Making History

MAKING CONVERSATION

Coffee and chocolate

‘My boy! And so prompt on the hour! It’s just dripping through now, won’t be a moment. Come in, come in! Not so tidy as it should be, but you should find somewhere to sit. Perhaps there? Good. I shall be an Augunblick. You speak German? Of course you do. I get cups. For you, Michael Young, cups!’

I sit with my hands on my knees and inspect my surroundings while he moves about the gyp-room fixing coffee.

‘Well, not speak it exactly,’ I call through. ‘I can more or less read it. Got a friend who helps me with the…you know, the tricky idioms.’ I am not certain he can hear me over the rattle of cups.

Good rooms he’s got for himself, I observe. Double bay out onto Hawthorn Tree Court, view of the river and the Sonnet Bridge beyond. Two walls lined with bookcases. I stand to get a better look.

Wow!

Primo Levi, Ernst Klee, George Steiner, Baruch Fiedler, Lev Bronstein, Willi Dressen, Marthe Wencke, Volker Riess, Elie Wiesel, Gyorgy Konrad, Hannah Arendt, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen and on and on and on.

Row upon row, every book I’ve ever heard of on the subject and dozens, scores, hundreds even, that I haven’t.

If Zuckermann is a modern historian, how come I have never run into him before? A few shelves down, the books become more general. Here is one I know well, Snyder’s Roots of German Nationalism, Indiana University Press. I can almost quote its ISBN number, which I have, of course, included in the Meisterwerk’s bibliography, compiled only two nights before. I pluck it down, obeying that strange compulsion that leads one firstly to examine, in other people’s houses, the possessions one has in common. I remember seeing somewhere that advertisers for car companies had discovered that people are far more likely to read advertisements for cars they have just bought than for any other make. Same syndrome here I suppose. Or perhaps we feel it to be less a violation of somebody’s privacy to peer at the duplicate of an object we own ourselves, than to poke our noses into something strange. Whatever.

‘ “Political nationalism has become for the European of our age,” ’ quotes Zuckermann, coming through with a wobbling tray, ’ “the most important thing in the world, more important than humanity, decency, kindness, piety; more important than life itself.” Is that right?’

‘Word for word,’ I say, impressed.

‘And when did he say that, Norman Angell? Some time before World War I, I think. Prophetic’

‘Here, let me.’

‘It’s okay. I put it down here. Now! Milk? Sugar?’

‘Milk, but no sugar, man,’ I quip.

‘Sugar man, Zucker Mann! Most amusing!’

He is laughing, it seems to me, more at the furious blushing that follows this dire effort, than at any brilliance in the joke itself. Why do I bother?

‘Ah,’ I see you have bound your luggage now. Very wise.

I look down at the bunjeed up old briefcase that I have set down on the floor beside me. ‘Yeah. Suppose I’ll have to treat myself to a new one eventually. I’ve had this old thing all the way from primary school.’

‘Here. Now, excuse me for a second.’ He hands a cup of coffee to me and takes a mug of something else, hot chocolate I suppose, over to a lap-top at his desk. ‘I am enjoying,’ he says, blinking at the screen and sliding his finger over the trackpad, ‘a game with a colleague in America.’

I see over his shoulder that he has started to download some mail. I can make out a message only three or four letters long. He reads it with a giggle and moves to a table by the window where a chess game is set out on the window-seat.

‘Siss!’ he exclaims, moving a black knight, ‘I never thought of that. You play, Michael?’

‘No…er, no I don’t. I mean, I know the moves, but I wouldn’t give you much of a game I’m afraid.’

‘Oh, I’m sure you would. I’m terrible at chess. Terrible. My friends mock me for it. Okay. It’s done.’ He comes and sits down again, opposite me. ‘So. How’s the coffee?’

I raise the cup to him. ‘It’s cool. Thanks.’

‘Cool? Oh, yes. You mean it’s okay? Cool. It always makes me laugh this word. In and out of fashion like roller-skates over the past how many years. I remember when West Side Story was opening in New York. “Play it cool, Johnny, Johnny cool!” When was that? Let me see…yah, sure. 1957, nearly forty years away, my first year at Columbia. And still you people are saying Cool! But no more cool cats, hey? Now we have cool dudes.’

I squirm in my seat. ‘I don’t know really, Professor, I’m twenty-four and way past it.’

‘Call me Leo. Oh certainly, way past it, sure. Twenty-four! Soon you will have to change your name from Young to Old. Yes, you turned twenty-four in April, I believe.’

I stare at him. ‘How did you know that?’

