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Page 12


  This was code for a brutal intervention, Panzer tanks on the border, violence in the streets, and afterwards a taste of the surprises Hitler had already unleashed on the ridiculous Schuschnigg in Vienna. At the mention of the Austrian Chancellor, parts of the crowd erupted and for the first time, watching other faces around him, Tam sensed that what probably lay in store for Karlovy Vary and the surrounding towns and villages wasn’t entirely welcome. These people still belonged to the last surviving democracy in Central Europe and no matter what the Sudeten National Socialist Party might think, ownership of a vote that truly meant something, that might decide the way you wanted to live, was still precious.

  Tam felt a tug on his arm. It was Renata. Time to go. Tam carved a path through the crowd as Henlein was reaching the end of his speech. A gaggle of toughs guarded the street that Renata wanted to take. These men, all armed with cudgels, weren’t young. One of them looked Tam in the eye. He tried Czech first, then German.

  ‘Where are you going, comrade?’

  The word ‘comrade’ was the clue. The man spat it out. Only Reds left an occasion like this early.

  ‘Die Glienicker.’ It was Renata. ‘There’s a meeting we have to attend.’

  ‘Where’s Die Glienicker…?’ The man was still looking at Tam.

  ‘I’m afraid I’ve no idea.’

  ‘Where are you from?’

  ‘England.’

  ‘So why are you here?’

  ‘I’m not sure that’s any business of yours.’

  ‘Wrong, my friend. You have a passport?’

  ‘Not on me.’

  ‘Every visitor has a passport.’

  His eyes flicked left. Two of his colleagues stepped forward, grabbing Tam by each arm, and forcing him against a shop front. Tam resisted the urge to fight back. Given the odds, this was neither the time nor the place to bring his visit to an early end, and so he allowed himself to go limp. The glass on the shop front was cold against his face. There were summer flowers inside, bright explosions of yellows and reds. Unseen hands were all over his body, patting him down, searching through his pockets, and he was thankful that he’d stowed his passport in the bag he’d left at the house. He could hear Renata behind him, arguing with the men in Czech. He didn’t understand a word. Then, abruptly, he was free again.

  The man who’d done all the talking was very close. Tam could smell alcohol on his breath.

  ‘Be careful, comrade. And say thank you to the lady.’

  *

  They finally made it into the street, heads down, hurrying away from the roar of the crowd as Henlein reached the end of his speech. There was comfort in the cobblestones underfoot and the knowledge that they seemed to have escaped intact.

  ‘Not quite.’ Renata pulled him into the shelter of a bar on the corner of a side street. ‘I had to show them my ID. They took the details.’

  ‘That’s all they wanted?’

  ‘Of course not. They wanted to know about you. I told them you were English. When they asked what you were doing in Karlovy Vary I said you were gathering material.’

  ‘For what?’

  ‘A book.’

  ‘And they believed you?’

  ‘Of course they didn’t. It was the best I could do.’ There was a hint of reproach in the wanness of her smile. ‘You might want to think of a book you’d like to write. Because they’ll probably be back.’

  Tam shrugged and ordered two brandies. Just now he could conjure nothing from his imagination except the certainty that the next few days and maybe weeks were going to be tougher than he’d anticipated. Enemy territory was a dramatic phrase but he could think of nothing more apt.

  ‘Does any of this nonsense surprise you?’ Tam nodded towards the open door. The street outside was beginning to fill with people, mainly men, a blur of swastika armbands in the gathering darkness.

  ‘I grew up in Prague,’ Renata said. ‘Prague is different. These are country people. They happen to speak German, but don’t be fooled. They’d like a nice little corner of Czechoslovakia for their own, but that doesn’t open their doors for the likes of Hitler. If we stick together, if we keep the Germans out, there might be a future for us all. Otherwise,’ she shrugged, reaching for her glass, ‘the whole country will be speaking German. Prosit.’

  Tam returned the toast. He knew it was the least he owed this woman. He’d listened to her voice when she was talking to the bully boys back at the rally. Not a single tremor. Not the least sign of nervousness. Deeply impressive.

  ‘Tell me about Edvard. You’ve known him long?’

