Your Face Tomorrow 3: Poison, Shadow and Farewell

when a group of tourists is kidnapped, in an earthquake, an explosion, a terrorist attack, in a fire, it doesn't matter: even if it's our colleague, brother, father or even our child, however young. Or even the person we most love, yes, even them, anyone but us.'

'I wasn't there when she received and read it, but she showed it to me afterwards, or, rather, translated it for me: although Maria spoke English, Val's German was better, and that was the language in which they wrote to each other. It was a long letter, but not that long, I mean not enough for Maria to be able to explain all that had happened to her during the War years; she summarized the most important facts. She, too, had married and her name was now Hafenrichter; however, her husband had died at the Russian front, leaving her a widow. She was managing to scrape a living in the international zone of Vienna (as you know, Vienna, like Berlin, was divided into four occupation zones: American, British, Russian and French, and the center was international, that is, it was controlled and patrolled by the four powers simultaneously). She spoke about her current hardships, the same dire situation as in German towns and cities, although Vienna had suffered less devastation, and she asked for help, although without specifying what form that help might take, money, medicine, clothes, provisions… Her parents, Mr. and Mrs. Mauthner, had died, as had one of the four sisters, the third, and it was presumed that the oldest, Ilse, was also dead, for she had vanished along with her two small daughters. The only surviving Rendl was the boy, whom she had taken in and whom she now wished to send to England, and she was asking Valerie's help in that regard too, if possible: the child had had a terrible time, and in Austria he faced a bleak, poverty-stricken future, and she could barely manage to support herself. But the worst thing was…' Wheeler's voice faltered and he hesitated for a moment, then recovered. 'The worst thing was that she explained to Val what had happened: 'I don't know how,' she said, and those were the words that tormented Valerie from the moment she read them until her death, the words that killed her: 'I don't know how,' she said, but the SS had somehow found out that Rendl had a Jewish grandmother and had bribed officials to have her name removed from the records. The records in question, though, hadn't been destroyed, only moved elsewhere and replaced with false documents: the originals turned up and the accusation was found to be true. The SS were very strict on the matter of racial ancestry, Maria told Valerie (imagining that there would be no reason why Valerie would know about that), and it seems that the case reached the ears of Himmler himself, who was enraged by such deceit and determined to make an example of Rendl, mostly in order to wring confessions from any other SS officers who were in the same or a similar situation, promising them that if they did confess, he would treat them more leniently, or at least less severely, than their impostor colleague. The discovery, along with the rumors that followed Heydrich's death, that even he had been 'half-Jewish''-'Heydrich,' I thought, 'who died slowly and in great pain, from those bullets impregnated with poison'-'led him to believe, as I found out later, that his purer-than-pure body of men had, in fact, been transformed, since the enactment of the Nuremberg Laws, into a refuge for Mischlinge and even for 'half-Jews,' reasoning, as was proper to a mind as sick as his, that there could be no better disguise for the prey than to camouflage themselves as hunters. Well, perhaps his mind wasn't so very sick when you think of Delmer or, even more so, of Jefferys, who were both capable of dreaming up the most complicated plans and machinations. Or when you think of mine, perhaps, for we all had war minds, there are no healthy minds in wartime and some never recover. But returning to the letter: Maria had managed to learn what Rendl's exemplary punishment had been: to be sent to a concentration camp as a prisoner, even though he was only a 'quarter-Jewish'; and not just that, but one day, the Gestapo turned up at his house in Munich, where he and his family were living at the time, and took the girls away. They didn't take the boy because he wasn't there when this happened, he was staying in Melk with his grandparents, and once the Gestapo had got over their initial rage, they didn't bother overmuch to seek him out. When Ilse, horrified, asked why they were doing this, all they would say was that the girls were Jewish, but that they had no proof against her; if she wanted to go with the girls, that was her business. Properly speaking, those girls were only one-eighth Jewish and would normally have been considered to be 'German.' But that was the reprisal, the punishment: making 'full Jews' of the descendants of the man who had deceived and tricked them. After all, as Goring said, or Goebbels, or perhaps it was Himmler himself: 'I decide who's Jewish.' None of this became public, of course, it would have made a terrible impression, it was made known only to the officers of the SS, as a warning to them to tread carefully, and that is why the PWE heard almost nothing about it. The SS were very keen on secrecy and childish rituals. According to neighbors who witnessed the scene, Ilse got into the car that was about to carry her girls away and no more was heard of any of them. It was supposed that, once in a concentration camp, all trace of them would have been lost and their 'origin,' which was the reason they were there, quite forgotten, and they would have become, in effect, Jews or, at best, 'dissidents'; no, there was no 'best' about it: their fate would have been the same. Maria didn't want to deceive herself with fantasies, she had no hope that they were alive. She assumed they were dead, with no room for speculation or doubt, especially once information was published about the gas chambers and the mass exterminations. So that was what the letter said, Jacobo. Maria ended by saying that she didn't know if Valerie was still alive or if she would ever read those lines, but she begged her, if she was alive, to send her news and help as well, especially for Ilse's son, young Rendl. He would have been about eleven or twelve at the time.' Wheeler paused, took a breath and added: 'If only those lines had never reached her eyes. If only no one had ever told her. I wouldn't have seen her kill herself. I wouldn't have been left alone and sad.'

