Javier Marias - Your Face Tomorrow 3 - Poison, Shadow and Farewell

Wheeler stopped speaking and eagerly drank some water, finishing the whole glass in one gulp or, rather, in several slow prolonged gulps, the way children drink when they're very thirsty, but, who, unable to cope with too much liquid at once, have to pause now and then to recover their breath, although without for a moment removing their lips from the cup, as if they feared that someone might snatch the glass from them. Then he summoned Mrs. Berry, asked her to bring him more water and a few olives as an accompaniment to my beer. 'That's how you still drink in Spain, isn't it, with something to nibble on so that the alcohol doesn't go to your head,' he said. 'I've got some Spanish ones, crushed olives with lemon, from Andalusia, I believe. They're very good. I understand you can buy them in Taylor's, almost opposite where you used to live.' I remembered that delicatessen well. It was a fairly expensive shop, but during my Oxford years, I had largely subsisted on its many frivolous products (I've never been much of a cook). I told Mrs. Berry not to go to any trouble on my behalf, there was no need, but Wheeler had asked her for them and she wanted to please him. When she had left the room and I had my olives before me-although she never really left the room entirely, she continued to come and go, always silent and busy-I asked Wheeler:

'And is that what your wife became used to, Peter? To what you called "those vile deeds"? At the time, I suppose, they weren't seen like that. And it might be that they are vile deeds now, but that they weren't then. Just part of the struggle.' I paused, slightly perplexed because I wasn't sure that I myself quite understood what I had just said, which is why I added: 'If, that is, it's possible for something to be fine when you do it, or at least justifiable, but not when you've done it, since the two things are one and the same. I mean, I don't know if it's possible for the same thing to be different when it's present and when it's past, when it's an ongoing action and when it's just a memory. Oh, ignore me.'

Wheeler looked at me as if he really had become lost in my confused thoughts, and didn't answer me at once; indeed, he seemed to be taking me at my word and ignoring me.

'In one of his volumes of autobiography,' he said, 'I can't recall whether it was Trail Sinister or Black Boomerang (I read them when they were published in the sixties, partly to see if Valerie was mentioned or alluded to at any point; she wasn't, nor was the affair in which she played the largest part, the leading role), Sefton Delmer described traveling to Germany towards the end of March 1945 and seeing the spectacle with his own eyes, the same spectacle he had seen before in Spain during the final days of your War (he had been there too, as a correspondent) as well as in Poland and in France: people aimlessly fleeing, trudging through a series of ruined landscapes, dragging with them all that remained of their possessions or that they had been able to pile into their broken-down vehicles, or walking along roads and across fields with very young children on their backs, their eyes empty or terrified, sometimes with dead children whom they couldn't bring themselves to bury at the roadside or whom they didn't dare to abandon, but continued pointlessly to carry as if they were effigies… And Sefton Delmer said that he didn't stop to ask anyone if, by any chance, what had first impelled them to set off along the roads and begin their aimless wanderings had been the messages broadcast on Radio Cologne or Radio Frankfurt, whose frequencies he had taken over. I remember that he wrote: "I didn't want to know. I feared the answer might be 'yes.'" So he did know. But he had done those things and would have done them again, just as almost everyone else was driven to do such things, just as almost everyone else does in time of war. During a war, very few ideas, even the most unlikely, fail to be put into practice. Almost anything that occurs to anyone as a way of harming the enemy finds an outlet, although it might not be publicly acknowledged afterwards. The trick we played with those radio broadcasts was so effective and had such grave consequences that the Nazi authorities were obliged to abandon the airwaves altogether as a way of issuing orders or instructions to the population. They had to fall back on the Drahtfunk, a wired diffusion network on which we could not intrude but which was much more problematic and restricted in scope. Yes, Delmer and his black game made a huge contribution. I don't know if he won the War for us, but he certainly contributed to our winning it more quickly.'

