to be seized, SS leaders to be arrested and the SS disarmed. But the order has not been given.

General Fromm, von Stauffenberg's superior, has been told that the Führer is not dead by Field Marshal Keitel himself. He is incensed when he is ordered by Olbricht to put Valkyrie into operation immediately. He and General Olbricht come to blows. Olbricht now puts out the orders under his own authority, with a proclamation declaring martial law and beginning: 'The Führer, Adolf Hitler, is dead.'

When von Stauffenberg finally enters Olbricht's office with von Haeften it is 4.30 p.m. He announces that Hitler is dead. 'I saw them carry him out,' he says.

Von Stauffenberg now goes to see Fromm and tells him that Hitler is dead. Fromm says that is impossible: Keitel himself has told him that Hitler is only lightly wounded. When Olbricht tells him that the orders for Valkyrie have been sent out, he slams the desk with his fist. He says it is high treason. They are all under arrest.

'On the contrary,' says von Stauffenberg, 'you are under arrest. I placed the bomb myself, right next to Hitler.'

Fromm replies, 'The assassination attempt has failed. You must shoot yourself.'

In the small panelled office, the atmosphere is almost farcical. Fromm is trying to save his neck. A pistol is pulled on him. Fromm is given five minutes to decide if he will join the uprising. After five minutes he declares that he considers himself relieved of his command. He is placed under guard in a side room.

At Wilhelmstrasse, the head office of the Auswartiges Amt, von Gottberg has been waiting since soon after dawn, full of excitement. Hans-Bernd von Haeften, who is the older brother of von Stauffenberg's aide, Werner von Haeften, and other conspirators gather. They occupy themselves with office work and correspondence. They rejoice that it is the last time they will ever have to close letters Heil Hitler! At 2 p.m. they receive the agreed message, Panta rei, Greek for All in motion. Hitler is dead. The Valkyrie plans to seal off the government area of Berlin are to be put into operation right away from General Army Office. Von Gottberg looks out of the window for the movement of troops. People are walking unconcerned down Wilhelmstrasse and there are no soldiers in sight. Someone tells von Gottberg that there is a report that Hitler has survived an assassination attempt unscathed.

'It's a trick,' says von Gottberg. 'Stauffenberg himself confirms that Hitler is dead.'

But they can get no information from the Bendlerblock, Reserve Army Headquarters. Von Gottberg is desperate to speak to von Stauffenberg, and von Haeften tries many times to reach his brother. The lines are dead or overloaded. Two hours pass as they wait, helpless.

After placing Fromm under arrest, von Stauffenberg starts on a round of telephoning to assure the other conspirators that Hitler is dead. He tells them that it is impossible that Hitler has survived: he has seen the explosion and the body being carried out. He calls von General von Stülpnagel, the Military Governor of Paris, and other conspirators in Prague and Vienna. Some of the troops are ordered out, as the plan demands, and they set off from Potsdam to occupy the government quarter of Berlin. But a diligent Major Remer, a convinced Nazi in charge of the Guard Battalion, manages to speak to Hitler himself and orders some of the troops back to barracks. Tanks from the Officers' School in Krampnitz are moving fast, however. Von Stauffenberg's inner circle come and go, increasingly uncertain.

Wilhelmstrasse. At about 5.30 p.m. von Gottberg sees that the street below is cordoned off and steel-helmeted soldiers are taking up their positions on both sides of the road, right up to the Adlon Hotel. Von Gottberg and von Haeften are delighted; they embrace. They have a list of people who are to be arrested as soon as the military leaders are ready. Von Gottberg tries to call the Bendlerblock again, but still he cannot get through. They decide to delay any announcements and appointments within the office until they are certain.

At the Bendlerblock, an SS colonel arrives to ask von Stauffenberg to a meeting with the Chief of Secret Police. Von Stauffenberg has him arrested. The confusion deepens as reports come in that Hitler will himself soon make a statement. Support melts away. The conspirators are not, after all, in control of Berlin or of communications. Junior officers loyal to the Führer arm themselves and shooting breaks out. Von Stauffenberg is hit in the shoulder. Now he telephones Paris, his last hope, from Fromm's office, but he is told, 'The SS are advancing.'

He slumps in the seat.

'They have left me in the lurch,' he says to von Haeften, who is burning papers in a bin. At 6.15 p.m. the radio announces that an attempt has been made on the life of the Führer, but that he is unhurt.

At about 7 p.m. there is an awful moment: the troops below in Wilhelmstrasse are withdrawing and soon the traffic is flowing again. Von Gottberg, who has been deathly pale all day, has the feeling that the blood is draining from him with the soldiers as they file away. It is all over. He stays in the office until eleven, destroying papers, thinking of his alibi, hoping to speak to von Stauffenberg. Maybe General Stülpnagel is even now bargaining from Paris with the Allies about surrender.

At Army headquarters in Bendlerstrasse, Fromm is brought back to his office by the junior officers. He confronts von Stauffenberg and the other conspirators, saying that they are now under arrest and must hand over their weapons: they have committed an act of high treason. General Beck asks to keep his pistol in order to shoot himself. Fromm agrees. Others want to write statements. For half an hour von Stauffenberg stands in bitter silence as they write. Fromm declares that he has convened a court martial and that it has found the colonel, whose name he cannot speak, as well as Lieutenant von Haeften, Colonel Mertz von Quirnheim and General Olbricht, guilty. Von Stauffenberg now speaks: the others were under his command and he takes full responsibility.

The four men are led down some stairs and outside to where sandbags have been piled against a wall in the long, cobbled, rectangular courtyard. Drivers from the car pool have been ordered to light up the place of execution with the headlights from their vehicles. Ten non-commissioned officers stand ready with their rifles. The conspirators are shot one by one. It is reported that von Haeften tries to throw himself in front of von Stauffenberg, as a last act of devotion. Just before he is shot, von Stauffenberg shouts, 'Long live our sacred Germany.' Es lebe unser heiliges Deutschland. One person reports that he shouts, 'Long live secret Germany,' and that is possible, because the words heiliges and the unfamiliar geheimes could easily have been confused.

Upstairs General Beck, who has shot himself in the head, is still alive after two attempts. He lies groaning in a corner asking if he is dying. Fromm orders an officer to finish him off. The officer says he cannot shoot a German general lying wounded and defenceless on the floor. He orders a soldier of the Guard Battalion to do it. This man drags Beck into a corridor, leaving a trail of blood from his head, and shoots him.

Von Gottberg and von Haeften stop off at the Adlon for a drink with a colleague from their office.

'At least we tried,' von Haeften says.

'There is no more hope. Hitler has destroyed Germany,' says von Gottberg.

At 1.30 a.m. they hear that Hitler has made a broadcast denouncing a small clique of disappointed officers. The Führer speaks to the German people from the Wolfschanze: a small, but deluded, group of officers, including von Stauffenberg, has tried to kill him, but he has been spared. He is very lightly injured.

That night he declares in front of Mussolini that he will practise Sippenhaft without mercy. Mussolini is reported to be shocked. The armoured divisions have withdrawn to barracks.

The bodies of the five dead men shot in the courtyard of the Bendlerblock are loaded on to a lorry and driven to a graveyard beside the Matthiaskirche in Schoneberg and hastily buried on Fromm's orders in their uniforms and decorations. The next day Heinrich Himmler has the bodies exhumed, cremated and their ashes scattered in the open spaces of a park near by.

20

CONRAD' S BELL RINGS harshly. It takes him some time to understand what the noise is, as if he has never heard his bell before. In fact the sound is a kind of grating cry, the cry of a crow. He wakes where he has fallen asleep, on the sofa. He is losing a sense of the days. He has no idea of the time or the date. He goes downstairs and finds Tony, who hands him a registered letter.

'Morning, mate. This came for you. I signed for it. You weren't answering.'

'Thanks, Tony.'

'You orright?'

'Yes, I'm fine. I've been working hard.'

And Tony gives him some freshly baked bread, still warmly aromatic.

'Pugliese. Where me gran come from. You must eat, my son.'

'I'm eating, Tony. Trust me. But thanks very much.'

He goes upstairs with the bread and the letter. Fritsch has written to him at last. After how many weeks? He can't work it out. He opens the letter and reaches for his Cassell's dictionary.

Sehr Geehrter Herr Senior, 

I have the only known copy of the film in which you have shown interest. This film has been in my possession since 1944. Many times I have wondered what I can be doing with it. I believe from the Bundesfilmarchiv that you are writing about some of the resisters. I was an assistant to Mr Steuben, of Wochenschau, deceased, and the footage filmed on B Camera, Arri 2C, by me was on August 15th, 1944, and never used. This is the footage of the execution of four of the plotters of July 20th, 1944, which event I believe is known to you. The four executed include Count Axel von Gottberg. I am not interested in selling this footage to you, but in making sure that it is given to a responsible person. It can never be shown in the public media. I have lived with this secret for sixty years. Also, I cannot allow this footage to be held in Germany. Many times I have decided to destroy it. If you can come to Berlin there is a possibility that I can give you this film and the negative. Please telephone this number to make an appointment.

Conrad immediately calls the number in Berlin. He is trembling as it rings. A woman answers and he asks for Herr Fritsch.

'Papi. Telefon!

'Guten Tag. I am Conrad Senior. I received your letter.'

They stumble along in German. Conrad agrees to meet him in four days' time outside Schonhauser Allee 23, in Prenzlauer Berg. He imagines Fritsch in East Berlin — he has a strong urge, at times uncontrollable, to fill in the details of other lives -keeping this awful film for years, like some venomous creature, some poisoned substance, all through the communist days and then in the new united Berlin wondering what he could do with it, how he could atone, perhaps, for his part in this terrible act. And maybe all this time, sixty years now, Fritsch has never been able to talk about it or think of any way of disposing of it honourably until he sees Conrad's notice in the archive or hears about it at a showing or a reunion of other Wochenschau veterans.

