The New Confessions

18 Berlin, Year Zero

I was full of astonishing optimism during my journey to Berlin. I felt, hard though it may be to credit, that my life was beginning again. Karl-Heinz was alive. Somehow, I knew we would finish The Confessions now, and though I had no idea what form it would take, I was sure it would come about. Too much lying around in hospital beds. Too many hours staring at the Pacific Ocean with nothing to occupy my mind, I hear you say. I had sent Karl-Heinz the money he had asked for; now all I had to do was find him.

However, that elation — that old exhilarating sense of potential — began to seep away as we flew over the city on our approach to Templehof. I had been prepared for an image of destruction, but the vision that confronted me that afternoon in March 1946 was not so much shocking as unreal in a bizarre, sinister way. Berlin was gone, its skyline vanished. When you stand in a city and look casually about you, you see towers, roofs, steeples, gables, chimneys, treetops. Light comes at you through angles and over inclines, sometimes squeezing in through alleyways, sometimes basting the general view in wide boulevards and parks. Berlin was not razed, the shells of buildings still stood, but it had lost all those idiosyncrasies that made it particular — that made it “Berlin.” Only the Funkturm stood tall and untouched above the devastated streets. Everything else was uniformly gray and everything had been battered.

How can I explain it? If you have ever seen a rugby team troop off the pitch at the end of a game played in exceptionally muddy conditions, you can bring to mind an analogue. The tired, tousled, dirty men seem suddenly the same size and thickness, all covered and clotted in mud. The slim, speedy winger is indistinguishable from the balding hooker with the beer belly. Their ordeal, their exhaustion and dishevelment, have homogenized them. And this is what had happened to Berlin. It was one large ruin. The city had fused.

I was billeted in a villa in Zehlendorf — west in the American sector. It was designated by the press bureau of the military government PSR-4, for some reason. There were half a dozen journalists staying there and it was run by a pale silent woman called Frau Hanf. She was tall and rather beautiful in an exhausted, strained sort of way, but she was the very paradigm of formality. I never dared ask her a personal question.

The next day we were taken on a tour of the city. My depression deepened. What overwhelmed me was the mess. It seemed impossible that it could ever be cleaned up. I could not imagine how a new city could ever emerge from this devastation. We drove up the Kurfürstendamm towards the Gedächtniskirche. The houses on either side were scorched shells, uneasy facades, set between vast rubble mounds. To my amazement, however, I saw bright signs and fresh paint, even neon. Shops, cafés, Lokale, were open and making a brave show of plying for trade. The streets were full of people, stooped and intent and walking uncharacteristically slowly for Berliners. Everywhere were gangs of grubby trousered women sorting through bricks. Opposite the church, the Gloria-Palast — where The Confessions: Part I had played for a week — was a tumbled crater of stone and concrete.

We drove on. Another tremendous shock. The Tiergarten had gone! gone completely, not a tree left. In its place were thousands of tatty garden plots. I was overwhelmed by this transformation. I tried to imagine Hyde Park, the Bois de Boulogne, Central Park, as vast vegetable gardens, all the trees cut down for fuel.…

On the Brandenburg Gate were red flags and pictures of Lenin. The stark white of the memorial to the Unknown Russian Soldier seemed almost obscene set against the miserable incinerated black of the buildings all around. The Dome, the Schloss, the Chancellery … the Adlon Hotel, Wilhelmstrasse … everything shattered or demolished. I looked out of the windows at the drear view, the gangs of women and POWs sifting through the debris, my mind a confusing sequence of “before” and “after.” Where was the Bristol, the Eden, the Esplanade? Where were the embassies, the theaters, the department stores? That pile of bricks had been the bar where I would have a drink after my stint as doorman at the Windsor. This space used to be Duric Lodokian’s house. That rubble mountain had been the hotel where Leo Druce had his wedding reception. Monika Alt used to live behind this cauterized facade.… And so on. It’s pointless to rehearse the conflict of emotions, the sweet and sour memories that day provoked. They lessened subsequently and with some speed. You can get used to anything. Normality is like some tenacious waste-ground weed: it will establish itself in the most unlikely places. But I never got used to what had happened to the river Spree. Perhaps because that first day I had arrived in Berlin in ’24, in the early morning before the city was up and about, I had walked along its banks from the Lehrter Station through a cold misty dawn. Now it was the city’s sewer, clogged and polluted, rimmed with scum and thick with effluent and excreta. Its strong ornamented bridges had all been destroyed and makeshift wooden spans replaced the shattered arches. It seemed almost too solid to flow, but if you could bear to stand long enough (you could hang a hat on the smell off it, as the Berliners used to say) you could see its surface shift and eddy after a fashion, as if it were a prototype river not yet perfected, an early design model now superseded and antiquated.

