9780670920426 by Smakprov Media AB

Anna Funder All That I Am

From the bestselling author of Stasiland and Wifedom

‘Spellbinding . . . there are echoes of the best espionage tales’ Sunday Telegraph

‘This book is a wonder’ Spectator

PRAISE FOR ALL THAT I AM

‘A superb novel that transcends its setting . . . This book is a wonder. Do, please, read it’ Spectator

‘The strengths of Funder’s writing are emotional and imaginative. In what she has to say about love and betrayal there is profound truth’ The Times

‘Anna Funder proved herself a first-rate reporter with Stasiland – now she appears as a compelling novelist in a dark story of German émigrés in the 1930s, struggling to warn the indifferent English against the Nazis’ Claire Tomalin

‘Spellbinding’ Sunday Telegraph

‘The subtlety of Anna Funder’s novel is in the elegance of her precise prose, and in her painstaking portrait of an ordinary woman swept up in extraordinary events . . The result is a strong and impressively humane novel’ Times Literary Supplement

‘With all the excitement of a thriller, an absorbing study of exile, courage and memory’ Evening Standard, Best Books of the Year

‘A bravura piece of storytelling – perfectly plotted, exactingly described . . Funder has taken the raw material of truth and from it created a novel of real power and beauty’ Daily Telegraph

‘A murder mystery now more than three generations old becomes a catalyst for a deeper, richer story about two perennial but inexhaustible themes: love and loyalty. Rarely has a novel been filled with such intelligent, inquisitive, introspective characters’ Sunday Times

‘History, like hope, is not something to be solved, but to be carried. Anna Funder has written an essential novel about how we carry the bricks of history on our backs, and how we continually build new homes from the material of the past. All That I Am is an intimate exploration of human connection and our responsibility to one another. Funder breathes life into Kundera’s aperçu that the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting’ Colum McCann

‘A seamless and powerful tale . . . a narrative of individual endeavour and survival, which examines universal themes. Above all, this is a book with a strong moral compass . . . Dora and Ruth, especially, convey a sense of truthfulness and decency that transcends their time and should inspire us, even now, to expose injustice and tyranny’ Independent on Sunday

‘A gripping story of love and betrayal. Dora is the most attractive fictional heroine in a long time’ New Statesman

‘Superb . . . Funder writes beautifully, with an understated lyricism that never gets in the way of the gripping story. Deeply moving’ Irish Times

‘An enthralling novel’ O, The Oprah Magazine

‘You will suffer a couple of blows to the heart and the solar plexus by the time you finish All That I Am, a book that hits a nerve and jangles the body, for it speaks to the times we are living in RIGHT NOW Courage, it seems, is a constant, a precious element of humankind in times of upheaval and terror. The need for truth, yearning and the connection of one human to the next – as Anna Funder writes it – is so tangible it popped my head apart some’ Tom Hanks

‘Imaginative, compassionate and convincing’ Wall Street Journal

‘Funder writes with grace and conviction about the intrusion of the political on the domestic and the thrill of falling in love over a cause’

The New York Times Book Review

‘Absorbing . . . by alternating between Ernst and Ruth, Funder leaps through time with alacrity. She adds an integral perspective on a shopworn subject by invoking the lives of Nazi dissidents whose attempts to alert the world to the growing menace of Nazism were ignored until it was too late’ Publishers Weekly

‘Funder’s political and moral intelligence shines even more brightly than in Stasiland; the compassionate but unsentimental truthfulness towards her characters even more moving for being interwoven into a narrative of such complexity’ Australian, Books of the Year

PRAISE FOR STASILAND

‘Superb . . . Still as acutely creepy a look into what life was actually like there as I’ve been able to find’ William Gibson, The New York Times

‘Stasiland struck me like no other in the last five years. It is fascinating, entertaining, hilarious, horrifying and very important’ Tom Hanks

‘Meticulous and compassionate . . . a heroic act of listening’ London Review of Books

‘A brilliant and necessary book about oppression and history . . . Here is someone who knows how to tell the truth’ Evening Standard, Books of the Year

‘Anna Funder explores, in the most humane and sensitive way, lives blighted by the East German Stasi. She allows ex-Stasi operatives an equal chance to reflect on their achievements, and finds – to her dismay and ours – that they have learnt nothing’ J. M. Coetzee

‘Anna Funder’s Stasiland demonstrates that great, original reporting is still possible. She found her subject in East Germany, went for it bravely and delivers the goods in a heartbreaking, beautifully written book. A classic for sure’ Claire Tomalin, Guardian, Books of the Year

‘Stasiland is a brilliant account of the passionate search for a brutal history in the process of being lost, forgotten and destroyed. It is a masterpiece of investigative analysis, written almost like a novel, with a perfect mix of compassion and distance’ Elena Lappin, Sunday Times

‘At once lyrical, bitter, funny and sad, her writing releases many individuals of their stories – a second liberation’ Jonathan Heawood, Observer

‘If I had to single out just one paperback this year, it would be Anna Funder’s Stasiland. Funder brings home with chilling detail the sheer human wastefulness of a political system built on deception and betrayal. It’s a terrible story, but written with vivacity and wit’ Simon Shaw, Daily Mail

‘A journey into the bizarre, scary, secret history of the former East Germany that is both relevant and riveting’ Sunday Times, Books of the Year

‘Filtered through Funder’s own keen perspective, these dramatic tales highlight the courage that ordinary people can display in torturous circumstances’ Publishers Weekly

