Peter Vansittart - Secret Protocols

We waited for him to find a word to put it. He swallowed, grunted, shook his head, then produced it, nodding as if at applause. ‘Method. That’s it. Method.’ More conversationally, he said, ‘I seem to remember Pompeii. Earth tremors, odd quivers on the sea, priests with their omens. Well, occasionally the wild ass talks sense.’

Latvians. Newcomers. Shadows of watchtowers along the Berlin Wall, on frontiers, above camps. The wild ass mouthing sense. I was watching the Villa more attentively, though Nadja only shrugged, then drove away for two nights on rumour of the latest ‘find’: a broken vase, possibly Ligurian, a blackened coin, an empty podium inscribed ‘Freer of Waters’ in dog-Latin. Returning quietly triumphant, she showed me a stone cut with seven lines radiating from an almost obliterated oval, possibly a fish, root of life, emblem of saviours, ‘Lords of the Net’.

Even after so brief an interval, reunions were always festive, and we hurried for a walk on our favourite path, beneath hills, wooded or terracotta, very straight, ending at a bay, resuming, exactly opposite. With assurance, perhaps accuracy, she had earlier explained that the water between was reserved for ghosts, usually undeviating in their movements.

‘Like sha .’

‘Very like sha . And the quicksilver speed of the hunted.’

Yet, after all, she had not wholly overlooked the wild ass. Yesterday, in the garden, under languid summer sky, we both felt a windlike motion beneath our feet. Then nothing, but, she considered, a nothing stretched to its limit, and we spontaneously raised glasses to Pompeii, before again – at this moment it seemed appropriate – reminding ourselves of that promised venture to swarthy, outlandish la Terre Gaste. With straight faces we promised each other the call of a bird, hitherto unknown, of an unlikely horn, from descendents, worshippers, of cauldrons and cannibal gods. A place barren, yet of unseen Watchers. In peasant lore it had been scorched by a lightning power, which, Nadja continued, Etruscans and Romans called bibental , a warning against touching such soil, lest it take vengeance.

We agreed that it might be public duty to inveigle the Latvians there, then abandon them to dire, nocturnal presences. ‘You should,’ she then admonished me, ‘feel the shame of unkindness,’ displaying none herself.

We discussed our dreams, she more wholeheartedly than me in crediting Freudian analysis. ‘I would dream, Erich, of tall old ladies, slanting forward over a floor always wet. My doll learnt to talk, but I was always dumb. I used…’ – she gauged my interest, was reassured – ‘I used to imagine that sleep was death, during which I wandered at will. Sometimes between stars, huge, rather sickly, like too many biscuits. Or deep beneath the ground. With luck, life might return in the morning, as, I hope, you can see it did. I would leave shoes in certain positions, to discover whether they had moved in the dark. And…’ she gleamed, with astonishment playful or real, ‘sometimes they had!’

My latest dream was stolid though unpleasant. I am lost in a Forest townlet, unknown yet eerily familiar. Black-and-red triangular roofs, steeple pointing to a cloud like a dark beard, crucifix starkly ominous above dense trees, a tracker hound sniffing behind me. ‘Your illusions in pursuit.’ But our smiles were not in unison. Privately, I connected the hound with Latvians.

There was more. On the beach, lying as if in wait, was a damp copy of Combat , containing a denunciation of the gross profits of Wiesbaden, once supplier of gas ovens to the camps. Named amongst its executives was the Herr General. Though for Nadja he was ignoble war criminal, for me he had never entirely lost elder-brother comradeship. I could see him dancing with Mother, reading, shooting, attending reviews, joining in the Reichsmarschall’s toy-soldier games.

The Reichsmarschall, swollen, toga’d, broad face drugged and painted, lion cub at his feet, in the phantasmagoria of medieval-style hunts, huge curled horns and bottle-green verderers. Or, in English plus-fours, talking with Paul Klee and raggle-taggle Munich ‘bohemians’.

Europe had long shivered with interconnections. Combat continued that, before the war the Herr General had been Vice-Chairman of the Riga Commercial Bank, investing heavily in Britain and America, in Baltic and North German steel. With Goering, Hess, Ley, he had helped integrate German heavy industry, operating mainly through I.G. Farben and subsidizing pro-Nazi elements in thirty-seven countries, in parliaments, business, sport, the press, universities. Farben had been prosecuted at Nuremburg for slave labour, but most sentences had been nominal.

Combat added that, after Stalingrad, the Herr General had initiated treasonable correspondence with Eisenhower, Eden and de Gaulle and, as I knew, Bernadotte. Captured near Budapest by the Russians, he had been released, probably ransomed, in 1948. In an unsubstantiated report, he had warned Tito against a staff-officers’ conspiracy. The piece closed with news that his flight to Washington with Prince Louis Ferdinand, the Kaiser’s grandson, had been postponed.

I needed to tell Nadja. She was curt. ‘He appears very like an all-purpose district official I once had to beg from. So clever in giving and receiving, enjoying placing the pauper’s cloak on the millionaire’s back.’ She reflected. ‘Retribution is healthy. Very. But this…’

Could mere greed be sufficient diagnosis of a Hagen de nos jours ? Another comfortable turncoat now staffing Third World charities and covertly supplying landmines to dictators, small arms to African children. Flamboyant skater on thin ice, whom Nadja ranked with Storm Princes quoting Rilke and Goethe, who fondled horses, while underling killers complained of headaches, moments of depression, overwork. He and the Reichsmarschall were night-ogres dodging sunrise that would destroy them.

Alone again, by the wide, murmuring sea, I held dubious communion with the man who had saved me not from sunrise or White Rose martyrdom but from the Eastern Front.

After this, I was certain that Nadja, too, was oppressed by the Latvians, without directly referring to them.

‘I suppose, Erich, that we, too, are suspect. Not needing others. Reading. Yet so much is worth it. Ask children to look at the night sky. They see only a mess, like a dustbin kicked over. Nonsensical names: Pleiades, Uranus, Orion’s Belt.’ Her hands traced constellations. ‘It would not matter, but they replace them with a screen thick with guns and blood. Ask even Dick the day, and he will say Thursday. But ask him about Thor or Saturn, and he will go on the blink. Well…’ she relented, was gay as a hostess. ‘How snobbish I am! I must invite retribution!’

To an imaginary seminar, in little more than a whisper, she said. ‘Does it matter? It does matter. When Brussels replaces language to digital signs, knobs, tubes, and makes watching football compulsory…’ An actress opening a scene, she was emphatic, commanding. ‘Some skeleton of real mind must be defended. Resisting order, regulations, directives.’

Responding, I managed to quote St Augustine, learnt from Wilfrid: ‘From the depths that we do not see comes all we do see.’

‘Yes. My thanks, truly. Augustine can be very wicked, but sometimes unbelievably wise. And even here, Erich, in our pleasure-domes and anchorages, Prometheus refuses submission to Zeus, at the risk of terrible beaks. Until Heracles brings light. Yet he, so brave, can be stupid as Siegfried. Dangerous.’

‘A most disputable analogy. Nevertheless…’

I did not continue; she already knew my direction. Analogy, however disputable, banal, misapplied, is yet Earth at its best, attempting to identify then name the truth.