My diary. A typical day.

Berlin, March 25, 1946. Woke early after a bad night’s sleep. Frau Hanf obligingly provided me with an early breakfast of stewed fruit and porridge before the other journalists were up. I got her to sit and have some coffee with me by offering her a cigarette. I asked her what her husband had done before the war — she said he’d been a washing machine manufacturer. She has no idea where he is now. We talked about how one might set about finding a missing person. You can leave notices around the city, she said. There are even agencies that will track down relatives for a fee. The military government and the control commission are no use at all. She said this without resentment or bitterness.

Driven to the Kommandatura for a briefing on the next Four Powers meeting. Dull stuff. Talked to an American staff captain who said the Russians had not raped excessively. They were more interested in looting, he said. Given that most of the Russian troops were Asiatics he thought that the amount of raping in Berlin had been “about average.” He became very bitter, however, about the question of silk stockings. “More women in Berlin wear silk stockings than in Paris or London,” he insisted. Must see if I can confirm this.

Lunch at the WarCorrMess in the Hotel Am Zoo. Windsor soup, brisket of beef, dressed cabbage. Floated the silk stockings theory. Several people agreed. Wrote a small article for the Herald-Post on the matter. Late in afternoon took some photographs in a burned-out-tank park — v. dramatic

Saw Die Spur des Falken again. Bogart is excellent. Cinema freezing. Looked in at Dandy Bar. No sign of Henni. Home.

The Dandy Bar was in a small street just off the Kurfürstendamm. It was in the ground floor and basement of a ruined apartment block. In the vestibule there was a reception desk and a cloakroom. Stairs led to the basement, where there was a bar and tables and chairs set around a small stage and dance floor. The place had pretensions. Some of the walls were paneled, the wood salvaged from grander buildings, and there was a lot of red plush about. The tables had white cloths and the waiters wore uniforms. It was patronized almost exclusively by American soldiers — who had more-easygoing fraternization laws — and girls.

I went there the evening after my tour round the city. The bar was open but empty. A three-piece band of emaciated men in loose Hawaiian shirts played “Don’t Fence Me In” rather well. I showed the barman a photograph of Karl-Heinz. Yes, he said, he used to come here when it was the “old” Dandy Bar, before the management upgraded it. In the old days it was for homosexuals, “men and women,” he added liberally. Karl-Heinz hadn’t been seen since. “How long ago was that?” I asked. “Four, five months,” he said. And no, no letter for him had been delivered or collected. I left a message just in case and took to dropping in there most nights. It seemed the only thing I could do. A bottle of wine cost ten pounds and I once ate a meat dish there that someone later told me was spaniel.

During those first weeks in Berlin I did my job reasonably dutifully and associated with other journalists. I found myself very quickly caught up in the apathy and aimlessness that seemed to brew in the air above the ruined city. In a curious way it was a bit like Los Angeles, only here the constant climate was destitution and deprivation. Those of us exempt from these afflictions were still contaminated by the prevailing mood, like an airborne virus. The tone employed in conversation was one of bitchery and complaint. We sat in our basement nightclubs, drinking and eating our fill, moaning about our work and living conditions. Outside, the rest of the city went to hell.