‘I began the sprightly prose prepared for an indictment of the horrors of a victimized society, and finished laughing along with the frankspeaking characters Funder found. Wit survives and inhumanity is often undermined by its ironies’ Iain Finlayson, The Times

‘Funder writes breezily, with a dry wit, and the book fleshes out the familiar picture of a joyless Communist state, meditating on how people thought, felt and survived. Weaving her own observations into the appalling, inspiring and sometimes hilarious testimonies she hears, she vividly communicates her fascination with this monstrous, absurd country’ Daily Telegraph

‘I was gripped . . . Highly personal, intelligent and disturbing accounts of living under repressive regimes’ Deborah Moggach, Observer, Books of the Year

‘Anna Funder’s Stasiland is essential reading for anyone going East. Funder, an Australian living and working in Germany, became obsessed with the silence surrounding the ongoing presence of so many undercover informers after unification, and wrote this fascinating, funny and very human account of her attempts to discover the truth behind the Stasi’ Ivana Bacik, Irish Times, Books of the Year

‘A journey into the bizarre, scary, secret history of the former East Germany that is both relevant and riveting’ Anthony Sattin, Sunday Times, Travel Books of the Year

‘There is much humour and even affection in her portraits . . . In theory at least, torture was as illegal under Hitler as it was under Honecker. It was, however, a brave man or woman who drew attention to the brutality of East German prisons. All this and much else comes wonderfully to life in Funder’s racy account’ Guardian

‘A sometimes shocking, occasionally bizarre and often amusing portrayal of a place that, despite its undeniable achievements since 1989, is still something of a parallel world within united Germany’ FT Magazine

‘In Stasiland [. . . Funder] spiritedly plunges herself into “this land gone wrong” and attempts to understand a regime like the German Democratic Republic through the stories of ordinary men and women, “not just the activists or the famous writers”. The result is a terrific act of life-giving to people – 17 million of them – who have hitherto lacked not just a voice but an audience’ Nicholas Shakespeare, Telegraph

‘Brilliantly illustrates the weird, horrifying, viciously cruel place that was Cold War East Germany . . As well as the horror, Funder writes superbly of the absurdities of the Stasi’ Andrew Roberts, Evening Standard

‘Extraordinary tales of the country after the fall of the Berlin Wall . . . She also writes superbly about what it is like to live in Berlin today’ Sunday Telegraph

‘Stasiland, Anna Funder’s award-winning exposé of the devastating effects of the work of the secret police inside East Germany, is leaving bookshops at a rate rarely seen with serious factual works . . . At times it reads more like a thriller than a historical survey’ Vanessa Thorpe, Observer

‘Wonderful . . . Funder displays an eye for telling detail in charting the intimate stories of ordinary people and ex-Stasi officers’ Irish Times

‘Goes beyond Orwell . . . What the reader learns from these stories is that evil swings like a pendulum, from the banal to the surreal, but no matter where it is in the spectrum, it always leaves pain behind’ Booklist

‘The detail of her cases is so powerful as to disarm’ Times Literary Supplement

‘Moving and exhilarating, Stasiland is the kind of book that makes us love non-fiction. With her tenacious curiosity and energetic intelligence, Anna Funder is a natural: she has amazing nerve, a fresh prose style and a novelist’s warm response to character and human drama’ Helen Garner

‘Anna Funder’s Stasiland offers a series of fascinating stories about people whom the author encountered on her visit to the former German Democratic Republic after the fall of the infamous Berlin Wall in November 1989 . . . It’s a book which offers remarkable insight into the lives of individual Germans in the communist East under the ever-watchful eyes of the internal security army of the DDR , the Stasi’ Canberra Times

‘Anna Funder’s portraits of these products of state paranoia are by turns funny, heartbreaking and stirring. She tells the story of the collapse of a way of life with wit, style and sympathy’ Marie Claire

‘Funder uncovers extraordinary tales of survival and subversion in the most perfected surveillance state of all time’ Publishing News

PRAISE FOR WIFEDOM

The New York Times Notable Book of 2023; Book of the Year in Economist, The Times, Daily Telegraph, Financial Times, Guardian, Big Issue and Lit Hub

‘Simply, a masterpiece. Here, Anna Funder not only remakes the art of biography, she resurrects a woman in full’ Geraldine Brooks

‘A marvellous book . . . I just loved it all, and have a permanently marked-up, dog-eared copy on my shelf for the next generation’ Tom Hanks

‘Electrifying . . . Daring in both form and content, Funder’s book is a nuanced, sophisticated literary achievement . . . A sharp, captivating look at a complicated relationship and a resurrection of a vital figure in Orwell’s life’ Kirkus Review, starred review

‘One of the most startling explorations of life-writing (Eileen’s, Orwell’s and Funder’s) in recent times . Wifedom is a genre-bending tour de force that resurrects an invisible woman, and relitigates the saintly image of the man she called “Eric” . . . a moving, forensic act of biographical reconstruction’ Robert McCrum, Independent

‘A virtuoso performance on the theme, adding personal memoir, some fictional reconstructions and a glittering sense of purpose’ Sarah Bakewell, The New York Times

‘With the precision of a historian, Funder cobbles together scant details to reconstruct a life. And with the imaginative force of a novelist, she speculates in clearly sign-posted moments on what that life was like . . . A spectacular achievement of both scholarship and pure feeling’ Jessica Ferri, Los Angeles Times