  ‘Yes. He was a friend of Karyl’s. He came from a village on the other side of the mountain from Jáchymov. His dad was a farmer. Two bad harvests in a row and he had to look for a job. In the end he found work on the railway. That’s how he met Karyl.’

  ‘And now?’

  ‘Now he does something else.’

  ‘Like what?’

  Renata shook her head. ‘Some other time.’ She nodded at Tam’s glass. ‘Drink up.’

  They made their way back to the house they’d visited earlier. This time it was Edvard himself who opened the door. Tam could smell onion soup and glimpsed a kitchen beyond the curtain at the end of the tiny tiled hall. A woman stood at the stove, stirring a huge saucepan of soup with a wooden spoon. Her name was Haninka and when she turned round, wiping her hands on her apron, she had a face that belonged to a different century, roughened by a life of hard physical work. When Edvard said something in Czech, nodding at Tam, she threw her head back and cackled with laughter. Three surviving teeth and eyes a milky blue.

  ‘She’s Edvard’s mother,’ Renata murmured. ‘His father’s dead.’

  ‘And Edvard lives here?’

  ‘Sometimes, yes.’

  Haninka spooned the soup into the waiting bowls. The taste of the soup and the warmth of the bread that came with it took Tam back to The Glebe House: the same shadowed spaces, the same burble of conversation. Renata and Edvard were talking in Czech, with occasional glances in Tam’s direction. There was a complicity between them that went further than mere friendship. No wonder Renata had been so eager to come home.

  ‘So you met our Nazi brothers.’ Edvard’s smile had settled on Tam.

  ‘I did.’

  ‘Then you have my sympathies. Henlein leads these people by the nose. He’s selling them goods unseen. Who in their right mind agrees a bargain like that?’

  It was a country phrase and it brought another cackle of laughter from his mother. She forced more soup on Tam and scolded Renata for not feeding him up. Her thickly accented German, to Tam, was close to incomprehensible but every time she looked at Renata the seamed old face lit up.

  Edvard had produced a bottle of wine. Three glasses and a teacup appeared on the rough wooden table. This time there was no toast, just an exchange of nods. Tam’s glass was the biggest. He took a sip, then another. It was undrinkable.

  Haninka was bent over the stove. From the oven came a dish of potatoes crusted with cheese. She put it in front of Tam. Renata told him to eat.

  Tam did her bidding, helping himself. Suddenly there was a bowl at his elbow and he watched the old woman’s rough fingers dust the steaming cheese with paprika. After the wine, the fiery potatoes came as a relief. He was thinking about a second helping when Edvard stiffened at the table. Moments later he was at the front door. Tam heard a low mumble of conversation, then Edvard was back in the room with a guest.

  The newcomer was small, robustly built, with a shock of curly black hair and a sallow, indoor face. His black suit was giving out at the elbows and the heel of one of his boots flap-flapped on the flagstones as he approached the table. His eyes were huge, moving slowly from face to face. He was carrying a stained hessian bag which he gave to Edvard. Tam judged his age at thirty, maybe a year or two older.

  ‘My name is Spielmann,’ he announced. ‘We will speak in German.’

  Without waiting for an invitation, he made himself comfortabl
e at the table and seized the bottle of wine. Fat, stubby fingers. Bitten nails. In the absence of an extra glass, Tam pushed his own across. Already, he sensed that this man’s sudden arrival was far from unexpected. His gaze settled on Tam.

  ‘Your name, sir?’ His fleshy lips were moist from the wine.

  ‘Tam.’

  ‘Mr Tam…’ He nodded, enjoying the feel of the word in his mouth. ‘I come from Dresden. You know Dresden? Perhaps not. A beautiful city.’

  As it happened, Tam had been there twice, once for more than a week. He began to enthuse about the city – the walks beside the Elbe and the view of the Frauenkirche from the Neumarkt – but Spielmann wasn’t interested. A second bottle of wine was making the rounds. He intercepted it before it got to Renata. Already he’d dismissed the offer of food and Tam began to wonder how much else he’d had to drink.