It wasn’t that my zeal to find Karl-Heinz had diminished, it was that I couldn’t think of any other way of channeling it apart from sitting at the bar in the Dandy, drinking and listening to the band and hoping vaguely that he might look in. Sometimes I went to other clubs — Rio Rita’s, Femina, Tabasco — with their lesbians and stunning transvestites, the racketeers, the cigarette and chocolate smugglers with their expensive women. In spite of evidence to the contrary, one could live very well in Berlin in those days, if one could afford it. But I found, quite apart from its association with Karl-Heinz, that I preferred the Dandy’s shabby pretensions and its ever changing multitude of whores.

One evening I chatted to one of these girls. Henni. I had no sexual interest in her but the American press was desperate for vice stories from occupied Germany — how victorious GIs were being corrupted by conquered Frauleins—and as she was alone I thought I might get some “human interest” from her. Henni was a tall girl, with almost a subterranean pallor. She had thick fair hair that needed a wash. Her upper lip was long and it gave her a faintly doleful expression. She was drinking colored water and smoking a cigarette. She said she was waiting for a major in the 82nd Airborne but he never turned up. She told me that she had been in the chorus of the Deutsches Opernhaus. I offered her another cigarette and ordered a bottle of wine. After we had talked for half an hour, she gestured towards my pack of cigarettes and said, in English and without much enthusiasm, “You give me that, we go ficken.”

She took me back to the room she shared with her mother just off Savignyplatz. Her father, a music teacher, had poisoned himself in ‘45 when the Russians entered the city. Her mother, an old lady, smiled politely at me and left the room when we arrived. The room was small, very cold and neat. There were many pictures of cats on the walls. There was only one glass pane in the window that looked over a rubble-filled courtyard; the other holes were filled with cardboard.

Henni made a thin tea that we drank without sugar and milk. She put my cigarettes away in a cupboard.

“My mother will be delighted,” she said. “We can sell them tomorrow.” She gestured at the bed. “Shall we? Hunger is a great incentive for prostitution.”

I liked Henni. I found her intelligent dry efficacy entertaining and quite inoffensive. I went to the Dandy most nights, and when she was there returned home with her. I brought food and chocolate, but what she really wanted was cigarettes, the only hard currency in Berlin in those days. When I bought a carton of two hundred Lucky Strikes at the big post exchange in the American sector, I used to say to myself, “Ten nights with Henni.” Henni’s mother would take them down to the black market site in the Tiergarten and exchange them for food. Berlin was full of prostitutes in 1946, nearly all amateur ones. Three hundred thousand at least, one journalist said. It was, moreover, a city of women, three to every man. It was difficult for Henni to get regular clients, such was the competition, and there was something about her faintly doleful, faintly disdainful expression that put men off. Apart from me, she said she averaged three or four customers a week, and she never went with Russians.

I liked to lie in bed with her, chatting (her mother went down the hall to a neighbor’s room). It was warm in bed and we would lie there smoking Lucky Strikes and drinking whiskey. I told her about my days in Berlin. (She found it strange to think that we had shared the city before — that I might even have seen her as a little girl. “And look at us now,” she added.) She would tell me about her singing career and how she was looking forward to renewing it. One evening I asked her to sing me something and, straightaway, lying on her back, cigarette burning between her fingers, she sang in a pure clean voice “Wohin Sint die Goldenen Zeiten?” The haunting loveliness of the tune reduced me to tears.

April 10, 1946. Managed to get a car and driver to myself and went to a beach on the Havel for a picnic with Henni. We motored through the Grunewald, which is more or less untouched. A bright day with watery sun. Yachts and motorboats on the lake. Henni went swimming; I declined. She wore a dark-blue two-piece swimsuit and a red-and-white rubber bathing cap. She splashed energetically in the water then rushed out and flung herself on the sand to sunbathe. Beneath the wool of her costume I could see her nipples were hard and erect and the fair hair in her armpits was dark and sleek from the water.

