Otto de Kat - News from Berlin

She had not known him to make such an impassioned speech before. He was not addressing her in particular, although he had begun by putting his arm around her and offering his congratulations. A hush had fallen. Adam did not raise his voice, but each word was charged with electricity. He conjured an ideal vision which was common to them all, because they had forged it together; he lifted the curtain on their workaday hardship, revealing the pitiful circumstances in which they were forced to live: the lack of justice in the law courts, the overweening callousness, the snitching that had become the norm, the dearth of all hope and love. Sweeping statements, to be sure, but despite the pathos and the rhetoric, Adam spoke with such conviction that they had to believe him. Shoulder to shoulder, glasses aloft, that fourth day of June, 1941, had felt like a triumph of sorts, a foretaste of what was to come, what would ultimately be theirs.

The evening was perfect, the best Emma had ever had in Germany. Adam was applauded, his eyes shone, he had the air of a soldier called up for service and eager for battle. And with reason: he felt himself a soldier, for all that his battles were fought without guns. The ministries in Berlin were caught up in a guerrilla war between administrators and clerks, divisions and subdivisions, spies and counter-spies. Adam found his arm being twisted by Himmler’s minions on a daily basis.

But on the evening of Emma’s birthday, with the sun’s heat lingering in the gardens of Dahlem and not a single aircraft to be heard, all was clear and transparent. She felt reconciled with the way her life was going, with the empty days without Carl, the anguish of the war, the yearning for a normal existence, for children, for her father and mother. Carl was not aware of her moods of despair. She had never told him, nor had she told him about Watse’s warning. This was her party, her night of radiance, free of all grudge and fear. The radio was switched on and they danced; there was a gramophone, and records of banned singers. Were the windows closed tight, and the curtains? Dancing on a volcano, feet tripping lightly over a floor of flames. Ich bin von Kopf bis Fuss. Until the first rays of sunshine in the morning.

Apart from Lara nobody knew he was going to London. He informed his office that he was spending a few days in the mountains. Swissair B 320 took about three hours to fly to Lisbon. Once there, he had to find some way of boarding a plane to England: quite a challenge, as there was only one flight a day and many prominent individuals seeking passage. Fortunately, the name Desmond Morton worked wonders. At Lisbon Airport he was promptly assigned to an extra flight scheduled for the following evening.

Time was racing by, and Oscar’s desperation grew. It had taken a whole week to get in touch with Morton, precious days in which his information was going to waste. Just as well there had been only one day’s delay in Lisbon. Lisbon, a strange, forgotten city, and at the same time an international laboratory for espionage, and a small paradise for diplomats. Everyone was watching everybody else, in almost unbroken sunshine, in the Cidade da Luz, the City of Light. Should he pay a visit to his friend van Oldenborgh, who organised support for refugees? Another time perhaps, better not attract attention. He avoided the Dutch embassy for the same reason. The last time he called there he had been infuriated by the then envoy, the impossible, pedantic Sillem, the man who failed to lift a finger to help the motley crowd of stranded compatriots, simply abandoning them to their fate. Oscar couldn’t abide him, neither could van Oldenborgh.

Oscar took the tram uphill to Alfama, the old fishermen’s quarter in the middle of the city. From there he looked out over the River Tagus and listened to the sing-song tones of Portuguese spoken around him. A scattering of palm trees put him in mind of Africa; there was a Moorish feel to the place. But he paid little attention to his surroundings, all he wanted was to find some peaceful spot to escape the oppressive heat of the downtown area. The outdoor café he stopped at was almost empty. The sun shone on the Tagus, with its wide mouth leading out to the ocean. Cargo boats chugged upriver, fishing craft moored at the quays, pilot boats sent up curves of spray as they raced to their clients, yachts sailed leisurely to sea. It left him cold, all of it. It was as if a huge screen had been unrolled upon which the scene on the river was projected: unreal, obscure, a magic-lantern performance that had nothing to do with the real world. He heard seagulls, church bells, children playing in the alleys, the sounds of a lost age. It felt unseemly to be sitting there, as if he were shirking his duty. Which was what he had done, of course. He had tried his utmost to push Emma’s news to the back of his mind, pretend she had never told him. Only when that didn’t work, and the realisation hit him that he had no choice but to warn Morton, had he set about booking a flight. It had all taken days and days. Morton’s arm was long, but even for him Switzerland was a difficult nut to crack. In Portugal apparently he had more influence.

For the past three months Lara had occupied him without pause. Occupied was not the right word: too matter-of-fact. She held sway over him without touching, infusing every chamber of his soul with warmth. Even that was a poor description, like some old-fashioned fairytale romance; no, it would not do. Try as he might, he was unable to put his dreamed life with Lara into words. How she looked, moved, spoke, kept silent, asked a question. He felt himself the keeper of a warehouse of gestures and words, he was a repository of feelings both processed and raw. She took him back to the days before the death of his father, to an age of innocence. She was a wondrous, distant echo of the girl who had kissed him on the mouth in a fathomless past, and breathed life into him.

His memories of their first days together were all tangled up. His confusion had not abated since that day in Café Eiger and their walk the next morning – not before ten, she had said, and he had been there at ten.

“Hello, Oscar, quite a change from yesterday, isn’t it?” The sun had not yet risen above the Jungfrau, which stood out against the deep blue sky in almost lurid contrast. Waiters were shovelling the snow off the terrace into banks along the edges. There was one couple having breakfast with their overcoats on, waiting for the sun to burst upon them.

“Germans,” Lara muttered. “Complete fanatics.” Oscar, ever on his guard, peered at them. But they seemed harmless: the man and the woman were far too showily dressed, and besides, he had only decided to go skiing on the spur of the moment two days earlier. But should he not, for his part, have made some enquiries about Lara? He dismissed the idea at once, feeling almost ashamed.

“Shall we walk to Kleine Scheidegg?” He had made the suggestion casually, as if that was what they had already agreed to do. Going to sit with her at a table again seemed a little daunting. The previous day had been the longest café-table session of his life: an avalanche of impressions as he came under the spell of the woman he was with, who had dropped from the snowy sky like a falcon on a field mouse.

Lara van Oosten, forty-one years old, whose life, according to her, seemed to be over. No children, and a boyfriend she had once loved, but whose whereabouts now were unknown. He might be dead, in fact that was quite likely. In any case, he had vanished. The story of her life. She evoked in him a sharp ache of yearning which he had not known since boyhood, when books and poems were opening up a dizzying range of possibilities, when he met the girl who whisked him away from an existence flowing calmly along its steady course. Now, aged fifty-six, he found himself well and truly at sea.