  ‘You know what I like to do in Dresden? More than anything? I like to fish. And you know why I like to fish? Because of this book.’ He muttered something to Edvard, who fetched the hessian bag. From the bag he produced a book which he pushed across the table. The book, in English, must have been fifty years old. The spine was broken and many of the pages were loose. Leafing carefully through, Tam found himself looking at sepia photos of fishing ports on the east coast, mainly Grimsby and Hull. The harbours were thick with drifters, tiny workboats relying on sail, and at the back of the book he found a section devoted to Fraserburgh, a harbour he knew well, up on the coast beyond Aberdeen. Spielmann’s eyes never left his face.

  ‘The women,’ he said. ‘Look at the women.’

  Tam turned a page. The photographer had abandoned the busy clutter of the granite quay for the nearby sheds where dozens of women filleted the catch. To the rear of the benches where the women worked was a big area where the fish were auctioned every morning. The sheds had been enlarged after the Great War and Tam had been here himself on countless occasions, buying cod and herring for The Glebe House.

  ‘You speak English?’ Tam looked up.

  ‘Nein. No English. But I have this.’ His hand plunged back into the bag. This time Tam was looking at a flensing knife, the wooden handle worn with use. Spielmann began to slash at the space between them, filleting some imaginary fish, telling Tam how he’d spent long days on the Elbe above Dresden, catching shad and carp and even once a salmon and how he’d taught himself to use the knife the way the ladies in Britain did, so much flesh, so few bones, and so quick.

  ‘So, Mr Tam, you find me a job, ja?’ He nodded at the book. ‘With the ladies, ja?’

  ‘You mean in England?’

  ‘Ja. You know what I am? Apart from a fishing person? I’m a Jew, Mr Tam. Here, take a look – ’

  The bag again, and a yellow star, hand-sewn, tossed down on the table like the Joker in some imaginary card game.

  ‘You know who makes the star for me? My mother. She hates the ones they give you. Factory stars. Stars probably made by Jews. That’s the kind of game they play. The Jews make the stars, thousands of them, millions of them, one star for every Jew. But me? I have a special star. From my mother.’

  Spielmann was beginning to lose control. He was sweating heavily and his hands were shaking and Tam wondered how many times he’d been through this routine. There was a madness about the man, barely disguised, and when at last he fell silent it was only to wipe the spittle from his lips.

  ‘Life was tough in Dresden? For Jews?’

  ‘Impossible. Life is impossible. Where you can go. Where you can shop. Which part of the tram is yours. Who you can talk to. And what happens when they find you without your precious badge.’ One pudgy hand closed over the star. ‘There’s nothing left for Jews, Mr Tam. Where I come from it’s standing room only. And you know the worst of it? People don’t care. Everyone else, they look the other way. Why? Because they’re frightened. Frightened and maybe ashamed.’ There was an edge of accusation in his voice. ‘So what do you do, Mr Tam? If you’re Jewish and you catch fish and find a book like this, and a knife like this, and you think that maybe one day you can find yourself in a place like that?’ He nodded at the open book. ‘My mother tries, Mr Tam. She tries very hard. She knows an old man in Dresden who speaks English. I ask him to write me a letter. I send the letter to the person who wrote that book. I tell him about my knife and my fish and about everything I’ve learned. And you know what happens? Nothing. No reply. No job. Nothing.’

  ‘The book is very old,’ Tam said gently. ‘The author will be dead.’

  Spielmann swept the fact aside. He didn’t want any kind of debate. What he wanted was a new life where strangers wouldn’t spit at him on the street and where his mother wouldn’t live in fear of an early morning knock on the door.

  ‘You know where I went after Dresden? When it got so bad? I went to Vienna. Imagine. Vienna. It was Christmas. There were funfairs. I make some friends. No one likes the Jews but there are Austrians who keep their feelings to themselves and so I start to think that things aren’t so bad after all. I take my knife to a shop in the market that sells fish. I even find myself a job in the back of the market where no one can see how Jewish I am. That was good. That was better than good. Just me and the knife and the fish, and the fish don’t care about Jews and neither does the knife. But then last month the Germans come again, and there are old women, Jewish women, Jewish professors even, on their knees on the pavement scrubbing and scrubbing, and I look at what’s happening and I realise it’s even worse than Dresden. You happen to be Austrian, you get a rifle and a uniform. Me? I get a yellow star and a brush for the pavement. And so one night I start walking again, walking and walking, always at night, always east, the wandering Jew, and one of those nights I cross the border high in the mountains and I find somewhere to live and even a little work again but everyone says the Germans are coming, the Germans are following me, and so here I am, meeting the Englishman, meeting Mr Tam, telling him my story, knowing that everything’s going to be fine.’

