The Poison Tide

way, with this sort of work, not in America. ‘It would be an honour to play a part,’ he ventured; ‘it’s just, I feel my duty…’ He hesitated, aware that his ‘gut feeling’ was not an explanation the professors would respect. He was spared the immediate trouble of articulating another by a sharp rap at the door.

It would have been easy to have mistaken the woman who entered for a servant but it was clear from Haber’s manner that she was his wife and that he was not pleased to see her. They rose to greet her and she offered her hand, but without warmth. Clara Haber was in her forties, short, trim, with a round face that must have been pretty once, tired-looking eyes and a mouth that turned down sadly at the corners. Her faded black dress and the severity with which she had dragged her hair into a bun suggested that she cared no more for her appearance than for the order of her house.

‘You’ve visited my husband’s laboratories?’ she enquired, settling on a Kanapee.

‘Professor Haber has shown us some of the work he’s carrying out at the Institute, yes,’ Troester replied cautiously. ‘Remarkable. Fascinating.’

‘Do you think so?’ There was no mistaking the chill in her voice.

Haber frowned angrily at her but she refused to let him catch her eye. For a few uncomfortable seconds no one spoke.

‘Doctor Dilger is a great-grandson of the physiologist, Tiedemann,’ Haber remarked at last. ‘An American but from a German family…’

‘Oh?’ she cut across him. ‘Tiedemann was a great man. You must be proud.’

‘Yes, I am, Frau Haber.’

‘A great scientist.’

‘Yes.’

She leant forward, her gaze fixed intently upon him. ‘Are you going to work for my husband, Doctor? If you’re an American you can refuse.’

There was another long silence. Haber was squirming in his chair but she paid him no attention. She was watching Dilger with the patient fervour of a mystic at prayer, her dark eyes pleading with him — to do what? The clock in the hall chimed the half-hour.

‘Please, Frau Haber.’ Count Nadolny was on his feet. ‘Gentlemen, I think we should leave. Frau Haber is not herself.’

‘Don’t you see?’ she said quietly. ‘You must, Doctor. Someone must say “no”.’ She leant forward, her hands clasped so tightly her knuckles were pushing white through her skin. ‘You’re American, you must see how mad…’

‘I’m a German.’ Dilger was angry at her presumption. Was she trying to humiliate him in front of her husband? ‘I am a German,’ he repeated, raising his voice. ‘As a German it would be an honour to serve alongside Professor Haber.’

‘An honour!’ She spat the word back at him. ‘An honour to serve. You’re a scientist.’ Her eyes were sparkling with fury now. ‘It’s a crime, a perversion of science. Professor Haber… my husband… is a criminal.’

‘Enough,’ Haber shouted, ‘enough,’ and he tried to grab her arm.

‘Gentlemen, really, we must go.’ Nadolny was at the door.

‘No. I’m leaving,’ and she rose quickly from the Kanapee. ‘I’m leaving,’ she said again and this time it sounded like a threat. There were tears on her cheeks but she stared at them defiantly, even with contempt. Then, turning her back, she walked out of the room, her rebuke heavy in the air.

Professor Haber begged them to excuse his wife. She was suffering from a nervous disorder, he said. She had been a fine chemist before their marriage; too clever to settle. She believed the scientist should work for the good of mankind in general, a notion Haber dismissed with a wave of his bony hand as hopelessly naive. ‘Where is the general good in wartime?’ he asked them on the doorstep.

Troester patted his arm reassuringly. ‘There is nothing beyond victory, my friend.’

As they turned from the house to the waiting cars, Dilger glanced sideways at Nadolny. He was smiling. I’m a German. Was that leap of faith ringing in the Count’s ears too?

Dilger thought about the visit and their conversation constantly over the next few days. He thought about it on the tram to the Red Cross Hospital and in the director’s office as he slid his letter of resignation across the table. He thought about it at dinner with his sister, and even at the Club Noir, eyes fixed on a troupe of scantily clad girls dancing on its brightly lit stage; his mind at the bottom of the professor’s bell jar. But most of all he thought about his father in his old cavalry uniform and his cousin Peter’s mud-stained scarf, a visit one summer to family graves in Baden and evenings singing old songs with university friends in Heidelberg; a line of Heinrich Heine whispered to lovers in the dark, language, Kultur, memory — German, German, German in every fibre of his being. Something he could be sure of and something deeper than his sense of whether it was right or wrong.

Then, one morning, he caught the tram to the Charite Hospital but instead of turning inside he walked further down Luisenstrasse to the low building, like a stable block, that served as the experimental laboratory facility of the Military Veterinary Academy.

4. Wolff in Berlin

‘BOERS FIGHT ON against the British,’ Boyd intoned. ‘Seen this?’ He thrust the Morgenpost at Wolff. ‘Are they fightin’ for Germany? You know these people, Mr de Witt…’

The story was at the bottom of page eight. The British had seized rifles from a ship bound for their colony in the Cape. According to the unnamed source, it was the first of a large consignment purchased for the Afrikaner rebels.

Wolff folded the newspaper carefully and slipped it back on the attache’s desk. ‘No, they’re fighting for a homeland, Boyd — freedom from the British.’

‘A homeland, I see.’ Quite plainly he didn’t. The trade attache was an incurious young man. Berlin was his first posting and he was still struggling with what he referred to in his Bostonian drawl as ‘the ways of the old world’. Wolff had met him on his first visit to the American Embassy and every day since.

‘Happy to be of assistance to a great company like Westinghouse, Mr de Witt,’ he had said, accepting Wolff’s credentials without question — and he was proving as good as his word. ‘There are twenty-five thousand of us here. Do you speak German? If you do risk speakin’ English, be sure to wear this,’ and he’d pushed a stars-and- stripes lapel badge across his desk. ‘They’re mad at us for sellin’ the British ammunition, so expect some abuse. Oh, and don’t speak it on the telephone unless you want the police at your door.’

The city was in the grip of a fever. Suspicion. Exhortations to be watchful for ‘the enemy within’ were papered on every station wall, to lampposts and kiosks. Symptoms were as uncertain as those ascribed to the medieval plague. Who is he? Where is he? Hiding in the bread queue or behind a newspaper in the works canteen, swinging from a tram strap, the butcher, the baker, the candlestick-maker who betrayed himself with a careless word, just a suggestion of doubt about the conduct of the war?

Englishmen generally considered Berlin dreary and compared it unfavourably with London or Paris. Too modern, they liked to say, its buildings too pompous, or functional, like factories, the streets and parks too well ordered; a city without a soul. They were patronising in a way that only Englishmen know how to be. It wasn’t Berlin they disliked but the new German Empire. They were afraid. In the years before the war it was brash, confident and, if you knew where to look, colourful. But within hours of stepping from the train, Wolff had sensed a sadder and a stiffer city.

Files of soldiers passed his hotel every day with ‘London’ chalked on their gun carriages and Berliners still cheered and sang ‘The Watch on the Rhine’, but only because they felt they ought to. On his second day Wolff had visited a department store and queued at a counter behind an old man buying a black armband for his coat.

‘My grandson,’ he’d explained to the shop assistant.

Everyone blamed the British. War with France was almost the natural order of things but no one Wolff spoke