News From Berlin by Otto de Kat Page A

his protest in public. Protest, a word the Germans couldn’t even spell anymore.
    “All the crucifixes had to be removed from Bavarian classrooms. Orders of one Doctor Meyer, some local bigwig in lederhosen, I presume. Mind you, that von Galen protested to Hitler! Never happened before, someone complaining to Wotan in person. And that was not all, there were people demonstrating in the street, and rumour has it that Hitler was jeered at in Bavaria, although that is something I find hard to believe.”
    Henderson broke in: “We heard that story too. But they can carry on hanging crucifixes in the schools, because the order was rescinded. It was a mistake, Goebbels said. Not agood moment to rile the Catholics, probably. So long as they can carry on hanging Jews – now there’s something they should be protesting against, instead of making a fuss about wooden crosses in the classroom!”
    Henderson was not Roman Catholic, presumably. Jewish perhaps? Indignant in any case. His anger and sarcasm struck a chord with Oscar, recalling the rage that possessed himself at times, the powerlessness, the anguish over Emma in Berlin. This amicable gathering of diplomats was merely a brief interlude of distraction.
    They plied Smith with questions, whose replies were duly commented upon and expanded. He was a messenger from the Underworld, on short leave, witness to events which were taking place just outside the others’ ken and yet almost close enough to touch. An exasperating state of affairs to the diplomatic frame of mind, although they abided by Goethe’s rule: judge by what you see, and respect the unseen. Goethe, the giant whose lifework lay unread, the intellectual locomotive of the old Germany with all those quarrelsome kings and counts and dukes and generals and bishops. That it should come to this, in the land of Goethe … a refrain of lament over the land that once brought forth heroes of such greatness, not that anybody knew what that greatness stood for. People simplyparroted one another, perpetuating the myths. The land of Goethe, what of it? The land of Alfred Rosenberg and Goering more like, the land of stupidity and death. A play in three acts: the rise, the flowering, and the downfall of the Idiot.
    Oscar respected the unseen, certainly. It was his lifeblood. But not now.
    It was well past midnight by the time he trudged up the Schifflaube on his way home.

Chapter 6
     
    Kate woke up early, as usual: a habit left over from when Emma was a toddler. She had lost the ability to sleep late. London was hushed and still, the light of morning barely perceptible. Wednesday, June 4: Emma’s birthday. The first quarter-hour of the day, when she surfaced from dreams that more often than not were disturbing. She was a dreamer, making up at night for what she missed during the day. Passion and common sense were opposite sides of the same coin in her case, some would say. She herself did not go in for such introspection. Fifteen minutes to recover from sleep, her arms and legs feeling heavy, her musings and sentiments as light as air. Emma, Carl, Oscar. Matteous. The silkiness of the name as pronounced by him, the African tone and lilt of it, were impossible to emulate, but the echo of it rang in her ears. She had left him behind in his lodgings the day before, restraining herself from taking him home with her. The rain pelting down on Earls Court Road had not made for a cheerful scene. The way each of them had kept silent in that small room overlooking the busy street said enough: what am I doinghere, is this where you want me to be, I can’t stay forever, nobody knows me, I no longer exist.
    Thinking back, Kate recalled Matteous’s ice-cold hands, and his disconsolate look when she broke the silence at last with some favourable comment on his room.
    Fifteen minutes in bed in the quiet of earliest morning, a delicate mechanism affording her a leisurely adjustment to the passing of time. One hand on her stomach, the other