  He reached for his glass, visibly exhausted. Then his eyes settled on Edvard and he forced a crooked smile before nodding towards the door.

  ‘You want me to go now? Have you heard enough?’

  9

  DAHLEM, BERLIN, 12 MAY 1938

  Joachim von Ribbentrop lived in an impressive three-storey villa, lapped by an enormous lawn, in the wealthy Berlin suburb of Dahlem. It was a house that spoke of power as well as money, with room for tennis courts and a swimming pool, but what struck Dieter most of all was a collection of kids’ bicycles propped beneath a huge willow tree. This was a family property, proof that even at the very top of the Reich there still existed an appetite for the messiness of real life.

  The invitation to Dahlem had come from Ribbentrop’s wife, Annelies. On the prompting of her husband, she’d evidently phoned the Japanese Embassy and spoken briefly to the ambassador. Adolf, their fourth child, was having a party. Still very young, he was already fascinated by the faraway countries his papa described on his return from yet another diplomatic mission. The presence of Keiko would be the perfect surprise and if her consort, the young flier who’d done so well in Japan, cared to attend as well then so much the better. Dress would be casual. Presents should be modest. Guests would be away by late afternoon.

  The question of dress had preoccupied Keiko for several days. Dieter knew by now that she’d turned her back on the formalities of Japanese public life but, given the spirit of the invitation, she’d decided to wear a full-length kimono in smoky vermilion that she’d borrowed from the young cultural attaché at the embassy. The kimono was complemented by a delicate kanzash, black and gold, pinned to fall free from the hair she’d so carefully piled around her head, and she also carried a fan in bright spring colours with a shadowy bird motif that only appeared once the fan was fully spread. She wanted this hint of magic to work with children, especially the younger ones. At four years old, Adolf might be the perfect audience.

  A car from the Foreign Ministry had called at the apartme
nt off Friedrichstrasse to pick them up. Now, Dieter stood aside as the driver helped Keiko from the big Mercedes. For the third day running Berlin was enjoying cloudless skies and Dieter could hear children’s laughter drifting from the open windows on the ground floor. A woman rounded the corner of the house. She was middle-aged, thin-lipped, watchful, with a face untroubled by the sun. The sight of the kimono, to Dieter’s amusement, sparked a smile.

  ‘Perfect,’ she said. ‘Joachim promised me something special. Young Adolf will be so excited. I’m Annalies, Joachim’s wife.’

  She extended a hand in greeting and then led them into the house. To Dieter’s surprise, Keiko seemed born to this new role. She took tiny steps, a fixed smile on her face, her long body perfectly erect. Moments before they mounted the steps, Dieter softly called her name and when she glanced back he mimed applause.

  ‘Wunderbar,’ he murmured.

  She acknowledged the compliment with the faintest nod of her head and then opened the fan to hide her blushes. Another geisha trick, Dieter thought. Perfectly executed.

  Once through the ornate front door, the big hall smelled of furniture polish and fresh flowers. Art hung on the walls, the pictures slightly too big, the frames slightly too heavy. There was a clutter of antique furniture and a huge bust of Hitler in polished black granite. This was a house, Dieter thought, designed to make a statement about its owners. According to Georg, the regime had been kind to the Ribbentrops and here was the proof.

  The birthday boy appeared, open-mouthed at the sight of Keiko. He was small for his age, blond and a little shy. He tried to stifle a fit of the giggles and at first he hid his face as Keiko bent to shake his hand.

  ‘This is Herr Merz,’ she said. ‘Herr Merz flies aeroplanes.’

  The mention of aeroplanes widened his eyes. A little girl had appeared, evidently Adolf’s sister. She had none of her brother’s shyness and she seized Keiko’s hand and pulled her towards an open door beyond the stairs.