‘Blending forensic research, fiction, life-writing and criticism, Funder upends the legacy of literary triumph to reveal the woman behind it . . . Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life is a brilliant, creative hybrid of life writing, feminist polemic and literary criticism, which upends the way we read’ Susan Wyndham, Guardian

‘Electrifying . . . a genre-melding hybrid that allows Eileen’s likeness to be partially recovered through her own words and the testimonies of those who remembered her, as well as reimagined in fictional passages to flesh out the gaps in the record . . . Wifedom is a vital, if incomplete, portrait of a woman whose unseen work was instrumental in the creation of books that became cornerstones of twentieth-century literature’ Stephanie Merritt, Observer

‘Funder is a boundary-breaking, risk-taking writer whose previous books synthesized memoir, fact and imagination to impressive effect . . . At her best, Funder shows that radical compassion – which is not the same as forgiveness – will move one closer to understanding, in marriage and biography, every time’ Donna Rifkind, Wall Street Journal

‘Anna Funder is a premier-league writer who can roll fiction, reportage, criticism and memoir into glinting prose, her sentences like handheld treasures you keep turning over, admiring for their graceful contours and crafted precision’ Marina Benjamin, Spectator

‘Anna Funder’s fascinating, furious, inventive biography of Eileen takes us more immersively into the Orwells’ world. And Funder is a formidable writer for the job . . In Wifedom she blends fiction, biography and autobiography to bring Eileen vividly alive’ Alice O’K eefe, The Times

‘In this rattlingly fierce book, Anna Funder sets out to unmask the “wicked magic trick” by which Eileen O’S haughnessy Blair has been made to disappear . . . readers will be simply thrilled – and shaken – by this passionately partisan act of literary reparation’ Kathryn Hughes, Sunday Times

‘Radical in its outlook and distinguished by a creative writer’s imaginative insights . . Funder’s evocation of Eileen’s fugitive life haunts this reader’s imagination. It is a spellbinding achievement’ Jason Harding, Financial Times

‘A truly wonderful biography . . Anna Funder has written another brilliant human portrait’ Claire Tomalin

‘Astonishing . . . Wifedom is no less than the rescue of a remarkable woman from the deliberate ellipses of default male history’ Caroline Criado-Perez

‘Full of keen psychological insight and eloquent prose, this shines’ Publishers Weekly, starred review

‘There’s exhilaration in reading every brilliant word’ Chloe Hooper

‘This book is an utter triumph and nothing short of a miracle’ Anne Summers

‘Anna Funder reveals in her genre-bending biography of the hitherto forgotten O’S haughnessy, the Orwells’ was a marriage of literary equals, as George relied on Eileen for much, much more than afternoon tea’ Lit Hub, 25 Non-Fiction Books You Need to Read this Summer

‘Wonderful, unexpected and exciting from beginning to end’ Antonia Fraser

‘A strikingly original study that casts Orwell in new light. Deeply perceptive, it is a testament to forgotten wives of famous men everywhere’ Julia Boyd

‘Wifedom is both an immovable and an irresistible book, an object and a force. Anna Funder [. . .] has written another great and important narrative of oppression and covert suppression’ Michael Hofmann, Australian Book Review

‘Elegantly and imaginatively resurrects Eileen’ Economist

‘An extraordinary blend of forensic historical detective work and evocative fiction, as well as snatches of memoir. It not only writes O’S haughnessy back into the story but also questions how far we’ve really come in terms of gender equality. To read about O’S haughnessy is to fall in love with her’ Radio Times

‘Audaciously brilliant’ Jessie Thompson, Independent

‘Genre-bending, eye-opening, wonderfully written’ Fiona Sturges, i

‘Dazzling, infuriating . . . A biography, a critique of the art of biography, a witty essay and an act of rescue’ Chris Hewitt, Star Tribune

about the author

Anna Funder is the author of the international bestsellers Stasiland, All That I Am and Wifedom . In 2004 Stasiland won the Samuel Johnson Prize and, along with All That I Am, has been published in twenty-six countries. All That I Am won the Miles Franklin Award, and was a finalist for the International IMPAC Dublin Award and the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. Wifedom was an instant Sunday Times top ten bestseller, and won the Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger. Before turning to writing full-time, Anna worked as an international human rights lawyer. She lives in Sydney.

Anna Funder ALL THAT I AM

A novel

PENGUIN BOOKS

UK | USA | Canada | Ireland | Australia

India | New Zealand | South Africa

Penguin Books is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com

Penguin Random House UK , One Embassy Gardens, 8 Viaduct Gardens, London sw 11 7bw

penguin.co.uk

First published in Australia by Penguin 2011

First published in Great Britain by Viking 2011

Reissued in this edition 2025 001

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Penguin Random House values and supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes freedom of expression and supports a vibrant culture. Thank you for purchasing an authorized edition of this book and for respecting intellectual property laws by not reproducing, scanning or distributing any part of it by any means without permission. You are supporting authors and enabling Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for everyone. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner for the purpose of training artificial intelligence technologies or systems. In accordance with Article 4(3) of the DSM Directive 2019/790, Penguin Random House expressly reserves this work from the text and data mining exception

Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A.

