The Other Side of Silence

SIXTEEN

The red beam from the lighthouse tracked across the Villa Mauresque as if searching the blue night sky for an enemy bomber to target but finding only me and Somerset Maugham seated side by side, next to the almost motionless swimming pool, and alerting each of us to the possibility that one of us might bring some as yet unknown harm to the other. He remained very still, and whenever the red light crossed his creased features, turning them the color of blood, he reminded me of a sort of vampire. I had been silent for a long moment and the old Englishman was sensitive enough to see that I had been much affected by the telling of this painful story—more affected than I could have imagined. It had been more than ten years, after all, and I hadn’t even got to the good bit.

“It’s been a while since I talked about it,” I told him. “If it comes to that, I don’t think I’ve ever talked about it. Frankly, it’s not the sort of thing you bring up over a beer and a sausage.”

“I’m sorry,” he said.

I tapped a fingernail against the cocktail gong. It sounded just like my heart. Or so I wanted to believe. How else was I going to finish my story? I swallowed hard and kept on going.

“Königsberg was surrendered to the Russians on April ninth, nineteen forty-five, after which I and ninety thousand other German soldiers were marched off into captivity. Me, I was one of the lucky ones. Someone helped me to escape, in nineteen forty-seven. Most of us died, however. I believe General Lasch was only repatriated about nine months ago. Meanwhile, the city was renamed Kaliningrad in July nineteen forty-six, in honor of some murderous Bolshevik, and cleansed of its entire German population. Many of those people unfortunate enough not to have fled the city were just forced into the countryside, where they starved or died of the cold. Today the only Germans left there are probably the statues of Immanuel Kant and Schiller.”

“But what happened to Irmela? What happened when she reached Germany? You can’t end the story there. Surely you haven’t finished.”

“I have if you want a happy ending.”

“I don’t like happy endings. I like an ending to be ambiguous because that’s the way life is. But wait a moment. Where’s the happy ending in you being sent off to a Soviet labor camp? That doesn’t make sense.”

“I’m still here, aren’t I? That’s about as happy as this story gets, I’m afraid.”

Maugham nodded. “Beginnings are much more enjoyable, it’s true. I sometimes think that novelists should never be allowed to write their own endings. Because this is where fiction p-parts company with reality. In real life we never actually recognize when something has truly ended. Which makes wrapping up a book in just one or two chapters almost impossible.”

I nodded and lit a cigarette. I’d smoked too much and my throat felt dry—too dry to continue speaking, but I knew he wasn’t going to let me stop there. I poured another gimlet from the pitcher and swallowed it—for medicinal purposes, of course.

“Nevertheless,” he said, “we both know there’s another ending to your story that you haven’t yet shared with me. After all these years there has to be.”

I nodded again. “Yes, there is.”

“I think you’d better tell me, don’t you?”

I took a breath and dived in.

“All right, sir. After Hennig and I met with Irmela and persuaded her to send the unencrypted signal—which was more difficult than might have been thought—he lent me a car and I drove her from Königsberg to Gotenhafen, a distance of about two hundred kilometers, along a road that was sometimes jammed with civilians trying to escape from the Red Army. Some even chose to take a shortcut across the frozen sea, often with disastrous results. Meanwhile, the weather grew steadily worse with strong winds, snow, and below-freezing temperatures. Conditions on the road were so bad we almost didn’t reach the ship before it set sail, so there was little time for a proper good-bye. I wish I’d said more to her. You always do. I suppose given the speed with which we coupled, it makes just as much sense that we should have uncoupled so quickly. Everything we did back then was done in a hurry. A last-minute thing. She kissed me quickly and then bounded up the gangway of the Wilhelm Gustloff while I stood there like a useless capstan feeling a horrible mixture of relief that she was on board and real fear that I might never see her again.

