To Room Nineteen (21 page)

Again Dr Schröder began to talk, and again of his admiration for their country, leaning across the table, looking into their faces, as if this was a message of incalculable importance to them both.

He was interrupted by the clarinet player who stood up, took a note from the regular ground-throb of the music, and began to develop a theme of his own from it. Couples went on to a small area of shiny floor not occupied by tables, and which was invaded at every moment by the hurrying waiters with their trays of drinks. They were dancing, these people, for the pleasure not of movement, but of contact. A dozen or a score of men and women, seemingly held upright by the pressure of the seated guests around them, idled together, loosely linked, smiling, sceptical, good-natured with the practice of pleasure.

Immediately the dancing was broken up because the group of folk singers had come in at the big glass entrance door, in their demure conventual dress, and now stood by the band waiting.

The woman at the next table gave a large cheerful shrug and said, ‘This is the fifth time. This is my fifth home-evening.’ People turned to smile at the words
heimat-abend,
indulgent with the handsome woman and her look of spoiled enjoyment. Already one of the folk singers was moving among the tables to collect their fee, which was high; and already the rich papa was thrusting towards the girl a heap of money, disdaining the change with a shake of his head – change, however, which she did not seem in any urgency to give him. When she reached the table where our couple sat with Dr Schröder, Hamish paid, and not with good grace. After all, the prices were high enough here without having to pay more for folk songs which one did not necessarily want to listen to at all.

When the girl had made her rounds and collected her money, she rejoined the group, which formed itself together near the band and sang, one after another, songs of the valley, in which yodelling figured often and loudly, earning loud applause.

It was clear that Dr Schröder, who listened to the group with a look of almost yearning nostalgia, did not feel its intrusion as an irritant at all. Folk songs, his expression said, were something he could listen to all night. He clapped often and glanced at his guests, urging them to share his sentimental enjoyment.

At last the group left; the clarinet summoned the dancers to the tiny floor; and Dr Schröder resumed his hymn of love for Britain. Tragic, he said, having stated and restated the theme of praise – tragic that these two countries had ever had to fight at all. Tragic that natural friends should have been divided by the machinations of interested and sinister groups. The British couple’s eyes met ironically over the unspoken phrase, international Jewry, and even with the consciousness of being pedantic, if not unfair. But Dr Schröder did not believe in the unstated. He said that international Jewry had divided the two natural masters of Europe, Germany and Britain; and it was his passionate belief that in the future these two countries should work together for the good of Europe and thus, obviously, of the whole world. Dr Schröder had had good friends, friends who were almost brothers, killed on the front; where British and German troops had been manoeuvred into hostility; and he grieved over them even now as one does for sacrificed victims.

Dr Schröder paused, fixed them with the glare of his eyes, and said: ‘I wish to tell you that I, too, was wounded; perhaps you have not noticed. I was wounded on the Russian front. My life was despaired of. But I was saved by the skill of our doctors. My entire face is a witness to the magnificent skill of our German doctors.’

The British couple hastened to express their surprise and congratulations. Oddly enough, they felt a lessened obligation towards compassion because of Dr Schröder’s grotesque and touching belief that his face was nearly normal enough to be unnoticed. He said that the surface of his face had burned off when a tank beside him had exploded into pieces, showering him with oil. He had fought
for three years with the glorious armies of his country all over the Ukraine. He spoke like a survivor from the Grande Armée to fellow admirers of ‘The Other’, inviting and expecting interested congratulation. ‘Those Russians,’ he said, ‘are savages. Barbarians. No one would believe the atrocities they committed. Unless you had seen it with your own eyes you would not believe the brutality the Russians are capable of.’

The British couple, now depressed into silence, and even past the point where they could allow their eyes to meet in ironical support of each other, sat watching the languidly revolving dancers.

Dr Schröder said insistently, ‘Do you know that those Russians would shoot at our soldiers as they walked through the streets of a village? An ordinary Russian peasant, if he got the chance, would slaughter one of our soldiers? And even the women – I can tell you cases of Russian women murdering our soldiers after pretending to be buddies with them.’

