blindness.
I watch his face fall into dejection, but I continue.
Rare indeed is the man who might overcome such an affliction, I tell him. But wonders do happen in nature, maybe only once or twice in the Age of Man-to those whom Providence shows especial grace, to truly exceptional men whose destinies she throws open to greatness. Ordinary men she does not see, I tell him, but you are no ordinary man.
He looks taken completely by surprise. As though I have voiced a profound truth about him, a truth known only to himself.
‘Yes.’ His voice is a whisper.
‘What need have you of medicine if you possess this rare essence, the will to rise to the call of Providence and all the power she bestows? To overcome the damage in your eyes, and use this power to see…’
Perspiration breaks out under the hair on his brow.
‘How?’
‘Trust in yourself absolutely. In your will. You alone can achieve this. See the sun in front of your eyes!’
His hands are agitated in his lap. He stands up; I take his elbow and turn him towards the window, where the first rays of the sun are shining through the bare trees.
‘Do it. See the brightness in front of you.’
He is in turmoil.
‘I see nothing,’ he says.
‘Open your mind,’ I say, raising my voice. ‘See everything. Let your will triumph. There is no limit to your will! ’
His breath quickens, and now I see that he might do it. So I shout at the top of my voice, ‘ Now, see it now! ’
The tension on his face is tremendous. Then his eyes flare like an animal’s exposed to bright light. The room is filling with light.
‘Yes… I see it,’ he says, his voice tight. ‘I see it.’ He turns quickly. He is seeing the desk, the books, the room.
I breathe with relief. He has done it! I have done it.
Laughing, I throw my hands in the air. I want to shake his hand and say well done.
But he is not smiling. He seems stunned, shaken to the core. His face has turned a dead white.
The large eyes focus on me now for the first time, as if I am a creature in an aquarium. They have a most unsettling effect. I wait for him to speak but he says nothing.
‘You have your sight,’ I say. ‘You’ll be an architect.’
My words seem to travel across a great chasm to reach him. ‘An architect,’ he whispers. ‘You think after this total… unpardonable betrayal, I would be an architect?’
I know he is speaking of the war. Standing in the light he begins to tremble all over, as if from extreme cold, and his breath comes in short gasps; then he covers his face with his hands and lets out a low cry, as though he is being reborn into the world.
Too surprised to speak, I wait until he is more composed.
Go back to the ward, I say.
Without thanking me, or uttering another word, he pulls open the door and leaves.
In those few moments I was more frightened of him than of my own father.
Chapter Thirty-nine
It all began when I met Captain Kurt Rogel,’ Friedl said.
He was on the sofa in the sitting room, across from a fire Denham had made from the last of the winter’s wood. After getting over the shock of finding Friedl and Nat at his door, after a dinner over which the young men had recounted the tale of their escape-on a Danish herring trawler from Warnemunde on the Baltic coast-Denham stood at the mantelpiece listening, with Eleanor next to him in the armchair. Nat had gone to bed.
‘He picked me on the Ku’damm, must have been June ’32. Invited me to Horchers, the best restaurant in Berlin. Got to know me over a bottle of Pfalzer. Military bearing, Prussian blue eyes, French manners. Forty-five years old and with a permanently amused expression. From an old family in Pomerania. Soon I was more or less living at his house in Zehlendorf. Much later, he told me about the network…’
Friedl turned his glass of whisky, watching the fire’s light through the crystal.
‘Kurt was a career army officer. Had been since the war. He’d paid little regard to Hitler throughout the ’20s. I mean, there was something just absurd about him, so odd after all, and his support came and went. But by the winter of 1930 the Depression was biting deep, and Kurt and his colleagues, officer friends, became seriously alarmed by the little corporal. Every time this man spoke the crowd was tens of thousands larger.
‘Who was he? The question no one seemed able to answer. Which is why Kurt and the officers began looking into the man’s past. The records of his war service, the missing years in Vienna, all that. Of course, they suspected something, and I can’t say I was surprised. Ask a warm boy in Berlin back then and chances were he’d say the Bohemian Herr Hitler wasn’t as cold as you’d think. The investigations turned up what you’ve now seen, and that’s only what they could find. More went missing or was destroyed. They tracked down Engelhardt of the List Regiment, found some of the Munich boys who gave those police statements…’
‘And Hans Mend?’ Denham said.
‘Him, too, the Arschloch. The idea was to show the dossier to President Hindenburg and so keep Hitler firmly out of power. But then in January ’33 a deal was done behind closed doors, and this great deceiver was handed the chancellorship of Germany before Kurt and his friends could act. That dossier suddenly became a very dangerous thing to possess. Kurt needed someone with contacts abroad whose sympathy was beyond any doubt.’
‘Jakob,’ said Eleanor
Friedl nodded. ‘Jakob Liebermann was invited to join what was becoming a small, highly placed resistance group. He used his banking network to spirit the dossier to safety.’
Friedl took a cigarette from a silver case that sparked in the light. Denham had seen it before. Those engraved initials KR, which had made him so suspicious when they’d first met at the Hotel Kurgarten.
‘But by the end of ’33 the group was biding its time. The dossier was left in its hiding place because they were convinced Hitler would soon overreach himself, take a step too far, at which point the army’s support for him would crumble. Or that was the hope.
‘But instead the monster’s power increased tenfold. It was as if the country was under a spell, as if it still is… We decided to use the dossier. The question was how.
‘The idea of us blackmailing the Fuhrer was crazy-we’d have been murdered in our beds before we knew what had hit us, along with anyone who’d ever met us. But a foreign government could do it, blackmail him. The British, for example…’
Friedl dropped his head back on the sofa.
‘For my safety I was not told everything. I was to meet a British reporter who would identify himself with an agreed password at the first meeting. The date for the meeting was the first of August, the day the Games opened in Berlin. With so many foreigners there it would seem less suspicious.
‘A week before the meeting, while I was in Friedrichshafen, something went badly wrong.’ Friedl sighed, looking tired, and stubbed out his cigarette. ‘One of the officers in the network was betrayed and arrested. Under interrogation he revealed the names of two or three others-and the dossier’s existence. On that day I believe Hitler himself learned of the dossier for the first time. Kurt got an urgent message to me…’
Friedl stopped. Fighting down the lump in his throat had the effect of making his eyes fill up.
‘… warning me not to go to the house. Then they got him, too. What happened to him after that, I never found out.’
The cat leapt in a silent arc onto the sofa, looking for company. Friedl lifted it onto his lap, and ran his fingers through the tabby fur for a while. The purring seemed to calm him down.
‘Who knew the dossier was hidden in London?’ Richard said.