Conrad feels faint. He hasn't been eating. He books himself a ticket to Berlin at a local cheap-flight shop. He has no money in the bank but his credit card is still acceptable, apparently. And then he goes to the Café where workers and taxi drivers gather for breakfast. He tries to estimate how many days have gone by, conscious that during this time the baby has been growing. He leaves a message for Francine: I must go to Berlin. I believe that this is coming to a conclusion now. Please call me to discuss our situation.

He sits in this Café. The taxi drivers are enthusiastic talkers. They meet here every day for a little Midrash of their own. He wonders how many taxi drivers are still Jewish. It was once the immigrants' route to accumulation. And the taxi drivers' test demanded prodigious feats of memory. Are Jews more intelligent than the rest of us? Is that what the Nazis really feared?

He remembers von Stauffenberg's guru, the poet Stefan George's, view of Jews: One Jew is very useful but as soon as there are more than two of them, the tone becomes different and they tend to their own business. Jews do not experience life as deeply as we do. They are, in general, different people.

It was the knowledge of the extermination of Jews and political commissars in the East that turned von Stauffenberg from conservative aristocrat to regicide. An army major reported to him seeing one thousand naked Jews shot by the SS in the Ukraine. Mendel wanted Conrad to determine in what state von Gottberg died. Did he die a German patriot or as someone who wanted to atone for the sins visited on the Jews, on Mendel's people? For Mendel that was the issue when all else was forgotten. And soon he may be able to provide the answer and then his task will be complete.

Francine has been doing nights as a locum, but she wants to see him before he goes to Berlin. They meet at the flower market in Columbia Road for breakfast on Sunday morning when she comes off shift. Night shifts affect her badly: he is distressed to see the imprint on her face, as deeply worn as the action of water on rocks, so deeply that she seems permanently to have aged. But worse for Conrad than this haggardness is the certainty that she is profoundly unhappy. She is possibly still in love with John.

They eat a bagel with smoked salmon and scrambled egg, and they drink dark Arabica. Outside the Café, as though they are in a jungle clearing, is a dense wall of greenery and blossom. On a Sunday morning it is almost impossible to walk out on the pavement, such is the commingling of people and plants. Suddenly, to his utter dismay, he sees that Francine is sobbing. He stands up and puts his arm around her and leads her out into the flower market. They stand in a courtyard amongst coppery bougainvillea, tree ferns and large blue pots. He holds her until her sobbing eases.

'I've got rid of it.'

She stands, silent within his embrace.

'I love you,' he says. 'We'll be fine.'

But in his heart he feels a certain bitterness that she should have destroyed the child without consulting him.

'I've waited for days to speak to you. You never rang,' she says.

He feels her body quaking.

'I am so sorry. I was completely lost.'

21

IN THE MORNING von Gottberg and the others turn up for work as usual. They appear to be paralysed with disappointment. In the next few days they wait for the inevitable. Although he is offered several opportunities to escape to Switzerland, to France or to Sweden, von Gottberg is unable to leave his wife and children at the mercy of the Gestapo. In any event he feels a sacrifice is due to Germany. Different conspirators react in different ways. On the Eastern Front Major-General Henning von Tresckow, who supplied the explosive, writes a note: Now everyone in the world will turn upon us and sully us with abuse. Hitler is not the archenemy of Germany, he is the arch-enemy of mankind. In a few hours' time I will stand before God to answer for my actions.

He drives out into a wood with his adjutant, asks him to go back to the car for a map, and then blows his head from his body with a hand grenade. Other conspirators denounce their colleagues. A few escape across the borders by one means or another.

Five days later von Gottberg is arrested. Two Gestapo men are waiting for him in his office when he comes in. One sits, as is traditional, at his desk going through his papers. Von Gottberg is taken away to Gestapo headquarters, and then to Oranienburg. Dr Six sends an emissary to the prison: he is keen to keep von Gottberg and his foreign contacts as a bargaining chip when the final defeat comes. It is, for the moment, only Schweizer's logbook that ties von Gottberg to Schweizer's master, von Stauffenberg. Later Six turns on von Gottberg saying, Wir haben einen Schweinehund unter uns gehabt — We have had a schweinehund among us — when a document proposing high office for von Gottberg in the new government is discovered. He is to be the ambassador to Great Britain. But Six may be playing a double game, speaking at the same time to his boss, Himmler; the prospect of a settlement with the Allies has been on Himmler's mind too. Who better to send as an emissary to Churchill than an Oxford man? Every day von Gottberg is brought from Oranienburg which is not far from where he and Elizabeth sat in the little DKW looking at Sachsenhausen six years before. Every day he is driven to Gestapo headquarters in Albrechtstrasse, where, the records show, he only incriminates people who are already dead or out of danger. Von Stauffenberg is one of these. Stauffenberg's remains are by now lost in Schoneberg, dispersed, ashes to ashes. The Gestapo are sure von Gottberg knows more and, at Himmler's behest, want to find out about all his contacts abroad.

Von Gottberg is beaten and he is made to stand for hours without sleep. Other conspirators are tortured on a rack, or half drowned in buckets of water. The guards are creatures of the movement; their continued existence is tied to the regime. They see these men, distinguished men, who are being dragged in in ever-increasing numbers, as the enemy within; it is always the case that the enemy within, the ones who refuse to accept the articles of faith of the masses, are hated most. The guards have dealt with Jews and Ukrainians and Poles and now they see that they have, in this patriotic work, been insulted by the privileged who own castles set in broad acres and from time immemorial have had everything - fine linen, wines, and leather-bound books - while they have had nothing. Worse, these are the very people who stabbed Germany in the back in 1918. It's an opportunity many of them cannot resist. Their vindictiveness and cruelty are beyond belief.

Von Gottberg's daily interrogations are interrupted. It is announced that he and the other traitors will be summoned before the People's Court presided over by Judge President Roland Freisler, to be condemned to death. The purpose of the court is to minimise the importance of the uprising; Freisler's job is to blacken the name of the conspirators for home consumption. They are a small group of deranged ingrates, who believe they know better than the Führer, which, of course, is logically impossible, because the Führer is the people. The Führer principle demands that the people hold no doubts or even opinions of their own. Throughout the trials Freisler is to enunciate these ideas clearly.

To Field Marshal von Witzleben he sneers, 'A Field Marshal and an Oberst General declare that they can do better than our Führer. You understand why we call this overweening ambition? You shrug your shoulders? Well, that is a kind of answer. We are of one opinion that the Führer is of the greatest help to us all alive and well.'

And to another defendant - although no defence is permitted - Major-General Stieff, Freisler says, 'What you reject is of as little interest to us, as the perverted desires of a homosexual are to the healthy German male; for if you do not see that that is rabid defeatism, then you are politically just as perverted. But here it is our healthy opinions which matter, not yours.'

To the former Mayor of Leipzig, Carl Gordeler, who says he wanted power restored to the General Staff, he replies, 'But we have that now! Yes, because we always have it in the person of the Führer. There is no more complete quintessence of all the powers emanating from the people.'

And then Axel von Gottberg's turn comes. The defendants have been given an assortment of clothes that look as though they may have been donated to help the homeless. He wears a loose jacket, a grey workman's shirt, and trousers without a belt or braces. His shackles are removed in an anteroom. Two guards lead him into the courtroom to a bench where the defendants wait. Behind Freisler, who is wearing juridical robes, is a huge Nazi flag. The light from the arc lamps is very strong, blinding to the defendants.

Just as von Gottberg, transparently pale, almost ethereal, is summoned from the box, there is a commotion outside the court on the landing. Two women are demanding to be let in. That they haven't fully understood what is going on is quickly apparent: 'We demand to be let in to attend this hearing.' They are led away and arrested. Von Gottberg recognises their voices, the voices of his wife Liselotte and his sister Adelheid. His head sinks into his hands, as though any support it had has gone. A few days later the children, Robert, three, Angela just two, and the baby, Caroline, are taken away to an orphanage where they are given the names Horst, Waltraud and Heidi.

Von Gottberg stands calmly, already imagining death, perhaps longing for death after what he has been through. He doesn't understand why there are film cameras in the court. The film is being made by Wochenschau on the orders of Reichsfilmintendant Hans Hinkel, to demonstrate to the public that the small claque of traitors is decadent scum, who never fully understood the legitimate and heroic struggle of ordinary German people under the Führer, a struggle against humiliation and unemployment and decline.

Freisler is particularly interested in Oxford and the Rhodes Scholarship.

'An English scholarship. Ideal preparation for a traitor. So your years at Oxford were not entirely wasted. You proposed negotiating with the armies in the West and capitulating?'

Von Gottberg replies 'Gewiss! Certainly.

He is going to his death with composure. When von Gottberg says, 'I believed it was best for the people of Germany to negotiate,' Freisler replies, 'We are not interested in what you thought. We are not interested in your view of foreign policy. We want to know if a German stands before us.'

Of course von Gottberg is not allowed to reply. But he stands there as if he has already passed from this hellish nightmare.

That night in the small block next to Plotzensee Prison six people are hanged; they are brought in - it is reported - half-naked and one by one they are slowly hanged. The cameras turn, as Hitler wants urgently to see the death throes of his enemies. But von Gottberg is not executed; he is held back for further questioning because the interrogators believe he has more information. He is held for eleven agonising days. Himmler wants his death sentence commuted so that he can use him and his contacts. When this suggestion is passed to Hitler he falls into one of his terrifying rages, which are becoming increasingly frequent, and he declares that the traitors at the Auswartiges Amt are the worst of all.

'Hang them, hang them like cattle.'

Axel von Gottberg is hanged in a batch of four on August the 26th.

22

CONRAD HAS BOOKED himself into a cheap hotel in Prenzlauer Berg. The old tenements of East Berlin stretch away on either side of the road, some not yet renovated, others already gentrified. There is still plenty of scope for improvement, but there are Cafés and bars everywhere and untended parks. In the streets and on the U-Bahn he sees young people with dyed Mohican haircuts, chains attached to their waists, body piercing and tattoos. Some have curiously resigned dogs. There are also what could be neo-Nazi youths with shaved heads and combat trousers. He has the impression that East Berlin is not completely won over by the new world on offer: in fact a huge banner, in English, hangs from one of the tenements: Fuck the Free World. Forty-five years of communism followed by the Stasi may well have produced a truculent, suspicious people.

