The Second Midnight, page 15
He gave her a faint smile. ‘I nearly did it, didn’t I?’
The first midnight began to strike.
Too excited to sleep, Hugh sat on the end of his bed with his elbows resting on the sill of the open window. He was smoking a hand-rolled cigarette which Miroslav had given him.
The cigarette was making him feel slightly queasy; but there was compensation in the fact that Miroslav’s stinginess with tobacco was notorious among the servants. Hugh knew he had been honoured.
As the strokes of the clock continued, Hugh found the events of the day were flashing through his mind in a series of split-second mental images. Magda in her bathing costume on the pier gave way to Heinz’s half-drowned face. Once again he could sense the fear which had emanated from the old lady with the warts and the couple from the motorboat when Magda told them that her father was the deputy military attaché on the Reichsprotektor’s staff. Scholl himself, summoned by telephone from the castle, had collected them from the plovarna in his Mercedes; the car smelled of leather and cigar smoke.
At the villa Hugh was treated as a hero, much to his embarrassment. Frau Scholl kissed him on both cheeks and instructed her cook to give him the best meal the kitchen could offer. The colonel doubled his admittedly minuscule wages. Early in the evening Scholl took Hugh upstairs to see Heinz.
Heinz was in bed, propped up on three pillows. His room was a shrine to National Socialism: pictures of the Führer cut out from the illustrated papers decorated much of one wall; Mein Kampf was on the bedside table beside the Hitler Youth dagger. Heinz limply shook hands with Hugh and thanked him.
Much to Hugh’s surprise, Scholl had shown no inclination to blame anyone for the incident. Magda had made a clean breast of what had happened: she had been irresponsible; Heinz had been stupid; and if Hugh hadn’t been there her brother might well have drowned. Frau Scholl spoke a few sharp words to Heinz; but the colonel was simply grateful that the accident had been no worse. Hugh couldn’t help imagining how his own father would have reacted in a similar situation.
It was undeniably pleasant to be a hero, though he realized that this exalted state was unlikely to last. On a more practical level – and he fully understood the need to be practical if he was going to survive – saving Heinz’s life had consolidated Hugh’s position on the staff. Frau Scholl, for example, was completely won over; and he was no longer just another lame dog as far as Colonel Scholl was concerned.
But what about Magda? In front of her parents she had thanked him like someone reciting a lesson. Didn’t it mean anything to her? The memory of her touching his arm on the pier made him feel both sick and excited, rather like he used to feel on Christmas Eve when he was very young. It was most puzzling – and curiously upsetting.
‘Don’t you know that smoking stunts your growth?’
The voice rose from immediately beneath his window. From the first word he knew it was Magda’s. He was so surprised that he dropped the cigarette; the glowing tip turned and twisted through the honeysuckle until it vanished into darkness.
‘I don’t usually smoke.’ His own voice started high and ended low. ‘Miroslav gave it to me.’
He could just make out the paler darkness of her hair. She must be wearing rubber-soled shoes.
‘I wanted to say thank you,’ she whispered abruptly. ‘I couldn’t do it properly with all those people around. Do you understand?’
‘I think so.’ Hugh leaned out further. Above him, the stable clock began the familiar preliminary whir. He seized on it, grateful for an excuse to move to a neutral subject. ‘It’s going to strike in a few seconds.’
‘I know. It’s like a second midnight.’
The uncanny echo of his own thoughts jolted Hugh still further.
He said before he could stop himself, ‘Anything can happen in the space between the midnights.’
The first chime rang out.
As the clock struck she turned and ran almost soundlessly back across the lawn to the villa.
Eight
The next twelve months were the happiest that Hugh could remember.
Miroslav made more than sure that he earned his keep. The old man was a perfectionist; he was always grumbling that the younger generation – which in this case meant anyone beneath the age of sixty – didn’t know the meaning of work.
