Remote Sympathy

REMOTE SYMPATHY

for Alan,

again

In Weimar there are no distances.

––THOMAS MANN, Lotte in Weimar

 . . . the past is not preserved, but is reconstructed

on the basis of the present.

––MAURICE HALBWACHS (Buchenwald prisoner 77161), The Social Frameworks of Memory

There is no such thing as an innocent memory.

––JORGE SEMPRÚN (Buchenwald prisoner 44904), What a Beautiful Sunday!

PART ONE

ALL THE BIRDS ARE HERE

FROM LETTERS WRITTEN BY DOKTOR LENARD WEBER

TO HIS DAUGHTER

Frankfurt am Main, September 1946

Look at the picture, Lotte: the Palmengarten in midwinter. How pretty the trees are, their branches sugary with snow. I have a pile of pictures just as pretty; my neighbour gave me a stack of old calendars, and so, in the absence of any other paper, I’ll write to you on the backs of all the vanished years.

Did your mother ever tell you that we met at a museum in Dresden? It was 1930, and I was studying medicine and working on my machine that would save the world. Recently I’ve thought about returning there, to the place where I first caught sight of her, but the museum is in ruins now, the exhibit we visited destroyed. A mass of melted wire and plastic and bone, buried in the rubble like some strange fossil.

I remember the ripple of her black hair. Her butter-yellow dress.

During my studies I’d read about the early therapeutic uses of electricity: Mediterranean torpedo fish applied to the temple for a headache; the limbs of hopeless paralytics shocked back to movement. I’d read, too, of more recent experiments in America and France and Italy, where electrotherapy promised relief from epilepsy and anaemia, neuralgia and chorea, and, some suggested, even cancer. But it was the eighteenth-century writings of John Hunter, the great Scottish surgeon, that sparked the idea for my machine: his theory that the cure as well as the disease could pass through a person by means of remote sympathy; that the energetic power produced in one part of the body could influence another part some distance away. Each evening in the parlour, I sketched out my plans for the Sympathetic Vitaliser, and I listened to recordings of Lotte Lehmann as I worked, partly to keep myself awake, and partly because her crystalline notes allowed me to worry away at my central premise. In fact, one of her arias – ‘Come, Hope’, from Beethoven’s Fidelio – was playing as it first became clear to me: if a singer could shatter glass when her voice reproduced its resonant frequency, couldn’t we shatter a tumour in the same way? By causing its cells to vibrate in sympathy, couldn’t we turn it to dust? No need for the knife, just the correct dose of destructive energy delivered to growths crouched in the pelvis or breast or brain, or lodged in the lymph nodes like pearls. Come, hope – let not the final star of the weary fade away . . . While my mother slept, I remember, I placed a pile of books on the pedal of my father’s grand piano, then lifted the lid and ran a finger across the taut strings; the instrument let out a soft falling sigh. I peered inside the open cavity and smelled the mahogany and lacquer and wax, and the secret chill of the wires. For a moment I feared the lid might fall on me, shut me away in that dark box, and I steadied it with my hand. Then I sang middle C and the middle C wire vibrated, and I moved down the scale, note by note, and watched each string begin to move in turn, to quiver and blur as it recognised its own frequency in my voice. For all the earth was alive with energy; every atom of every single thing sang with its own resonance, and this was as true of flesh as it was of piano strings.

Electrotherapy was starting to catch on in Germany by that time too, and I suppose I fancied myself a radical young researcher. An innovator. As nearby as Giessen, Erwin Schliephake was trialling his short-wave apparatus, and I remember I wrote to him to question the safety of its thermal effects: perhaps it did kill the bacteria in the milk, I remarked, but it killed the mice as well. I pored over the dozens of photographs in Carl Franz Nagelschmidt’s publications: carcinomas of the ear and tongue healed by his high-frequency treatment, which also offered a miraculous resolution of pain – though Nagelschmidt insisted that inoperable tumours remained inoperable, and that a patient with metastatic cancer had as little chance of survival as ever. Except I knew he was wrong. I knew it, Lotte. I saw for myself the veins of light that leapt from Tesla coils – coronas and streamers that seemed to depict the very pathways of the body, the blood vessels and nerves that led far inside a person to where the scalpel could not reach. Sing into the open piano: watch the wire shiver.

In May 1930 I travelled to Dresden specially to see the exhibit at the new German Hygiene Museum. He was in all the newspapers, the Transparent Man: a real skeleton sheathed in a hard, clear skin, with the circulatory and nervous systems wrought from twelve kilometres of wire, and every plastic organ packed into place. I told my mother that I thought seeing the model might help me design the prototype of my machine, and she burst into tears.