“Not that the ship looked to me to be anything but seaworthy, although I’m no sailor. Much later on I learned that for the best part of five years the Gustloff had been docked at the pier in Gotenhafen, where it had been used first as a hospital ship for German soldiers wounded in Norway, and then as a floating barracks for trainees in the submarine division of the German navy. Consequently, the ship’s engines hadn’t been in operation for all that time and most of the skeleton crew wasn’t even German, but it was only supposed to be a three-day voyage, so this didn’t seem like a problem for a ship launched in nineteen thirty-seven. And certainly not as much of a problem as the sheer number of people who had boarded her. It was hard to say how many had crowded onto the ship to escape the Russians, but some estimates put it as high as twelve thousand, including a crew of one hundred and seventy-three. Back in the day it had been designed to accommodate fourteen hundred passengers and four hundred crew. So you can imagine what the scene at Gotenhafen was like. A vision of hell, perhaps. A Doré wood engraving of the Inferno. It goes almost without saying that there were not enough lifeboats, nor were there enough life vests, and in all respects, the ship was woefully ill-prepared for any kind of emergency. With so many people on board, nearly all of the exits and gangways were blocked and there was no time to practice any emergency drills. Also there were only two escort vessels to provide some sort of protection against Russian submarines. Because of the extreme cold, one of the two escort vessels—a torpedo boat—developed a crack in its hull and was forced to return to Gotenhafen. Which left just one escort vessel. The Löwe. Not only that, but a group of German minesweepers operating in the area of the Bay of Danzig was deemed to be in danger of colliding with the Gustloff, and so a decision was taken to turn on the ship’s navigation lights. Which went against all naval practice in wartime.

“Of course, all that would have been bad enough, but after the unencrypted message that Hennig forced Irmela to send on an open radio channel, there were already three Russian submarines heading for the area when the Gustloff set sail. At the submarine base in the Finnish port of Turku, they’d heard the same open-microphone message regarding the Gustloff and the Amber Room as the Russian Baltic naval headquarters in Kronstadt, and confusion now reigned about exactly what to do next. Eventually, the captain of one Russian submarine, the S-13, sighted the Gustloff lit up like a Christmas tree, radioed HQ for further instructions, and was ordered to shadow the ship but hold fire. Because it was night, the S-13 felt safe enough to surface, and then awaited clarification regarding the Gustloff and its priceless cargo from Kronstadt HQ, which had itself been desperately seeking a final decision from the Kremlin. Finally, the Kremlin responded: At all costs the Gustloff was not to be sunk.

“Unfortunately, the captain of the S-13 was a drunk named Alexander Marinesko, who was already facing a court-martial for a previous bender. He was probably drunk when he decoded the message from Kronstadt, and in the decryption of his orders it seems that he must have made a fatal flaw, probably omitting the word ‘not’ from his plaintext message. Minutes later, at eight forty-five p.m. on January thirtieth, nineteen forty-five, he ordered four torpedoes loaded into the S-13’s forward-firing tubes. At nine fifteen he gave the order to fire, and three of the torpedoes hit their target.

“I can hardly imagine what it must have been like. The snow, the cold, the freezing water, the high seas, the dark. All of the naval auxiliary women, including Irmela Schaper, were quartered in the empty swimming pool on the ship’s lowest deck, and they were probably killed instantly by the second torpedo. Others were not so lucky. Thousands of passengers were drowned inside the ship as water flooded in through the damaged hull. Thousands more jumped into the water and were drowned or quickly succumbed to hypothermia and died. The ship sank to the bottom of the Baltic Sea less than an hour after the torpedoes hit, with the loss of over nine thousand lives, making the Gustloff the largest single loss of life in maritime history. Eight thousand of them were women and children. By contrast, just fifteen hundred people were lost on the Titanic.”

“Good God,” said Maugham. “I had no idea. I mean, I’ve never even heard of the Wilhelm Gustloff.”

“Two thousand people survived, among them Captain Harold Hennig—obviously—and many of the Gustloff’s worthless crew, including the ship’s captain, Friedrich Petersen. Hennig was one of almost five hundred men who managed to get into lifeboats and who were rescued by Gustloff’s escort vessel, the Löwe. Within less than forty-eight hours, these people were all safely landed in Kolberg, some two hundred and fifty kilometers to the west of Danzig. As for the Amber Room, it’s by no means certain it was on the ship. Later on there were rumors that this was just a lie—disinformation to try and dissuade the Russians from sinking the ship—and that the Amber Room was actually transferred onto a train for Germany. But if it was on the ship it went to the bottom of the Baltic Sea with all those people, including Irmela and her unborn child.

“Of course, if she hadn’t been on that ship she might easily have died on any of the other ships carrying German refugees that were sunk in the winter of nineteen forty-five. The Goya, on which seven thousand people lost their lives. The Cap Arcona, on which another seven thousand also died. And the Steuben, on which three and a half thousand Germans died. Six months later, the S-13’s captain, Marinesko, was dismissed from the Russian navy. And that’s as much as I know, most of it from a book about the Gustloff that was published about four years ago, which is the factual account of a survivor. Until I saw Harold Heinz Hennig checking into the Grand Hôtel in Cap Ferrat under the name of Harold Hebel, that was the last I’d seen or heard of him in more than ten years. Now you know why I hate him so much. And what kind of man we’re dealing with.”

