Cover

Naomi Wood

The Hiding Game

Dedication page

for Joan, Ari and Ed

Epigraph page

‘Again it is astonishing how defencelessly

everything collapses.’

Victor Klemperer, I Shall Bear Witness:

The Diaries, 1933–41

1

England

So: Walter König is dead. Irmi called with the news in the middle of the night: she sounded upset, and couldn’t understand why I wasn’t. ‘He was your friend, Paul,’ she said. ‘How can you feel nothing?’

I said I didn’t know.

Tricksy Walter, unlovely Walter: he was no more a friend to me than Jenö, really, who had disappeared decades ago in London. What should I care that Walter was dead? His life was no more than easy treacheries and lazy spite, and I’d washed my hands of him when I’d left Berlin for good.

I felt nothing; it was hardly a surprise.

Half of our group are gone now: Walter, from stroke; Kaspar, his plane shot down over Alexandria, and then there is Charlotte, dead in the beech forest, not five miles north of Weimar, where this story begins.

I think of Charlotte every day. Memories of her are all electricity. I can be sitting at a canvas, brush poised, ready to paint, when I am strung with a pain I do not know what to do with, even after all this time: nearly thirty years have passed since her death; forty, since we lived together in Berlin. Now she comes to me in dreams, over lunch, when I’m in the bath; I see her at the loom, strolling the Tiergarten in her men’s clothes, and finally, before the Bauhaus raid, saying she would not leave Germany.

I would rather Walter dead three times over than to have lost her, but there; that’s a dreamt-up notion. The truth is, I hold Walter accountable for her death. He could have asked Ernst Steiner to spring her from the camp; he could have talked to the right people. It was within his power. Perhaps it was even the last move in his stratagem: to let her die, in the clearing before the forest began again, where we had camped during so many summers, before we’d cycle down to the city, watching the blinking negative of the rushing forest take us back to Weimar, when all six of us were together in our first golden years at the Bauhaus.

My friends would all have different accounts of what happened to us, and I can’t deny my subjectivity. I know the story is lit now by later sorrow: my happiness glows stronger, and grief has perhaps given more depth to the harder times. Sometimes, I envy my younger self, at others, the past is a dereliction.