I felt unaccountably depressed. If it hadn’t been for the khaki Chevrolets and the sprinkling of uniforms on the beach, we might have been back in the 1930s. What was I doing here prostituting this bright intriguing girl? I felt heavy with guilt. To expiate it I spent an hour telling her about myself as if sheer weight of information could transform me from a client to a person in her eyes. I told her about Karl-Heinz and my search for him, my dream of finishing The Confessions. She suggested matter-of-factly that I leave a poster outside Karl-Heinz’s former apartment saying I was looking for him. Everyone in Berlin used this method to trace missing friends and relatives. (Why hadn’t I thought of this?)

As we drove back into the city I sensed my guilt and awkwardness receding. I went back to her room for sex. The ruined city, I can see, is the true context of our relationship. But why do I want her to be at least fond of me?

I took the U-bahn back to FSR-4. It started to rain as I walked the few blocks to the house and I smelled the corpses. Most of the dead beneath the rubble have decomposed completely by now, but a shower of rain seems to call forth a final ghostly reek of putrefaction.

Back at Frau H.’s, a man I knew vaguely from Reuters — just arrived — asked me if I know a Monroe Smee. I had forgotten all about Smee. I said I knew him in Hollywood before the war. Why? “I was in L.A.,” this man said, “and I met him. He was very curious to hear what had become of you.”

Tomorrow I go to Stralauer Allee. Frau H. serves up an interesting dinner. Two small carp and a sauce made from black bread, beer, onions, carrots and gingerbread seasoning.

Berlin in those days was one huge noticeboard. On every available surface were nailed, pinned or stuck printed notices and handbills. Most sought news of people who had at one time occupied the now-ruined houses, but there were also want ads and for-sale signs. Someone in our street, for example, wanted to buy a pair of skis. I wrote out my own notice in red ink asking for information about the whereabouts of Karl-Heinz Kornfeld, former occupant of 129B, and, armed with hammer and nails, set off.

The block was almost completely destroyed and the nearby Spree smelled particularly purulent. I hammered the notice on the doorjamb and stood back. What could make Karl-Heinz want to return to this ruin? Sentiment? Very unlikely.… Spring was well advanced and the piles of masonry were green with weeds. I felt a sudden helplessness. Henni had told me that twenty-five thousand refugees arrived in Berlin each day at the moment. How was I going to find Karl-Heinz among all these people? I realized I should have gone at once to the missing persons agencies that Frau Hanf had told me about. I was irritated by my procrastination. My Berlin aimlessness had cost me several weeks. I looked at my notice stuck to the door. The street had several of these requests for information. Did anybody ever read these things, or was it just a typical Berliner illusion of getting something done? I went back to PSR-4 without much confidence.

However, I resolved to make one final effort. With Frau Hanf’s help I discovered the names and addresses of two agencies and approached them with Karl-Heinz’s details. They were not sanguine. They hinted that he might not even be in Berlin anymore. Four million German refugees, they told me, had fled westwards or had been expelled from Russian-occupied countries since the war had ended. Perhaps Herr Kornfeld had gone with them? They would see what they could do.

About a week after these visits I went to see Meine Frau die Hexe at the cinema. I’m not sure what stimulated my memory — I think one of the extras reminded me of his secretary — but I thought suddenly of Eugen P. Eugen. Was he still alive? He might be worth trying. I thought of our earlier encounters. The man was tenacious, there was no denying that, and unscrupulous. Conceivably, he might be more efficient than the harassed agencies.

The building that had contained Eugen’s offices had been completely destroyed, along with the rest of Fehmarnstrasse. Indeed the street had not yet been cleared; only a meandering path ran through the rubble hills. I knew I was in the right place because I could see the burned and shattered blocks of the infectious-diseases hospital a few hundred yards away. Then as I walked back to Putlitzstrasse Station I had an idea. Ten minutes’ further searching uncovered the small café where Eugen used to lunch. What had he been eating that day when he told me Sonia had beaten him up? Cucumbers? Cabbage? Sausage?… Yes, it was cabbage — I remembered the smell.