‘I looked you up of course. Your home page on the Vor-r-rld Vide Vep!’ he accompanies his comically over-enunciated accent with a magician’s flourish of the hands. ‘Michael Duncan Young, born Herford, April 1972.’

Everybody at every university has a world wide web page these days. Mine is feebly boring and written for me by Jane who understands all the computer stuff, the frames, the Hot Java, the applets, the VRML, all that. The page consists of a weedy biographical section, a photograph of the two of us by the river she had somehow scanned or digitised or whatever it is that you do and some links to the history faculty and to her own pages which are much whizzier than mine and include video of DNA twirling around and other seriously bonza gear.

‘And which exact day in April should it be, I wonder?’ Zuckermann continues. ‘Let me make a guess.’

‘I don’t see that.’

‘How about—…how about, say…the twentieth? The twentieth of April? How’s that?’

I wipe my palms against my thighs and nod.

‘How do you like that?! Bullseye! A twenty-nine-to-one shot and I get a bullseye first time! And the place of birth? I thought at first perhaps I was looking at a typing error, and that you were born in the town of Hertford in England. But, no, perhaps your father was a military man. Perhaps you were born in Herford, Germany, where there was until a few years ago a British Army camp?’

Again I nod.

‘So. You were born in Herford, Germany on the twentieth of April, 1972.’

He looks at me with a twinkle. For a horrible second he is the double of that absurd old man in braces who used to sing along with the Smurfs with his chin on the table, eyes moving left and right as they danced past him.

‘What about you?’ I ask, anxious to change the subject. ‘You aren’t a historian. What are you exactly?’

His eyes follow mine to the bookshelves. ‘Very dull, I’m afraid. Just a scientist. Physics is my subject, but I have as you see…other interests.’

‘The Shoah?’

‘Ah, you think perhaps to flatter me by using the Hebrew. Yes, most especially the Shoah.’ His eyes return to me. ‘Tell me Michael, are you a Jew?’

‘Er, no. No I’m not, as it happens.’

‘As it happens. You are sure?’

‘Well, yes. I mean, not that it matters to me one way or the other, but I’m not a…I’m not Jewish.’

‘Forster, you know, in the thirties he wrote an essay on what he called “Jew Consciousness”. How do we know, he said, that we are not Jews? Can we any of us name our eight great-grandparents and be sure they were all Aryan? And yet if only one of them was Jewish, then our lives are as absolutely contingent upon that Jew as they are upon the male line that has given us our surname and our identity. An interesting point, I thought. I doubt if even the Prince of Wales could name his eight great-grandparents, no?’

‘Well I certainly can’t name mine,’ I say. ‘Come to think, I can’t name my four grandparents exactly either. But as far as I know I’m not Jewish.’

‘Not that it matters to you one way or the other.’

‘No,’ I say, striving to keep a note of petulance out of my voice. There is for sure something very creepy about this whole deal, this whole line of questioning. Zuckermann is staring at me intently as if he is coming to some decision, although which way that decision is going I can’t tell.

I had discovered over the course of my researches that there are plenty of really weird people in my field and some of them assume as a matter of course that you share their weirdness’s. There was a group in London who had somehow found out the subject of my thesis and sent me samples of their ‘literature’ that had me and Jane straight on the phone to the police.

Zuckermann laughs at the expression on my face. ‘I can see that it irritates you to be jerked around like this.’

‘Well, I just don’t see where…’

‘Okay! No more jerking around, I promise. Straight to the point.’ He leans forward in his chair. ‘You,

Michael Duncan Young, have written a thesis on a subject that interests me very much. Very much indeed. So. Two things. Alpha, I should like to read it. Beta, I should like to know why you wrote it. There. It is that simple.’ He leans back again to await my answer.

I swallow hard. These are deep waters, Watson. Tread carefully. Tread very carefully. ‘The first thing you have to know,’ I say slowly and trying without success to meet the piercing blue of his gaze, ‘is that I am not a…you know, I’m not some kind of weirdo, some kind of…I’m not a David Irving type, if that’s what you think. I don’t collect Iron Crosses or swastikas or Lugers or SS uniforms or claim that only twenty thousand people died in the holocaust, any of that crap.’

He nods, with his eyes closed, like someone listening to music and waves for me to continue.

‘And you are right, my birthday does happen to fall on the twentieth of April. I suppose ever since I first knew that April twentieth was, you know, what you might call a red letter day, I’ve been…fascinated, or, I don’t know, guilty you might say.’ I take a gulp of coffee to wet a rapidly drying throat.

‘Guilty? That’s interesting. You believe in astrology perhaps?’

‘No, no. It’s not that. I don’t know. As I say. You know.’

