The Invisible Victory

6

'She looks a pretty thing, why don't you call her up?' Jeff indicated the telephone.

'Don't be ridiculous! She'd be dreadfully embarrassed.' I had recounted our meeting in the laboratory at Wuppertal.

'She's peddling her ass, she isn't in the position to be embarrassed about anything. You're not a sissy, are you?'

'Of course I'm not!' Jeff was 'kidding', as an Englishman 'chaffed'. But I could never be certain how thick his cushion of amiability was between jest and truth. In the end I thought it wise to invite her. She rose wearily, not recognizing me until about to sit down at our table. I introduced _Herr Beckerman aus Amerika,_ and asked, 'What's your name?'

'Magda.'

'You're not from Cologne, surely?'

'From Vienna.' She crossed her hands modestly in the lap of her mauve shot-silk dress. I noticed how much more heavily made up she was.

'Don't I G Farben pay enough?'

She gave an unfriendly look. 'I'm of a large family.' She added, as though she were moonlighting as a respectable waitress or shopgirl, 'Everyone has to take a second job in Germany.'

'Ask what she wants to drink,' interrupted Jeff in English, impatient at exclusion from the conversation.

'Champagne,' Magda said automatically.

We held a three-cornered conversation in English and German over the bottle. Jeff never learned German, partly from impatience and partly because he feared the natives could outsmart him in their own language. Magda smiled as I translated his gallantries, but she struck me as acting badly the _fine de joie._ 'How much does she charge?' Jeff enquired abruptly.

Magda told me fifty marks, about four pounds.

'Why don't you go with her?' asked Jeff amiably. He took out his wallet and fluttered a fifty-mark note on the table. 'I'll grub-stake you-if that's the correct expression.'

'Don't be ridiculous! I couldn't possibly pick up a girl so blatantly.'

'A man who goes off with a whore in secret is like a man who goes off drinking in secret. If I kept either from my friends, I'd be ashamed of myself.'

Jeff's tone had become abrasive, but I was more frightened of the girl than of him. Two years ago, incited by the easygoing tales of fellow-undergraduates at Trinity who were richer and worldlier than myself, I had shopped along the gaudy pavements of London's West End and picked up a tart near Marble Arch. Though I had saved for three months, I could not afford the best, and in my subsequent remorse feared that I had picked the worst. I had sponged the parts involved with dilute hydrochloric acid, which suggested itself to a chemistry student as a promising antiseptic. The result was a raw redness for which I dared invoke neither medical advice nor friendly sympathy, and I had no wish to find myself repeating the experiment. But Jeff pressed me, with the amiable wickedness of a man watching another slide into his own sins. I gave in.

Magda told us that she lived beyond the Hohenstaufen-ring, the first arc of boulevards and squares which spread round old Cologne like the ripples from a stone. Jeff offered us a lift. Magda suddenly became animated as she climbed into the Cord, lightly touching the steering-wheel, the shiny instruments, the gear lever and brake in open-mouthed reverence. It struck me that she had never before been in a car at all.

_'Ein wunderbarer Auto,' _she breathed.

'Fantastiche,' Jeff corrected her, glowing with satisfaction as he pulled on his gauntlets.

Magda stopped us at the corner of Mozartstrasse, a broad and prosperous street, saying we could walk the rest. She clearly did not wish to arrive in such grandeur. Jeff said he would find a bar, and call Heike in Berlin. He had an extravagance towards tile telephone which I thought admirably American. 'I'll be back in half an hour-have a good time,' he called, roaring away and leaving a smell of high-grade petrol.

I self-consciously took Magda's arm, in equal parts aroused and ashamed. Without speaking a word, she led me towards a narrow side-street lying in the glow of a sickly gas-lamp. I had imagined our destination some disreputable small hotel or bug-infested lodging-house. As she opened the green door in a four-storied narrow terrace dwelling, I realized with alarm that I was being taken home.

The tiny hallway was unlit. I followed her towards a narrow flight of stairs with broken banisters. In gaslight seeping from a door above, a small boy and girl were grinning at me

I stopped. Desire fled. Vice in such domestic surroundings was ridiculous. 'I don't want to,' I said.

Magda turned. 'You'll still have to pay me.'

I pushed at her Jeff's fifty-mark note, which she folded carefully and put in her large brown handbag. I turned to the door, eager to be out of the place. Then I imagined myself standing half an hour on a freezing street corner. 'Could I have some coffee?' I asked plaintively.

Silently, Magda led me to a kitchen downstairs at the back, stone-floored and lit by the glow of the stove. An old man smoking his pipe rose and left at once, bowing to me with a deference which doubled my feelings of guilt. Magda removed her imitation leather overcoat and lit the gas-mantle. I heard scuffling upstairs. The house was as crammed with humans as a warren with rabbits. 'You've a large family, you said?'

'Four brothers.' She added sourly, 'All out of work.'

'Was that your father?'

'Yes.' She moved a saucepan of coffee on to the black iron stove. 'He's an engineer, but he lost everything when the mark fell to zero. So did everyone else, of course.' She spoke as if describing a bad summer which had ruined their holidays.

I sat at a small, rough wooden table which smelt of onions. 'How long have you been at I G Farben?'

'Since the summer. I should have been a chemist, you know. I'm well educated. But in Germany today, nobody can achieve what they deserve. All I do is keep the place clean and look after the laboratory animals.'

'What's Professor Dr Domagk like to work for?'

