Good People (27 page)

‘Weller, look at those elegant women,' said Thomas. ‘Those are hats by Paul Poiret, I can recognise his work, always stylish, but never too much. Our branch in Paris worked with him.'

They made way for the young women to pass, who nodded in thanks. Their silvery grey eyes dwelled on Weller and Thomas, before they looked away into the sky.

‘Are they thanking us or Göring's aeroplanes?' Thomas laughed. He was always cheerful in the presence of gloomy people. Not because he felt ill will towards them, but because it relieved him to see that unhappiness afflicted everyone. Someone was sad, you were happy and the next day it was the opposite. ‘If you told me that all my problems were routine, typical of the age, or even just of Germans, I would thank you and be off, and glorify your holy name forever,' he once said to Erika Gelber, who, even after many years of therapy, didn't always understand when he was being facetious.

The women passed a group of soldiers who were stopping men in the street, putting shovels in their hands and leading them to a ravaged building in which only the outer walls remained, like the wings of a bodiless bird.

They walked by a row of bare trees that reminded Thomas of an honour guard stripped of its colours. Beyond that were stores selling expensive housewares, clothing and jewellery, and a teashop where women sat, bundled up in their coats.

‘War is a strange thing,' said Thomas. ‘In one place it destroys everything, and two steps away there's no sign of it.'

‘Listen, Thomas,' said Weller, sitting on a bench and signalling to him to sit down. Thomas looked sadly at the three black silhouettes
disappearing down the street. ‘You know I regard you as a friend. You are the only one who can advise me in a delicate matter. I am sure you know what I mean, the gossip about me because of the way I was treated in Moscow…'

‘I heard some things,' Thomas admitted, ‘but I avoid rumours, especially about friends.'

‘For many years I've dealt with the East, mainly with the Soviet Union,' said Weller, who had not heard him, of course. ‘I've devoted my life to that country. I should have been there.'

‘I understand that very few people were invited to the meetings.'

‘They chose Hilger as the interpreter,' Weller huffed. His face was flushed from brandy. He wiped his forehead with a handkerchief, coughed and put his hand on his heart. He looked like a bitter old man whose soul could no longer be disentangled from a lifetime of insults.

‘That's not surprising,' said Thomas. ‘Clearly Ambassador Schulenburg would prefer one of his own people.'

‘No one in the Foreign Office trusts that bald guy,' Weller hissed. ‘He's too close to the Soviets.'

‘There will be more opportunities.' Thomas tried to soothe him, touching his shoulder in a friendly way and noting that Weller's cheeks dimpled in the same way whether he was laughing or angry.

A flock of crows flew over the trees with loud caws, then fanned out onto the roofs of the charred buildings. The cloudy sky had the yellow hue of early winter.

Weller seemed encouraged. ‘I know we're back in the saddle, Thomas, thanks to the model, and lots of fellows who cold-shouldered me are getting in touch again. But I'm never going to meet Stalin now.'

Thomas was perplexed that meeting Stalin mattered so much to Weller. After all, what could you learn about a leader in a brief formal meeting? Was it to stand next to him, to be photographed with him? Was Weller a lightweight who just wanted to touch a movie star?

‘You know something, Weller, my friend,' said Thomas. ‘We're only passing through, so it's natural to be impressed by the great events of our time, but in the end we'll only experience a narrow slice of
history. If you think about it like that then you can take heart.'

‘You mean the night when the treaty with the Soviet Union was signed wasn't a great event?' Weller asked.

‘More or less.' Thomas was surprised by his own sincerity. ‘When we started to put together the models of national character for Poland, France and Italy, the first stage was a simple historical survey of those nations. Naturally we ran into problems from the start. For instance, when exactly does a nation come into being? But I'll tell you a secret: all the surveys were boringly similar. Every period is dominated by some mighty power—that prince, king, empire, conqueror, et cetera—with endless wars and even more treaties. I instructed them to throw it all in the trash, and look at other details. What commerce took place between northern and southern Italians? How sweet and expensive were the grapes grown on the Cinque Terre hills that slope down to the coast at Genoa? How did the French adjust to secular schools? Every period has its own nuances, but the grand sweep of history is always forged from the same principles. The Roman Empire disappeared in the fifth century; it was no more than an episode in history. A long time before it, in the beginning of the twelfth century BC, the Mediterranean basin was destroyed, entire cultures were wiped out, and the region was relegated to darkness for centuries. Then different empires appeared: the Greeks, and the Romans, and the one after that. The Poles and Lithuanians once had an empire, and they defeated our ancestors in battle. And now'—he waved his hand at the horizon of Warsaw—‘look at us today.'

