If the Dead Rise Not (Bernie Gunther Novels) by Philip Kerr

Author:Philip Kerr [Kerr, Philip]
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780399156151
Publisher: Putnam Adult
Published: 2010-03-18T05:00:00+00:00

27

I READ HER LETTER ON THE TRAIN TO WURZBURG.

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 Ive been told by someone from the police chiefs office in Potsdam that you wont be released from prison until I have left Germany.

It looks as if this has to be for good, Im afraidat least for as long as the Nazis are in government, anywayas Ive also been informed by someone in the Foreign Ministry that I wont be given a visa again.

And if all that wasnt bad enough, Ive 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 elses 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, its only because the elation that I once might have felt at being in love with someone againits not easy for me to love anyoneis alloyed with the acute pain of our parting and separation.

There is a painting by Caspar David Friedrich that encapsulates the way Im feeling right now. Its called The Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, and if youre ever in Hamburg, you should go to the local art gallery and take a look at it. If you dont 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.

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