The hotel is simple: the rooms are cell-like, functional, with one mean, flat warehouse window. It gives a glimpse of the tall, red-brick Zionskirche, where Protestant opposition groups gathered during the war. A square near by is named after Kathe Koll-witz who lived and painted here, recording the lives of the poor, and here he starts his researches into Berlin's Cafés and bars and chic sights. His editor has made it clear that this is the last time she subsidises his travel. He sits in a Café reading guidebooks. Very quickly he has a list of places he must, at the very least, look at.

And so, here he is in Berlin, a little drunk from the three Bloody Marys he swallowed on the plane, strangely excited -nervous — a man of thirty-five, largely unemployed, in an uncertain state of marriage, but somehow - he feels - about to be instructed in what it is to be human. This, of course, has been the aim of philosophers and theologians, and even novelists, for many years, but perhaps you can only have an insight into these matters, as Mendel said to him about his father, when you see humanity under the greatest duress.

He spends the rest of the day visiting the top bars and Cafés and sights of Berlin, culled from a book called Berlin Top. He particularly likes a Café near the opera house on Unter den Linden. He sees some old men gathered in animated conversation and writes in his notebook:

Historic Unter den Linden, after years of East German neglect, is once again the lively centre of this fascinating city. And here, not far from Berlin's renowned Humboldt University, where Albert Einstein, its most famous faculty member, is commemorated, is the Operncafé. This is the sort of place Berliners would rather keep to themselves, but get here early on a sunny day and you will find Alt Berlin pausing for a coffee and a Himbeer tart. It's as if they are paying their respects to the Berlin of Einstein and Brecht and Isherwood and Grosz. Here you can see their ghostly shapes passing. This place is No 1 in my top ten of insider's Berlin.

What the readers of the travel pages don't need to know is that George Grosz, the satirist and Dadaist of that extraordinary prewar period, wrote that it had come to him that it was complete nonsense to believe that spirit or anything spiritual ruled the world. His work, he said, was a reaction to the cloud-wandering tendencies of the so-called sacred art that found meaning in cubes and gothic while the commanders in the field painted in blood.

No, the readers don't want to know that Berlin - in this respect just like Jerusalem - has been in the grip of the terrible, fatal, belief in spirit, what Mendel called vaporous clouds of nonsense. And it was Mendel's conviction that these vaporous clouds of nonsense - how similar, Conrad suddenly sees, to Grosz's cloud-wandering tendencies — led to Hitler and even to von Gottberg's sacrifice. And to the death of countless millions. The question of how many millions has not been fully agreed, as if a final determination could in some way fix the wretched twentieth century for ever in the past. Grosz was pointing to Mendel's deepest fears: when Hitler arrived it wasn't so much the commanders in the field who were painting in blood, but the brown plague of the SS, and also the Gestapo, directed by their beloved Führer, who had himself forsaken his own modest talents in watercolour for the new medium in which he was undoubtedly to become the modern master.

Conrad is in a hurry. He rushes around Berlin, walking the length of Unter den Linden, paying a quick visit to the Pergamon Museum — top for antiquity, don't miss the Pergamon altar — a lightning visit to Checkpoint Charlie - unmissable reminder of Le Carré's Berlin — Gendarmenmarkt — wonderfully evocative square, ringed by fine restaurants — Reichstag — Norman Foster's sensitive and glorious restoration, wonderful views, long queues — Holocaust Memorial — reminiscent of the Jewish Cemetery on the Mount of Olives — Brandenburg Gate — utterly iconic, and finally he walks all the way through the Tiergarten - one of Europe's most inspiring parks, don't miss the English Garden — to the zoo — one of Europe's greatest and longest established — and closed; but he gazes at the giant elephants that form the gates and then he tries to find von Gottberg's house behind the ruined Kaiser Wilhelm church - soaring monument to Prussian dominance — but it seems the Erotic Museum now stands on the site. It's late and he hurries to cover cocktails at the Adlon — faithfully restored to former glory - and Potsdamer Platz - new hub of Berlin's sensation seekers - a boutique hotel - light, modern feel, low-carb food, which you might need after too much Eisbein. He has never eaten an Eisbein, but he has seen it, reaching up from the plate like a cathedral spire in a bombed city, historic Teutonic cuisine.

When he finally gets back to his hotel he feels a certain resentment rising from the night porter who is watching television in a small office. He looks like a veteran rocker, with a ring in each ear, a ponytail tied back and a tattoo escaping underneath his collar, perhaps something he regrets now in the new, cool, low-carb Berlin. He hands Conrad his key brusquely.

The bed is narrow and prescriptive: Don't try anything fancy here. He lies down exhausted. His walk through the English Garden brought Oxford to mind. When Conrad arrived in Oxford to explore his destiny, he fell under the thrall of the place. The gardens, the glories of Christ Church Meadow, the endless surprises of the quads and fellows' gardens and the climbing roses on crumbling stone walls, even the tall cow parsley growing outside St Michael's Church in Carfax, all these whispered to him in a language he seemed already to have learned in another life. He saw that every cobblestone and every path and every carved ceiling and every inch of lawn in Oxford had been willed. Until that first year he had seen mountains and sea - landscape — as something created by accidents in geological time, but at Oxford he saw what hundreds of years of human tending can achieve, a harmony of place and ideas.

As Conrad wandered through the English Garden and darkness was closing, he saw that whoever laid out this place had captured an ideal perfectly, with small enclosed gardens of roses, arbours, gates, framed views to water through trees and a sense of a landscape that had been tended and controlled. For von Gottberg, as for Conrad's father, Oxford was seductive. In the English Garden, did he think of his excursions on Addison's Walk with Mendel or their brisk forays into The Parks and Christ Church Meadow? He has a profound fellow-feeling for von Gottberg, walking through the English Garden on his way to work, through the ruins of Berlin in those last days of his life. This garden must have whispered to him too, of his loss of the love of his life, and of Elya Mendel, his friend and mentor, and above all of his blithe youth. As he walked to work on that awful day, July the 20th, he must have known that he would almost certainly lose his life and family. But by then he had made up his mind. He was prepared, even eager, to sacrifice himself. Perhaps he decided the time had come to disperse the clouds of nonsense for ever.

Conrad is nervous. What does Fritsch have in store for him? His mind is teetering out of control. This condition is often described as racing, but it is not racing so much as an inability to settle. He feels clammy and cold by turns. The English Garden, the Sony Centre in Potsdamer Platz, the Holocaust Memorial, the martyrs' memorial outside Balliol, Francine's unborn baby, von Gottberg standing calmly in front of Freisler, Emily rolling a joint and blowing smoke into his mouth, they are all becoming scrambled as though they have lost any hierarchy of meaning. This is what it must have been like for his father. His father's doctor, who knew how distressed Conrad was to be sent away by his own angry father, wrote to him saying that he had early-onset dementia and had lost control of his emotions.

At last he sleeps and he dreams of Francine's baby, of a tiny foetus; and he dreams of minute, perfectly formed organs and then he dreams that the foetus is crying. He wakes up horrified, sweating. He calms himself by reading a guidebook. At random he reads that the zoo contains one thousand, four hundred species ranging from jellyfish to Indian elephants - good-natured pachyderms. The top attraction at the moment is a young gorilla called Sagha. He makes a mental note. He reads that the Huguenots brought culture to Berlin in 1688 after the Edict of Potsdam. There were one hundred and sixty thousand Jews in Berlin in 1933. He drinks some water.

By morning he has the impression that he has hardly slept, yet his wake-up call finds him profoundly asleep. He sets off to capture as many of the sights on his list as he can before his appointment. He loathes shopping, but he knows that shopping is important, so he visits, briefly, two centres - lively Kaufhaus, the biggest in Europe, sensational selection of electronics; pubs — don't miss Berlin's famous bars; the Kneipen; gay and lesbian scene — lively, Christopher Street Day Parade in July is a fixture on the gay calendar; the lakes - Wannsee, infamous for the final solution. Visit Wannsee Haus, Nikolassee for bathing; River Spree — forty-six kilometres are within city limits: Athens on the Spree; Nazi architecture — Olympic Stadium, Air Ministry, creepy.

He emerges from the U-Bahn at Senfelder Platz and walks up Schonhauser Allee, away from Kollwitz Platz — lively, dotted with Cafés, he notes - and looks for number 23. Across the way is a park with a Café promising barbecues and vegetarian food. Perhaps this is where Mr Fritsch wishes to meet. But the numbers on the right-hand side of the street are all odd numbers and sequential so he follows them until he comes to a cemetery, No 23-25. It is a Jewish cemetery. This is the appointed place. He waits at the gate. After about five minutes he sees, standing stooped, almost hunched, a man looking at him. He waves. The man walks over. He is elderly, dressed in a brown suit without a tie and he wears a small brown hat. He carries a Lufthansa bag of the sort that used to be given away to passengers many years ago.

'Herr Senior?'

Jawohl. Sind Sie Herr Fritsch?

They shake hands. Fritsch is about eighty-five, Conrad guesses. His eyes are yellowish, perhaps caused by liver problems. (Conrad thinks of himself as having medical knowledge by proxy.) His hand is very soft with the feel and instability of a gel; his face is minutely lined with surface-dwelling blood vessels. His back is curving forward, forcing his head lower than it wants to go. He leads Conrad into the cemetery and points to a box of kippas, exactly like the disposable kippas at the Western Wall in Jerusalem; Conrad places one on his head and Fritsch leads him away from the entrance into the overgrown cemetery itself where most of the tombstones lie on the ground or are tilted at an angle. It is a vast cemetery and Conrad for the first time has the feeling that Berlin's Jews were real rather than symbolic beings.