‘If only you could have found a cure in time for your father,’ she said.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

On the train ride from Frankfurt, I watched my reflection slip across fields sprouting with barley and wheat and corn so bright the green might have been painted on. My aunt and uncle met me at the station – my mother’s sister and her husband. They lived not far from Dresden’s Großer Garten, and day after day the crowds streamed towards the exhibition hall there – it seemed the whole country wanted to witness the body’s secret workings. The Transparent Man hung on every advertising column, face upturned, arms lifted as if to catch hold of the sun.

It was a clear May morning the first time I went to see him; I know that. Soft white fluff from the poplar trees flecked the air and gathered in drifts on the pavements, stirred by the movement of feet before settling once more into downy mounds. I made my way past office workers and factory workers and young mothers with all the time in the world. My final examinations weren’t far away, and I whispered the anatomy of the ear to myself as I hurried along: tympanic membrane, malleus, incus, stapes . . . There was too much to remember about the human body: how it functioned and how it failed. There is still too much to remember.

I’d brought only heavy clothes with me from Frankfurt, unsuitable for the warm day, so my aunt had given me some of Onkel Alexander’s to wear; the jacket, which smelled of tobacco, hung loose across my narrow back, flapped across my chest. I had just turned twenty-five but I felt eight years old again, standing in my dead father’s clothes while my mother pinned them up and drew dusty lines at my wrists and waist with her tailor’s chalk. It was a rectal carcinoma in his case – painful and humiliating – though all I knew at the time was that Papa had been very sick, and sometimes very sick people don’t get better, and we would have to make do.

Despite my rush, once I reached the exhibition hall I lingered in the tuberculosis room and the cancer room and the primitive races room; I took my time over the mechanical model of the heart. I delayed visiting the very thing I’d come to see, worried that it might disappoint. I suspect you’d understand that feeling, Lotte. I suspect you inherited my twisting anxieties, though I always hoped you’d be your mother’s tranquil daughter. When finally I made my way to the room that held the Transparent Man, I was surprised to feel the tug of tears; I had not expected him to be so beautiful. He stood on his circular plinth, his clear arms raised, his chest laid bare, plastic organs lit each in turn by tiny bulbs, every nerve pathway and every blood vessel on show. I followed the branching networks of wire and imagined the waves from my machine passing along them until they hit the tumour they were calculated to destroy, and I felt a great surge running through my own body: what if it worked? What if the Sympathetic Vitaliser worked? It really might save the world. It was all I could do to keep still, to keep quiet: in the other rooms, in front of the other exhibits, the crowds chattered away in their usual voices, but here before the naked figure they whispered as if in a church – even the sniggering schoolboys, even the blushing fiancées. And indeed, he stood in a kind of apse, a kind of chapel, shining beneath a pointed archway, lit only from overhead in the otherwise darkened space.

‘Like an angel,’ a young woman next to me murmured.

Her companion said he couldn’t see any robes and he couldn’t see any wings, but I knew what she meant: the figure shimmered above us, seeming to float in the shadows, a creature of water, a creature of light, like us but not us, like us but perfect.

‘Yes,’ I murmured, even though the young woman hadn’t been addressing me.

I felt rather than heard the couple behind me – they were irritated because they couldn’t see past my lanky frame, I knew. Since I was about fifteen years old I’d stood a head taller than my peers, and I was always conscious of the space I took up, the way my arms and legs encroached on the aisles in buses and trains, the way I blocked the view. I’d developed a stoop to my shoulders, and my mother told me I would be a hunched old man one day. I turned and nodded to the couple, then moved to the side. They rushed at once into my spot, scowling at me.

I stayed at the museum for hours. After some lunch and a glass of beer, I jotted down notes on modifications to the Vitaliser – the size of the contact plates, their best placement. Then I bought two postcards of the Transparent Man: one to send to my mother, and the other for me to keep, so I could remember him exactly. I kept circling back to his room – I couldn’t stay away – and found myself watching the crowds as much as I watched the figure itself. They stood and wondered at him, and lightly touched their own clavicles and jaws, and studied their own hands as if they might see right inside themselves. And I started to understand what I had already known: that the body wasn’t a collection of separate parts, each performing its own solitary task, but a circuit, a machine, an exquisite and collaborative machine. The fold-out illustrations in my anatomy textbooks had never shown me this, and nor had any of the surgeries I’d observed, and nor had the work I’d done in the dissection room. Here I could see every organ at once, every artery and vein, every nerve, as large as life.

