“I think that’s a job I’d be good at.”

“Maybe you’ll be the first person who ever enjoyed going to Würzburg.”

“That’s always a possibility.”

27

I READ HER LETTER ON THE TRAIN TO WÜRZBURG.

Adlon Hotel, No. 1 Unter den Linden, Berlin

My dearest Bernie,

It grieves me more than words can tell you that I cannot be there to say good-bye in person, but I’ve been told by someone from the police chief’s office in Potsdam that you won’t be released from prison until I have left Germany.

It looks as if this has to be for good, I’m afraid-at least for as long as the Nazis are in government, anyway-as I’ve also been informed by someone in the Foreign Ministry that I won’t be given a visa again.

And if all that wasn’t bad enough, I’ve been told by an official in the Propaganda Ministry that if I publish the newspaper article I was planning to write and call upon the AOC to boycott the German Olympiad, then you could find yourself in a concentration camp; and since I have no wish to expose you to this kind of threat, you can rest assured, my dear Bernie, that no such article will now appear.

Perhaps you will consider that this will be a tragedy to me; but while I lament that I am now forbidden the chance to oppose the evil of national socialism in the way I know best, the greater tragedy, according to my understanding of that word, is the obligation I now have to give you up, and the utter improbability of seeing you at any time in the near future. Perhaps ever!

Given more time, I should have spoken to you of love and, perhaps, you would have done the same. Tempting as it is for a writer to put words in someone else’s mouth, this is my letter and I must limit myself to what I myself can say. Which is this: I love you, right enough. And if I now seem to draw a line under that, it’s only because the elation that I once might have felt at being in love with someone again-it’s not easy for me to love anyone-is alloyed with the acute pain of our parting and separation.

There is a painting by Caspar David Friedrich that encapsulates the way I’m feeling right now. It’s called The Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, and if you’re ever in Hamburg, you should go to the local art gallery and take a look at it. If you don’t know this painting, it depicts a solitary man standing on a mountaintop staring out over a landscape of distant peaks and jagged rocks. And you should picture me, similarly positioned on the stern of the SS Manhattan carrying me back to New York, and all the while staring back at a rocky, jagged, increasingly remote Germany that contains you, my love.

You might equally think of another Friedrich painting when you try to visualize my heart. This picture is called The Sea of Ice, and it shows a ship, hardly visible, crushed by great shards of ice upon a landscape more bleak than the surface of the moon. I’m not sure where this picture can be seen, as I only ever saw it myself in a book. Nevertheless, it represents very well the cold devastation that is my current situation.

It seems to me I might very easily curse the fortune that made me love you; and yet I know, in spite of everything, that I don’t regret it one little bit, because, in the future, every time I read of some dreadful deed or criminal policy carried out by that big-talking man in his silly uniform, I will think of you, Bernie, and remember that there are many good Germans who have courageous, good hearts (although none, I think, could ever have a heart as courageous and good as yours). And this is good, for if Hitler teaches us anything, it is the stupidity of judging a whole race as one. There are bad Jews and there are good Jews, just as there are bad Germans and there are good Germans.

You are a good German, Bernie. You protect yourself with a thick coat of cynicism, but at heart I know that you are a good man. But I fear for all good men in Germany and I wonder what terrible choices now lie ahead of them and you. I wonder what awful compromises you will be called upon to make.

Which is why I want to help you to help others in the only way now open to me.

By now you will have found the enclosed check, and your first inclination on seeing that it is much more than you asked to borrow may be not to cash it at all. That would be a mistake. It seems to me that you should take it as my gift to you and start the private detective business you told me about. And for this good reason: in a society founded upon lies, the discovery of truth will become more and more important. Probably it will land you in trouble, but, knowing you, I suspect you can handle that in your own way. Most of all, I hope that you can come to the aid of others in need of your help, as you tried to help me; and that you will do what, because it is dangerous, you ought not to do because it is also right.

I’m not sure I expressed that correctly. While I speak German well enough I find I am out of practice writing it. I hope this letter does not seem too formal. Emperor Charles V said he spoke Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men, and German to his horse. But you know, I think that horse might just have been the creature he loved best in the world and that, like you, his horse was very bold and full of spirit; and I cannot think of any other language that suits your temperament, Bernie. Certainly not English, with its many shades of meaning! I never met a more straightforward man than you, which is one of the reasons why I love you so much.

These are ugly times and you will have to go to ugly places and deal with people who have made themselves ugly, but you are my knight of heaven, my Galahad, and I feel certain you can endure all these tests without becoming ugly yourself. And you must always tell yourself that you are not just sweeping leaves on a windy day, although there will be times when that is what it will feel like.

I kiss you. Noreen. xx

WÜRZBURG WASN’T AN UGLY PLACE, although the Franconians had done their best to make their state capital a virtual shrine to Nazism and had effectively uglified what was a pleasantly situated medieval red-roofed town in an open part of a river valley. In almost every shop window there was a photograph of Hitler or a sign advising Jews to keep out or risk the consequences-sometimes both. The town made Berlin look like a model of true representative democracy.

Dominating the landscape from the left bank of the river was the old castle of Marienberg, built by the prince-bishops of Würzburg who had been champions of the Counter-Reformation during another ugly time in German history. But it was just as easy to imagine the imposing white castle inhabited by some evil scientist who exercised a powerful and malign influence on Würzburg, unleashing an elemental force to make monsters of the town’s unsuspecting peasants. These were mostly ordinary-looking folk, although there were one or two with boxy foreheads, vivid surgical scars, and ill-fitting coats who might have given even the most committed galvanist some pause for thought. I felt kind of inhuman myself and walked south from the railway station and onto Adolf-Hitler-Strasse with awkward, stiff legs, which might easily have belonged to a dead man, although that might have been the lingering effect of Noreen’s letter.

Checking into the Palace Hotel Russia House helped to lift my spirits a little. After a week in police custody, I had the taste for a good hotel. Then again, I had the taste anyway, and now that I’d decided to overcome my scruples and cash Noreen’s check, I also had the money. After a light supper in the hotel’s Königs Café, I walked three quarters of a kilometer east, on Rottendorfer Strasse, to a quiet suburb near a reservoir to see the widow Rubusch.