The authorized representative in the EEA is Penguin Random House Ireland, Morrison Chambers, 32 Nassau Street, Dublin D 02 Y h 68

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

I sb N : 978–0–670–92042–6

Penguin Random House is committed to a sustainable future for our business, our readers and our planet. This book is made from Forest Stewardship Council® certified paper.

In memory of Ruth Blatt (née Koplowitz)

Dear Ernst, lie shadowless at last among The other war-horses who existed till they’d done Something that was an example to the young.

W. H. Auden, ‘In Memory of Ernst Toller’, May 1939

Outside my window the world has gone to war Are you the one that I’ve been waiting for?

Nick Cave, ‘(Are You) the One That I’ve Been Waiting For?’

The most civilized nations are as close to barbarity as the most polished iron is close to rust. Nations, like metals, shine only on the surface.

Antoine de Rivarol

When Hitler came to power I was in the bath. Our apartment was on the Schiffbauerdamm near the river, right in the middle of Berlin. From its windows we could see the dome of the parliament building. The wireless in the living room was turned up loud so Hans could hear it in the kitchen, but all that drifted down to me were waves of happy cheering, like a football match. It was Monday afternoon.

Hans was juicing limes and making sugar syrup with the dedicated attention of a chemist, trying not to burn it to caramel. He’d bought a special Latin American cocktail pestle that morning from the KaDeWe department store. The shopgirl had lips pencilled into a purple bow. I’d laughed at us, embarrassed at buying such frippery, this wooden shaft with its rounded head that probably cost what the girl earnt in a day.

‘It’s crazy,’ I said, ‘to have an implement solely for mojitos!’

Hans put his arm around my shoulders and kissed me on the forehead. ‘It’s not crazy.’ He winked at the girl, who was folding the thing carefully into gold tissue, listening close. ‘It’s called ci-vi-li-sation.’

For an instant I saw him through her eyes: a magniﬁcent man with hair slicked back off his forehead, Prussian-blue eyes and the straightest of straight noses. A man who had probably fought in the trenches for his country and who deserved, now, any small luxuries life might offer. The girl was breathing through her mouth. Such a man could make your life beautiful in every detail, right down to a Latin American lime pestle.

We’d gone to bed that afternoon and were getting up for the night when the broadcast began. Between the cheers, I could hear Hans pounding the lime skins, a rhythm like the beat of his blood. My body ﬂoated, loose from spent pleasure.

He appeared at the bathroom door, a lock of hair in his face and his hands wet by his sides. ‘Hindenburg’s done it. They’ve got a coalition together and sworn him in over the lot of them. Hitler’s Chancellor!’ He dashed back down the corridor to hear more. It seemed so improbable. I grabbed my robe and trailed water into the living room. The announcer’s voice teetered with excitement. ‘We’re told the new Chancellor will be making an appearance this very afternoon, that he is inside the building as we speak! The crowd is waiting. It is beginning to snow lightly, but people here show no signs of leaving . . .’ I could hear the pulse of the chanting on the streets outside our building and the words of it from the wireless behind me. ‘We – want – the Chancellor! We – want – the Chancellor!’ The announcer went on: ‘. . . the door on the balcony is opening – no – it’s only an attendant – but yes! He’s bringing a microphone to the railing . . . just listen to that crowd . . .’

I moved to the windows. The whole south side of the apartment was a curved wall of double casements facing in the direction of the river. I opened a set of windows. Air rushed in – sharp with cold and full of roaring. I looked at the dome of the Reichstag. The din was coming from the Chancellery, behind it.

‘Ruth?’ Hans said from the middle of the room. ‘It is snowing.’

‘I want to hear this for myself.’

He moved in behind me and I drew his hands, clammy and acidic, across my stomach. An advance party of snowﬂ akes whirled in front of us, revealing unseen eddies in the air. Searchlights stroked the underbelly of clouds. Footsteps, below us. Four men were racing down our street, holding high their torches and trailing ﬁ re. I smelt kerosene.

‘We – want – the Chancellor!’ The mass out there, chanting to be saved. Behind us on the sideboard the response echoed from the box, tinny and tamed and on a three-second delay.

Then a huge cheer. It was the voice of their leader, bellowing. ‘The task which faces us. Is the hardest which has fallen. To German statesmen within the memory of man. Every class and every individual must help us. To form. The new Reich. Germany must not, Germany will not, go under in the chaos of communism.’

‘No,’ I said, my cheek to Hans’s shoulder. ‘We’ll go under with a healthy folk mentality and in an orderly manner instead.’

‘We won’t go under, Ruthie,’ he said in my ear. ‘Hitler won’t be able to do a thing. The nationalists and the cabinet will keep a tight rein. They just want him as a ﬁgurehead.’

Young men were pooling in the streets below, many of them uniformed: brown for the party’s own troops, the SA, black for Hitler’s personal guard, the SS. Others were lay enthusiasts, in street clothes with black armbands. A couple of boys had homemade ones, with the swastika back to front. They were carrying ﬂ ags, singing, ‘Deutschland, Deutschland über alles’. I heard the cry, ‘The Republic is shit,’ and made out from its intonation the old schoolyard taunt – ‘Rip the Jew’s skirt in two/the skirt is ripped/the Jew did a shit.’ Kerosene fumes buckled the air. Across the street they were setting up a stand where the young men could exchange their guttering torches for new-lit ones.

Hans returned to the kitchen, but I couldn’t tear myself away.

After half an hour I saw the wonky homemade armbands back at the stand.

‘They’re sending them around in circles!’ I cried. ‘To make their number look bigger.’