I didn’t want to leave, didn’t want to return to my aunt’s apartment with its squat sofa and its fringed lamps and its framed prints of horses. I could hide myself somewhere in the exhibition hall, I thought; emerge again once everyone had left and the building had been locked for the night. I wouldn’t have to jostle past the crowds and worry that I was too tall. I could climb onto the plinth and stand right next to him, measure my height against his. I could touch his glassy skin, trace the route from the stomach to the brain, from the hand to the heart.

I did no such thing, of course. When the time came to leave, I exited the building with everyone else, blinking at the sunny late afternoon.

‘There you are,’ said my aunt. ‘We thought we’d lost you. I made Streuselkuchen, you know. Where have you been all this time?’

I showed her the postcard I’d bought to send to my mother.

‘You’ll give her a heart attack,’ she said. ‘Won’t he, Alexander. A heart attack. Now, how much room do you have in your suitcase? I’ve sorted out a few bits and pieces for her. Does she still like plums? Of course she still likes plums, who doesn’t. A few jars of my plums, and some of my pears, and what about some peas? Peas? And carrots? And look, take some chocolates – she always had a sweet tooth, and we’ve only eaten the nut ones. And orange marmalade? Some people find the peel too bitter. Well, she can try it, and then I can send more. She just needs to say. She just needs to sing out.’

Every time I visited it was the same – Tante Miriam loaded me down with food for my mother. This had started some two decades earlier, when my father was diagnosed and my mother began to wither away alongside him. She was a statuesque woman before he fell ill, but the flesh vanished from her bones, and she had to take in all her own clothes as well as cutting his down for me. Tante Miriam had let out a shriek when she saw her for the first time. ‘I’d not have recognised you,’ she said. ‘I’d have walked past you in the street. Would you have recognised her, Alexander?’ And her husband shook his head and said no, he wouldn’t have recognised her. After that, Tante Miriam started sending jars of preserves and slabs of cake, tins of fish and wedges of cheese. My mother packed it all away in the pantry and always wrote a thank-you note on her best paper, but I was the one who ended up eating most of the food, or throwing it out when it turned bad.

‘Electricity?’ said my aunt when I tried to explain my machine to them over supper. ‘Sounds very dangerous.’

‘Very dangerous,’ echoed my uncle.

They frowned at me, chewing on their black bread and waxy slices of Gouda.

‘And how would you know what you were doing?’ said my aunt. ‘You can’t even see it.’

‘Quite right, quite right,’ said my uncle, spearing a gherkin. ‘Invisible.’

‘But that’s just it,’ I said. ‘No surgery. No trauma to the surrounding tissue. If you came to see the Transparent Man I could show you how the human body––’

‘No,’ said my aunt, shaking her head. ‘No no no.’ Didn’t I remember cousin Norbert – not a real cousin, of course, but that was neither here nor there – who’d lost the use of his arm when he thought he could rewire a table lamp himself? He should have taken it to a professional, to someone with the proper training and qualifications. This was what happened when you tried to cut corners. Now everyone assumed he’d been wounded in the war, which wasn’t a bad thing in itself, she supposed, but he still couldn’t tie his own shoelaces. She had no wish to accompany me to the exhibition, and certainly no wish to see a Transparent Man – I don’t need to know what goes on inside me, she said. She’d heard that it was very graphic, and that people were lining up outside the door and down the street to see it, and that a woman had fainted and had to be fanned in the face with a lottery ticket. She sniffed. Some things were better kept covered up.

The following morning, I went straight back to the museum. It was a Saturday, and the crowds were even worse, and I couldn’t get close to the Transparent Man; people bumped into me as they wrestled their way to the front, and I hunched my head into my neck and my neck into my shoulders. I stood at the back of the throng and waited for a gap to open up while the bulbs inside his body kept on illuminating each organ in turn. The Transparent Man reached his arms up and away from all the people as if praying for rescue. And then I noticed her – the young woman from the previous day, who’d thought he looked like an angel. She was by herself this time, as far as I could tell, and she wove through the crowd, saying excuse me, pardon me, excuse me, until she was standing directly behind the plinth. She was partially hidden by the figure, though I could make out the butter-yellow of her dress through his legs, and her black hair and pale face rippling through his pelvis. I moved so I could see her better. She lifted her head to look up at the Transparent Man, and the light hit her face and her long, fine neck, and she stretched out a hand and touched his calf, first with a fingertip and then with a cupped palm as if to warm him. Another woman saw her and began to shout: ‘You can’t do that! It’s not allowed! Stop it! Stop it!’ An attendant came rushing over, and the scolding woman pointed and said, ‘She was touching it. Touching it.’

‘There are signs,’ said the attendant. ‘Anyone touching the exhibits will be asked to leave, and prohibited from returning. It’s quite clear.’