Wheeler remained silent and thoughtful and again raised the back of his wrist to his brow, as if to wipe away some sudden beads of sweat or as if he were again taking his temperature. 'Give me your hand and let us walk,' I quoted to myself. 'Through the fields of this land of mine, edged with dusty olive groves, I walk alone, sad, tired, pensive and old.' I had known this poem since I was a child, they were the words addressed by Antonio Machado to his already dead child wife, Leonor, who died of tuberculosis at the age of eighteen. Valerie hadn't died, she had killed herself when she was only slightly older, looking at her own hourglass and holding it in her hand. But she, too, had left Peter alone, sad, tired, pensive and old. Regardless of all the things he went on to do afterwards.

I should have expected this revelation after what Wheeler had been telling me, but I was so taken aback that, for a moment, I didn't know what to say. And when he did not immediately go on, I gave voice to a thought that slipped unavoidably into my mind, even at the risk of diverting his thoughts elsewhere and missing the end of the story:

'That's what Toby said had happened to him. I told you, don't you remember?' And I recalled, too, the look of irritated surprise on Wheeler's face when he had heard the story. 'Is that what he said: 'I watched the suicide…'' he had repeated, taken aback, without completing the sentence. 'That he had watched the suicide of the person he loved.'

Wheeler responded at once, but this time he was more sympathetic than annoyed:

'Yes. It disappointed and angered me a little when you told me that. After all, how were you to know? Nothing like that ever happened to him, but he enjoyed playing the man of mystery and hinting at a more turbulent or more tragic past than he actually had; not that his past didn't have its moments, but that's true of almost anyone who lives through a long war. He must have stolen my story when he told you that, to make his own more interesting. That's the trouble with telling anything-most people forget how or from whom they found out what they know, and there are people who even believe they lived or gave birth to it, whatever it is, a story, an idea, an opinion, an anecdote, a joke, an aphorism, a history, a style, sometimes even a whole text, which they proudly appropriate-or perhaps they know they're stealing, but push the thought to the back of their mind and thus hide it away. It's very much a phenomenon of the times we live in, which has no respect for priorities. Perhaps I shouldn't have got angry with poor Toby like that, retrospectively' Wheeler stopped, took a couple of sips of sherry and then murmured almost reluctantly, almost with distaste: 'Fortunately for him, he didn't ever have to see that. It's not a scene that is easy to bear, I can assure you. It's best to avoid tragedies. Nothing can ever make up for them. Certainly not talking about them.'

'What happened?' And out of politeness I added as I had on another occasion, although this time I had to force myself to do what I had been taught as a child, never to put the screws on anyone. 'If you don't want to tell me, Peter, don't.'

I was afraid that, at any moment, Mrs. Berry might close the piano and come downstairs and, so to speak, break the spell, although we could still hear her music; she seemed to have moved on to Scarlatti; she always played cheerful pieces, which that afternoon just happened to be by people who had changed countries, Scarlatti having spent half his life in Spain, although no one knows how or where he died or even if he had a grave, just like Boccherini: they probably both died in Madrid and both now lie in unmarked graves. A country indifferent to merit and to services rendered. A country indifferent to everything, especially to anything that no longer exists, or to matter in the past.