The cellar café still existed and was open. Above it teetered the facade of a house, shored up with wooden buttresses. Somehow I knew Eugen would be there.

Of course, he wasn’t. Life is rarely that accommodating, but the proprietor said there was a good chance he would be in that evening.

When I returned at seven, half a dozen people sat in silence staring at watery beers in front of them and trying not to look at a small man eating avidly and noisily in a corner. I knew it was Eugen, though I would scarcely have recognized him. He was gaunt and his blond hair was gone. He wore a collarless gray-flannel shirt and a green uniform jacket. On his bald pate were three large scabs. I sat down opposite him.

“Herr Eugen?”

He looked up.

“My name is Todd. You did a job for me, a long time ago, 1928.…”

He stared at me and frowned.

“My God,” he said. “My God, yes. And then we met again in Switzerland. With Miss Bogan.”

We shook hands.

“How is Miss Bogan?”

“She’s fine.”

“Good, good. I am a great admirer.”

Neither of us seemed to want to reminisce about our last encounter. I told him what I required of him. He screwed up his face.

“Difficult. Almost impossible.” He paused. “Have you got a cigarette? You’re sure he’s in Berlin?”

We discussed the problems, then his fee. We settled on five hundred cigarettes. Somehow the transaction seemed to rejuvenate him. I could see the tiny dapper blond man in him again, like his soul.

“Can I offer you some food? They say these are rabbit rissoles. It may not be rabbit, but there is certainly a minimum of sawdust.”

I declined politely. We were awkward with each other. Two decades intervened.

“It’s strange to meet again,” he said. “I can’t tell you how distressed I was — the last time. I felt most embarrassed.” He laughed. “Which is most unusual in my trade. Not like me at all.”

He then embarked upon a long angry complaint about a burned-out tank that still hadn’t been removed from the end of the street where he lived. I commiserated with him.

“What do you think of our wonderful city?” he said with sudden bitterness.

“It’s terrible,” I said. “I couldn’t believe it, at first.”

“Can you imagine London, Paris, so totally destroyed?”

I thought about it. Buckingham Palace razed, Nelson’s Column toppled, Sacré-Coeur a heap of white rubble, all the bridges gone across the Thames and the Seine, the Grand Palais open to the sky …

“It’s hard,” I admitted. I was about to remind him who had started the destruction business off, but I changed the subject. I asked him where he would start looking for Karl-Heinz.

“Berlin is full of gangs,” he said, “deserters, displaced persons, refugees. They live in holes in the ground. I’ll make some inquiries with the police.” He smiled proudly. “I still have my contacts there.”

April 23, 1946. Interminable press conference at Lancaster House — British HQ — announcing the failure of discussions for pooling food supplies in the four sectors. Talk to a British soldier who says the officers “are living like gods” in Berlin while the other ranks are confined to barracks. Everywhere is out of bounds to the British enlisted man. “We are an army of gentlemen and floor wipers,” he says. It is not like this in the American sector.

To the Dandy Bar. Henni tells me she had the chance of a job in Hamburg teaching music in a school. She thinks she should get her mother out of Berlin. I encourage her. To her room for one hour, then back to PSR-4 in time for a late supper. I think Frau Hanf has developed a soft spot for me; she remembers seeing Julie. I tell her what has become of Doon.

April 24, 1946. Saw a film poster today—Der Ausgleicher, a Western. I almost walked past it until I translated the title and saw “ein Film von J. J. Todd.” Word soon got out in the WarCorrMess and I find I am something of a celebrity. Two of my colleagues interview me. Curious to have a film playing in Berlin again.

A message from Eugen. We are to meet tomorrow in the Dandy Bar at midday.

Eugen wasn’t actually allowed in the bar because he was too badly dressed. I arrived to find him arguing with the doorman. I led him away and calmed him down. He was close to tears.