The other members of the crowd began to back away, as if they might be implicated somehow, blamed for a crime they hadn’t committed. Before I knew what I was doing, I was striding over to the rule-breaking woman and placing my hand on her shoulder.

‘I do apologise, sir,’ I said to the attendant. ‘She’s a student of mine, an anatomy student. You can understand the interest.’

The other woman snorted. ‘What difference does that make? I’m interested in it too. We’re all interested in it – that’s why we’ve paid to come and look at the thing. But you don’t see us grabbing it. Leaving our grubby fingerprints all over it.’

The attendant peered at the Transparent Man.

‘As mentioned, it was motivated by a professional interest,’ I said. ‘A scientific interest. It won’t happen again.’

I pressed my fingers into the young woman’s shoulder, and she said, ‘No! Absolutely not. I do apologise, sir.’

‘Well,’ said the attendant, ‘in future, please remember where you are.’

‘Of course,’ I said.

‘Of course,’ said the young woman.

‘Now,’ he said, turning to the woman who had complained, ‘where did she touch it?’

‘Just here, on the calf,’ she said.

‘Now she’s touching it,’ said the young woman.

‘That’s different,’ said the attendant.

‘Quite different,’ said the woman.

The attendant took a clean handkerchief from his pocket and scrubbed at the spot.

‘We should keep going. There’s still so much to see,’ I said, and guided the young woman away.

‘Why did you do that?’ she said when we were out of earshot.

‘I . . . I don’t know. People like that . . . they can make things very difficult, once they get an idea in their heads.’

‘I expect it made their day,’ she said. ‘Anyway, it was very nice of you to help, but I would have been all right on my own.’

‘I can see that.’

‘And you need to come up with some better lies. You look far too young to be my anatomy professor.’

We were at the café by now, and she insisted I let her buy me a coffee to thank me.

‘I thought you said you would have been all right on your own.’

‘So I would have. But it was still a nice thing to do.’

‘I saw you here yesterday,’ I said as we waited for a table.

‘It’s my third time.’

‘It’s my second. He’s . . . he’s . . . ’

‘Perfect.’

‘Yes. Perfect. And also . . . I don’t know. Defenceless.’

‘Yes,’ she said.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘So, am I a diligent student?’

‘The best in your year. With the steadiest hands.’ I still have no idea, Lotte, why I mentioned her hands, but I remember that I blushed. I began telling her about the machine then, outlining for her the principle of remote sympathy, and as I spoke I could feel – I could almost see – the heat of her hand lying close to mine on the café table.

‘So if something is wrong with my knee,’ she said, brushing her fingers over the knee-length hem of her yellow dress, ‘you might apply the contact plates to my lower back? Here? And here?’

‘Exactly,’ I said, trying not to imagine her lower back. And then, before I could stop myself: ‘But there is nothing wrong with your knee.’

I noticed the way she looked at me: as if I had already cured the disease. As if I had already invented the miracle.

‘I’ve seen it work on geraniums,’ I said, and she laughed.

‘You can cure a plant of cancer?’

‘I’m sure of it.’

‘Extraordinary.’

‘I still don’t know your name,’ I said.

‘I’m Anna. Anna Ganz.’

Twelve months later she left Dresden for Frankfurt, and we were engaged.

From then on, more than ever, I willed my machine to work. It felt like praying.

All through 1931, when I began working at the Holy Spirit Hospital, I spent my evenings at home labouring over the prototype of the machine. I experimented with triodes and condensers and meters, fine-tuned the copper coils and wires that would lie at the Vitaliser’s heart. When I burnt myself with the soldering iron, and the smell of my own seared skin merged with the resinous scent of the flux, I hardly paused for long enough to allow my mother to dress the wound. I spent months on the contact plates that I would apply to my subjects’ palms, chest, forehead, temples, back and feet; if I made them too large they’d be unwieldy to attach, but if I made them too small I increased the chance a patient might feel some discomfort from the current. I tried silver and copper – even a thin layer of gold, for its non-corrosive properties – and I tested them on myself, Lotte, as well as on your mother. Buckling the straps around her bird-thin wrists and ankles, her pale stomach, asking, ‘Does it hurt? Does it hurt?’

My mother watched on, shaking her head. ‘Poor Anna!’ she said. ‘What kind of honeymoon is this?’ But I could tell she had high hopes for the Vitaliser too. ‘A villa on Zeppelinallee,’ she said. ‘A motor car! A maid!’