“And after the war? What happened to him? Why was he never brought to justice?”

“He was much too small a fish for anyone to bother with. The Allies were after more important Nazis. Believe me, no one gave a damn about Harold Hennig. And that is especially true now as the Federal Republic of Germany tries to move on and become a good partner for America and Britain in the war against world Communism. These days, justice takes second place to pragmatism. But Erich Koch was arrested in nineteen forty-nine and is in a Polish prison awaiting trial for war crimes. The Poles have a different attitude than the Bonn Republic about the deaths of half a million Poles. Frankly, I don’t give much for his chances. My guess is that they’ll hang him and good riddance. If ever a man deserved to be hanged, it’s Erich Koch. Not that Hennig doesn’t deserve to be killed a hundred times over for what he did, too.”

“And yet in spite of what he did, you said you didn’t want to kill him. I think under the circumstances—if I’d lost what you lost—I would have killed him.”

“I didn’t say I didn’t want to kill him. I said I wasn’t going to kill him. There’s a big difference. I’m through with all that kind of thing. It’s me I’m thinking about now, not him. My own peace of mind versus my own tawdry revenge. I have to live with myself. Even at the best of times I can be poor company.”

“But if Hebel is Harold Hennig and was once a Nazi, how is it possible that he could be working for the Communists now? For Soviet intelligence? Surely they must know about his Nazi past?”

“The KGB or the HVA doesn’t care about who you were and what you did any more than the American CIA does. What matters is how they can use you to their present advantage. After the war, the East German HVA—that’s the foreign intelligence service of the GDR—recruited lots of Nazis at the behest of the Russians. They perfected many of the Gestapo’s techniques. Almost nothing changed except the ideology. The fact is they’re still the Gestapo in all but name. And if you’re an enemy of the state who’s facing the guillotine or ten years in a labor camp, there’s nothing to distinguish between a Communist German tyranny and a Nazi one. It’s the same Fascism but with a different flag. If the shit looks and smells the same as it did before, it’s still shit.”

“I suppose so.”

“Take my word for it. I know these people.” I smiled. “I should, since they’re my people.”

“You scare me, Walter. I know that isn’t your real name but I can’t imagine you’d feel comfortable with me using that, so I will just go on calling you Walter, or Mr. Wolf. But the world you describe isn’t a world with which I am familiar. Not anymore. In nineteen seventeen it was all a bit of a lark, really—spying on the Russians. Look, what I’m saying is, I’d appreciate your help with all this. I’m an old man. And it strikes me that these people are playing a game I’m no longer qualified to play. My offer—that you should come and be my bodyguard—it still stands.”

I wanted nothing to do with it all, of course. What did it matter to me what this Burgess fellow had said about the British SIS on the tape? I’d never cared much for the English. In two wars against Germany I’d seen how they were capable of fighting to the last American. And yet in spite of my commendable moral stance on the subject of Harold Hennig, there was a part of me that wanted to see this vile man brought down, and for good. I liked the old man and I think he liked me. If I could help him defeat a blackmailer like Hennig then that would be some kind of payback for what he’d done to Irmela and, in a smaller way, to me.

“I don’t think so, Mr. Maugham. But I’ll be happy to partner you in this rubber. That’s the least I can do. But in return you can do me a favor and say hello to a lady friend of mine who’s keen to meet you. She’s a writer, too.”

“All right. I’ll be glad to. If she’s a friend of yours.”

“So, tomorrow, when Hebel gives me the tape, I’ll bring it straight here to the villa and you can listen to it and decide what to do then. And if you think I can still be of service to you—well, let’s wait until tomorrow, shall we?”

After telling my story I got back in the car and went away with a hole inside me where before a heart and stomach had once been coexisting. That’s the thing about the past; it never quite belongs as much to the past as you think it does. I hadn’t thought about Irmela or her unborn child in a long time, but I still bitterly regretted their passing. The idea that I could have talked about them both with impunity now seemed risible. Time hadn’t healed anything, and I think people who say time makes things better really don’t know what the hell they’re talking about. For me, it was an inoperable tumor that I’d managed to ignore for more than a decade; but the tumor was still there. Probably it was going to stay with me until I died.

You could say I was feeling a bit sorry for myself and perhaps I was also a little drunk because instead of driving straight home I somehow found myself ignoring the lobster pot where I lived and heading out of town and up the hill toward Anne French’s villa. I told myself that if you spend enough time around homosexuals, you begin to feel the need to redress the balance with the company of a congenial woman. It’s not much of an excuse for what I was doing but I couldn’t think of a better one.

