a place called Fort Bliss, which appears to be somewhere in the middle of Texas. Our Count was sent to Peenemьnde by Goebbels himself, to handle the propaganda side. He knows absolutely everything about the place. The Americans are
'I suppose there's no chance the man's telling a pack of lies?'
Greenparish looked offended. 'Of course not. He has the fullest documentation to back him up.'
I decided to go to bed, letting Greenparrish make his own mistakes. At the door, I asked, 'But why should the Americans continue to be the slightest interested in missile research? They've won the war.'
'Dear boy,' Greenparish sighed. 'You don't imagine the Russians think they've won
34
I was to go home before Christmas. My nose had smelt enough of the putrefying corpse of Nazi Germany. I had a career and a divorce to resume. I was delighted with last minute orders to travel by way of FIAT HQ in Paris. The pulse of Paris, I learned from American officers, had missed a beat or two during the occupation but was now bounding as joyfully as ever.
Two days before my departure in mid-December, I found a pair of familiar faces on the front page of the British Forces newspaper. Fleming, Florey and Chain were in Stockholm. The Karolinska Institute had been suffering the same confusion as many old-established bodies gazing across the rubble of the postwar world. Penicillin was eminently worthy of a Nobel Prize, particularly as its discoverers, unlike Professor Domagk, were on the winning side. The Swedes' intention to award it to Fleming got into the London newspapers, raising so much academic dust the Institute had to think again. They gave half the Prize to Fleming and shared the other between Florey and Chain. This raised the dust chokingly, so they ended by splitting it three ways. The trio were in tails and white waistcoats, Fleming looking like President Truman, Chain with a Groucho Marx moustache, and Florey resembling the then vanished band-leader more than ever.
'You know those fellows, I suppose?' asked Greenparish, reading the paper over my shoulder in the mess.
'I know Fleming and Florey quite well. I was wondering how they were enjoying each other's company in Stockholm. They've never worked in the same lab, nor collaborated in anything, nor even shared the same lecture platform. They're strange bedfellows in the cradle of success. People say they're enormously jealous of each other, though of course under a conscientious politeness.'
'It is a sad failing of us academics to gossip with the well-rehearsed and well-relished maliciousness of beautiful actresses.'
'I suppose Fleming was the discoverer of penicillin, like a shiek who discovers oil in the desert and uses it to light his camp fires. Florey was the prospector who extracted it.'
'Then how do the Americans come into it?'
'They made the money.'
'With both products,' Greenparish observed. 'Elgar, I had a message to give you last night.' Spotting a new issue of
I dropped the paper. 'What's the matter with her?'
'A very common feminine complaint, I fear. She's had a baby.'
I exclaimed, 'But she must be at least thirty-five-'
'Really? I had the impression she was a young girl. Like a lot of people in Wuppertal, she knows you're here, and what you're about. She'd like to see you. It's up to you, of course, if you want to risk disobeying standing orders.'
'Do you know anything of the husband?'
'Alas, she has no such encumbrance. She was raped by some SS man, when things began to break up earlier in the year. I wouldn't go near her if I were you, she obviously wants to get something out of you.' Greenparish started reading his
I was appalled at this casual revelation. I knew that in Nazi Germany, where personal feelings were as irrelevant as leaves blowing across a battlefield, SS men who made any Nordic type of female pregnant faced nothing but the congratulations of the State. But a woman of Gerda's sensitivity and intelligence, and with her whole family killed…
'I might warn you that we arrested her,' added Greenparish, without looking up from his magazine. 'Someone denounced her because she was a Nazi schoolmistress. But in the end we let her out. She claimed she had to strike a compromise with her conscience under Hitler. Don't all the women? I expect even those blonde maidens who scattered rose-petals before the tyres of Hitler's Mercedes, when he came home from the surrender of France. So dreadfully vulgar, the Nazis.'
I stood up and walked in the fresh air of the small garden. I could not face Greenparish a second longer. But he was right. Why should I go against my country's orders and risk seeing Gerda? She was cared for in hospital, better off than the millions of Germans living on bomb sites. She had been raped, but millions more had been killed. But she had asked to see me. And the war had left me perhaps the person nearest to her in the whole world. That evening I put on my duffle-coat and walked to the same hospital where the earliest cases had been treated with Domagk's sulphonamide.
It had been bombed, its windows replaced by boarding. Inside was dim and cold, and you could see the marks on the wall where Hitler's portraits had been removed.
'I'm from the Control Commission,' I said to the middle-aged woman in an old-fashioned folded nurse's cap, who was sitting at a table with neatly arranged piles of forms in the hall. She gave me a hard look when I asked to see the doctor attending Frдulein Dieffenbach. She clearly did not approve of unmarried mothers.
The doctor was wizened, bent, white-haired, in a patched white coat with a stethoscope sticking from the pocket. I explained briefly who I was, and what I knew.
'Yes, Frдulein Dieffenbach was delivered safely of a daughter four days ago.' He clasped his bony hands together. 'You knew about her parents? That was terrible, terrible. Dr Dieffenbach was one of our most esteemed practitioners, and did enormous good here in Wuppertal.'
'May I see her?'
'I think that would be inadvisable. She is very, very ill.'
I asked in alarm, 'What's the matter?'
'Puerperal fever,' he told me starkly. 'We try to keep infection down as much as we can, but it is difficult with the sterilizing plant worn out like everything else.'
'You're treating her with sulphonamides?' I asked at once.
'Unfortunately not with the effect I should have hoped,' he replied wearily. 'She may be infected with the staphylococcus-we cannot tell, with our restricted facilities. Culturing pus to identify the infecting germ is a luxury we must forgo. And of course the sulpha drugs don't touch the staphylococcus. I have to use my clinical nose-' He tapped his nostril.
'What about penicillin?'
He sighed. 'Ah! That is not for us Germans.'
'Her life's in danger?'
'That's undeniable. Of course, much depends on her natural strength. But none of us is bursting with health these days.'
'I must see her. I knew her family well before the war. It might put heart into her, to fight the illness off.'
I went up an ill-lit stone staircase in the company of the doctor and the memory of Rosie. Gerda lay in a bed at the end of a small ward, separated from her neighbour by a white screen. She had not changed as much as I had feared. Her hair was two long plaits of pale gold, tied by the nurses with a pair of bows made from bandages. She was flushed with fever, thin, her face lined. Her mouth was a little open, and looked as soft as ever.
'Oh…!' She lay against a pile of pillows staring at me, no expression on her face at all.