Weller had closed his eyes. He opened them. ‘Heiselberg, doesn't the thousand-year Reich have any meaning for you?'

‘There won't be a thousand-year Reich. That's not a human timespan. In another thousand years perhaps there won't be any snow in the world.' Seeing Weller's astounded face, he wondered whether he had gone too far. ‘Clearly my hope is that there will be a great empire in the lifetimes of as many generations as possible.'

‘I'd lose my sanity if I thought about the world that way,' Weller protested.

‘On the contrary. Think of that night you missed in Moscow as a minor episode, like that tiny cloud. And Stalin, whom you want to meet so much, is, let's say, a slightly bigger cloud, like one of the Hittite kings.'

They sat in silence. The sky turned grey, and a weak glow came from the streetlights that had survived the bombing. A rumble of thunder was heard.

‘I'm tired.' Weller rose heavily. ‘Let's go home.'

They reached the corner of Marszałkowska and Jerozolimskie, turned left and started walking rapidly towards Nowy Swiat. It started to rain, and there was more thunder. They sheltered under the awning of a café.

‘Look.' Thomas pointed at a poster on the facade of a hotel. ‘It's an advertisement for soap, see? There's a running deer. But why is there a circle around it? What kind of dream are they selling people? Run fast, and you'll always be trapped in a circle?'

Weller didn't answer. He made a dash for the bakery next door. Through the window Thomas saw him buy a loaf of bread and a jar of mushrooms. When he came out, he smelled the bread and said to Thomas, ‘We'll have a fine dinner. You're going to have the best soup in Europe.'

His gloomy exhaustion seemed to have vanished. When they reached their building, Weller said, ‘From the way you spoke about the advertisement, I sense that you still think about your life in that American business.'

‘It's hard to erase more than a decade invested in one company.'

For a month he hadn't said that word. For years he had said it dozens of times a day: ‘Milton', ‘the Milton company', ‘we at Milton'. Could a man like Weller, who had jostled with bureaucrats of his own kind all his life—even Frau Tschammer had more intelligence than most of them—understand what real action was like? It was hard to be reconciled with the fact that everything you had achieved in one of the most difficult markets in the world had evaporated because of abstract struggles that had nothing to do with you. But the betrayal of
the Milton people was worse. They had arranged another position for Carlson Mailer, but cut loose the man who had made the German branch and its sub-branches his lifework. He carried the cartons out of the office himself. And he, innocent as he was—he only understood how innocent when he started job-hunting in the newspaper—had always believed that Milton was also his company.

The old doorman pulled his hands out of his coat pockets and stood to attention. He opened the creaking iron gate, and they walked down the dark tunnel that led to the courtyard. The two upper floors of the right-hand building had been smashed by the bombing of the Luftwaffe. Only the galvanised downpipe remained erect, like a mast. Someone had hung a flag from it. They turned to a white building whose first floor was decorated with frescoes, sgraffiti and a niche sheltering a statue of the Virgin. Lights glowed from the windows. A tango could be faintly heard.

They climbed the steps. Thomas urged Weller to give him his first Russian lesson now.

‘Uspokoytyes, vy slishkom uvlekayetyes,'
*
Weller answered and hummed the first line of the anthem: ‘Poland has not yet been lost.' Both of them had a weakness for childish humour that reversed the order of things. Just a week ago they had visited a church as part of their initiative to speak with moderate priests, and when they walked between the wooden pews, they chuckled together. Weller sang, ‘Jesus, I live for you,' and Thomas intoned, ‘Oh, Mary, save me.'

Outside the doors on the first floor hung grey military shirts caked with mud, dry leaves and thin red streaks.

It wasn't until Weller gripped his sleeve and started to pull him upstairs that Thomas noticed he was frozen to the spot. He was dragged along, dizzy, until Weller relaxed his grip. They climbed the stairs, and he saw the mud stains on the wall. One of the soldiers had probably cleaned his boots there. Dry red flakes dotted the floor.