'Jewish cemetery,' says Frisch, although this is already rather old information. 'Here Max Liebermann is buried and many important Jewish families also.'

There are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of stones. A workman in a kippa passes with a barrow. Conrad catches sight of some of the names: Rosenblum, Goldfarb, Katz, Kaplan: he wants to know how Jewish names differed from German names. What was it that distinguished these names from those of their Aryan neighbours?

Fritsch has thought this meeting through. He leads Conrad deeper into the cemetery and points to a stone bench that looks directly at a fallen mausoleum of the Nathansohn family. Conrad feels as they sit that they are in the middle of Jewish Berlin. He has the strange sensation that he has been here before. This is the true Berlin, crowded with the dead. Fritsch takes from his flight bag a small, lined exercise book. It becomes clear that he has prepared some questions and answers and has written some English words down. There is nothing in the bag that could be the film whose existence hangs over Conrad now.

'You are a historical researcher?'

Conrad recognises his own word, Forscher.

'Yes. I am interested in the life of Axel von Gottberg. I have the letters Count von Gottberg wrote to my teacher, Professor Elya Mendel, at Oxford University. I was told that a film was produced by the Deutsche Wochenschau of the execution of members of the resistance, and I wished to see it. That is the reason I asked the Bundesarchiv, film section, to make enquiries.'

Conrad believes that the introduction of the word Oxford into the conversation early on is a good tactic.

'Who is Mr Elya Mendel from Oxford?'

'He was - he died seven years ago - a friend of Count von Gottberg at Oxford and they were separated by the war.'

'Mr Mendel was a Jew?'

Conrad thinks, Oh shit, this is the end of our conversation.

'Yes, he was a Jew.'

'I am a Jew. My mother was a Jewess.'

The words Jude and Jüdin spoken here by this elderly man carry a powerful charge. He has never before heard these words spoken although he has read them many times. His Cassell's dictionary does not contain the words Jude or Jew.

'Why do you wish to see the film?'

Conrad thinks that he should explain to Fritsch, who is sitting with his notebook ready, his relationship to Mendel, but he cannot. He could probably not do it in English.

'I believe,' he says, 'that as an historical researcher I must know everything I can about von Gottberg. That includes' (the word einschliesst comes unbidden to mind as though he has suddenly become German-speaking) 'his terrible death.'

This cannot be strictly true.

'Why are you interested in von Gottberg?'

'His friend Mendel gave me all his papers. He wanted me to write the story of their friendship after he died.'

And it seems to Conrad as he struggles with the words that this is the heart of it.

'Was Mr Mendel well known?'

'He was one of the most famous men in Oxford.'

They sit silent for a moment in the flickering, underwater light of the sun through the tall, unruly trees. Only the workman's wheelbarrow makes a noise. This wheelbarrow is a leftover of East German times, a long, unwieldy cart with an iron wheel.

Then Fritsch asks him a strange question.

'Did you love Mr Mendel?'

'Yes. Yes, I loved him like a father, perhaps a grandfather.'

'In this time I was a young man working for the Wochenschau. I am eighty-nine years old. My family home is not far from here. My mother died when I was young. I was not known to be a Jew, although I was informed on - informiert worden war (Conrad remembers the phrase from his reading) - and my boss at Wochenschau protected me. When I was ordered to go to Plotzensee Prison for this work, I wanted to kill myself. But I could not refuse my boss.'

The conversation is halting and they have to stop many times for clarification, but in retrospect Conrad remembers it running unhesitatingly and directly, because neither of them is able to elaborate or explain. Instead they have the simple narrative:

I am a Jew; I had to film the hanging of the resisters. 

I loved Mendel; he asked me to write about his friendship.

And so the narrative proceeds: Fritsch filmed three of the nights of hanging. His boss, Mr Steuben, was preoccupied with the technicalities; he brought in many lights so that the place looked like a film set. The night that von Gottberg was hanged it was said that the Führer wanted the film sent to the Wolfschanze in East Prussia so that he could see it before he went to bed at 3 a.m. A plane was standing by at Tempelhof. The rolls of film Fritsch shot on B Camera were processed but never given to the editor; Fritsch's boss, the chief cameraman, said that it would not be necessary; all the executions had been covered in a technically satisfactory way on his camera, A Camera.

'So, I have kept this film for sixty years.'

'Why, Mr Fritsch?'

'I believed it was necessary to remember.'

'But you never told anybody?'

'No, I could not. The problem was very simple: I was a Jew and I had taken part in this terrible (schreckliche) crime. With the Stasi it was dangerous for me and my family. But I could not destroy the film or tell anyone about it. Only my daughter knows about it. After the end of the GDR I wanted to do something, but my wife was dying and my daughter came to live with me and we never discussed the matter until I saw the notice in the Filmarchiv.'

Fritsch suddenly reaches for his hand.

'If I give you this film, you shall promise me that you will never tell anybody where it is from.'

The soft, gel fingers hold the back of his hand insistently: Conrad thinks of a chameleon's grip. As a boy he used to catch chameleons and take them into the house to help his grandmother's war on flies. Proximity to a fly, even if the chameleon was perched warily on Conrad's finger, always caused its long tongue to shoot out.

'No, I will never tell anybody where I got this film, I promise. I make an oath to you now.'

'I have never looked at the film again. I cannot look at this material.'

He releases Conrad's hand. His frail shoulders are hunched: his back is toppling and as he leans forward silently for a full minute Conrad sees a disturbing round lesion on his throat.

'Here my mother is buried,' he says. 'She died in 1934. After that no more Jewish burials were allowed here. I was no more a Jew until 1989. Now I go on Shabbat to the synagogue to remember my mother and her family. All gone. You shall take this film and you must do what you want with it, but please do not tell anybody where it comes from.'

'I promise.'

The light in the cemetery is flickering steady so that there is an aquarium background to their conversation.

'Do you have children?'

Conrad finds it difficult to answer, such is the awful intensity of his feelings.

'No. Not yet.'

'You must have children.'

'OK.'

'I believe you are an honest person, Mr Senior.'

'I hope I am.'

'I have one more thing to say.'

'Yes.'

'These Junkers who died were very brave. Von Gottberg was brave. That was one man (Es war ein Mann) but please do never forget that six million Jews died also. Sometimes I see that nobody in Berlin wants to remember that. They want to make themselves feel good with the expensive memorials from famous architects, but the reality is now forgotten. And I think that only those people who experienced those times can truly understand. We are fewer every year. My life has been very difficult. Can you understand?'

'I can.'

Now, as Fritsch speeds up, Conrad is able only to follow his story in segments. But the gist of it seems to Conrad overwhelmingly clear: an ordinary man, a film technician, has had his life utterly destroyed by people who believed that spirit operated in the world.

Eventually Fritsch stops, as if he has run dry.

'Tomorrow I will meet you here at 10 a.m. and give you the film.'

From his airline bag he produces a brown padded envelope.

'In here is a letter to E.A. Mendel of Oxford. It was given to me by Pastor Schonborn at Plotzensee. He asked me to send it after the war. But it was not possible and then it was too late. The Russians came and . . . you know what happened.'

'Now I understand why you asked me about Mr Mendel.'

Fritsch smiles briefly, a smile from the forgotten depths. The small red veins move about and then settle back.

'Yes. I must be sure you are, as you say, honest.'

He says 'honest' in English. He has it written in his notebook.

'Honest. Yes, you will keep it. I have not read the letter.'

They leave the cemetery, replacing the kippa in the box at the gate. Conrad makes a small donation for the restoration fund. Seventy years after the place was destroyed by Brownshirts in one night it is still a long way from being restored. And the whole monstrous Third Reich, which destroyed this old man's life, lasted only twelve years.

They part at the gate. Fritsch walks with difficulty: over the years, his back must have moved upwards and it is threatening to crush him. It is looming. More and more you hear people discussing their backs, blaming them for their problems, as if backs have a malign intention for the rest of their bodies. They seek help from people who manipulate and placate or propitiate their recalcitrant backs. But Fritsch's problems seem to belong to another order, something with mythical significance. From Grimm's Illustrated Fairy Tales, Conrad remembers an illustration of two trolls knocking their heads on a spike in order to make a rich soup from the chunks of dislodged flesh that fell into a large pot. He watches Fritsch as he walks stiffly across the road and past the park.

He feels light-headed, as though he has emerged from under water. He and Francine once went scuba diving; emerging from the cemetery is a strangely similar feeling. All the while he was in there with Fritsch he was submerged in another country and now it is a surprise to find Berlin outside the gates of the cemetery, just as it was.

Back in his room, he opens Fritsch's package. A makeshift envelope, of folded paper stuck down, is addressed to:

E.A. Mendel Esq.,

All Souls College, 

Oxford, 

England.

He stares at the envelope. God knows what state von Gottberg was in when he wrote this letter. The pastor must have provided him with a pen and paper. Conrad cannot open the letter. For five or ten minutes he stares at it or out of the window to the church spire. Von Gottberg's familiar, impeccable handwriting is intact, despite everything that has happened to him. It is as though handwriting is immortal. A man's last letter should only be read by the intended recipient, but then Mendel has passed all his papers to him to make what he can of them. He opens it finally. Outside, the spire of Zionskirche is, apparently for his benefit, lit by the dying sun. Conrad's hands are shaky. Until he engaged on Mendel's task, he was unaware that his hands could shake uncontrollably or that he could sit bolt upright at night from the depths of sleep. The paper is brittle.

26 August 1944

My dearest Elya,

I am soon to be hanged. One of the things that I have missed most since we were together in Oxford is our talks. Walking in the English Garden here I have often thought of Addison's Walk and I thought how we must have looked to any passing stranger, arguing and laughing as we strode along. They would have heard you say, 'Whenever you are in a corner, you turn to Hegel.'

My dear Elya, I loved you and it is one of the great regrets of my life that I shall never see you again. Please, if you can, make contact with my family when this is over, which it must be soon, and try to talk to the children and help them to understand. I shall also miss our friends; as you know I loved Elizabeth. Earlier this year when we met, just a few months ago, although it seems like years, we talked of you.