But Hugh gradually won the old man’s grudging approval. After the sheer drudgery of his life with Jan and Bela, working in a garden was almost a pleasure. There was another reason to work hard: the fear of dismissal never entirely left him. He had found a secure haven in an otherwise hostile land, and he was determined to cling to it.
Moreover, he found the Scholl household an endless source of fascination. It was unlike any other family he had known. Magda and Heinz weren’t afraid of their father. Frau Scholl treated her husband in private in much the same way as she treated the children.
It was even more extraordinary because they were Germans. Dr Spiegel, Madame Hase, Jan and Bela had all in their different ways led him to believe that the Germans were a race of monsters. But the Scholls were just an ordinary family; if anything, rather nicer than most. Apart from Hans Bruckman, the soldier who doubled as the Oberst’s batman and chauffeur and considered himself a cut above the rest of the staff, the servants were Czech. Hugh had hitherto understood that the vast majority of Czechs loathed the Germans, but his fellow servants seemed to like their work and respect their employers.
In one of his rare communicative moments Miroslav gave Hugh a hint of the reason for this apparent contradiction. They had spent a crisp November afternoon raking up leaves and burning them in the kitchen garden. The old man suddenly spat into the flames of the bonfire.
‘At least this lot notices when the lawns are clear,’ he said. ‘It’s enough to break your heart when no one cares what you do.’ He shook his head with gloomy satisfaction. ‘You should have seen some of the folk we’ve had here.’
‘Have you worked here long?’ Hugh asked the question idly, largely to prolong the break from work.
‘Man and boy since 1892. I’ve seen them come and go. We had a count once, before the war – the big war, that is, not this one. Austrian bloke – served with the imperial garrison. He only took the house because it’s near the race course. He kept a full staff here all the year round but I doubt he spent more than a week or two here in a year. Yoh! We’ve had some rum ones.’
Hugh threw a dead branch on the fire. A shower of sparks went up. ‘Some better than others?’
‘The worst one was a furrier – we had him from ’thirty-six until the Germans came. Treated us like shit, and his wife was worse. Jumped-up guttersnipes.’ Miroslav spat once more. ‘At least our Kraut’s a gentleman.’
Perhaps, Hugh thought, only people were important in the end. There were different nationalities, religions, races and political creeds – huge abstractions too slippery for his mind to grasp. When the abstractions took flesh – and he thought of the deaths of Dr Spiegel and Madame Hase – they became like deadly diseases which swept through whole populations. But somehow they didn’t amount to much beside an elderly alcoholic who had risked his life to shelter you or an employer who thanked you when you did him a service.
Hugh’s work was not confined to the garden. Colonel Scholl’s job included liaison with units of the former Czechoslovak army which had been absorbed into the armed forces of the Reich. He was also partly responsible for contingency plans for the defence of the Protectorate. These two aspects of his job involved him in a lot of travelling and in dealings with many Czechs who did not speak German. Official interpreters were of course available; but occasionally Scholl would take Hugh instead, if the meetings were at short notice and reasonably close at hand. The Bureau of Translators, he explained, was very overworked.
Hugh occasionally wondered whether there was more to it than this. He had once overheard the colonel complaining to Frau Scholl that the Bureau was practically a subdivision of the Gestapo. Scholl’s conversations with Czech officers were never remotely treasonable but perhaps – Hugh thought – he disliked being spied upon; or perhaps he wanted to be sure that he was hearing what the Czechs were really saying to him rather than what the official translators wanted him to hear.
Everyone, including Hugh, was surprised by the rate at which his command of German improved. Hugh privately attributed it to the solid foundations that Dr Spiegel had laid. He also suspected that the more languages you knew, the easier it became to learn others. His accent, according to Magda, was that of an educated Saxon; the Scholls came from Saxony.
His employers would have been less surprised by Hugh’s fluency if they had known how much their daughter was talking to him. It began in a small way – a few words about the weather when their paths crossed in the garden. Hugh had Sunday afternoons free and he often used to spend them in the pine woods around Zbraslav. When he was walking there near the end of October, he ran into Magda. Nothing was said about meeting again; but the following Sunday he returned to the same place and found her there.
