THE INVISIBLE VICTORY

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.

9

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?'

'Yes. Almost everybody seems to be applying it to Hitler.'

'Well, what odds does it make?' she added resignedly. 'I'll raise my arm as the Nazis march past like everyone else. A good many heathens and sinners bow to the altar in church. Who wants to lose a job these days?'

We both became aware in the same instant of a young man staring at us. He was pale with a line of black moustache, in a dark suit, well-pressed but threadbare, and a curly-brimmed trilby, perhaps a clerk or a shop assistant. I was frightened by the hostility of his eyes. It was before, but not long before, everyone in Germany had to be careful what they said, indoors or out. But it was common knowledge that sharp words shot bravely against the Nazis were arrows which could provoke artillery. Doubtless the shabby fellow had no interest in us, or was reflecting on a morning row with his wife or had a hangover. But we instinctively stayed silent until the linked pair of cars slid into the station on their monorail. It was Rider's lasting bounty that every German grew suspicious of the next.

I always threw a glance into Domagk's room as the Schwebebahn traversed the I G Farben works, but I never glimpsed him. We crossed the Wall, the main shopping street of Elberfeld, festooned with long Nazi banners. Flags were to be flown on all days of national significance, of which the Germans had many. Some brave or foolish housekeepers or shopkeepers flaunted the red, black and white horizontal stripes of the old Weimar Republic, the flag which Hitler described with a lapse of his usual prudery as, 'a bedsheet of the most shameful prostitution'. Shortly the swastika was to fly all over Germany triumphantly alone, hoisted to the peak of its flagstaff by the law of the land.

The month of April had jolted past fiercely. When the Germans recovered their breath from Hitler's sweeping up full political power, people began to say it was not dangerous, or even significant, because the Nazis were a