‘Mm. Also of course, it is a subject that the biographies cover in very little detail, so it is very fitting for a doctoral thesis, where one needs to pitch one’s tent in virgin fields, yes?’

‘There is that too, yup.’

He opens his eyes. ‘We haven’t said the Word, have we?’

‘So sorry?’

‘The Name. We have avoided the Name. As though it might be a curse.’

‘Oh, you mean, er, Hitler? Well…’

‘Yes, I mean “er, Hitler”. Adolf Hitler. Hitler, Hitler, Hitler,’ he says, with increasing volume. ‘You scared of him? Hitler? Or maybe you think I don’t allow the name Hitler in my rooms, like it’s saying “cancer” in a lady’s boudoir?’

‘No, I just…’

‘Sure.’

We sink into a silence until I realise he is expecting me to say more.

‘Um…as for your being able to read it. My thesis, I mean. It’s with my supervisor at the moment, Dr Fraser-Stuart, and obviously he’s got to go through everything, check it all out, you know, before it gets sent off to Professor Bishop. And then I think it’s going to Bristol. Professor Ward. Emily Ward. I see you’ve got one of her books there…anyway, this lunchtime I had to print out a fresh copy for Dr Fraser-Stuart, after…you know, what happened in the car-park and everything, but I could run off another for you if you like. Um. Obviously.’

‘Well, I tell you the truth, Michael. You still got those pages I saw?’

‘Yes, but they’re all out of order and in a bit of a state.’

‘I am so eager to read your work that I’ll take all you got and put it together myself. I imagine there is page numbering?’

‘Sure,’ I say, reaching for the briefcase, ‘help yourself.’

He takes possession of the fat bundle of tyre-marked, torn, scrunched and grit-pocked papers and places them carefully on the table, gently smoothing out the top page as he speaks. ‘So Michael Young. Would you say that you knew more about the young Adolf Hitler than anyone else alive?’

I blink and try to consider this as honestly as I can. ‘I reckon that would be going a bit far,’ I manage at last. I got over to Austria last year and went through as many records as I could find, but I don’t think I came across anything that hadn’t been seen before. It’s a very narrow window of time that I’m interested in, you see. I think I can say I found out more about his mother’s background, Klara Polzl, than was known before, and some stuff about the house in Brunau where he was born, but that’s very early and had no real influence over his life. See, they moved to Gross-Schonau when he was only one, and then to Passau a couple of years after that, and when he was five they went from Fischlhalm to a village near Linz, and everything that can be known about his schooldays there is known, I would say. The historians in the late forties and in the fifties had the advantage of being able to talk to people who knew him as a boy. Obviously I only had old records to go on. So…’

‘Still you avoid the name.’

‘I do? Well, it’s not deliberate, I promise you,’ I say, definitely rattled by now. The foregoing has been a pretty long speech for me. ‘To answer your question, I think I know as much about ADOLF HITLER’s childhood as anyone, and in some areas, yes, more.’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘Why?’

‘I’m so sorry?’

‘Why do you want to know exactly?’

‘Well, I shall read your work first if I may,’ he moves towards the door, signalling the end of the visit, ‘and then maybe, you will do me the favour of coming to visit me again?’

‘Sure. Absolutely. Okay.’

‘Fine.’

‘I mean,’ I look again at his bookshelves, ‘you’re obviously something of an expert yourself, so your opinion would be of great value.’

‘Kind of you to say so, but I am not a professional,’ he says, granting me an equally unconvincing academic courtesy.

I stand awkwardly by the door, not sure how to say goodbye.

‘Actually,’ I blurt out, ‘my girlfriend’s Jewish.’

Not pink this time, but scarlet. I can feel the full flush spreading through my back and chest, surging up my throat and then flooding the whole face until it is a great flashing beacon of misery and confusion. What a turd! Why did I say that? Why did I say that?

He surprises me by putting an arm round me and patting me gently on the shoulder. ‘Thank you, Michael,’ he says.

‘She’s in biochemistry. This college. Perhaps you know her?’

‘Perhaps. And she is still your girlfriend? After what you did to her car?’

‘Oh. Well. She’s very forgiving. It amused her in fact.’

‘It amused me, too. Such a chivalrous compliment, if the truth be told. So, you’ll come visit me again? And maybe next time you’d like to see my laboratory, hey?’

‘Mm!’ I say, ‘that’d be fascinating.’

He throws back his head and laughs. ‘Actually, my boy, I think, much to your surprise, that it would be fascinating.’

‘Well, right. And thanks for the coffee…oh, I didn’t finish it.’

‘No bothers. Whatever it was like before, it sure is cool now.’