On the second floor stood a row of four pairs of boots. The boots on

the right were brown. The leather at their tips was black-violet. Mud, leaves and pine needles were stuck to the soles. A brown shirt with buttons, spotted with bloodstains, was hanging on the door handle. Thomas had a strange urge to turn the boots over and inspect the soles.

‘Are you coming?'

When he raised his eyes, Weller had already disappeared. Thomas raced after him to the third floor. On the landing he encountered two pairs of upside-down boots. Thomas stared at them and stifled a scream. A thick layer of dried blood clung to the soles. He felt a thump in his chest; he took a groaning breath. The black veils descended around his face. For the first time in his life he wanted to wrap himself up in them, in the darkness.

He muttered something and sat down on one of the steps, gripping the rickety banister. In his imagination he saw Clarissa leaning on the door while he was standing in the stairwell, the valise in his hand. With a smile she whispered, ‘You're not moving from here.' Her face was flushed, she approached, pressed against him and he—something stuck in his mind like an annoying leaf to a shoe, a sentence that Fiske once quoted out of a book: ‘The right proportion for a woman's head? About an eighth of the length of her body.'

The banister swayed, and his hand scraped against the rust encrusted on it. He was filled with shame, as though summoning an image of Clarissa to pull him through his weakness had polluted her.

‘Do you want me to call a doctor?' Weller sounded flat. ‘I could call Dr von Wirsch on the first floor.'

He looked up at Weller. The idea that one of them might go back down to the first floor produced a ghastly shared laugh-yawn, which begged to be released. Damn it, that was the best joke the man had ever made.

Weller came downstairs and stood between him and the boots, one hand holding the bag of bread, the other reaching out. ‘Heiselberg,' he ordered. ‘We're going to our apartment.'

He imagined bodies and faces spinning round, drenched in blood, the parade of souls, coughing and panting, that had come down these
stairs in the last month. These were the tenants who had been driven out—university lecturers, a former member of parliament, a journalist, clutching coats and blankets, loaves of bread, sausages and cheese, big squares of butter melting into the blankets—and the young German officer making them hurry. Afterwards the officer had joked to the new tenants, ‘You only need one sentence in Polish: “He's off to work, he'll be back in the evening.”'

Thomas tripped on the steps. Weller pushed him up. When they reached the top floor Weller sat him down on an armchair in the parlour. The room was redolent with the warm smell of meat and bay leaves. Thomas saw him pick up a silver ladle near the wood stove, and stir the big pot.

‘Eight hours on a low fire, and you'll see how great it is,' he called out. ‘My grandmother made me swear to cook this stew only on a wood fire.'

Thomas watched the goldfish in the aquarium. In the light from the streetlamp the fish looked like an orange serpent, spitting fire. A little red scratch twisted on his palm.

Weller spread a cloth on the table in the dining alcove and put deep soup bowls onto white plates. On either side he arranged silver forks and knives and soup spoons with gold-plated handles, the legacy of the previous owners. Weller surveyed the table with satisfaction and returned to the pot. Now he hurried towards Thomas with the ladle. ‘Taste, Heiselberg, you have to taste, it's a delicacy.'

Thomas felt the heat of the stew. He sipped from the spoon. The liquid burned his tongue, and the taste was thick and rich. His breathing settled. Weller came to the table holding the steaming pot, and again he complained that in Germany, in all Europe really, they hadn't yet understood the potential of root vegetables. ‘I believe that this time I prepared a wondrous meal, worthy of honourable diplomats like us,' he grunted with pleasure. ‘My dear friend, I beg you to learn to enjoy a fine meal at last.'

Thomas remembered that he was hungry.

…

The days passed swiftly. Thomas worked harder than he had ever done at Milton, beginning at 8 a.m. and finishing late. They participated in meetings full of idle chatter, with dozens of people, and whole days were frittered away—a phenomenon that Thomas called ‘the Germans' chronic shortage of time'. They provided evaluations of the situation to the Foreign Office; they wrote dozens of letters every week, and they had to keep the model of the Polish national character up to date. Von Ribbbentrop wanted a new edition by March 1940, and this time it would be bound as a book. Von Ribbentrop proposed removing the word ‘national' from the title, and his associate Martin Luther announced that this would make the new edition glow with precious light in many people's eyes.