When you glimpsed them in the train stations, they were configured in narrow strings or little knots, always moving, moving, their gaze and gait strictly forward-directed (with no waste of attention, with no attention to spare). But in Salzburg two days earlier I saw seventy or eighty of them lined up on the street corner, very predominantly very young men, in international teenage gear, baseball caps, luminous windcheaters, dark glasses. Soon they would be approaching the German border (just a few miles away) – and then what? Theirs was a journey with charts and graphs and updates (those cell phones), but with no certain destination. Dawn had just arrived in Austria, and the buildings shone sheepishly in the dew. And you thought, How will all this look and feel a few weeks from now – after Oktober?
At four o’clock, as scheduled, I was joined by my penultimate interviewer, an academic, who began by reminding me of a salient historical fact. She was middle-aged, so it was not in her living memory; but it was in the living memory of her mother. In the period 1945–7 there were 10 million homeless supplicants on the periphery of what was once the Reich, all of them deported, ejected (in spasms of greater or lesser hatred and violence, with at least half a million deaths en route), from Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Romania. And they were all Germans – the ‘ethnic’ Germans that Hitler claimed were so close to his heart.
‘And your mother remembers that?’
‘She was at the station. She was seven or eight. She remembers the iced-up cattle cars. It was Christmas.’
I had been gone for seventy-five minutes and the businessman was still in mid-conversation. By now his phone had a charger in it; and the short lead, plugged into a ground-level socket, required him to bend even tighter – he was jackknifed forward with his chin an inch from the knee-high tabletop.
‘You carry on like this and you won’t have a roof over your head. You’ll be on the street and you’ll deserve it. The wheels are coming off your whole operation. And I’m not surprised. Bloody hell, people like you. You make me sick, you do. Professionally sick.’
The pianist had gone but other noisemakers were on duty – a factory-size vacuum cleaner, a lorry revving and panting in the forecourt. I went back to my book. August 1924, and Vladimir was in Czechoslovakia again, holidaying with his mother in DobŘichovice. The hotel was expensive and they were sharing a (sizable) room divided in two by a white wardrobe. Soon he would return to Berlin, where Véra…
All ambient sounds suddenly ceased, and the businessman was saying,
‘D’you know who this is? Do you? It’s Geoffrey. Geoffrey Vane. Yeah, Geoffrey. Geoff. You know me. And you know what I’m like…Right, my patience is at an end. Congratulations. Or as you’d say, Super…
‘Now. Get your fucking Mac and turn to your fucking emails. Do you understand me? Do you understand me? Go to the communication from the fucking agent. The on-site agent. You know, that fucking Argy – Feron. Fucking Roddy Feron. Got it? Now bring up the fucking attachment. Got it? Right – fucking 4C.’
The often-used intensifier he pronounced like cooking or booking. At this point I slowly went and slid on to the chair opposite me, so I could have a proper look at him – the clerical halo of grey hair, the head, still direly bowed and intent, the laptop, the legal pad.
‘It’s the fucking liability. Do you understand me? Now say. 4C. Does that, or does that not, square with Tulkinghorn’s F6? It does? Well praise fucking be. Now go back to fucking 4C. And fucking okay it. Okay? Okay.’ And he added with especial menace, ‘And the Lord pity you if we have to go through this again. You fucking got that? Sweet dreams. Yeah, cheers.’
And now, in unwelcome symmetry, the businessman also moved to the seat opposite, though swiftly and without rising above a crouch; with his meaty right hand he appeared to be mopping himself down, seeing to the pink brow dotted with motes of sweat, the pale and moist upper lip. Our eyes met inexorably, and he focused.
‘…Do you understand English?’
IV
Do I understand English? ‘Uh, yeah,’ I said.
‘Ah.’
And I speak it, too. Like everyone else around here. Great Britain no longer had an empire – except the empire of words; not the imperial state, just the imperial tongue. Everyone knew English. The refugees knew English, a little bit. That partly explained why they wanted to get to the UK and Eire, because everyone there knew English. And it was why they wanted to get to Germany: the refugees knew no German, but the Germans all knew English – the nut-brown maid who was brushing the curtains knew English, the sandy-haired bellhop knew English.
‘…You’re English,’ he announced with reluctant wonder.
I found myself saying, ‘London, born and bred.’ Not quite true; but this wasn’t the time to expatiate on my babyhood – with the mother who was barely older than I was – in the Home Counties circa 1950, or to dream out loud about that early decade in South Wales, infancy, childhood, when the family was poor but still nuclear. For half a century after that, though, yes, it was London. He said,
‘I can tell by the way you talk…That was a tough one, that.’
‘The phone call.’
‘The phone call. You know, with some people, they haven’t got a fucking clue, quite honestly. You’ve just got to start from scratch. Every – every time.’
‘I bet.’ And I cursorily imagined a youngish middle manager, slumped over his disorderly workstation in a depot or showroom out by an airport somewhere, loosening his tie as he pressed the hot phone to his reddened ear.
‘Look at that,’ he said, meaning the television – the eternally silent television. On its flat screen half a dozen uniformed guards were tossing shop sandwiches (cellophane-wrapped) into a