Mary and Hamish kept their peace and wondered how Dr Schröder had described to himself the mass executions, the hangings, the atrocities of the German army in Russia. They did not wonder for long, for he said, ‘We were forced to defend ourselves. Yes, I can tell you that we had to defend ourselves against the savagery of those people. The Russians are monsters.’

Mary Parrish roused herself to say, ‘Not such monsters, perhaps, as the Jews?’ And she tried to catch and hold the fanatic eyes of their host with her own. He said, ‘Ah, yes, we had many enemies.’ His eyes, moving fast from Hamish’s face to Mary’s, paused and wavered. It occurred to him perhaps that they were not entirely in accordance with him. For a second his ugly, blistered mouth twisted in what might have been doubt. He said politely, ‘Of course, our Führer went too far in his zeal against our enemies. But he understood the needs of our country.’

‘It is the fate of great men,’ said Hamish, in the quick sarcastic voice that was the nearest he ever got to expressed anger, ‘to be misunderstood by the small-minded.’

Dr Schröder was now unmistakably in doubt. He was silent, examining their faces with his eyes, into which all the expression of
his scarred face was concentrated, while they suffered the inner diminishment and confusion that happens when the assumptions on which one bases one’s life are attacked. They were thinking dubiously that this was the voice of madness. They were thinking that they knew no one in Britain who would describe it as anything else. They were thinking that they were both essentially, selfconsciously, of that element in their nation dedicated to not being insular, to not falling into the errors of complacency; and they were, at this moment, feeling something of the despair that people like them had felt ten, fifteen years ago, watching the tides of madness rise while the reasonable and the decent averted their eyes. At the same time they were feeling an extraordinary but undeniable reluctance to face the fact that Dr Schröder might represent any more than himself. No, they were assuring themselves, this unfortunate man is simply a cripple, scarred mentally as well as physically, a bit of salvage from the last war.

At this moment the music again stopped, and there was an irregular clapping all over the room; clearly there was to be a turn that the people there knew and expected.

Standing beside the piano was a small, smiling man who nodded greetings to the guests. He was dark, quick-eyed, with an agreeable face that the British couple instinctively described as ‘civilized’. He nodded to the pianist, who began to improvise an accompaniment to his act; he was half-singing, half-talking the verse of a song or ballad about a certain general whose name the British couple did not recognize. The accompaniment was a steady, military-sounding thump-thump against which the right hand wove fragments of ‘Deutschland Uber Alles’ and the ‘Horst Wessel Song’. The refrain was: ‘And now he sits in Bonn’.

The next verse was about an admiral, also now sitting in Bonn.

The British couple understood that the song consisted of the histories of a dozen loyal German militarists who had been over-zealous in their devotion to their Führer; had been sentenced by the Allied courts of justice to various terms of imprisonment, or to death; ‘and now they sat in Bonn.’

All that was fair enough. It sounded like a satire on Allied policy
in Germany which – so both these conscientious people knew and deplored – tended to be over-generous to the ex-murderers of the Nazi regime. What could be more heartening than to find their own view expressed there, in this comfortable resort of the German rich? And what more surprising?

They looked at Dr Schröder and saw his eyes gleaming with pleasure. They looked back at the urbane, ironical little singer, who was performing with the assurance of one who knows himself to be perfectly at one with his audience, and understood that this was the type of ballad adroitly evolved to meet the needs of an occupied people forced to express themselves under the noses of a conqueror. True that the American army was not here, in this room, this evening; but even if they had been, what possible exception could they have taken to the words of this song?