‘Come inside,’ Hans called over his shoulder from the kitchen.

‘Can you believe that?’

‘Honestly, Ruthie.’ He leant on the doorjamb, smiling. ‘An audience only encourages them.’

‘In a minute.’ I went to the closet in the hall, which I’d converted into a darkroom. It still had some brooms and other long things – skis, a university banner – in one corner. I took out the red ﬂ ag of the left movement and walked back.

‘You’re not serious?’ Hans put his hands to his face in mock horror as I unfurled it.

I hung it out the window. It was only a small one.

PART I

‘I’m afraid, Mrs Becker, the news is not altogether comforting.’

I am in a posh private clinic in Bondi Junction with harbour views. Professor Melnikoff has silver hair and half-glasses, a sky-blue silk tie, and long hands clasped together on his desk. His thumbs play drily with one another. I wonder whether this man has been trained to deal with the people around the body part of interest to him, in this case, my brain. Probably not. Melnikoff, in his quietness, has the manner of one who appreciates having a large white nuclear tomb between him and another person.

And he has seen inside my mind; he is preparing to tell me the shape and weight and creeping betrayals of it. Last week they loaded me into the MRI machine, horizontal in one of those verdammten gowns that do not close at the back: designed to remind one of the fragility of human dignity, to ensure obedience to instruction, and as a guarantee against last-minute ﬂ ight. Loud ticking noises as the rays penetrated my skull. I left my wig on.

‘It’s Doctor Becker actually,’ I say. Outside of the school, I never used to insist on the title. But I have found, with increasing age,

that humility suits me less. Ten years ago I decided I didn’t like being treated like an old woman, so I resumed full and ﬁerce use of the honoriﬁc. And comfort, after all, is not what I’m here for. I want the news.

Melnikoff smiles and gets up and places the transparencies of my brain, black-and-white photo-slices of me, under clips on a lightboard. I notice a real Miró – not a print – on his wall. They socialised the health system here long ago, and he can still afford that? There was nothing to be afraid of, then, was there?

‘Well, Dr Becker,’ he says, ‘these bluish areas denote the beginnings of plaquing.’

‘I’m a doctor of letters,’ I say. ‘In English. If you don’t mind.’

‘You’re really not doing too badly. For your age.’

I make my face as blank as I can manage. A neurologist should know, at the very least, that age does not make one grateful for small mercies. I feel sane enough – young enough – to experience loss as loss. Then again, nothing and no one has been able to kill me yet.

Melnikoff returns my gaze mildly, his ﬁngertips together. He has a soft unhurriedness in his dealings with me. Perhaps he likes me? The thought comes as a small shock.

‘It’s the beginning of deﬁcit accumulation – aphasia, short-term memory loss, perhaps damage to some aspects of spatial awareness, to judge from the location of the plaquing.’ He points to soupy areas at the upper front part of my brain. ‘Possibly some effect on your sight, but let’s hope not at this stage.’

On his desk sits a wheel calendar, an object from an era in which the days ﬂ ipped over one another without end. Behind him the harbour shifts and sparkles, the great green lung of this city.

‘Actually, Professor, I am remembering more, not less.’

He removes his half-glasses. His eyes are small and watery, the irises seeming not to sit ﬂush with the whites. He is older than I thought. ‘You are?’

‘Things that happened. Clear as day.’

A whiff of kerosene, unmistakable. Though that can’t be right. Melnikoff holds his chin between thumb and forefinger, examining me.

‘There may be a clinical explanation,’ he says. ‘Some research suggests that more vivid long-term recollections are thrown up as the short-term memory deteriorates. Occasionally, intense epiphenomena may be experienced by people who are in danger of losing their sight. These are hypotheses, no more.’

‘You can’t help me then.’

He smiles his mild smile. ‘You need help?’

I leave with an appointment in six months’ time, for February 2002. They don’t make them so close together as to be dispiriting for us old people, but they don’t make them too far apart, either. Afterwards, I take the bus to hydrotherapy. It is a kneeling bus, one which tilts its forecorner to the ground for the lame, like me. I ride it from the pink medical towers of Bondi Junction along the ridge above the water into town. Out the window a rosella feasts from a ﬂ ame tree, sneakers hang-dance on an electric wire. Behind them the earth folds into hills that slope down to kiss that harbour, lazy and alive.

In danger of losing their sight. I had very good eyes once. Though it’s another thing to say what I saw. In my experience, it is entirely possible to watch something happen and not to see it at all.

The hydrotherapy class is at the fancy new swimming pool in town. Like most things, hydrotherapy only works if you believe in it.

The water is warm, the temperature ﬁ nely gauged so as not to upset the diabetics and heart ﬁbrillators among us. I have a patch I stick on my chest each day. It sends an electrical current to my

heart to spur it on if it ﬂ ags. From previous, quietly death-defying experiments, I know it stays on underwater.

We are seven in the pool today, four women and three men. Two of the men are brought down the ramp into the water on wheelchairs, like the launching of ships. Their attendants hover around them, the wheels of the things ungainly in the water. I am at the back, behind a woman in an ancient yellow bathing cap with astonishing rubber ﬂowers sprouting off it. We raise our hands obediently. I watch our swinging arm-ﬂesh. The aging body seems to me to get a head start on decomposition, melting quietly inside its own casing.

‘Arms over heads – breathing in – now bringing them down – breathing out – pushing till they’re straight behind you – breathe IN!’

