The Invisible Victory

5

The big black dog became a monster with eyes of firelit emeralds, the white steep-roofed cottage which it guarded dazzled us for a second then reeled into the darkness. We sped through a cramped village with an angular, elegantly spired church and past farmhouses cheerlessly black, countrymen the world over turning their backs on the night. On a hill I caught the turreted outline of a schloss, ahead wet bare trees, snow falling thinly between them and swirling on the ground as it never did in England, broad sheaves of telephone wires undulating gently from post to post as far as we could see. It was about eight in the evening of Monday February 27, a fortnight after my excursion with Gerda. Jeff Beckerman was taking me for a night out in Cologne. The distance was about thirty miles, the road running south along the River Wupper through Solingen, a town famous like Sheffield for scissors and knives. The autobahn still lay in the mind of Germany's new ruler, with a lot of other things.

Jeff Beckerman laughed. 'You're scared.'

'I'm not used to motoring,' I said shortly. My father could never have owned a car, even when Mr Morris of Oxford was putting wheels under the British masses.

'She could do a hundred miles an hour, if the road was good.'

I watched uneasily as the speedometer needle hovered round sixty. Jeff drove a car which I had never heard of before nor seen since, a Cord L29 Phaeton which he had shipped extravagantly from America in contempt for the Bugattis and Bentleys, the Delahayes and Alfas, which fulfilled the need for mobility and cutting a dash among Europe's young bloods. It was long and white, its silvery headlights a foot across, its running boards merging into a pair of front mudguards as elegant as an actress's eyebrows. I am a mechanical ignoramus, but I gathered that it was designed by a man called Erret Lobban Cord to be propelled through the front wheels, and that our whitewall-tyred spares were strapped either side of the enormous flat bonnet because these front wheels had a tendency to fall off.

'Berlin was _fantastiche, _utterly _fantastiche.'_ The word had just superseded _wunderbar_ in Jeff Beckerman's conversation. 'Berlin's nothing like Wuppertal. It's nothing like the rest of Germany. It's like America, only more like America than America could ever dare-you get me? Berlin's _real. _The skin's torn off, you can see the raw flesh and nerves underneath. I had the feeling that no one was playing a part, not the girls in the cabarets, the pimps and the crooks, they _revel_ in what they're doing. Even the whores put their heart and soul into their job.'

My employer did not spend much time in Wuppertal. He preferred leaving his brewery to Herr Fritsch, the grey-faced elderly manager in his pince-nez and 'butterfly', as the Germans called a wing collar. Jeff was interested in Germany, in the bouncy way he was interested in women or his car. He regarded his exile as an educative jaunt before returning to New York and getting down to the serious business of making a million. 'What about our brown-shifted friends?' I asked. 'Didn't they spoil your fun?'

'Why should they, old man?' Jeff often used this expression which is sprinkled on English conversation like salt, but always getting it a little wrong by putting the emphasis on the end, sounding slightly sneering. 'You don't have to walk into trouble, neither in Berlin nor Chicago.'

'You don't rate Adolf Hitler's gangsters more dangerous than Al Capone's?'

'I don't. Capone runs a gang of crooks, Hitler's are disciplined like the Army.' With his teeth, he pulled off his leather gauntlet, a reflector of chiselled red glass on the back-the latest thing for displaying driving signals. From the pocket of his ankle-length black leather motoring coat, a trophy from Berlin, he produced a packet of Chesterfields. 'What are the newspapers saying about Hitler in England?'

'I don't know. My mother sends me the _Sunday Graphic_ every week, but it seems filled with pictures of the Royal Family.'

I lit the cigarette jutting from his full lips. Jeff was five or six years older than me, red faced and too fleshy, but still giving the impression of an athlete. He wore his brown hair _en brosse,_ his heavy eyebrows transecting his face as a single bar. He enjoyed a long-standing intimacy with money, which reduced it to a reckoning in his daily plans no more intrusive than breathing. Like many Americans, his life was a tropical sea of hedonism traversed by occasional icebergs of puritanism. His father owned chemical companies in New York State-but of course he was making a fortune from bootlegging. The Beckermans brewed beer long before dropping their final 'n' en route from Hamburg to Ellis Island, and would brew it again when American thirsts might be legally slaked.