I stopped in front of the gate posts, lit a cigarette, and stared along the drive at the house. The lights in her bedroom were on and for a moment I just sat there, imagining Anne in bed and wondering if I was about to make a stupid mistake and spoil everything between us. What would a woman like her want with a man who owned as pitifully little as I? Apart from bridge lessons.

I almost turned around and drove away. Instead I drove slowly up the drive and stopped the engine. Discretion might be the better part of valor, but it has no business between men and women on a warm summer’s night on the French Riviera. I hoped I wouldn’t offend her, but being drunk I was willing to take that risk. So I opened the car door, stepped out, and cocked an ear. Coming from the guesthouse was the sound of a large radio and someone trying vainly to tune it to a more reliable frequency. A few moments later the radio was turned off, the door opened, and Anne came outside wearing just a short, almost see-through cotton nightdress. It was a very warm evening. The cicadas showed their appreciation of her cleavage and shapely legs with an extra loud click of their abdomens. I certainly felt like giving my own abdomen a bit of action, too.

“Oh, I’m glad it’s you,” she said. “I thought it might be the gardener.”

“At this time of night?”

“Lately he’s been giving me a funny look.”

“Maybe you should let him water the flower beds.”

“I don’t think that’s what he has in mind.”

“The heat we’ve been having? He’s in the wrong job.”

“Did you come here to mow my lawn, or just to talk?”

“Talk, I guess.”

“So, what’s your story?”

“I’m all out of stories tonight. Fact is, Anne, I’m feeling just a bit sad.”

“And you thought I might cheer you up, is that it?”

“Something like that. I know it’s a bit late.”

“Too late for bridge, I’d have thought.”

“I’m sorry, but I just wanted to see you.”

“Don’t apologize. Actually, I’m glad you’re here. I was feeling a little sad myself.” She paused. “I was listening to the BBC World Service news on the shortwave. And now that I have I wish I hadn’t. Apparently the Egyptians have nationalized the Suez Canal and closed it to all Israeli shipping.”

“What does that mean?”

“Well, for one thing, it means the price of oil is going to go up. But I think it also means there’s going to be a war.”

“When we haven’t finished paying for the last one? I doubt that.”

She shrugged. “A last throw of the dice from Britain and France to prove that these old colonial powers still matter? After all, it’s them who administer the canal. Of course. Why not?” She smiled. “But you didn’t come up here to talk international politics, did you?”

“We can if you like. Just as long as I don’t have to vote for anyone. That never changed anything. Even in the good old days.”

“How old?”

“Very old. Old enough to be good. Before the Nazis, anyway. Speaking of the very old, I spent the evening with Somerset Maugham. At the Villa Mauresque.”

“How is he?”

“Getting strangely older by the minute, if that were humanly possible.”

“Makes two of us.”

“Not that I’ve noticed.”

“You’d be surprised. The longer I stay parted from that fifty-thousand-dollar publishing advance, the older I feel.”

In the car, I’d resolved to tell her everything; if I was going to risk my neck for the Englishman there had to be something in it for me, and that something had started to look like it might just be Anne French.

“Then it’s good that I’m here. I’ve got some news that should make you and your publisher very happy. I’ve persuaded Somerset Maugham to meet with you.”

This was making more of my effort on her behalf than was perhaps warranted, of course, but it sounded like the sort of thing she probably wanted to hear, which, for obvious reasons, was the kind of thing I was keen to tell her.

“When?”

“Soon.”

“Really? That’s fantastic.”

“I wouldn’t be too sure about that. Frankly, I think he is a kind of vampire.”

“All authors are a bit like that.”

“I wouldn’t know. But I feel like I lost a lot of blood up there tonight. I feel drained.”

“Then you’d better come in the house and let me mix you a transfusion.”

“I think I’ve had enough to drink already.”

“Something else then. Coffee, perhaps.”

“Are you sure? It is late. Maybe I should go.”

“Look, Walter, I’ve never been one for knowing what I should and shouldn’t do. I always wanted to be good but now I realize I should have been a little less specific. Especially now you’re here. Now I think I just want to be wanted.” She shrugged off the nightdress like an extra skin and stood there naked in the moonlight. “You do want me, don’t you, Walter?”

“Yes.”

“Then let’s go in before I change my mind, or I get bitten by something while I’m standing here naked. A mosquito, perhaps.”

“Not if I get there first.”