We need, apparently, to be reminded to inhale.

The young instructor on the pool edge has a crescent of spiky white hair around her head and a microphone coming down in front of her mouth. We look up to her as to someone saved. She is pleasant and respectful, but she is clearly an emissary bearing tidings – rather belatedly for us – that physical wellbeing may lead to eternal life.

I am trying to believe in hydrotherapy, though Lord knows I failed at believing in God. When I was young, during the First World War, my brother Oskar would hide a novel – The Idiot or Buddenbrooks – under the prayer book at synagogue so Father would not notice. Eventually I declared, with embarrassing thirteen-yearold certainty, ‘Forced love hurts God,’ and refused to go. Looking back on it I was, even then, arguing on His terms; how can you hurt something that doesn’t exist?

And now, eons later, if I am not careful I ﬁ nd myself thinking, Why did God save me and not all those other people? The believers? Deep down, my strength and luck only make sense

if I am one of the Chosen People. Undeserving, but Chosen still; I am long-living proof of His irrationality. Neither God nor I, when you think about it, deserve to exist.

‘Now we’re concentrating on legs, so just use your arms as you like, for balance,’ the girl says. Jody? Mandy? My hearing aid is in the change rooms. I wonder if it is picking all this up, broadcasting it to the mothers wrestling their children out of wet costumes, to the mould and pubic hair and mysterious sods of unused toilet paper on the ﬂoor.

‘We’re putting the left one out, and turning circles from the knee.’

A siren sounds, bleating on and off. Over at the big pool, the waves are going to start. Children walk-run through the water with their hands up, keen to be at the front where the waves will be biggest. Teen girls subtly check that their bikini tops will hold; mothers hip their babies and walk in too, for the fun. A little boy with red goggles darts in up to his chin. Behind him a slight young woman with hair falling in a soft bob on her cheeks walks calmly forward, shoulderblades moving under her skin like intimations of wings. My heart lurches: Dora!

It is not her, of course – my cousin would be even older than me – but no matter. Almost every day, my mind ﬁ nds some way to bring her to me. What would Professor Melnikoff have to say about that, I wonder?

The wave comes and goggle-boy slides up its side, tilting his mouth to the ceiling for air, but it swallows him entire. After it passes he’s nowhere. Then, further down the pool, he surfaces, gulping and ecstatic.

‘Dr Becker?’ The girl’s voice from above. ‘It’s time to leave.’

The others are already over near the steps, waiting for the wheelchair men to be positioned on the ramp. I look up at her and see she’s smiling. Perhaps that microphone gives her a direct line to God.

‘There’s ten minutes till the next class but,’ she says. ‘So no hurry.’ Someone is meting out time in unequal allotments. Why not choose a white-haired messenger, lisping and benign?

Bev has left me a small pot of shepherd’s pie in the fridge, covered tight in plastic wrap. It has a sprinkling of pepper on the mashedpotato topping, and it also has, in its perfectly measured single-serve isolation, a compulsory look about it. So I thaw a piece of frozen cheesecake for dinner – one of the advantages of living alone – then ﬁ zz a Berocca in a tall glass to make up for it. I’ll have to explain myself to Bev when she comes tomorrow.

In bed the cicadas outside keep me company – it’s still early. Their chorus coaxes the night into coming, as if without their encouragement it would not venture into this bright place. What a ni-ight! they seem to chirrup, what a ni-ight! And then we are quiet together.

Two quick knocks at the door – Clara and I maintain formalities because formalities are required between a man and a woman who work alone in a hotel room, as between a doctor and a patient in the most personal procedure. Our formalities transform this place of rumpled dreams – the sod-green curtains, the breakfast tray uncleared, the bed I hastily made – into a place of work.

‘Good morning.’ An open smile on her red-painted lips, lips that look suddenly intimate. It is the smile of a young woman whose ﬂ ame is undiminished by racial exile; who has possibly been loved this morning.

‘Good morning, Clara.’

Today she wears an apricot faux-silk shirt with lavish sleeves and three-button cuffs – a cheap copy of luxury that lasts but a season and may just be the essence of democracy. ‘Peachy’, as they’d say here in America, although in English I can’t tell poetry from a pun. She brings with her morning air, new-minted for this day, the 16 th of May 1939 .

Clara looks around the room, assessing the damage of the

night. She knows I do not sleep. Her gaze comes to rest on me, in the armchair. I’m ﬁddling with a tasselled cord. Its green and gold threads catch the light.

‘I’ll do it,’ she says, springing forward. She takes the cord and ties back the drapes.

But the cord is not from the drapes. It is from my wife Christiane’s dressing gown. When she left me, six weeks ago, I took it as a keepsake. Or an act of sabotage.

‘No mail?’

Clara collects it each day from the postbox on her way in.

‘No,’ she says, her face averted at the window. She takes a deep breath, turns, and walks purposefully to the table. Then she rummages in her bag, still standing, for her steno pad. ‘Shall we ﬁ nish the letter to Mrs Roosevelt?’ she asks.

‘Not now. Maybe later.’

Today I have other plans. I reach over and pick up my autobiography from the table. My American publisher wants to bring it out in English. He thinks that after the success of my plays in Britain, and my American lecture tour, it should sell. He is trying, God love him, to help me, since I gave away all my money to the starving children of Spain.

