Peter Vansittart - Secret Protocols

New Europe was rising around us as if baying the moon, but we concerned ourselves with it no more than we did black holes beyond the serene blue. The coast vibrated with financial acrobats, oil sharks, pop screamers, but Nadja was intent only on puzzling the contradictions within Theseus, Jesus, Alexander, the crowded ramifications of myth, history, hearsay, her dark brows relaxing at a solution, contracting on discovering its fallacy.

The outside could not be wholly evaded. Kennedys murdered, National Guardsmen shooting anti-war Ohio students, Chancellor Brandt’s fall, when his secretary was exposed as a Stasi spy, the British Cabinet escaping Irish bombs, Mountbatten less fortunate. Russian scientists dosed monkeys with leukaemia to save mankind, Professor Leary had issued a diktat , that killing police was a sacred act. What, we idly wondered, was he professor of ? Blood dried on the anti-Fascist rampart, the Berlin Wall.

Our day was simple as an egg. For me, names that convulsed the world – My Lai, Ayatollah, moon landing, Khmer Rouge – meant less than Malraux’s cleaning of Paris, were remote as Thebes, Carthage, the Planetary Influences Needful for Sexual Compatibility, Black Power or the Inflammable Ray.

Nadja, more easily moved, had wept at the election of a Polish Pope, then, shrugging, demanded a bucket to water her plants.

With all human knowledge apparently available by touch of an electronic button, and human understanding virtually unaffected, we saw ourselves as snugly harmonious, with vast, unskilled populations being steered by multinational quangos towards Pleasure Island. Workers paid not to work, symphony orchestras not to perform, publishers not to publish; armies hired as movie extras, bishops rebuked for Faith, treason boasted, stupendous roads built on unprecedented taxes for forbidden vehicles. A new imagination was seeping into the West disburdened of literature, history, the supernatural and with the unconscious controlled by drugs.

We preferred small stories to accounts of sensational coups and deranged singers. Stories of the West German professor forbidden to leave campus without students’ permission; our builder, M. Malraut, always completing his labours with some petty theft, like a Monet signing his masterpiece or, Nadja amended, a wolf urinating on a tree.

Becalmed in domesticity, the Danish hygge , we trailed long pasts, older than Pact, war, invasion. Suffused with the primitive and lost, one May we stood naked to watch the ‘sun dance’ at dawn. Yet the past had to be treated carefully, like a pistol finely chased but loaded. My forebears, die Erste Gessellschaft , had once slaughtered Nadja’s. Livonian Knights, Teutonic Knights, Knights of the Sword. I seldom risked mention of the Herr General. ‘Such gentlemen damage. They are the hard edge.’ She was glad to imagine him whimpering after capture, bereft of pride, almost eyeless.

She enjoyed me reading aloud Estonian poems salvaged from the Miscellany , notably Ivar Ivorsk’s ‘Twilight’:

She herself was twilight, concealing more than she revealed, so that I told her that she was set in a Pasternak verse:

That surrounding towns supported more astrologers than priests was, she thought, to be expected. Despite the books and orchestras to be superannuated, technology had not yet eliminated mind, wayward, unpredictable, dogged by primitive hopes and terrors of interlocking worlds, the heavens and hells of dazzling bodies and monstrous shapes. She spent several hours studying an interview with the clairvoyant favoured by Marlene Dietrich, and Nancy Reagan, spouse of once the most powerful man on the planet.

She divulged little direct of her past; when she did, it was usually on impulse, not obviously related to our discussion.

Her eyes darkened with meaning far beneath her words. ‘I listened to Chopin nocturnes and would see a woman, beautiful, always alone, at her piano. In night. Sometimes a young man walks through the park, knocks but is never admitted. He bows, smiles pleasantly, the music following him. Ah then! Schoolgirl sentimentality… not that I was ever at school.’

Her accents were still often misplaced, could appear jokey, however serious the discussion, so that, at some unhappy disclosure, a puzzled stranger might politely laugh.

Far back, in Stockholm, I had confessed regret, even guilt, at refusal to volunteer for Aktion Suchnezeichen , German youngsters, godchildren of the White Rose, helping to rebuild cities blasted by Reichsmarschall Goering, Grand Huntsman of the Reich. But then realized that acknowledgement of any German or Russian goodness was forbidden. Her nature, brave and searching, was also unforgiving, seared by the Pact.

My descent from Count Pahlen did not much interest her, but of my childhood her questions were incessant, particularly of the legends and tales bred from the forests, flat landscapes, indeterminate colours. From kitchen talk, tavern memories. Always remember, Levi had said. I could tell her of peasant awe of the number 77, of children baptized Nothing at All, Long Dead, Crippled, to fool the census and evade Tsarist conscription. Stories returned: ‘The Silly Men and Their Cunning Wives’, ‘The Troll’s Mother-in-Law’, ‘The Bear Says No’. Herself a mythologist, she listened for the stories behind the stories; rites, fears, needs. Gods, she reflected, made the sky more supple.

‘What else?’ she demanded, dark eyes filling with light. ‘More.’

On Christmas Eve, Night of the Mothers, Father had shown me farmers rubbing salt into ploughs to assure harvest. Scribbling rapidly, she annotated Baltic tales of the World Tree rising in seven sections from a Cosmic Egg, periodically collapsing under sun, moon, stars; of the Underworld, where, by music, shamans controlled the dead; of the Finnish God, from a golden pillar above the sea, observing his reflection, commanding it to rise from the waves, it becoming the Devil.

I imaged Claire and Sinclair born of a psychedelic Cosmic Egg, but she frowned. ‘They feasted on flowers gone rotten.’ Several times she said she could love the girl who ran.

I drowsed through sun-locked afternoons, soothed by light curled by an arch, softened by roses, trimmed by stone and hedge, while indoors Nadja sought parallels and conclusions from antique myth. The glass door fronting her desk would tempt her to pause, contemplate a bird, bronze light aglow with message. Nothing was inanimate, the unexpected was always about to happen. Her real life, she thought, began with weeping when her mother called her favourite doll ‘It’.

With fresh light filling leaf, petal, grass, she might sigh, surrender, step out, followed by her cat, a shimmering Persian, with manners as decided as her own and, towards me, decidedly offensive. She treated it with respect but without gush, offending Daisy Haylock by remarking that the cats’ nine lives were sustained by English ladies’ conviction that animals understood speech.

Watching her approach, over the lawn, halting beneath a fringe of wisteria, I recollected young Parisians, strolling hand in hand, glad, heimlich , in each other. People, Nadja said, will never be perfect, but sometimes they behave perfectly.

‘Erich… Polybius thought Rome’s greatness was founded on superstition, deliberately introduced into public and private life.’

She always spoke, very rapidly, in French or English, though knowing German and Russian. Delighted, she spoke more of Polybius. For both of us, each day was possibility. Jules might dig up a coin – Galba, Domitian – a golden bowl be found in the grass. We were untroubled by Rilke’s injunction that lingering, even with intimate things, is not permitted.