There were other regular opportunities. Magda had weekly lessons in Prague with a retired violinist who used to play in the orchestra of the Narodni Divadlo. The violinist’s apartment was in Smichov, and Frau Scholl refused to allow Magda to travel there alone. If the car was not available, Hugh would be sent to keep her company.
It was a strange and often strained relationship. She was by nature impetuous, while Hugh’s experiences had left him stolid and cautious, at least on the surface. Everything they said and did was coloured by the inescapable fact that she was the master’s daughter and he was the master’s gardener’s boy. From the start she addressed him as du, the familiar form of the second person singular which one used for servants, pets, family and God, but he used the respectful Sie to her, even when no one else was around.
Hugh had never known anyone like her before. Everything about her was fascinating, down to the minutest details of her appearance. Even Heinz seemed larger than life, simply because he was privileged to be her brother.
Sometimes in his dreams, both waking and sleeping, Hugh would tell Magda who he really was and he would announce – with the assurance of a social equal – that he was going to call her du. After that the dream became blurred.
He knew of course that he could never do it. Magda would have to tell her father. The colonel had a soldier’s sense of duty: if he learned that Hugh was an enemy alien he would not let personal considerations stand in the way of reporting him to the authorities. The authorities would presumably intern him for the rest of the war. He doubted if anything very terrible would happen to him – unless there was some truth in the servants’ gossip about the Nazis’ secret camps.
But he would never see Magda again.
That was unthinkable. In consequence he buried his nationality as deeply as he could: he willed himself to forget that he was English. Magda asked him once if he knew any other languages besides Czech and German. He said that he had a little schoolboy French and Latin, which was true, but that he had forgotten most of the Hungarian he had once known. When Magda said she thought everyone in Europe learned a little English these days, he lost his head and denied that he knew a word.
In the winter of 1940–41, Hugh began to read again. Reading had not been an activity which Jan and Bela favoured, but for the Scholls it was as automatic as breathing. According to Magda, her father had been a journalist between the wars; he had been recalled to the army in 1935 when the sudden decision to expand the armed forces put experienced officers at a premium. Her grandfather, she told Hugh with some pride, had been professor of history at Leipzig.
On one of their Sunday meetings Hugh asked her if he could borrow a book or two to improve his German. She found him a couple of children’s stories that had belonged to Heinz; they were part of a series from Eher Verlag, the Nazi publishing house. Both of them featured a tall blond Aryan hero who foiled the vicious conspiracies of Jews and Bolsheviks with a combination of superhuman strength and stern moral rectitude. Hugh found them rather boring, but he was pleasantly surprised by the ease with which he read them.
They were the first of many. Magda was surprised by the appetite he developed for the printed word. He had been starved of it since Dr Spiegel died and now he became a glutton. He read everything – newspapers, novels, plays and poetry. The fact that much of it was incomprehensible to him made no difference. Much later, he realized why books were so important to him then: books, like languages, could make you free. They offered another technique to transcend the limitations of the present.
Hugh struggled through the first quarter of Mein Kampf – nearly two hundred pages – but had to admit defeat. Magda was not surprised.
‘We’ve got four copies in the house, but no one actually reads it except Heinz. My mother always makes sure there’s a copy in the drawing room when we’re having visitors.’
Magda told Hugh that she was going to be an historian like her grandfather. But, she confided, it was a very difficult subject because there were two sorts of history – the sort she learned in school and the sort she found in some of her father’s older books – and they often didn’t agree.
‘I asked Papa about it once. He said it was important to use the textbooks for school and examinations … that the government doesn’t approve of the other history.’
‘Did he say why?’ Hugh asked.
Magda shrugged. ‘Only that the end sometimes justified the means. But he made me promise not to talk about it at school.’