I don’t need money any more, but I do need to set the record straight. As sure as I sit here today, Hitler will soon have his war. (Not that anyone in this country seems to care – his opening salvo, the invasion of Czechoslovakia just weeks ago, has slid down to page thirteen in the New York Times .) But what people don’t realise is that his war has been on against us for years. There have been casualties already. Someone needs to write their names.

Clara is staring out the window at Central Park, waiting for me to gather my thoughts. While her back is still turned I ask, ‘Have you read I Was a German ?’

‘No. No, I haven’t.’ She swivels, placing a stray curl of dark hair behind her ear.

‘Good. Good, good.’

She laughs – Clara has a PhD from Frankfurt and a ﬁ ne mind and can afford lavish self-deprecation. ‘It’s not good!’

‘No, it is.’

She tilts her face to me, the freckles strewn across it as random and perfect as a constellation .

‘Because I’m going to be making some changes.’

She waits.

‘It’s incomplete.’

‘I should hope so.’

‘No. Not updates. Someone I left out.’

My memoir is subtly, shamefully self-aggrandising. I put myself at the centre of everything; I never admitted any doubts or fear. (I was cunning, though, telling of isolated childhood cruelties and adult rashness, to give the illusion – not least to myself – of full disclosure.) I left my love out, and now she is nowhere. I want to see whether, at this late stage of the game, honesty is possible for me.

When I open the book in my lap its pages stand up like a fan, held tight to a midpoint. The National Socialists took my diaries – probably burnt them on their pyres as well. I must work from memory.

The girl sits down at the table, side-on to me. Clara Bergdorf has been working with me for ﬁve weeks. She is a rare soul, with whom silences of whole minutes are calm. The time is neither empty, nor full of anticipatory pressure. It expands. It makes room for things to return, to ﬁ ll my empty heart.

I light a cigar and leave it smoking in the ashtray. ‘We’ll start with the introduction. Add this dedication at the end.’ I clear my throat. ‘I call to mind a woman, to whose courageous act I owe the

saving of these manuscripts.’ I breathe deeply and look out at the sky, today a soft, undecided colour.

‘When in January, 1933 , the Dictator of Braunau was given power against the German People, Dora Fabian, whose life has ended —’

And then I break off. Clara thinks I am paralysed by grief, but it is not so. I simply do not know how to describe that ending. In the park the wind toys with the trees, shifting leaves and branches a fraction every which way – as if the music has stopped but they cannot, for the sheer life of them, keep absolutely still. Clara risks a glance in my direction. She is relieved to see I am not weeping. (I have form in that department.)

‘Sorry.’ I turn back to her. ‘Where was I?’

‘“Dora Fabian,”’ she reads back, ‘“whose life has ended.”’

‘Thank you.’ I look out again and ﬁ nd my word. ‘Sorrowfully,’ I say, which is the plainest truth there is. ‘Whose life has ended sorrowfully in exile, went to my ﬂ at and brought away to safety two trunk-loads of manuscripts.’

Clara doesn’t look up. Her hand moves steadily across the page, coming to rest only moments after I stop speaking.

‘The police got to know of what she had done and sent her to prison. She said that the papers had been destroyed. After she was released from prison she ﬂed from Germany, and, shortly before her death, she got the papers out of Germany with the assistance of a disillusioned Nazi. Full stop.’

Clara puts down her pencil.

That is all? I close my eyes.

Dora’s editorial trace is all over my book: the sharp focus, the humour. At the end of our lives it is our loves we remember most, because they are what shaped us. We have grown to be who we are around them, as around a stake.

And when the stake is gone?

‘All right, then?’ Clara asks softly after a few minutes. She thinks I’ve drifted off, taken advantage of her sweet presence and gone to sleep. She touches the edges of the pad in front of her.

‘Yes, yes.’ I sit up properly again.

I will tell it all. I will bring Dora back, and I will make her live in this room.

The doorbell is ringing.

I ignore it. Without opening my eyes, I can tell it’s morning.

Ring ring ring ring ring ring ring . . . Verdammtes bell. Fuh-ken bell, as they say here. The thing has aged along with me and it sticks. I move my bad leg with the other one over the side of the bed, and slide my feet, gnarled as mallee roots, into the sheepskin shoes – one built up, the other plastic-soled. I leave my wig on the dresser.

Ring ring . . .

I open the door. The van speeds off – I can just make out, in purple writing on its side, ‘The World on Time’. It’s seven o’clock in the morning! A tad early, if you ask me.

A FedEx package on the mat. I stoop to get it with my stiff leg sticking out – I am a bald giraffe in an unreliable dressing gown and I feel sorry for any passers-by who might see me, mangy-minged and inglorious. This gives me a wicked thrill, till I imagine they might include children, whom I have, in general, no desire to horrify.

I move into the front room, my favourite room. It smells of furniture wax – Bev must have done it while I was out yesterday. She uses the wax – along with her Vicks VapoRub and her copper bracelets – as part of an arsenal against decay and time, suffocating the world with a layer of polyvinyls to make it shiny and preserve it forever like the plastic food in Japanese restaurant windows. She sprays the glass-fronted bookcases, the wooden arms of the chairs, even – I have witnessed this – the leaves of the rubber plant. One day I will sit too long and she will spray me as well, preserving me for all time as an exhibit: ‘European Refugee from Mid-Twentieth Century’. Not that I need preserving. Unkraut vergeht nicht, my mother used to say: you can’t kill a weed.