Now Elya, I must pass to something painful. It was clear to me in Washington in 1940 that you and Lionel had told Michael Hamburger that I was a Nazi, or at least a conservative nationalist. Elya, whatever I did was for Germany, certainly, but also for us, for our deep friendship and for a belief that a new world must be born and that people like us should be the midwives. I could have escaped Germany many times, right up to the last, Elya, but I believe that the true nature of a man is revealed when he is prepared to lay down his life for his beliefs. I tried to prevent what was coming, but I have failed. We have all failed. But I go to my death with this consolation: at least I tried to show that there was another Germany. It was always in my mind that I must demonstrate to you, Elya, that my principles are not, as you put it as we walked in Oxford, vaporous nonsense.

Goodbye, my dear, dear friend. Think well of me. I will for ever think well of you, day and night, if such a thing exists where I am going. Don't grieve for me; I am calm.

A

Conrad reads again: My dear Elya, I loved you and it is one of the great regrets of my life that I shall never see you again.

The letter, possibly the last words he ever wrote, is unbearable to Conrad. He has read what Mendel never could, that von Gottberg knew his friend had betrayed him, but still declared his love and forgiveness. And Conrad remembers painfully that earlier today he was wondering if von Gottberg was reminded of Oxford as he walked in the English Garden. And Fritsch said to him that only those who were there could truly understand, but Conrad believes that he has heard the dead speak, if only in whispers.

To calm himself, he decides to go walking. The night porter hands him his key without speaking to him. Conrad walks the city, preparing himself for what is to come. The city is curiously expectant; despite all the building works and projects, he sees that it is waiting for the dead to rise from the cemeteries.

He remembers walking in Jerusalem and seeing in an upstairs room the wild flailing shadows of Jews, who were waiting for the same thing.

23

CONRAD WAITS OUTSIDE the cemetery. Fritsch has decided he is a just man. In these surroundings he feels like a character in a thriller waiting for a drop; it is surprisingly difficult to be nonchalant and inconspicuous. Perhaps the passers-by are inspecting him to see if he is Jewish. Fritsch appears unexpectedly behind him, from within the cemetery, carrying his antique Lufthansa bag. He has been to his mother's grave, he says. Perhaps he has been praying for guidance. He reaches within the bag and produces a neatly wrapped parcel, which he says contains three rolls, the negative, the positive and the sound. The running time is twenty-four minutes. Even now Conrad sees traces of the meticulous technician in the toppling, frail figure of Fritsch. They have little to say this morning. They shake hands and Fritsch bows his head briefly. They both act as though they are in some way guilty.

'The smell was awful,' says Fritsch. 'I cannot forget it.'

Now Conrad is waiting once more, outside the Imperial War Museum. He has asked to see the show trials again. In his bag he has the rolls of film given to him by Fritsch. It is a damp morning. Summer is ending in a few soft, apologetic wet days and the leaves, for no obvious reason, get the message and start to fall. Nothing dramatic, just a sort of surrender. They are already lying, diseased, on the forecourt of the museum.

Yesterday he called Francine and told her he was home. She sounded more cheerful. Even as she says hello he is always able to tell from the timbre of her voice how she is. Sometimes he asks her, 'What sort of day have you had?' and she reads a little list of things that have gone well, or badly. It's as if every day must be assessed and marked. It's a habit of mind, he thinks, inculcated by the life of science or the belief in progress and order.

'Hello, darling,' she answered.

'Good day?'

'Yes, I got the job.'

'Brilliant. Wonderful. When do you start?'

'In two weeks. How did you get on in Berlin?'

'I have found some unseen film footage.'

'Of what?'

'Of von Gottberg in Berlin.'

'Anything more specific?'

'No, I haven't viewed it yet.'

'I'm glad the trip was worthwhile.'

He detects a note of scepticism, but he decides to ignore it.

'It was. How are you about, you know?'

'I don't want to talk about that at the moment. But obviously I feel a lot more cheerful since I got the letter.'

She can't talk about the lost baby and he can't talk about the poisoned film.

He stands on the steps watching the leaves make their slow, despondent descent on to the wet pavement. He seems to be standing there for ever. He has a churning, sick feeling in his stomach. He thinks there is a connection between the termination - the death - of his baby (he's sure it is his) and the death of Axel von Gottberg. Of course the only connection runs through him, but it is the inexplicable nature of consciousness to make personal meaning and significance out of the random. Walking around Berlin in the night he looked for the site of the Romanisches Café which Freisler so detested, the place where the aristocratic traitor had met with his effete friends to plot the subjugation of ordinary, honest Germans. He couldn't find any trace of it. It's lost under the post-war reconstruction. But he has seen pictures of it, ornate, elegant, opening on to Tauentzienstrasse, the waiters in long aprons moving attentively between the seated dilettanti. And it was while he was walking that he realised that he had neglected, in the terror of reading von Gottberg's letter, that he had mentioned meeting Elizabeth. That could only have been in Stockholm, he sees. And now he understands her final, defiant statement from the grave: I loved Axel von Gottberg. Perhaps in Stockholm they discussed flight. As he wrote to Mendel, he had many opportunities to get away, but his duty was to die.

The doors of the War Museum annexe open and he goes in. Upstairs he is shown to the same small viewing room and the rolls of film he has requested are brought out and laced up on the Steenbeck. He watches carefully how it's done. As soon as he is alone, he removes the film, takes Fritsch's film from his bag and laces it up, lining it up in the same way, film on one set of ratchets, sound on another. It's dark. He starts the film, afraid that after all these years it will disintegrate, but more afraid of what he is to see.

24

26 AUGUST 1944, 8 A.M.

AXEL VON GOTTBERG and three other prisoners are taken from Haus III to the condemned cells on the ground floor, which is known as das Totenhaus, the House of Death. They are in shackles and wearing only their trousers.

Since the Nazis came to power thousands have been executed here, half of them Germans. The House of Death is next to the execution block, which is an outbuilding, almost a shed, with large opaque windows at one end. From the roof of this building an iron girder was suspended in 1942. There are six meat-hooks attached to the girder. A guillotine also stood in this space, above a drain set in the floor, until it was destroyed in an air raid on the night of 3 September 1943. Three hundred prisoners were in Haus III that night. All these prisoners were hanged in the next four nights, although some had clemency proceedings outstanding and some were awaiting trial. The order for execution was given by telephone, without waiting for the paperwork.

Axel von Gottberg has been kept by the Gestapo for eleven more days, tortured and abused.

In the execution shed, Wernher Steuben, the cameraman, and his assistant, Ernst Fritsch, set up their Arri cameras. Steuben is close to a breakdown. This work is appallingly stressful: on the one hand the film is to be shown to the Führer and must be technically perfect, and on the other the people he has to deal with at the prison are barbarians. They don't understand the demands of film - lighting focus, reel changes, sound. The hangmen themselves are usually drunk. A bottle of brandy stands on a small table to the side for their benefit. But worse for Steuben is the fact that none of the camera team at Wochenschau want to do this work, and who can blame them? He has been forced to do it because the Reichs Director of Film has told his boss that the Führer himself is insisting that these executions be filmed. And Steuben, without being specific as to the consequences, has told Fritsch that it would not be in his interest to refuse, although of course he has only to say that he has looked after him in the past, but he may not be able to do it for ever; things are very different now.

Five or six times Steuben and Fritsch go through the plan. It's simple enough, but has one unpredictable element: the condemned take different lengths of time to die, depending on their weight and the hangmen's whims. Fritsch has to start running his camera, B Camera, three minutes after Steuben's camera, so that there is time to change reels as A Camera runs out, or between executions, whichever comes first. He could run longer magazines of film, but they are inclined to pick up dirt and hairs which blemish the film.

Axel von Gottberg is cold. It has been a very warm summer, but in the House of Death it is always winter. He sits on a form, his hands and feet shackled. He tries to imagine that he is with his family at his beloved Pleskow, and he tries to believe that it has been worth it to sacrifice everything. Death, he hopes, will be like an endless swim in the warm, vegetable water of the lake, of his own lake.

And now he is awaiting death shivering with the cold, as though he is perhaps anticipating the natural condition of the dead. The pastor comes to visit him. Von Gottberg asks to write another note and the pastor opens his bible in which he has concealed some paper and a pen. He returns half an hour later and takes the letter addressed to E.A. Mendel of All Souls College Oxford, England. Because the guards have taken to searching him as he leaves the prison, he passes it to one of the camera crew, who are decent enough people, when they meet at the urinals, and he asks him to mail it when he can: 'God will thank you for this Christian act of witness.'

Usually executions take place at night, but the Führer is at Wolfschanze, and the film must reach him tonight. Steuben has been told a plane is waiting.

Von Gottberg hears the guards taking the man from the next cell. He is a trade-union leader called Franz Liebherr, who was supposed to call workers out on strike after Hitler's assassination. The guards shout at him, 'It's a short walk. You don't want to be late for your next appointment.'

Near by someone is praying. After ten or fifteen minutes another man is led away. He calls out, 'Goodbye, friends,' but the guards shout at him to be silent. His shackles scrape and clatter on the floor as he leaves the building.

Von Gottberg longs to die. Another minute of this hell is unbearable. The evidence of the degradation of his people, of the descent into inhumanity, has already killed him. The prison grapevine has informed him that his wife has been arrested and his beloved children taken away. And they have been taken away because of what Elya called his taste for intrigue, a remark which Elizabeth reported to him in Stockholm. Surely this is the refutation, this Plotzensee, this House of Death, the hanging that waits. It is common knowledge in Plotzensee that it takes some time to die by strangulation.

At last they come for him. He stands up, as straight as he can, well over six foot, despite the bruises and burns.

'Gottberg, your time has come.'