It was a long ballad, and when it was ended there was very little applause. Singer and audience exchanged with each other smiles of discreet understanding, and the little man bowed this way and that. He then straightened himself, looked at the British couple, and bowed to them. It was as if the room caught its breath. Only when they looked at Dr Schröder’s face, which showed all the malicious delight of a child who had thumbed his nose behind teacher’s back, did they understand what a demonstration of angry defiance that bow had been. And they understood, with a sinking of the heart, the depths of furious revengeful humiliation which made such a very slight gesture so extremely satisfying to these rich burgesses, who merely glanced discreetly, smiling slightly, at these conquerors in their midst – conquerors who were so much shabbier than they were, so much more worn and tired – and turned away, exchanging glances of satisfaction, to their batteries of gleaming glasses filled with wine and with beer.

And now Mary and Hamish felt that this demonstration, which presumably Dr Schröder had shared in, perhaps even invited, released them from any obligation to him; and they looked at him with open dislike, indicating that they wished to leave.

Besides, the waiter stood beside them, showing an open insolence that was being observed and admired by the handsome matron and
her husband and her son; the girl was, as usual, dreaming some dream of her own and not looking at anyone in particular. The waiter bent over them, put his hands on their still half-filled glasses, and asked what they would have.

Hamish and Mary promptly drank what remained of their beer and rose. Dr Schröder rose with them. His whole knobbly, ugly body showed agitation and concern. Surely they weren’t going? Surely, when the evening was just beginning, and very soon they would have the privilege of hearing again the talented singer who had just retired, but only for a short interval. Did they realize that he was a famous artist from M—, a man who nightly sang to crammed audiences, who was engaged by the management of this hotel, alas, only for two short weeks of the winter season?

This was either the most accomplished insolence or another manifestation of Dr Schröder’s craziness. For a moment the British couple wondered if they had made a mistake and had misunderstood the singer’s meaning. But one glance around the faces of the people at the near tables was enough: each face expressed a discreetly hidden smile of satisfaction at the rout of the enemy – routed by the singer, and by the waiter, their willing servant who was nevertheless at this moment exchanging democratic grins of pleasure with the handsome matron.

Dr Schröder was mad, and that was all there was to it. He both delighted in the little demonstration of hostility and, in some involved way of his own, wanted them to delight in it – probably out of brotherly love for him. And now he was quite genuinely agitated and hurt because they were going.

The British couple went out, past the smiling band, past the conscious waiter, while Dr Schröder followed. They went down the iced steps of the hotel and stopped by the legless man who was still rooted in the snow like a plant, where Hamish gave him all the change he had, which amounted to the price of another round of drinks had they stayed in the big warm room.

Dr Schröder watched this and said at once, with indignant reproach, ‘You should not do this. It is not expected. Such people should be locked away.’ All his suspicion had returned; they must,
obviously, be rich, and they had been lying to him.

Mary and Hamish went without speaking down the snow-soft street, through a faint fall of white snow; and Dr Schröder came striding behind them, breathing heavily. When they reached the door of the little house where they had a room, he ran around them and stood facing them, saying hurriedly, ‘And so I shall see you tomorrow at the autobus, nine-thirty.’

‘We will get in touch with you,’ said Hamish politely, which, since they did not know his address, and had not asked for it, was as good as dismissing him.

Dr Schröder leaned towards them, examining their faces with his gleaming, suspicious eyes. He said, ‘I will attend you in the morning,’ and left them.

They let themselves in and ascended the shallow wooden stairs to their room in silence. The room was low and comfortable, gleaming with well-polished wood. There were an old-fashioned rose-patterned jug and basin on the washstand and an enormous bed laden with thick eiderdowns. A great, shining, blue-tiled stove filled half a wall. Their landlady had left a note pinned to one of the fat pillows, demanding politely that they should leave, in their turn, a note for her outside their door, saying at what hour they wished to receive their breakfast tray. She was the widow of the pastor. She now lived by letting this room to the summer and winter visitors. She knew this couple were not married because she had had, by regulation, to take down particulars from their passports. She had said nothing of any disapproval she might have felt. The gods of the tourist trade must not be offended by any personal prejudice she might hold; and she must have prejudices, surely, as the widow of a man of God, even against a couple so obviously respectable as this one?