Jeff enjoyed a simultaneous reverence and contempt for academics with First Class degrees like myself. He respected me as the only man in Wuppertal with whom he could hold an intelligent conversation. But he would have offhandedly packed me home with barely the fare in my pocket. He could be very simple or very shrewd, equally infuriatingly. He might have inhabited the America of Scott Fitzgerald, which vanished in a similar puff of misunderstanding, ridicule, nostalgia and shame as the British Empire. _The Great Gatsby_ had been on bookshelves for seven years, but I doubt if he had read it. Jeff only read books which helped him to get on.

The journey was bone-shaking, snow seeping round the celluloid side-screen. Jeff had lent me his raccoon coat, and I still wore my Trinity scarf. The road ran close to the huge pharmaceutical works at Leverkusen, a blue circle in the sky as tall as the factory chimneys which supported it proclaiming twice BAYER, the words crossed at the Y.

Kцln glittered in the diamonds of a road sign. I had not returned there since New Year's Eve, when I had changed trains at the Hauptbahnhof in the shadow of its dazzling skyscraper of a cathedral. Jeff took the Hohenzollern Bridge across the Rhine, the river which flows through the German soul.

He cursed. The far end of the bridge was blocked by another of the uniformed processions which crawled like worms over the body of Germany. This one presented 'the torchlight red on sweaty faces'. The Brown Shirts were stamping between the Cathedral and the Tankgasse, small knots of spectators in the falling snow raising arms through enthusiasm or prudence, while flankers pressed pamphlets upon them.

Jeff had to stop. The ends of the bridge, the walls everywhere, were plastered with posters. Hitler had dissolved the Reichstag, there was to be yet another election the following Sunday, March 5. As a foreigner, I found neither significance nor even identity in the dreary gallery of political faces-except Adolf Hitler's, as instantly recognizable today, with his lower middle-class, Austrian 'little man' moustache, which you still see decorating street-cleaners and tram conductors in Vienna. _Deutschland Eswache!_ cried the Nazis' posters. They had stolen the vivid red of their Communist arch-enemies, their message in Gothic type always angry, vituperative and vile, and always highly effective.

Waiting patiently, I recalled how Cologne had recently shone in the political news. The gentleman showjumper Franz von Papen had craftily made a secret rendezvous there with Hitler behind the back of Chancellor 'Artful Dodger' Kurt von Schleicher-who got wind of it, planted a spy with a camera, and had it over the next morning's newspapers. Hitler anyway regarded the gentleman showjumper as a joke. So absurd a joke that he later planned to provoke his invasion of Austria in 1938 by having Ambassador Papen in Vienna spectacularly murdered.

'There doesn't seem to be any trouble.' Jeff tapped the steering-wheel with his reflecting gauntlets. 'The Jews keep well out of sight, and the Communists choose their own time and place to trail their coat. I guess everyone else is too cold or too scared, and staying home. This sort of game is played in Berlin every night-you should have seen it when Hitler became Chancellor, the SA in thousands, parading in the Tiergarten and marching in columns through the Brandenburger Tor and along the Unter den Linden. There was nothing of a rabble about it. Everything was very military, bands playing and the marchers singing their heads off.'

'What was the reaction?'

'Rapturous. You know how the Germans love a torchlight procession.' He flicked up another Chesterfield. 'And they say old Hindenburg looked down from his window muttering _"Du lieber Gott,_ I never knew we'd taken so many Russian prisoners".'

We were making for a cabaret called the Sphinx, of which Jeff had heard from some fantastiche girl called Heike in Berlin. It was hardly the famous Parisian Sphinx, where I went-off limits-with the Americans after the Liberation, and where girls did strange things with cigarettes. We discovered a narrow dark doorway, a sequence of white electric bulbs writing Sphinx continually above. It was somewhere in the old town within the elbow of the Rhine between the Hohenzollern Bridge and the suspension bridge to the south, near the Gurzenich, the building where laws were made for the Holy Roman Empire. Through the unhappy propensity of Europeans for blowing up each other's cities, the whole area is now replaced by orderly pedestrian precincts providing all services from supermarkets to sex shops.

The lobby was flanked with panels of coloured glass depicting palms, pyramids and camels, symbols of greater romance and mystery to the Germans than the British, who policed them. Jeff's brow clouded. It clearly was not a patch on fantastiche Berlin. But I was excited enough, never having been inside a cabaret before.