He nods. The two guards lead him, shuffling out of the building and across the courtyard, half-naked on these bare stones. He is led through a door. Inside the execution room there is a blinding light, puzzling after the days and nights that have collapsed into each other so that he has lived in degrees of darkness and shadow. There is a smell in here of excrement. He has no idea what the lights mean or what the black, drawn curtains to his left are hiding. His death sentence, very formally couched, is read to him: Im Namen des Deutschen Volkes.

Now the hangman takes over. He holds von Gottberg by the arm. 'This way, my lanky friend. You should eat more, you know.' His assistants laugh. The assistants now lift him up and place the noose, which is attached to the meat-hooks, around his neck.

'For our sacred Germany,' says von Gottberg calmly.

The hangmen remove his trousers, to speed the clean-up, and then they release him.

25

CONRAD LURCHES FROM the building. He is sick in the street, until bile appears in small, bubbled strings. When he has voided himself, he sets off at a fast, snivelling jog, like a five-year-old.

Fuck that smiling bastard Mendel. Fuck you, you great toad, you amateur gentile, with your three-piece suits and your sly charm and your hairy ears and you five languages and your house in Headington with tasteful English garden, loud with roses, and your wonderfully urbane theories about how the world works and your barrowloads of honours and honorary degrees and membership of every fucking rinky-dink order of letters and science in the whole fucking world and your illuminated addresses and your knighthood - Sir Elya Mendel KBE and macher - and your love of Schubert and Beethoven and opera and the hampers spread on the grass at Garsington in the company of intelligent women, who all fuck like rabbits after you have given them the warm-up of Herzen and Turgenev — in fact anybody they have never read in English, let alone in Russian, Estonian or Aramaic. And your wonderful war in the Reform Club on Welsh rarebit and devilled kidney and claret -Just a little of the '36 left, Mr Mendel - and your high-minded intrigue in the Foreign Office and the British Embassy in Washington, your elegant dispatches and your cosy notes to Michael Hamburger: A second-class intellect, I'm afraid, Michael, gets the wrong end of the stick; deep dark Teutonic forests, goose-girls, duelling scars. By the way, can you come to All Souls for a Mallard Supper? We sing a ridiculous song about the mallard — I will give you the words — and then we eat one. More conventional food is also provided. Absurd really, but I think symbolic of this place, teetering on the edge of farce, but always self-aware.

Lovely war. Lovely old stones. Lovely gossip.

While your friend hanged slowly, his eyes bulging, his bowels opening.

Conrad reaches Westminster Bridge, his lungs gasping hopelessly for air. He leans over and looks down at the water. It's high, although still running in from the sea. Why did you ask me to do this? Why? Why? His stomach produces aiwretched spasm, a violent heave. Nothing but a clear, thin dessert spoon of liquid escapes him. His eyes are, by contrast, full of liquid. He reaches into the bag and takes the film can and drops it over the side. For a brief moment it floats, turning once, and then vanishes.

Hanged men are frequently priapic, Elya.

These also are human qualities.

26

' YOU LOOK A LITTLE peaky, if you don't mind me saying so.'

Tony is concerned. Conrad hasn't left the flat for days.

'I'm fine, Tony.'

'I'll get some food in, if you like.'

'No, it's OK. Emily's coming round later.'

'Blimey, that would cheer anybody up.'

'Tony, I'm going to be leaving soon.'

'I thought you and the missus was getting togever again.'

'We were. But it hasn't worked out.'

'Sorry to hear that, I really am. Come in for some bread. I'll do you a panino. I'm just about to do one for meself. Mozzarella, tomatoes? 'Ow's that sound?'

'Great. You're a pal, Tony.'

He is touched by Tony's solicitude.

In the back of the bakery is a yard. Tony has a little table there, and a vine growing out of a tub. He sits Conrad down.

'This is nice, Tony.'

There are tubs of white and red geraniums, rosemary bushes and a bay tree. It's a secret garden, Tony's own Hortus inclusus, his own fellows' garden. The desire for an enclosed personal space, a small piece of your own paradise, is a powerful one. He remembers the Maasai villages out on the plains beneath the Maasai Mountain of God, in all that vastness, round enclosures of branches and thorn trees into which the Maasai retreated at sunset from the threat of lions, leopards and hyenas. In there they and their cattle were safe, bathed in firelight, the night locked outside.

Tony comes back with two cappuccinos and two panini stuffed with mozzarella and plum tomatoes as he promised. Conrad takes a bite.

'Any good?'

'Lovely. Fantastic'

'It should be, it's Naples buffalo mozzarella. Mozzarella di bufala. If you was fed this when you was a nipper, like I were, it is in your blood.'

Conrad begins to weep.

'You orright, my friend?'

But Conrad cannot reply. He nods.

'I'm sorry, mate,' says Tony. 'Don't worry, whatever it is, take your time. Just a sec'

He comes back with some paper napkins.

'It's Francine, is that it?'

Eventually Conrad is able to speak.

'Sorry, Tony.'

'No problem, mate.'

'Tony, it's not Francine. I have seen something no human being should see. I can't tell you about it, but trust me, Tony, you're the only one I've even mentioned it to, it's something beyond imagination.'

That was my mistake, he thinks, insufficient imagination.

'Don't say no more, Conrad. Just eat if you can. I'm going to make you another. Mortadella? Prosciutto?'

'Whatever. Thanks.'

In all Conrad eats four panini. He discovers that he has been starving.

Francine was extremely honest: John had reflected during their separation and then he had left his wife, without first discussing his decision with Francine. It was the only decent way, he said, leaving her free to decide.

'So you both cleared the decks. How fucking noble.'

'You're a shit, Conrad.'

'Good luck with the rest of your life.'

But she was not done: three estate agents will value the flat; he can choose any agent he likes. And she will buy him out of his half at the median estimation. It is this detail, this coolness — the median estimation — which finally allows him to squeeze Francine from his being. And just a day later Emily rang, as if aware of a vacuum. She has a sad story: she crashed the car on the way to Notting Hill to pick up the children. She was drunk - totally mashed - at two o'clock in the afternoon. She's been fined and has lost her licence. It was just the wake-up call she needed. It's only been a few weeks but she's clean now and she wants to see him. He has been unable to sleep for more than twenty minutes at a time and now he hopes that her frail but sexually knowing body will soothe him. It's the sort of arrangement she understands. He has offered to drive the car when she picks up the children, if her mother can't do it. They will help each other at a time of need in this utilitarian fashion.

In the past two weeks he has asked himself if he has any grounds for complaint against Mendel. He has come to think it was wrong to hope that Mendel had any aim in mind for him, other than to have him complete, perhaps write, the story of his friendship with von Gottberg. And, he has also come to see, he led himself into this: he has a regard for his own ideas and sins and afflictions: they are, after all, just about all he has that he can call his own. And he has always had a certain arrogance, readily picked up by Francine, about the importance of his inner life, his human qualities. Now that confidence has taken a blow, perhaps a mortal blow.

He goes back to Elizabeth Partridge's papers, and finds a thirty-year-old obituary for her husband, Lord Dungannon. He is survived by his widow Elizabeth, Lady Dungannon, and is succeeded by his only son, Erroll O'Brien, as the seventh Earl of Dungannon. There is nothing, apart from the one letter with No! written on it, about Stockholm. He finds the phone number on a sheet of paper. The paper is quite thick and the address and phone number, Dungannon 23, are embossed in cerulean blue, lying on the paper in serpentine filaments. It takes him no time at all to establish the dialling code. He speaks to the estate manager, who tells him the Earl is presently in Dublin, but that he rings in every evening to see how the harvest is going - they are harvesting at the moment - and he will pass on the message to call Mr Senior. Conrad has the feeling that he is phoning not another country so much as another time in history.

But the death of von Gottberg has left its appointed time, and projected itself into his consciousness. It is inhabiting not just his mind, but his skin and his clothes. He remembers a film in a Polanski retrospective at the National Film Theatre, where he often used to go with Francine. In this film Franchise Dorleac, or her sister Catherine Deneuve, finds the material world disturbingly motile, refusing to obey the laws of physics. At the time he thought that it was an interestingly surreal conceit. He knows better now. In this way, von Gottberg's death has defied all physical laws and become present in his own time. It's come to inhabit and possess what should by rights be his to control. He understands now Fritsch's anguish: nobody can understand. He has been given, maybe he sought, just an inkling of what true horror means, what human beings are. That's it. That is what has happened to him: he has been given a lesson in reality. Never mind what philosophers say about the reality of things.

He longs for Emily to still his mind with - how to put this honestly? - her body. When Emily finally arrives, he sees that the two of them are ghosts.

Dungannon does not call him immediately. Perhaps he has aristocratic insouciance: vulgar to thrust, old chap. But Conrad feels, as he had hoped, more calm. Emily's children are still with her mother and she stayed the night. Their love-making was subdued but intense as if both of them required something beyond physical pleasure. They both need in their own way to re-enter the world of the familiar. Her breath had a slightly chemical scent, not unpleasant, but artificial, perhaps from the pills she is taking. He too is taking pills, tranquillisers. Her body had somehow changed from the sexually active to the defenceless. They are like two survivors of a plane crash finding each other in the jungle and thanking God they are not alone.

She asked him no questions about his absence. She said she called because she felt he was the only person she wanted to see.

'I rang you because, like, I knew you would not judge or criticise me, but that you would accept me. You were always on my mind when I was in the bin. I heard your voice in my dreams.'

He feels a little irritation at her self-centredness, but then he has no wish to talk about von Gottberg to her, so he is happy for her to ramble on, and describe her own feelings in detail for him. Without drink or drugs - he realises he has never seen her completely sober before — she seems very vulnerable, even puzzled, as though the business of life is a mystery. They have arrived at the same point by different routes.

She tells him she has a cottage in the country and she is going to live there with the children and be a proper mother. The notion of being a proper mother seems to be the only aim she can conceive of in this new, blank, featureless world, other than an inchoate appreciation of his human qualities. His cursed human qualities.