The other side of the package reads ‘Columbia University New York, Department of Germanic Languages’. Here in Sydney, the events of the world wash up later as story, smoothed and blurred as fragments of glass on the sand. And now?

Dear Dr Becker,

We refer to previous correspondence in this matter. As you are aware, the Mayﬂower Hotel is to be demolished at the end of 2001. The building is being emptied in preparation for this.

Um Gottes willen! How would I be aware? Sitting here in Bondi? And what ‘previous correspondence’? Then again, it might have slipped my mind.

The enclosed documents, belonging to Mr Ernst Toller, were found in a safe in the basement. The material consists of a ﬁ rst edition of Mr Toller’s autobiography, I Was a German , together with sheets of typed amendments to it. A handwritten note with the words ‘For Ruth Wesemann’ was found on top of them. The

German Restitutions Authority has conﬁ rmed that you were formerly known as Ruth Wesemann.

Should you so decide, the Butler Library of our university would be honoured to house this material for future generations. We already hold ﬁ rst editions of all Toller’s plays, and his correspondence from his time in the United States. We have taken the liberty of making copies for safekeeping.

If I or any member of the university faculty can be of assistance to you, we would welcome the opportunity.

Yours sincerely,

Mary E. Cunniliffe

Brooke Russell Astor Director for Special Collections

Toller!

His book is brittle as old skin, or a pile of leaves. The spine is broken, sprung loose from the cloth cover because of the sheets of paper thrust between its pages. Something from him to me: it can only be about her.

I reach to put it for a moment on the coffee table but my hands are shaking and some of the papers fall out onto the glass, then slip off to the ﬂoor. Inside me a sharpness – my hand moves to check the patch over my heart.

In his presence, and hers, I am returned to my core self. All my wry defences, my hard-won caustic shell, are as nothing. I was once so open to the world it hurts. The room blurs.

When I pick the book up again, it falls open at the ﬁ rst, typed insertion:

I call to mind a woman, to whose courageous act I owe the saving of these manuscripts. When in January, 1933 , the Dictator of Braunau was given power against the German People, Dora

Fabian, whose life has ended sorrowfully in exile, went to my ﬂ at and brought away to safety two trunk-loads of manuscripts. The police got to know of what she had done and sent her to prison. She said that the papers had been destroyed. After she was released from prison she ﬂed from Germany, and, shortly before her death, she got the papers out of Germany with the assistance of a disillusioned Nazi.

Ernst

Toller

New York, May

1939

Toller was always a master of compression. I pull a rug over my knees. I’d like to crawl back inside the night, perhaps to dream of her. But one can control dreams less than anything in life, which is to say, not at all.

I am so settled here I might never leave this room. The Mayﬂower Hotel, Central Park West, is quite a good hotel – not the best, by any means. Still, if I am honest, better than I can afford. But honesty is so hard. If I look too closely at the truth I might be unhinged by regret and lose hope in the world.

Then again, I may be well and truly unhinged already. Last week on the subway, a man hanging absent-mindedly onto the leather hand-strap stared at me a little long. Without thinking I ﬂ ashed him what Dora called my ‘famous person’s smile’. The poor fellow turned away as if ignoring a tic.

I ﬂed Europe for the land of the free, but I didn’t quite count on invisibility. In Berlin or Paris, in London or Moscow or Dubrovnik, I couldn’t take two steps without wading into autograph hunters. Once in a tender moment, Dora said it was good for me to know my work was appreciated. But I had been famous a long time; I was on ﬁ rstname terms with the phantom-Toller the press had made. Though I needed applause like oxygen, I never believed the love and plaudits were for the real me, who, because of my black times, I kept well hidden.

Clara has gone to get coffee. We are in a hiatus; the hotel knows I can’t pay the bill but is not throwing me out. Out of gratitude, we don’t push the limits by using room service.

I love Central Park. There’s a man out there now on a soapbox gesturing to passers-by, trying to attract and keep them like papers in the wind. I know that feeling: eyes screaming that the world belongs to you and you can reveal it all, if people will only stop, and listen. It is this prospect, of something freshly imagined, some new possibility of belief, that America holds out to all comers.

The book is in my lap. What chutzpah, to write my life story at forty! Or a bad omen. Perhaps, having written it down, I now feel the life is done. Dora would have made me snap out of it. There are some people just the thought of whom makes us behave better. It is six years ago now, that we worked on this book. In Berlin, in my narrow little study on Wilmersdorfer Strasse. Dora’s desk was behind the door, practically obscured if anyone opened it. She would sit there in the shadow, stockinged feet resting on two dictionaries stacked on the ﬂoor. My desk was bigger, under the window. She took down my words, pulling me up and putting me to rights if I veered off course. Dora thought I left the bitterest and most basic emotions out of the book, in favour of, as she put it, ‘all that derring-do’. I didn’t want to write about what went on inside me. Our worst ﬁght happened when I was writing about my – how should I say? – my collapse, after I was discharged from the front. When Dora wanted to interrupt me she used to put the steno pad down in her lap. When she had something serious to say, she’d swivel around to the desk, place pad and pencil down carefully there, and turn to me empty-handed. This was an empty-handed time.

She clasped her palms together between her thighs. ‘I think . . .’ she said, and stopped. She ran both hands through her dark, bobbed hair, which fell straight back into her face. She started again. ‘You’ve just written here so powerfully about the horrors of the trenches.