“My God! In the old days I wouldn’t have looked into a stinking dive like that!” he said. “I belonged to five clubs. Five. Very select. The most exclusive places.”

“Have you found him?”

“What? Yes. Yes, I think so.”

He calmed down when I gave him his cigarettes.

He took me off somewhere in the French sector. There were Tricolors everywhere. I think the French were enjoying occupying Berlin just as much as the Russians. We abandoned the car and walked through a partially cleared street. Tremendous fires had raged here and the buildings were quite black with soot. It was a cool cloudy day with occasional drizzle. From time to time the fresh wind unpeeled a patch of encrusted soot from the walls and sent it dancing through the air like a stiff black handkerchief. We turned a corner and came to an open space, once a small square perhaps. Beyond it, the houses had been completely flattened and we found we were in a brick wasteland, big as a soccer field, pretty with copious weeds and wildflowers. Here and there people seemed to be camping in hollows burrowed in the rubble. A crowd of about thirty gathered round a blazing bonfire.

With some difficulty Eugen and I made our way across the uneven ground towards a half-demolished church. I felt most peculiar. I could hardly believe I was going to meet Karl-Heinz. I felt childishly tearful and full of trepidation. I stumbled badly and my leg began to ache.

The roof of the church had gone and so had all the pews and furniture — for firewood, I assumed. Many people seemed to be living there, sitting docilely against the wall guarding bundles of possessions, or crouched over tiny fires cooking food in steaming pots. We went down into the crypt. It was lit by electric light, to my surprise, and was very smoky. Eugen spoke to a young woman with one arm. I looked around: the place was full of young people — boys and girls. She pointed her stump towards the back of the room.

We walked towards the rear past a row of makeshift rickety tables. Half a dozen people sat at them; they seemed to be rolling cigarettes but I couldn’t be sure, I only glanced at them.

Then I saw Karl-Heinz.

He was cooking something over a large woodburning stove that was responsible for all the smoke. He wore a thick, crudely cut greatcoat that came down to his ankles. His hair had recently been shaved off and was now a patchy prickly furze. It was mostly gray. He was very thin and his grizzled neck and jaw looked like those of an old man, slack flesh and stretched sinew, no firmness. He looked up and turned. His eyebrows were the same dark circumflexes. He smiled. A few teeth had gone.

“Hello, Johnny,” he said, simply. We embraced. He stank. But it reminded me of that day in 1924, at 129B Stralauer Allee.

I don’t mind telling you that I wept. I blubbed. I was happy to see him and at the same time unbearably sad. He was only a couple of years older than me but he looked like my father. We sat down around the stove and he insisted on serving up a miserable lunch. A soup of breadcrumbs and salt in hot water and potatoes fried in old coffee grounds scavenged from U.S. Army messes.

“At least it gives them a taste,” he said.

While we ate Karl-Heinz told me briefly about his war. He had been declared unfit for military service because of his ulcer, which, owing to wartime deprivations and the crudity of the liquor he consumed, had flared up in 1942. He carried on working in the theaters while they were open. He was in Hamburg for a while and then Munich. However, as the war neared its end he was drafted into a special battalion of men all suffering from stomach disorders. They were sent east of Berlin to face the Russians as they advanced.

“It was a very strange unit, Johnny. We talked about nothing except our health, our doctors. Ninety-five percent of us had ulcers.” I tried without success to imagine this unit.

By the time they had retreated from the Ringbahn to Potsdamer Platz, Karl-Heinz decided that this was the moment to desert and go to ground. For three months he pretended to be insane.

“Best performance of my life,” he said with a thin smile.

“What did you do?”

“Not while we’re eating, Johnny, please.”

I looked around at the disabled youngsters. “What’s going on here?”

