Richard Gordon - THE INVISIBLE VICTORY

We all accepted this comforting parallel gratefully. Dr Dieffenbach grunted and poured himself some more wine. He turned the talk to safe, professional subjects, recounting at length the last meeting of the Versammlung Deutscher Naturforscher and Arzte-the Congress of German Scientists and Physicians, the oldest of such societies in a country much given to lofty philosophical discussion of Nature's simple mechanics.

That night I went to Gerda's bedroom.

There were three rooms in the attic. One was shared by the pair of maids, the other two up a short stair for Gerda and myself. The wall between us was so thin that we lived in an acoustic intimacy which sometimes kept me hotly awake in the freezing darkness. I could hear the squeak of her cupboard opening, the scrape of coathangers with her heavy serge clothes along the rail-a most exciting sound, creating a vision of her in stockings and underwear, though an inaccurate and flattering one, my knowledge of these garments coming perforce from ladies' dress shop windows. My students today would think me unenterprising at not broaching the intimacy of that inch or two's lath and plaster, but in 1933 the bridal dress took firm precedence over the nightdress. I was anyway terrified at rousing with creaking boards the maids, or more horrifyingly Dr Dieffenbach himself.

That Sunday night I heard her light snap out, her bed creak, I could imagine hearing her breathing and the soft rustle of her limbs It grew towards one o'clock. Impulsively I crept from my door, tremblingly I opened hers.

She was not asleep, because she sat up at once in her black iron bed like a hospital cot, her feather-stuffed coverlet pulled round her chin

She whispered calmly, 'You mustn't.'

I left the door ajar. I sat on the edge of her bed in my brown flannel striped pyjamas from Marks and Spencers. I saw that she wore a white nightgown of some heavy material which covered her from neck to wrist as chastely as a surplice. I whispered back, 'I admired you tonight. The way you stood up for yourself.'

She said nothing for a moment. I noticed how her eyes shone in the faint light from the window above the bed. We were seldom in such proximity even fully dressed. But neither of us touched the other. She still smelt of household soap. 'You shouldn't have come into my room.'

I started shaking, less through emotion than because it was very cold. 'I couldn't go to sleep. I had to tell you.'

She shrugged her narrow shoulders under the white nightgown. I wanted to confess my yearning for her night after night, but I feared she would be affronted, or think me stupid. I had little practical experience of women. 'I shouldn't have contradicted my father.'

'I frequently contradict mine.'

'No, it wasn't right.'

'Of course it was right,' I told her in an urgent whisper. 'The Nazis are nothing but out-of-work clerks and penniless students, with a sprinkling of ruffians and criminals. Anyone can see that. And who is Hitler? Not a man of education and culture, like Papen. He's nothing but a corporal who managed to get himself decorated with the Iron Cross, as he's continually reminding everyone.'

'I should never have questioned my father's views. Especially like that, in front of my mother and Gunter.'

'Why shouldn't you?' I whispered more furiously. 'You're not a child. You're a grown woman who's entitled to her own opinions. Your parents are proud enough of your being a schoolteacher, they can hardly object to your claiming a mind of your own.'

'You don't understand.' She shook her head, her hair appearing pure white in two plaits over her shoulders. 'If I argue with my father, it makes it hard for him to preserve proper discipline, to keep order in the house.'

'To keep order?' It was a mystifying conception. I said, 'Would you like to come to the cinema again?'

'You're always asking. Perhaps next month.'

'Or go dancing?' I suggested daringly.

'I can't dance. Not a step.'

'Neither can I, in fact.'

'Why are you never serious with me?'

'With my prospects in life I can't afford to be serious with women. I can only afford flirtation.'

'You forget that I have my self-respect.'

'You mean your self-distrust?'

She responded to this only, 'Someone might hear us. That would be terrible.'

'Next Sunday I'll take you to the Zoo for tea.'

'I'll see.'

'Promise?' I urged.

'I'll have to ask Mama.'

I made to kiss her, she tipped her cheek, and I dodged on to her mouth.

'Mister Jim, no!' she protested under her breath.

'You are so beautiful, Gerda, just like Marlene Dietrich.'

I saw from the shade of a smile in the darkness that she took the compliment seriously. I stayed where I was. She whispered fiercely, 'You must go.'

I quoted the old Viennese saying, _Ich leibe dich, and du schlдfst'-_I love you and you sleep.

The words made her draw in her breath, as though I had cut her. 'You shouldn't speak of such serious things.'

'Come to England with me one day.'

'Now you're telling fairy tales.'

'I'm not. The War's been over fifteen years. The people of Europe must soon get tired of shouting names at one another across their frontiers. Who outside a madhouse could want another war?'

'One day, perhaps.' She repeated wearily, 'Perhaps.'

I went back to bed. The chaste excursion had so drained me that I fell asleep at once.

Shared intimacy between a man and a woman can be fully recalled by a glance held a second more than necessary. But Gerda never hinted that my intrusion into her bedroom was more than a dream. A month went by. We were walking towards the Schwebebahn on our way to work, at eight in the morning of the last Friday in April. She said abruptly, 'You were quite right about Hitler that night. About him being only a jumped-up corporal. Why, he isn't even German! He's an Austrian peasant from Braunau am Inn, everyone knows that.'

'I thought he was from Vienna?'

'He was only a vagabond there, shouting his mouth off that the Army hadn't lost the war, but been stabbed in the back by the civilians-'

'Which to his mind consisted only of Socialists, Communists and Jews-'

'Exactly. Anyone would have imagined him to have fought the war as a general. He picked up a following in the gutter, and wouldn't be throwing his weight about today if the Munich policemen had shot a little straighter ten years ago.'

She was talking of the famous Beer Hall Putsch of November 9, 1923, by then written with illuminated letters in Nazi mythology. It had been a squalid affair. Hitler had marched with General Ludendorff at the head of his Storm Troopers on the Munich War Ministry. Within half an hour, he had sixteen of his followers dead, Ludendorff arrested and himself cringing on the cobblestones. As a final indignity, the badly wounded Hermann Gцring was succoured in a nearby Jewish bank.

'We've all the natural resources we need to make us rich and powerful again, any of my schoolchildren could tell you that.' We had passed the Zoo, where I had in the end taken her for tea, and were hurrying up the wooden steps to the platform. She was in her discouraging black serge, with black lisle stockings and a big black leather bag. 'But Hitler's a braggart just like the Kaiser, and he'll get us into the same trouble, you mark my words. Teutomania is too expensive a luxury these days.'

'A braggart? I've heard him called a second Martin Luther.'

'Oh, Martin Luther! He was a disastrous failure. He never settled our religious differences and united our country, like your Tudor Kings and Queens. He divided it the more. Don't forget that I am a Catholic, Mister.' _

We reached the platform. 'Anyway, I shall have to support the Nazis,' she continued more soberly. 'I'm a schoolteacher, I'm employed by the State. If I'm thought unreliable politically I shall never see promotion, more likely I'll find myself dismissed. That's how everyone sees the situation at school. Though to tell the truth, most of the teachers needed little encouragement to become the wildest enthusiasts for Herr Hitler. And perhaps he won't turn out as bad as he seems. You've heard one of our German proverbs-Nothing is served as hot as it's cooked?'