Monsieur Ka by Vesna Goldsworthy

Author:Vesna Goldsworthy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House

9

Borzoi

‘They don’t feel guilty,’ Albie said of the Germans. It had been two years, almost, since Hitler died in his bunker, and there were still days when Albie spoke of the war as though it was not over. We had just walked from the Wigmore Hall to Baker Street and caught the Underground home after a Schubert recital. My head was full of music as we sat down to one last cup of tea before bed. I listened to Albie, but I resented his mood. It was unfair of me; he burdened me with his worries less and less.

‘Rather, they do,’ he continued, ‘but it is the wrong ones who feel the guilt. Those who have suffered themselves; the children who are not children any more. The fathers and grandfathers don’t. They say, “We were defeated” the way you might say fair cop. They understand the need for punishment. The defeated have to take their punishment. But their regret, Ber, is about the defeat, not about the vision which took them to war. Many continue to say that the English work for the Americans and the Americans work for the Jews. They see their own towns in ruins, their own suffering, and they call it defeat, not just deserts. It is insidious, that vision. I see the ruins and I feel guilty. The rubble makes me feel that our victory wasn’t clean. As though there are clean victories, victories without rubble.

‘Or they go on about the Russians. We did not fight you, they say, we fought the Russians. Every German man I meet fought on the Eastern Front. As though there were millions in the East and only a handful in the West, just a few enlightened souls in SS uniforms, walking through Paris of a Sunday afternoon with a Baedeker guide. So civilised, the group promenade in tailored uniforms on the Champs-Élysées. It gets to you. You are not supposed to hate the millions of frostbitten kids who suffered on the Eastern Front, are you?

‘The Americans employ them. A spot of manufacturing, that’s all, a bit of scientific expertise. Of no consequence, everyone says, nothing political. They have the know-how, those Germans. We have to forgive or we’ll never get the workers we need, the place won’t function. One has to be pragmatic. Send them food and clothing. A loan or two. You can’t punish an entire nation. I am confused, Ber. I sit in wood-panelled rooms and I feel I no longer know right from wrong. I see small men with spectacles on both sides of the bar, bookkeepers in uniform. I wonder if I am one of them. How do I know that what I serve is not evil? That it won’t come to look evil even if it does not seem so now?’

I walked up to Albie and massaged his temples, slowly, barely pressing in. I was struck, for the umpteenth time, by the unreality of his blond hair as it passed through my fingers, smelling of almond oil.

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