Down a narrow staircase hung a crimson plush curtain guarded by a German in fez and tasselled uniform, suggesting an advertisement for Abdullah Turkish cigarettes. The management tired abruptly of Eastern pretence. Beyond was a long brightly-lit basement resembling a teashop, with wall mirrors and small wicker tables under white fringed cloths, each with a numbered card in a bamboo holder and an old-fashioned telephone. At the far end, the curtain was down on a small stage, and two men in tails played _How Deep is the Ocean _on piano and drums as though it were a march. Attendance was thin, the weather and political turmoil not being conducive to carefree nights out.

'In Berlin, there's men dressed as women and women dressed as men,' complained Jeff.

The waiter in a floor-sweeping apron suggested champagne. Jeff ordered beer. He sat back in his fragile-looking gilt chair, lighting another cigarette and scowling. His black and white check tweeds came from Savile Row, his silk shirt from Florence, his foulard tie from the Rue de Rivoli. He dressed his part as man of the world. 'If you want a girl, you call up her table number,' he explained, nodding towards some gaudily dressed women sitting alone or in pairs against the walls.

But my attention was diverted by waiters equipping the patrons at tables near the stage with long bibs of red rubber. I was speculating what fancy dish might be on its way, when the curtain rose to a roll on the drums, revealing a small roped boxing ring, a mirror sloping above, into which a melancholy man in a long white coat was tipping buckets of greenish mud.

Jeff stuck his thumb in his top waistcoat pocket. 'We're going to see a couple of girls wrestling in mud.'

'Why mud?' I asked in surprise. 'Girls wrestling would be unusual enough for me.'

'It has to be in mud. The Germans have a genius for the extreme.'

It was a coy, even lugubrious entertainment. One girl was fresh-faced and solidly-built, good looking in a farmyard way. The other was pale and sad, seeming in need of a square meal. Both were dressed for the beach, in white rubber bathing caps and ankle-length robes of dazzlingly patterned towelling, removed to reveal swimsuits demurely skirted across the tops of their thighs. They climbed into the ring and braced themselves against the ropes, like the prizefighters in the newsreels. The band broke into Franz von Suppй's _Light Cavalry._ They fell upon each other, standing in the mud with their breasts pressed together, slapping each other's buttocks.

'This election's going to be a walkover for Hitler.' Jeff was affecting intense tedium. 'He's got big business in his pocket-I heard in Berlin how Sacht and Gцring fixed it.'

The music stopped. The wrestlers separated, standing in their corners glistening with green mud, their heaving breasts decrying any sham in the struggle. Jeff lit another cigarette. 'Hey, have you read Hitler's book, _Mein Kampf?'_ I shook my head. 'This _fantastiche_ girl Heike translated bits for me.'

'You talk politics with whores, do you?'

Jeff looked offended. 'She's a student learning English.'

I have since smelt through its flatulent pages. They expose the author's contempt for the mass of his fellow-Germans and his greatest respect for the English-so much for our Great War Prime Minister, the reader might imagine that Lloyd George knew Hitler's father. It spelt out the Fьhrer's plans with such determined precision, it is unfortunate that it was not translated in bed to an English statesman by some other wayward student of his language.

The bout restarted, the girls entwined on their floor of mud, flicking the rubber bibs of the nearest spectators. 'Only the Army can stop Hitler now,' Jeff continued.

'Why should they? He's hardly a pacifist.'

'But he's an upstart, and the Germans are even worse snobs than the English.' The pale girl grabbed the larger one between the legs, tipping her overhead into the mud then sitting astride her waist. The pair were barely distinguishable, covered with green slime. One of the big girl's breasts plunged free from her slippery bathing-suit. 'That was as rehearsed as the gestures in Hitler's speeches,' observed Jeff.

I quoted Comte de Mirabeau, 'Other states have an army, in Prussia the army has a state".'

Jeff countered this with a grin. 'What do you expect, in a country which calls war the continuation of foreign policy by other means?'

'Clausewitz' remark was irresponsible and immoral.'

'At least it was logical.'

The thin girl was acclaimed the winner. Both disappeared for a shower. The waiters began untying the red rubber bibs. Within six months, this entertainment would be banned in Germany, along with the music of Mendelssohn and the novels of Thomas Mann.

Then I noticed at a table against the wall the dark Slav girl from Professor Domagk's laboratory.