Conrad could warn her now that there is no symmetry in this world, although we are always looking for it, but he has come to understand that the looking for it is also a part of being human, and unavoidable.

27

CONRAD HAS NO money. He has borrowed the fare to Dublin from Emily against his payout on the flat. She seems to have plenty anyway. Dungannon rang and said he would meet him at the Shel-bourne, which is his base when he is Dublin to escape the demands of an estate at harvest time. He listened closely to Dungannon's voice on the phone: he spoke in that way that only the high-altitude upper classes maintain without embarrassment, yet it was unmistakably Irish with a sort of Celtic richness as though Gaelic had left a lyrical residue. He proposed dinner and gave a very specific time: seven twenty-five in the Horseshoe Bar. Conrad has booked himself into a rat-trap at the airport, a special deal offered with the cheap flight. He takes a bus into town in plenty of time. He is aware that he has neglected his clothes; his wardrobe has had no additions for three years, but he has a tweed jacket he bought in an Oxfam shop when he first arrived in Oxford under a colonial misapprehension, and he thinks this will be appropriate for Dublin, which he envisages as tweedy and literary in an old-fashioned sort of way: Guinness, poetry, the crate and pub crawls.

He announces himself to the concierge who takes him through to the bar. A balding man of about sixty is reading the Racing Times.

'My lord, your guest has arrived.'

He takes off his glasses and stands. He is very tall in an elegant light-grey suit with slanted pockets. For some reason the aristocracy favour pockets on the diagonal.

'How do you do?' he says. 'I am Erroll Dungannon. Welcome to Dublin. Would you like a drink?'

Conrad is bemused.

'You look just like him,' he says, although he hasn't meant to bring the matter up too suddenly.

'So my mother used to say. I wouldn't know,' he replies cheerfully. 'Two special whiskies, Sean.'

'Right away, milord.'

'Now,' says Dungannon, 'I saw you briefly at the funeral, but you didn't stay.'

'No, I didn't want to intrude.'

'Not at all, jolly good of you to have come.'

'The two girls who read must be your daughters.'

'By my second wife. Lovely girls. They live with their mother.'

His face is long, like von Gottberg's - like his father's - with deep, dark eyes and a strong nose. The little hair that he has is silvery and brushed backwards so that there is a large open brow. He seems to be running on a lower voltage than his father, however.

'Why was the funeral in Cornwall?'

'My mother insisted on it. She said that she had been happy there. She loved this hotel, by the way. She and her cousin, the novelist, were often here.'

His manner is light and amiable, as though the fact that he is von Gottberg's son is merely incidental and that talking to Conrad is a minor, but unavoidable, chore, whereas for Conrad it is extraordinary to see him here, looking - he finds it unsettling — like a sixty-year-old version of his thirty-five-year-old father.

'My mother, of course, came to believe that she had always loved Axel von Gottberg, but the truth is that for fifty years and more I heard nothing about him. She and my father — I mean Dungannon - had a friendly but passionless relationship. He was, as people say now, gay, although he never wanted to live that life. She married him soon after her first husband died in an air crash. I was thirty-one when my father - Dungannon - died and she told me about my real father. To be honest, it was too late. Too much to take in. In fact I was rather angry, thinking that as she became older she was glorifying a one-night stand. Also, of course, I understood that I had half-sisters in Germany, and it was far, far too late to disrupt their lives. Anyway my mother said before she died that you were asked by Elya Mendel to write something about Axel von Gottberg?'

'Did you know Elya Mendel?'

The whisky arrives at this moment. The barman pours two large glasses.

'Irish whisky. Forty years old. Older than you, I would imagine. They keep a little reserve for me here.'

They drink and Dungannon says, 'Rather good, don't you think?'

'I do.'

Conrad suspects that he is a drunk.

'You asked me about Elya Mendel. He was my godfather. He and my mother were very close. They wrote letters and telephoned often right up to his death. Of course he must have known I was Axel von Gottberg's son, but it was never mentioned. I had the conventional sort of upbringing, Eton, Oxford in the early sixties, and came back here after a spell in the Guards. Didn't suit me, I am afraid. At Oxford Elya Mendel was always kind and helpful. I probably wouldn't have got in without him anyway. I think I disappointed him a little. In the beginning we used to go for walks at Magdalen, but I wasn't up to the mark. I used to go for lunch on Sundays in Headington quite often in the beginning. I loved Oxford but I was not really an Oxford man. I spent a lot of time out with hounds, the Bullingdon and so on, and left after a year and a term. Balliol. Of course I didn't know then that it was my real father's college. Anyway, after the Guards I came back here, and here I have remained on the estate with some business interests in Dublin and London. I used to hunt, but my back is crumbling and my doctor has warned me off. Probably sounds a dull life to you, but I have been happy. Any more questions?'

He laughs loudly and unexpectedly, and Conrad remembers that friends spoke of von Gottberg's sudden laughter, rising from geological depths. The laugh has a curious and charming retrospective effect, inviting a certain irony about what has gone before. Conrad realises, as they go into dinner, that Dungannon has decided to give him just enough information to get rid of him.

Dungannon doesn't eat much: he has chosen grouse which he inspects and prods and then slices a few bits off. But he drinks freely and Conrad keeps up. After dinner they move to another bar for port.

'To be honest with you, Conrad, I am not very keen to be dragged into this whole business. I would appreciate it if you kept me out of the story or whatever you are proposing. Of course I am aware, very well aware, that my mother and Elya Mendel had, as they say nowadays, an agenda. And of course you will want to be true to Elya's wishes, but can I ask you to leave me out of it? There is no definite proof that I am Axel's son and in a way it was just an accident, a sideshow. I have no claim to any involvement. Do you follow me? No interest in digging up the past?'

'I haven't decided finally what to do with what I have, but yes, I promise to leave you out.'

'You're a good chap. How old are you? Thirty-five. You could be my son, just about.'

He laughs again, that astonishing laugh.

'Why do you think your mother never told me about you?'

'She probably thought you would work it out. I don't know. I have the memoir left for you. It's in my room. Remind me to get it before you leave. When are you off, by the way?'

Back in his hotel, Conrad lies drunkenly on his bed. He has come to see von Gottberg's son, and perhaps to tell him something of his father, but, for Dungannon, the world he knows is enough. He can't even contemplate the prospect of discussing his father. Conrad understands that his mother, who loved von Gottberg, wanted Conrad to know, after all those years of secrecy, that she was still true to his memory and had produced his son. Mendel wanted him to know that, even if it was at a distance, he had done something for his old friend, and helped Dungannon into his father's college, where he and von Gottberg had first met all those years ago. The most poignant detail for Conrad is that Elya Mendel took this gangling doppelganger on a few laps of Addison's Walk, perhaps hoping they could take up where he and the father had left off.

Conrad sees them. He wonders if anyone notices the resemblance, the tall youth with the startling laugh, the deep eyes, the long Mecklenburg nose, walking briskly with the small, chubby figure of Elya Mendel, who barely draws breath as he explains how the world is organised.

28

MY LAST MEETING WITH AXEL VON

GOTTBERG, A MEMOIR. ELIZABETH PARTRIDGE, 

DUNGANNON HOUSE, 2001

ELYA MENDEL HELPED arrange my flight to Stockholm. He always knew who to talk to. I was flown out with some Foreign Office people, who did not speak to me. I was supposed to report back on my meetings, although only Elya knew who I was meeting. By this stage of the war, the Luftwaffe was beaten, but it was still a nervous flight, arcing far out over the North Sea and then curving back over Norway. The windows of the plane were blacked out and it was very cold and bumpy inside the plane, but we landed safely somewhere outside Stockholm. The Foreign Office people were met, but I was left to find a taxi to take me into town to the Grand Hotel, where I was to make myself known as the guest of Mr Axel.

Axel had left a note for me that read: Welcome. I will be back as soon as I can. Love A. He had booked a room for me that overlooked the water across to the Old Town and the vast Royal Palace. There were flowers in the room, ordered, I was sure, by Axel. Down below the ferries were setting out from the quays to the islands as if everything in the world was as it should be, ordered, unruffled and calm. The madness and destruction of the war seemed to me to belong to another world, a world that, now, I could barely imagine. It was suddenly quite literally unreal, as though I had dreamed it and woken up, to discover my confusion. But of course, it was real. All too real. I sat on the terrace of the hotel in the warm sunshine, my heart full of bitterness and shame. How had we allowed our world to be destroyed? How had we got to this? Why had our wonderful, enchanted lives been ruined, our friends killed? All it needed was to get rid of Hitler. That, above all else, was what we should have been striving to achieve to avoid this Armageddon. Here in orderly, sensible, calm Sweden, the folly of war was so overwhelmingly obvious.

I walked up to a small park near by and ordered a coffee and a lingonberry tart and watched with deep envy ordinary people doing the everyday things, looking after their children, walking in the sunshine, reading the newspapers, chatting, without the sirens warning of V-i rockets, without the rationing and deprivation and without the destruction of my beloved London, which now lay ruined. Utter, utter waste, the product of hundreds of years of human striving, lying in ruins. And Axel's Berlin, I knew, was far worse with more to come and the Russians closing relentlessly from the East. A young woman in the national dress of tight bodice and wide skirt brought me the tart, such a simple, homely pleasure, and this sight made me feel so deeply for Axel, who had spent the last five years trying to get rid of Hitler, travelling God knows at what risk to himself, to ask that the German resistance be given some encouragement. But the blood rage of war demanded unconditional surrender, which meant unlimited destruction.

When Axel arrived at the hotel in the early afternoon, he noticed immediately my shock although I tried quickly to hide it. He was gaunt and his eyes had retreated deeper into his head; his elegant grey suit hung from him. His hair was thin, too.

'Is it that bad? I have grown old, but you look just the same, my darling.'

'Axel, no, you just look very, very tired and thin. But wonderful as always.'

We embraced and only later did it occur to me how it must have appeared, a German diplomat and an Englishwoman in each other's arms, the Englishwoman in floods of tears.