Wheeler really did seem weary now. At any moment, he might abandon his story, leave the rest for another day, fall silent or perhaps bring it to a definitive end. He might even regret having started, something I didn't want to risk, because I might never again find him in the same talkative mood, given that he normally kept himself to himself. 'Who knows, I might never find him again in any kind of mood,' I thought, 'if I'm going to leave here soon and go back to Spain. It's quite likely that I'll never see him again.' And so I decided to insist and even hurry him along.

'So what happened to Valerie?' I didn't mind pronouncing her name now. 'What was this affair in which she played the largest part? The leading role you said.'

Wheeler leaned forward slightly, rested both hands on the handle of his walking stick, which he had positioned upright between his legs, with his chin resting on his two hands, and I had the feeling that this was a way of gathering momentum or of preparing himself to make a major effort. His eyes shone and his voice sounded stronger, for it had grown weaker as he talked. It occurred to me that he might never have told, or only a long time ago and to very few people, what he was probably about to tell me. For I was still not certain that he would.

'Well,' he said, 'I'm not sure how familiar you are with the Nazi racial laws.'

'Not very,' I answered at once; I didn't want there to be any more pauses. 'Like everyone else, I have a vague general idea.'

'They were very precise, almost complex and, more than that, from 1933 onwards, they kept changing. Their application also varied depending on the people and organizations who interpreted them. The Ministry of the Interior was less strict in applying them than Dr. Adolf Wagner, the Nazi Party's chief authority on the subject, and he, in turn, was less rigorous than, for example, the SS. However, the relevant point here is this: you were considered to be a Jew if at least three of your grandparents were Jewish, regardless of any other factors; a person with two Jewish grandparents and who either belonged to the Jewish religion or was married to a Jew at the time the Race Laws came into effect was also legally Jewish (and, apart from a few very rare exceptions, "half-Jews" ended up being treated as Jews); then there were Mischlinge of the first degree, crossbreeds, who had two Jewish grandparents, but who neither professed the Jewish religion nor had a Jewish spouse; lastly, there were Mischlinge of the second degree who had only one "contaminating" Jewish grandparent and three grandparents who were "gentiles," that is, "Aryans" or what the Nazis termed "Germans." The difference was crucial, because, generally speaking, Mischlinge of the second degree were left in peace, and some were even able to obtain a German Blood Certificate, once the application had been studied by Hitler himself, who apparently judged the matter to be of sufficient importance to merit his spending time poring over each and every file and deciding whether or not the applicant should be "reclassified," as several thousand were. He did so at his own pace, of course, and I imagine that, unlike the applicants, he was in no particular hurry to make those judgements: some were "Jews" asking to be promoted to first-degree Mischlinge, or first-degree Mischlinge wanting to be recategorized as second-degree Mischlinge, with those in the second degree aspiring to "Aryani-sation" and the Certificate. Not a few committed suicide when they were relegated to "Jewry." People deemed to be doubtful cases were so panic-stricken that they often attempted, sometimes successfully, to forge, substitute, conceal or destroy their grandparents' birth certificates, especially between 1933 and 1939, after which this became virtually impossible. Many officials in town halls and registry offices, or wherever the documents were kept, removed compromising documents in exchange for outrageous sums of money or even property, sometimes even making use of convenient fires that broke out in certain parts of their archives or of plagues of highly selective mice. Or, if the forgery brought to them was perfect, written on old paper and everything, they would agree to do a swap and convert a Jewish grandfather or grandmother into a Catholic or a Protestant, with a change of surname included. This was a frequent occurrence in smaller towns and cities, where it was much easier. Of course, these officials almost never actually destroyed the document that had been replaced or removed, unless the payer demanded that it be handed over so that he or she could take personal charge of its disappearance. This wasn't usually the case, Jews not being in a position to lay down many conditions, and so the official would then keep the document just in case things changed in the future. The evidence, then, only vanished temporarily. Pour me a glass of sherry, will you,' added Wheeler, as if telling me all this had cheered him up. Talking about history often does have a cheering effect on the old.