She was shaking her head. “Why are you doing this?”
“Please. The truth.”
The truth? How do I know what the truth is?” Suddenly she had raised her voice, was almost shouting. People at the next table were turning round. “We’re brought up to think of Germans as something from outer space. Truth doesn’t enter into it.”
“Very well then. Give me the propaganda.”
She glanced away, exasperated, but then looked back with an intensity that made it difficult for him to meet her eyes. “All right. They say you scoured Europe for every living Jew — men, women, children, babies. They say you shipped them to ghettos in the East where thousands died of malnutrition and disease. Then you forced the survivors farther East, and nobody knows what happened after that. A handful escaped over the Urals into Russia. I’ve seen them on TV. Funny old men, most of them; a bit crazy. They talk about execution pits, medical experiments, camps that people went into but never came out of. They talk about millions of dead. But then the German ambassador comes along in his smart suit and tells everyone it’s all just communist propaganda. So nobody knows what’s true and what isn’t. And I’ll tell you something else — most people don’t care.” She sat back in her chair. “Satisfied?”
“I’m sorry.”
“So am I.” She reached for her cigarettes, then stopped and looked at him again. “That’s why you changed your mind at the hotel about bringing me along, isn’t it? Nothing to do with whisky. You wanted to pick my brains.” She started to laugh. “And I thought I was using you.”
After that, they got on better. Whatever poison there was between them had been drawn. He told her about his father and how he had followed him into the Navy, about how he had drifted into police work and found a taste for it — a vocation, even.
She said: “I still don’t understand how you can wear it.”
“What?”
“That uniform.”
He poured himself another glass of wine. “Oh, there’s a simple answer to that. In 1936, the Kriminalpolizei was merged into the SS; all officers had to accept honorary SS rank. So I have a choice: either I am an investigator in that uniform, and try to do a little good; or I am something else without that uniform, and do no good at all.”
And the way things are going, I shall soon not have that choice, he thought.
She tilted her head to one side and nodded. “I can see that. That seems fair.”
He felt impatient, sick of himself. “No it’s not. It’s bullshit, Charlie.” It was the first time he had called her that since she had insisted on it at the beginning of the dinner; using it sounded like a declaration. He hurried on: 'That’s the answer I’ve given everybody, including myself, for the past ten years. Unfortunately, even I have stopped believing it.”
“But what happened — the worst of what happened — was during the war, and you weren’t around. You told me: you were at sea.”
He looked down at his plate, silent. She went on: “And anyway, wartime is different. All countries do wicked things in wartime. My country dropped an atom bomb on Japanese civilians — killed a quarter of a million people in an instant. And the Americans have been allies of the Russians for the past twenty years. Remember what the Russians did?”
There was truth in what she said. One by one, as they advanced eastwards, beginning with the bodies of 10,000 Polish officers in the Katyn forest, the Germans had discovered the mass graves of Stalin’s victims. Millions had died in the famines, purges, deportations of the 1930s. Nobody knew the exact figure. The execution pits, the torture chambers, the gulags inside the Arctic Circle — all were now preserved by the Germans as memorials to the dead, museums of Bolshevik evil. Children were taken round them; ex-prisoners acted as guides. There was a whole school of historical studies devoted to investigating the crimes of communism. Television showed documentaries on Stalin’s holocaust — bleached skulls and walking skeletons, bulldozed corpses and the earth- caked rags of women and children bound with wire and shot in the back of the neck.
She put her hand on his. The world is as it is. Even I see that.”
He spoke without looking at her. “Yes. Fine. But everything you’ve said, I’ve already heard. 'It was a long time ago.' 'That was war.' 'The Ivans were worst of all.' 'What can one man do?' I’ve listened to people whisper that for ten years. That’s all they ever do, by the way. Whisper.”
She withdrew her hand and lit another cigarette, turning the little gold lighter over and over in her fingers. “When I first came to Berlin, and my parents gave me that list of people they knew in the old days, there were lots of theatre people on it, artists — friends of my mother. I suppose quite of few them, in the way of things, must have been Jews, or homosexuals. And I went looking for them. All of them had gone, of course. That didn’t surprise me. But they hadn’t just vanished. It was as if they’d never existed.”
She tapped the lighter gently against the tablecloth. He noticed her fingers — slim, unmanicured, unadorned.
“Of course, there were people living in the places my mother’s friends used to live in. Old people, often. They must have known, mustn’t they? But they just looked blank. They were watching television, having tea, listening to music. There was nothing left at all.”
March said: “Look at this.”
He pulled out his wallet, took out the photograph. It looked incongruous amid the plushness of the restaurant — a relic from someone’s attic, rubbish from a flea market stall.
He gave it to her. She studied it. A strand of hair fell over her face and she brushed it away. “Who are they?”
“When I moved into my apartment after Klara and I split, it hadn’t been decorated for years. I found that tucked behind the wallpaper in the bedroom. I tell you, I took that place to pieces, but that was all there was. Their surname was Weiss. But who are they? Where are they now? What happened to them?”
He took the photograph, folded it into quarters, put it back in his wallet.
“What do you do,” he said, “if you devote your life to discovering criminals, and it gradually occurs to you that the real criminals are the people you work for? What do you do when everyone tells you not to worry, you can’t do anything about it, it was a long time ago?”
She was looking at him in a different way. “I suppose you go crazy.”
“Or worse. Sane.”
She insisted, despite his protests, on paying half the bill. It was almost midnight by the time they left the restaurant. They walked in silence towards the hotel. Stars arched across the sky; at the bottom of the steep cobbled street, the lake waited.
She took his arm. “You asked me if that man at the Embassy -Nightingale — if he was my lover.”
That was rude of me. I’m sorry.”
“Would you have been disappointed if I’d said he was?”
He hesitated.
She went on: “Well he isn’t. He’d like to be. Sorry. That sounds like boasting.”
“It doesn’t at all. I’m sure many would like to be.”
“I hadn’t met anyone…”
Hadn’t…
She stopped. “I’m twenty-five. I go where I like. I do what I like. I choose whom I like.” She turned to him, touched him lightly on the cheek with a warm hand. “God, I hate getting this sort of thing out of the way, don’t you?”
She drew his head to hers.
How odd it is, thought March afterwards, to live your life in ignorance of the past, of your world, yourself. Yet how easy to do it! You went along from day to day, down paths other people had prepared for you, never raising your head — enfolded in their logic, from swaddling clothes to shroud. It was a kind of fear.
Well, goodbye to that. And good to leave it behind -whatever happened now.
His feet danced on the cobblestones. He slipped his arm around her. He had so many questions.