'Let's have a drink. We both need it.'

He was so worn and tired, but as always full of life. We sat on the terrace.

'Did you have a terrible flight? I worried that our Luftwaffe would shoot you down. And to be honest I wasn't sure you would come. I am overwhelmed that you are here.'

'I wasn't sure you were going to be here at all. Axel, why did you ask me to come?'

'You don't need to ask. You know the answer to that question. I love you. And I heard, of course, that Roddy had died. Do you miss him?'

'I do miss him. I feel guilty, too, that I never loved him. How are your children?'

'They are divine. That is the worst thing about this whole business, the thing that worries me most; our chances of success are not high and the price we will pay, and our children will pay, will be terrible.'

'Axel, for God's sake, you must get away. I have been asked to suggest it to you. Can't you take the family to Switzerland or come here and hide until it's over?'

Of course I knew that he could never leave Germany. Germany needed him; his fate was bound up with his country's. Whatever happened in Germany, and we could all see that the end was near, he was a part of it. Over the next few days I realised that he had become obsessed with the idea of restoring Germany's honour by killing Hitler. He talked quite freely, although Stockholm was full of Nazis and agents from every power.

'We have to get rid of him and then it will be my job to ask the Allies to deal with us, who got rid of him.'

'Is it soon, Axel?'

'Very soon. I have a surprise for you. Tomorrow we are going to go out into the archipelago, to the island of Grinda to stay in an inn.'

We walked around the town, past the Royal Dramatic Theatre where Greta Garbo started her professional life and down to the Old Town, which in those days still had fishermen and their families living above the nets and herring barrels. We walked hand in hand and perhaps were followed. The worst moment for me was when I saw one of the Foreign Office people in the street looking at a Dala horse. I broke away from Axel and pretended to be deeply interested in the contents of a herring barrel. Axel thought it was funny. He didn't speak about Liselotte, although I felt deeply uneasy about being here in Stockholm with her husband. I think all women believe adultery is a betrayal of themselves as women, while many men, in my experience, think of it as an endorsement of their true natures. But Axel asked me about Rosamund, and I told him that she was happily married with a baby girl and that she was quite well known now after her third book The Wings of the Dawn.

'Does she speak about me?'

'No. I think she has tried to put you out of her mind.'

'And Elya, does he ever mention me?'

'We always talk about you whenever we meet.'

'How does he feel about me?'

'You know we have all been swept up in this awful determination to crush the Nazis and of course Germany, for ever. I think he still believes that you should leave the country.'

'I can't. I know that you actually understand. I can't because we have to demonstrate that Germany is not the same thing as Hitler. Elya knows that.'

I saw then that Elya was always on his mind. What would Elya think? What would Elya say? Now I believe, after all these years, that Axel sacrificed himself for Elya. It seems ridiculous to say it, but he was trying to atone for that letter to the Manchester Guardian, which lost him the friendship and trust he most treasured in the world. In the night we became lovers over again but now with a fearful intensity of feeling because we knew that everything was lost. I found him at four in the morning staring out over the harbour.

'I haven't slept for four years,' he said apologetically when he saw that I was awake. I could see the ribs on his back.

After breakfast we took a ferry out to the islands. They were so beautiful, the light soft and hazy, each small rocky island with its own jetty and red, deep-red painted cottage, with a boat moored near by; it was a vision of what life could be, what life was supposed to be. So different from the gloom and fear and despair and deprivation of London and the utter desolation of Berlin.

'Can't we stay here, Axel, until it's over?'

'I can t.

'But please, get your family out at least, Axel.'

'I have to go through to the end. I have friends and colleagues who are risking their lives every day. We have to do it or die trying.'

We were standing at the prow of the ferry as it eased its sensible, pragmatic way past countless small islands and skerries. Here we were free as we hadn't been for years, not since we were young and blithe. Now, of course, I am immensely old, but then Axel and I already had the feeling that we had lost our youth. The war had taken it. He was obsessed with saving Germany, but I saw that it was almost suicidal. He looked so terribly worn. But for those two days, we were carefree again. It was as if we had been given a blessing from heaven. The strange thing was that I could easily imagine that this landscape, these astonishing islands set in the magical archipelago, were the real world and what we had left behind in Berlin and London was completely unreal, the stuff of nightmares. I had the feeling that we could just step out of our lives. And also, I knew after that first night that I was pregnant. I can't explain how I knew, but now I believe that it was fated.

The ferry came into the jetty at Grinda, I think after about an hour, and a pushcart from the inn met us to take our bags, which were very few. We walked up a track through woods and meadows that were deep in wild flowers. The Grinda Wardshus turned out to be exactly what we craved, a haven of utter tranquillity, with not a sign of a German or a British agent. In fact there was only one other guest, and he was a botanist, I think, from Uppsala. Probably nowhere in the world did the awful, cruel, relentless war seem further away.

Axel and I swam at a lovely sandy beach. I hadn't realised until then that the Baltic is more or less a freshwater lake, although I had seen eider ducks paddling by in flotillas. The water itself had only a slightly brackish taste. Our room looked out over a meadow to woods with the gleam of water beyond. We didn't talk that night or the next morning about the war. We seemed to understand that these were our last blessed moments together. Nor did I mention escape again. To tell the truth, I saw a certain stark beauty in Axel's attitude to the war: for him it had become a simple matter of principles and courage. Only by believing in these things could he justify himself and his existence. He did ask me to tell Elya that what his country had done to the Jews could never be forgiven. I didn't tell Elya.

We walked across the island through the meadows of flowers. Memory, famously, plays tricks, but there in that season I remember the fields full of marguerites, orchids, primroses and wild gentian. At the edge of the meadows, on fences or scrambling up trees, were pink and white wild roses, what we would call dog roses. We spent all that day walking, swimming and picnicking, happy, but also, as the day wore on, oppressed by the knowledge that this was just a reprieve, release on parole, as Axel put it. Still Axel's talent for wild enjoyment had not diminished, even under immense duress. I loved him so deeply that even as I write these words I feel this love surging through me.

Late that evening as the sky dimmed in summer twilight, we took the ferry back to Stockholm. We clung together watching this world separate from us. We could have stayed. In Stockholm at midnight the sky was an inky blue; I mean the colour of my Parker's Quink at school, a deep royal blue. We glided in past the Royal Dramatic Theatre and round to our berth outside the Grand Hotel.

In the morning, Axel had to leave early, before breakfast.

He woke me and said, 'Goodbye, my only love.'

I never saw him again and I have missed him every day, although as our son grew I saw his likeness and it has been some consolation to me.

Although Elya remained a true friend, in my heart I believed that he was in some degree responsible for the fact that Axel courted death. As Axel said to me in Stockholm, even if we fail to kill Hitler, we will be doing Germany a service by demonstrating to our friends that there is a more noble Germany. He died a hero.

29

CONRAD IS WRITING every day. By assembling this story on paper - he writes in wire-bound notebooks in the Bodleian Library — he finds a strange calmness. He has heard it said by a writer that he doesn't know what he thinks until he has written it down, and this seems to be true also for him. He was gratified to find that his name was still on the library's roll as a member of the university, and his reader's ticket, which bears a picture of him looking like a Moonie, allows him access to Duke Humfrey's Library, where he sits late into the winter gloom. Sometimes he brings a pile of papers with him; sometimes he delves into the library's collections. At the end of the day he cycles seven miles back to Emily's cottage. After six months or so, she more or less gave up her plan to be a good rural mother, but she and the children come from London most weekends and she is happy for him to look after the place in return for his room.

He likes the children, a boy of six called Jamie, and a little girl of four whose name is Lamoxie, a name that apparently came in a vision, but which Emily now believes may have to be changed to something more sensible as she is already being teased. They have taken to kissing him when they arrive on a Saturday morning. He wonders if this kissing is a form of anxiety caused by the fact that they are not sure who their fathers are, or whether kissing is so commonplace in expensive little private schools that they kiss anything animate.

When he leaves the library, the gas lights are lit and they are suffused gently by the damp air, so that if you didn't know better you might think this light contained particles of minute, Cheddar-cheese-coloured matter hovering around the lamps. Cyclists go by, past the Radcliffe Camera, up the Broad or down Holywell. They call happily to each other above the sound of the bikes on the road; his youth is going by. Sometimes he cycles home via Holywell, in the hope of hearing music escaping from the Music Rooms, and then he goes on past New College, with its glimpses of silhouetted figures in the quads beyond, and then he swings up Longwall Street and Magdalen in honour of Elya Mendel and Axel von Gottberg, whose lives, as he labours in the library, he is trying to shape. He struggles sometimes with the fear that in the process of writing about them he is trivialising their story or introducing new falsehoods into it. As he progresses he has to decide what material to ignore and what to include. But he sees that there is no objective truth possible. To the one overwhelming fact, as far as he knows, he and Ernst Fritsch are the only living witnesses.

When he finally reaches the house down a long, bumpy farm road, he lights a fire and heats some soup and reads or watches television. One night he sees with a shock that his friend Osric has been kidnapped in Baghdad. Two nights later he is out, after a miracle escape through a tiny window. He is selling his story. A happy, contemporary, ending. Conrad wonders if he was encouraged to escape because the Iraqis couldn't stand another night at close quarters with him.

As for himself, he is happy spending most nights alone out here. But he doesn't lead a hermit's life. He finds that he has friends who have stayed on or come back to Oxford; and he has been invited to eat at high table in various colleges, a sort of sacrament. He sees himself being absorbed into the fabric of the old place, so that he is just one more hopeful and slightly seedy seeker after truth, bicycling in the gloom, walking by the river, breathing the damp air, longing in a subdued way for the peace of the mind.

It's spring now, and sometimes he takes a break from the library, and walks down the High to Magdalen, where the fritillaries are out in the meadow beside Addison's Walk. They are curious flowers, speckled and venomous. He sees, more faintly with every passing day, Axel von Gottberg and Elya Mendel striding along and now he hears only snatches of their conversation and their ill-matched laughter.