“Well, I had to live. I became a Kippensammler. I collected cigarette butts. Then I decided to become an entrepreneur. There were all these young people living in the ruins. I got them to collect cigarette ends for me. It takes about seven butts to make a new cigarette. We sell them for two marks each. I pay them some money and we buy food on the black market. For a while we did well, but then everybody started doing it. Life had got hard again. But then you arrive …” He smiled. “My God, Johnny, you remember the day we met in Weilburg, 1918?” He stopped suddenly. The thought of all that time in between seemed to unsettle him. His smile faded. It unsettled me too. It is one of the least happy consequences of aging. All that “past” seems to mass behind the present, rendering it insignificant and nugatory. I thought of our two lives. All that effort, all those years, to end up eating coffee-flavored potatoes in the crypt of a bombed-out church. Around us the ruins of the third-largest city in the world. And there was still the future to come.

“I want you to come away with me,” I said to him. “We must get you to America.”

“Very nice idea,” he said. “What for?”

“We’re going to finish The Confessions.”

I think for the first time in the twenty-eight years we had known each other, Karl-Heinz looked at me with unalloyed admiration.

I found Karl-Heinz a place to stay not far from Henni’s building. I read a notice in the street that there was a room to let in a basement apartment. The young family who owned it were delighted to welcome him. The wife had seen him onstage many times. I bought him some clothes, gave him money for food, had him deloused and medically examined and secured him some false teeth and a new set of papers. All that was comparatively easy. Getting him out of the country seemed impossible.

Finally, I learned of a special Home Office scheme that had been created to allow German nationals the opportunity to rejoin members of their families in Britain. I applied on Karl-Heinz’s behalf, saying that he was a half brother of Mungo Dale and that there was accommodation and a job for him at Drumlarish. This claim was met with some skepticism. Proof was called for. I had conspired with Mungo and he obligingly wrote to the authorities saying that Karl-Heinz was the offspring of his mother’s second marriage and that he had spent many summers with the family before the Great War. They had rather lost contact with him since Mrs. Dale had died, but would be delighted to welcome him back to the Dale household once more.

In Berlin a search was instigated for documents to verify the story. It would take time, I was told, and in the end might be futile — so much had been destroyed. By this stage we were almost into June.

In the end I solved my problem by blackmailing a wing commander in the RAF (later Air Marshal Lord D—) who was suitably placed in the hierarchy of the military government to give the authorization. He was making a fortune by flying stolen antiques back to London dealers in RAF planes (an open secret in WarCorrMess). He was not alone. I could give the names of half a dozen high-ranking British officers who secured a comfortable postwar income for themselves based on German loot. This particular man was completely unperturbed when I put the deal to him. He said no editor of a British newspaper would dare print the story. I pointed out that I worked for an American newspaper and was not similarly constrained. He signed and had Karl-Heinz’s papers drawn up and authorized while I waited. As I left, he said, “It’s little shits like you who voted Winston out of office.”

Karl-Heinz left Berlin before me, but his journey took longer. As a low-priority passenger he was held up, reprocessed, delayed and misdirected. His papers were in order, that was the main thing. In the end that fact alone made it inevitable that he would reach his destination.

I said good-bye to Henni with much regret and real sadness. Her job in Hamburg had fallen through. But she had heard from Karl-Heinz’s landlady that I had secured him passage out of Berlin and asked if I could do the same for her and her mother. I had to say no. I told her to be patient. Life in Berlin couldn’t be like this forever. On our last night together we lay in her thin bed, smoking and drinking as usual — both of us, I think, trying to pretend that we would be doing this again the next evening.

“Are you married?” Henni asked.

“No.”

“Will you marry me?”

“What?”

“Marry me.”

“Good God.”

“Don’t you like me?”

“Of course I do.”

“Well, then.… We can get divorced as soon as we’re in England.”

“I’m not going to England, I’m going to America.”

“Even better.”

“I’m not American, though. I have to apply for a permit.”

“But if they let you in, surely they’ll let your wife in too. And your mother-in-law.”

I wanted to say that I’d already been married to a German and it had only lasted six months.

“Look,” I said. “I’m an old man. I’m forty-seven years old. Twenty-five years older than you. You can’t marry me. It would be a terrible mistake.”