'He likes to keep himself to himself. He's all right, except when anyone makes a mistake. Not just me, one of the other doctors or chemists. Then he just blows up.' She screwed a finger-tip against her temple. 'His mind works so fast, he's always a jump ahead.'

'What sort of dyes is the professor trying to turn into medicines?' I asked, partly from curiosity, partly from mischievousness over their secrecy.

She replied in her dull way, 'How should I know? Almost every day another compound comes to be tested from Dr Mietzsch and Dr Klarer.'

I had the feeling of meeting an acquaintance in a foreign land. I had heard at Cambridge of Dr Fritz Mietzsch, the chemist who in 1930 had synthesized a drug for the treatment of malaria. The disease had formerly been dosed with quinine, Nature's product from cinchona bark in Peru-the 'Jesuit's bark', which the ague-racked Oliver Cromwell stoutly refused to let stick in his throat. Sitting in Magda's kitchen, I remembered that the name of Mietzsch's new anti-malarial chemical was mepacrine hydrochloride, but that I G Farben had dressed it in the fancy title of 'Atebrin'. I also recalled that mepacrine hydrochloride was an acridine derivative, a bright yellow synthetic dye. Was Domagk trying to cure other tropical infections? I wondered. But Domagk had spoken to me of using dyes against 'various bacteria', which to the precise scientist did not mean the parasites causing malaria or other tropical diseases, but the streptococcus and staphylococcus and tubercule bacillus which swarmed so richly round mankind everywhere. I repeated, 'What dyes?'

'Why are you so interested? Were you sent to Germany as a spy?' She poured the coffee into a pair of enamel mugs.

'Secrets and cheese go bad with keeping, Frдulein. People begin to smell them. Are they yellow acridine dyes?' I persisted as she sat beside me. 'Remember, I've given you fifty marks tonight.'

'It makes no difference to me if I spend half an hour with you down here or upstairs.' She jerked her head upwards. 'I'm forced into it by the system,' she continued bitterly. 'By what's happening in Germany. Everyone at each other's throats and the politicians in Berlin squabbling like washerwomen. Perhaps everything will change with Hitler. He certainly seems to know what's wanted.'

'But I admire you. Doing that to provide for your family.'

'What's admirable in degradation?'

'It's a matter of motives, _nicht water?_ Killing people was widely advertised as highly admirable during the war.'

She sipped her coffee for some time in silence. 'Well, Mister Englishman, sympathy's not something I enjoy every day, I assure you. I don't suppose it makes much difference if I tell you they're red azo-sulphonamide dyes.'

That was interesting. I was familiar enough with sulphonamide, but I had never heard of its use for killing bacteria. 'They don't work like ordinary disinfectants,' she said. 'They're not like carbolic or formalin. Professor Domagk injects them into infected mice.'

'Do the mice live or die?'

'Die. Have you got a cigarette?'

'I don't smoke.'

As she felt in her handbag for a packet of cigarettes, she produced a folded sheet of paper. 'Have that, if you like. The mice don't always die. There was a lot of excitement in the lab just before Christmas. One of the dyes which Dr Mietzsch and Dr Klarer sent up to be tested was very successful. That chit will tell you all you want. Don't let anyone see it. I should never have taken it.'

She lit a cigarette. We talked for some time about the coming election, German politics, Lloyd George. She rose, and thrust into the stove a piece of jagged wood from a pile apparently scrounged from fences or dilapidated buildings. I had a moment to open the paper and observe a printed list of different bacteria down one side, scrawled writing down the other. 'I was intending to sell it,' Magda said frankly, 'but I should never meet anyone who might be interested. The American will be back,' she added, reaching for her coat.

Magda turned out the gas. As we left I could see the two children again, eyeing us from the stairs and whispering excitedly over our parade of wickedness. We walked arm and arm to the street corner. The snow had stopped. 'You are a chemist, mein Herr?' I nodded. She made a circular gesture round her face. 'You have the look of an English lord.' I laughed. 'Where do you live? In London?'

'Yes, in a big house in Harley Street. You've heard of that?' She shook her head. 'You travel to Wuppertal every day?'

'On the train. It makes a hole in my pocket.'

'Couldn't you find a job nearer home?'

'Is that a joke?'

'Perhaps you're right, and life will get better under Hitler.'

'That's what people are saying. Some don't care for him, of course, the Jews and the profiteers. But Hitler means business, you can tell that from the way he speaks. He's the only one up there in Berlin with the welfare of the ordinary people at heart. What do you suppose Schleicher and Papen and the rest are interested in? Lining their own pockets. Look at that disgraceful Osthilfe affair.'

'What about the Communists?'

'Oh, the Communists! They take their orders from Moscow. Hitler will soon put paid to them, thank God. They frighten the life out of me.'

She threw her half-finished cigarette into the gutter as we reached the main road. Jeff was in the Cord just round the corner. 'Hey, do you know what?' He opened the driver's door. 'I just got through to Berlin. The Reichstag's gone up in smoke. The whole town's out in the streets looking at it. It started around nine this evening, the sky's as red as dawn and they're expecting the dome to fall in any minute.'

I translated the news to Magda. 'A pity the deputies weren't all inside,' she said.

We dropped her at the Sphinx, Jeff not bothering to switch off the engine. She hurried inside to find another customer. As she waved from the doorway with its camels and palm trees, I raised my right arm and called jokingly, 'Heil Hitler'. She returned a smile, the first I had seen from her. I never encountered this early supporter of Hitler again. But she was a Slav, and doubtless ended with a red line ruled through her name in a concentration camp.