In the Evil Day

What happened to Moritz?

He didn’t come back from the war.

He was killed?

Well, the war.

A silence.

Afterwards, we tried to forget the war, you know. It was so unfortunate. Such a mistake. Your great-grandfather went into a decline. The business was ruined. All those years, the tradition. Destroyed. Gone. Your grandfather tried to pretend it wasn’t happening. He would not accept it. For him, London was closer than Berlin or Munich, he went to England five or six times a year. He talked about going to London as we would talk about going to, going to Monckebergstrasse. He had old friends from Oxford. And the people we dealt with of course. He knew Chamberlain, do you know that?

No.

And there was his mistress in London.

Chamberlain’s mistress?

No, your grandfather’s mistress, that drew him to London. Of course. She lived on Cheyne Walk.

You knew about his mistress?

It was no secret. We all knew. I met her after the war. A woman of great charm. And dignity. She was not a kept woman, she had her own money. He was a very attractive man, my brother. He hadn’t been close to your grandmother for a long time. They were friends, but they weren’t close. You know what I mean. She had her own interests.

Didn’t the war…I mean, what did his mistress feel about Germans then?

Silence.

She understood that Hitler didn’t speak for all Germans. But lots of English people admired Hitler. It made your grandfather so angry. That Mitford girl who hung around Hitler. Her father was an English lord.

About Moritz, didn’t you… What do they teach you at school? Do you read the great works?

Well, we have to read a lot of… My father loved English poets. Milton and Wordsworth. They were his favourites. And Blake, he liked Blake. He used to read them to us. Thackeray and Dickens he liked too. And Gibbon, he used to take Gibbon on holiday to the sea.

So was Moritz… And Shakespeare, he loved Shakespeare, the tragedies. He used to say that Shakespeare didn’t write the tragedies, a German must have written them and had his work stolen because no one except a German could be so… Sitting at the kitchen table, Anselm listened until the end of the tape, lulled by Pauline’s quiet voice talking about people whose blood ran in his veins and who were now just faces in faded photographs. He heard himself ask about Moritz again and receive no answer.

19

…HAMBURG…

In the morning, Anselm spread out the family tree his great-aunt had drawn up on pieces of paper, taping pages together as the record widened and lengthened. He had found it, carefully folded, in a desk drawer in the small sitting room. Unfolded, it was half the size of a single-bed sheet.

Pauline had traced the family back into the German primeval forest. The Hamburg branch had come to the city in 1680. From then on, she had recorded in her minute script the occupation of every member who achieved some distinction. Here a senator, here a consul, aldermen, physicians, a writer, a judge, attorneys, scholars, a composer. The rest were presumably just merchants. There was a French connection too, Anselm noticed. Pauline had written Huguenot in parentheses after the French names of people two Anselms married in the late 1600s.

Anselm found his grandfather, Lucas, and siblings Gunther, Pauline and Moritz. The birth dates, marriages and offspring of the first three were recorded, as were Lucas’s death in 1974 and Gunther’s in 1971. For Moritz, there was only his date of birth: 1908.

What became of Moritz, who looked like Count Haubold von Einsiedel? Did he marry? Were there children? When did he die?

Anselm remembered his father talking about Gunther. In 1940, the three children had been sent to live with Gunther and his American wife in Baltimore and they never really went home to Hamburg. But his father had never mentioned Moritz.

Time to go to work. Beginning to run in the morning was like starting an old machine, like pulling the cord of a lawnmower never oiled, the moving pieces reluctant, grating.

When he was warm, moving without pain, Manila came to his mind: Angelica Muir, the side-on look of her, the small nose, her teeth, the taste of her.

After the first lunch, he had many meals-lunches, dinners, late breakfasts, early breakfasts-with O’Malley, Angelica and Kaskis. They went to all kinds of gatherings and parties, everything seemed to turn into a party. O’Malley floated in the culture, spoke fluent Tagalog, knew everyone from millionaire Marcos cronies to penniless hardline Communists. He never stopped paying, no one else was allowed to pay. And, when things were moving at some party, he broke into song-country amp; western songs, Irish songs, operatic arias, songs from the War of Independence against the Spanish, Neil Diamond’s greatest hits, Cuban revolutionary songs.

O’Malley had called himself a financial adviser. His firm was Matcham, Suchard, Loewe, two secretaries and an elegant crew-cut Filipino with an American accent and a wardrobe of Zegna suits.

After he had filed his last story from the Philippines, Anselm had dinner with O’Malley and Angelica and Kaskis. She was wearing a green silk dress that touched her only on the shoulders, her nipples, her sharp hipbones. By midnight, fifteen people were in the party. At 4 a.m., they were in a garden, smoking the weed from the mountains, drinking out of the bottle, San Miguel, vodka, anything, fifty or sixty people, talking politics, breaking off to join O’Malley in songs about heartbreak, revenge, and dying for freedom. Around 5 a.m., under a tree in the heady night, he told Angelica that he was in love with her, it had come to him suddenly, no, a lie, from the moment he met her.

In the shadows, she kissed him, his head in her hands, her tongue in his mouth, touched his teeth with her perfect teeth, moved them, a silken abrasion felt in the bones of his face. It went on for a long time.

That kiss was in Anselm’s mind as he ran down the home stretch, a cold wind coming over the Alster, his eyes watering. He remembered the soft, damp night, the feel of the tropical tree against his back, against his spine, Angelica’s hipbones, her pubic bone on his, that he wanted to kiss her forever. If necessary, they could be fed intravenously while they kissed.

And then, at 5.30 a.m., he had to leave, the day already opening, a sky streaked from edge to edge with pale trails as if some silent armada of jets had passed in the darkness. Angelica put her hands into the taxi, ran them over his face like a blind person, said, ‘You should have spoken.’

She put her head in, one last kiss, their lips bruised, puffy, like boxers’ lips.

O’Malley appeared. ‘The right thing now, boyo,’ he said. ‘Go home and tell them to pull the plug on the miserable old cunt.’

Taking off, looking down at the hopeless tilting shanties, children, dogs, his numb fingers trying to direct the nozzle’s airstream onto his face, his eyes, it came to Anselm.

On the first night in the Tap Room, the Rotary harlot with the hand that lay on him like a big spider, O’Malley had believed that he was CIA and he had never changed his mind.

Years later, on that morning in Cyprus, two clean men, soaked, scrubbed, shampooed, cleaner than they would ever be again, after the doctors took off their gloves and left, Riccardi said something.

‘Why me?’ Riccardi said, not looking at Anselm. ‘Why am I the one they didn’t hurt?’

A hundred metres to go to the gates, no wind left, aching.

He couldn’t run it out, stopped, stood with his hands on his hips, feeling sick. Walked the rest of the way,