“Oh, all right,” she said. “My mother said I should try. She likes you — much better than Major Arbogast.”

“Who the hell’s he?”

“He’s my other man who comes here.”

I felt hurt, then foolish. “You’ll be all right,” I said reassuringly. I’m sure she was.

I left the city on a mild June day; the usual cocktail of emotions bubbled in my brain. This was the city that had made my career and reputation. It had brought me Doon. It had also undone me, in a way, too. And now it was undone itself. I had a funny feeling I would be seeing it again, so I didn’t bother to look out of the window when the USAF DC-3 took off from Tempelhof. I was wrong. It was a shame. I never came back.

VILLA LUXE, June 28, 1972

A gorgeous, stifling, unbearably hot day. I wonder if I might try the path down to the beach today. I can get down there not too badly; it’s the coming back that does for me. There is a small row of stone sheds in the cove where the fishermen keep their boats. I watch these old codgers as they come back up the path after a day’s work. They certainly don’t stride, but their plod never falters. A couple of them look even older than me. How come they can do it and I can’t? Perhaps I should ask Ulrike to take me round by boat.…

It was a hot day in 1946 when Karl-Heinz and I traveled up by train to Scotland. We sat in the thick warm air of the compartment, looking at the English countryside bright in its summer clichés. We stopped, inexplicably, for two hours outside Doncaster — or was it Peterborough? I remember vaguely that Karl-Heinz and I talked about the war and its terrible consequences. I recall one thing he said. “Why did you let him, it, happen?” I had asked him. “Couldn’t you see?”

“Well, I tell you, John,” he said. “One thing about the German people — we’re very like the British in this — we have no social courage. That’s why we make good soldiers and bad citizens.”

“Haven’t you? Haven’t we?”

“No. Not really. Don’t you think it’s true? We never complain. Neither do you. It’s always a bad sign in a population.”

We spent a couple of days in Edinburgh in a hotel in Princes Street. I took Karl-Heinz to meet my father, an encounter I’d long relished the thought of. Innes — Dad — had sold his home and now lived in an old folks’ home in Peebles, twenty miles from Edinburgh in the Tweed Valley and not far from Minto Academy. My father was eighty-four. I can see him now, his big arthritic knuckles trembling ever so slightly on his two walking sticks. We took tea with him on the terrace of the rather grand house he lived in (it’s a hotel now) on a hill overlooking the town and the fresh green park beside the fast brown river. We talked about this and that.

“So, what’re you going to do now, John?”

“Well, I’m going back to America. Karl-Heinz and I are going to finish a film we started a while ago.”

“God Almighty!” He had grown more profane as he had aged. “Finish? When did you start it?”

“Nineteen twenty-six.”

He shook his head sadly.

“Your son is a great artist, Mr. Todd,” Karl-Heinz said. “Truly.”

My father looked at Karl-Heinz as if to say, “Him? That joker?”

“He is,” Karl-Heinz said.

“There’s no need to be polite on my account, Mr. Kornfeld. I know my son well enough. Full of daft schemes from the day he was born.” His face darkened a moment. I knew he was thinking about my mother — my birth and her death inseparable. “I knew he’d never amount to much.”

We laughed politely.

Then he took one of his hands off a stick and patted me on the knee. He left his hand there, lightly, light as a napkin.

“Not like his brother, now. Done very well for himself, has Thompson. Rich man, successful, lovely family. Grandmaster of the lodge.”

I wasn’t upset. I looked at the old man. He wouldn’t give an inch. Eighty-four and as intractable as ever.

“You’re a difficult bugger, aren’t you, Innes?” I said. “Here, have another cup of tea and shut up.”

He laughed. Quite long and hard. Then he took his hand off my knee.

It was only after we left him that I realized his touch on my knee had been the only affectionate physical contact between us since I was a child. It brings tears to my eyes as I sit here and think about it now. That gesture carries a heavy cargo.

I never saw my father again. He died peacefully in his sleep one night in the winter of 1948.