Magda’s school was in Mala Strana, not far from the Michalov Palace. It was of course a German institution, created for the children of high-ranking party officials, senior civil servants and army officers. Hugh was astonished by the regimentation that surrounded the lives of the children, even outside school hours. Heinz of course was a member of the Hitler Youth; at present he was in the Jungvolk; he was eagerly looking forward to graduating into the seniors when he was fourteen. Even Magda was a member of the Bund Deutscher Maedel, the League of German Maidens.
‘It’s horrible,’ she said. ‘They’re always going on about how we should train ourselves to be healthy mothers of healthy children. I don’t want to be a mother: I’ll be too busy as a historian, I expect.’
Hugh blushed. They were climbing through the woods to a hill from which you could get a spectacular view of the Vltava in its gorge. He was grateful that the path was narrow at this point, so they were walking in single file.
‘Still, it was worse last year.’ Magda glanced back over her shoulder. ‘I was in the Jungmaedel then: we had to wear the ugliest uniform you ever saw and great big marching boots.’
She ran on up the path, offering Hugh a tantalizing glimpse of brown calves beneath a swinging skirt.
On 22 June 1941, the Germans invaded the territory of their ally the USSR without the courtesy of a declaration of war.
Helmuth Scholl had been expecting it. It had been obvious to him from the start that the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact nearly two years ago was merely a temporary expedient. It made military sense, of course: Germany had learned the dangers of fighting on two fronts in the last war. He agreed with the logic of Hitler’s strategy – knock out France, the one significant land power to the west of the Reich and then concentrate on the Wehrmacht on the east. He was amazed that some of his fellow officers had ever taken the Pact seriously. Hitler had made it clear from the beginning – in Mein Kampf – that the bulk of Germany’s Lebensraum would have to come from the Slav lands. And Hitler was consistent in this if in nothing else – that his policies since coming to power were based on the ideas he outlined in Mein Kampf.
Colonel Scholl had had firm knowledge of the impending invasion for nearly six months before it happened. Hitler’s Directive 21 for Operation Barbarossa inevitably involved the military staff at the castle in a great deal of work. The movement of men and munitions was only part of the problem; the worst headache was the need to co-ordinate the preparations of the Reich’s allies, Slovakia, Roumania and Hungary.
The sheer size of the attack worried Scholl. Hitler was concentrating the forces at his disposal into three huge army groups: one hundred and twenty divisions would attack on a broad front that stretched from the Baltic to the Black Sea. Everything depended on speed and the quality of the Russian defence. The strategy might be impeccable but the tactics, in Scholl’s view, had an unnecessary element of risk about them.
Hitler wanted too much and too soon. Scholl remembered a line from the American philosopher Santayana: Those who do not remember the past are condemned to relive it. At times he was terribly afraid that the Führer had forgotten Napoleon. Russia was not like other countries.
And the Russians were not like other soldiers.
The telephone call came four days later. Scholl was in his office in the castle, sipping the strong black coffee which he always had at ten-thirty. It was not a direct line, of course. The news had filtered back from the headquarters of Army Group North, somewhere in Lithuania, to the Army High Command in Berlin. The news was unofficial at this stage – the colonel had a friend on Brauchitsch’s staff – but it was nonetheless accurate for that.
He left his coffee unfinished and didn’t even touch the pastry that came with it. He ordered his car and told the secretary in the outer office that he wouldn’t be in for the rest of the day. His manner was as courteous as ever, but the secretary claimed that she knew something was wrong from the instant that she saw that untouched pastry; the colonel’s sweet tooth was notorious.
Bruckman drove him home. The chauffeur had known the Oberst since 1917, and he recognized the expression on his face. For once there was no conversation during the drive.
At the villa Scholl went straight to his study, leaving orders that he was not to be disturbed. But Eva, who had been upstairs supervising the maids, had seen the car arrive. He wasn’t surprised that she ignored his order. He was even grateful.