After my father had died we’d moved to the suburb of Nordend, where we rented a four-room apartment on the top floor; the piano took up most of the parlour. In summertime, when all the windows were open, the pealing of the bells from St. Bernhard’s coursed through the place, set the very bones humming. I loved the sound, but my mother said it put her teeth on edge, and I knew she would have liked to move somewhere smart.

When I finished the mechanism itself, I built the box to house it, cutting dovetails from pearwood I had chosen for its hardness; I imagined the machine would need to withstand decades of use. I scored the shapes of the controls into the fine grain – the needles and the dials, and the switch that would bring the whole thing to life – and then millimetre by millimetre I formed the holes until they were just big enough. Then I sanded the wooden walls so they were ribbon-smooth, and fitted the corners together, and they locked one into the other exactly as I’d calculated they would. In the recess of the lid I fitted slots to hold the copper contact plates and their straps and cords as well as the little chamois cloth for cleaning them. Like a proud father, I photographed the Vitaliser at every stage of its development. The brass handles were an afterthought once I realised the size and weight of the finished machine – in fact, it was Anna who suggested them.

‘It’s not going to sit in a laboratory,’ she said. ‘You’ll be shifting it around. Taking it to the bedsides of your patients.’

And I kissed her for her easy belief in it.

I experimented on geraniums first, just as Georges Lakhovsky had at the Salpêtrière in Paris, inoculating them with Agrobacterium tumefaciens so they produced tumours on their stems. These were small and white to begin with, the size of cherry stones, but grew rapidly into large multilobar masses. At that point I treated three of the plants with the Vitaliser, applying the contact plates to the area around the roots. The results astounded me: two weeks after the first treatment, the tumours began to necrotise. Three months later, all the plants in the control group had perished – all the untreated geraniums – while the three that received treatment were not only free of their tumours but flourishing.

I was aware that at some stage I would have to persuade real patients to let me try the Vitaliser on them, but I didn’t foresee any difficulties in that regard: a dying man will drink the sea; a dying man will swallow glass. I was going to save the world.

I started to fill page after page with graphs that calculated the resonant frequencies of the human body – the chest wall sixty cycles per second, the eye eighty-nine cycles per second. On graphs, too, I estimated the frequencies needed to kill the cells of different carcinomas – hundreds of thousands of cycles per second – the waves rising and falling, rising and falling, rippling from the tip of my pencil and across the paper and, it seemed, into the very air around me. I could sense the whole world vibrating: oysters and oak trees and paper and hummingbirds and fruit knives and moths all tuned to their own particular notes, and yes, brains and tongues and lungs and hearts too. I stopped working each night only when I fell asleep at my table – and even then, I saw waves curling and breaking on my eyelids’ black meniscus, shivering through my dreams.

At the start of 1932 I requested permission from the Holy Spirit to conduct a small trial of the Sympathetic Vitaliser; the director, Herr Baumhauer, was an ambitious man, eager to expand the hospital’s reputation as well as his own.

‘Do you know, at the Charité, they suspect vitamins?’ he said. ‘They’re looking into low-vitamin diets for cancer patients.’

I nodded. Everyone was trying something new: viral therapy, heliotherapy, Chinese rhubarb, fruit-juice injections – even hemlock. But electrotherapy, I told him . . . we could corner the market there.

‘Valentin Zeileis,’ he said. ‘Isn’t he the chap? With the castle in Austria, and the lightning machine?’

Zeileis was a former metal worker who had set up an electrotherapy institute in Gallspach; his approach to every ailment involved blasting patients with arcs that streamed from a kind of showerhead.

‘He claims a very high rate of success . . . ’ I began.

‘A total charlatan, from what I hear,’ said Baumhauer. ‘The German League to Combat Quackery wants him shut down.’

‘He has no medical training, it’s true. But the University Hospital in Vienna––’

‘And I read that he lights the place – the treatment room – with lamps held in the jaws of giant stuffed snakes.’

‘I don’t know anything about that,’ I said, though I too had heard stories. Zeileis had been bitten by a cobra, and the saliva of an Indian holy man had saved his life. Zeileis was descended from an ancient dynasty of Indian princes. Zeileis had used electromagnetic waves to set fire to a pile of wood six thousand kilometres away. I said, ‘The University Hospital in Vienna has one of his machines – the patients flock there.’

‘It’s always the same,’ said Baumhauer. ‘What the miracle doctor actually does is far less important than what the people believe.’

I thought that was the end of it, but then he said, ‘They flock there, eh?’

‘In their thousands, I’m told.’

‘Do they. Do they now. Well, you can’t argue with the numbers.’

That spring he invited me on a staff excursion to the Taunus, where he made sure I danced with the prettiest nurses who wore flower crowns in their hair. We had egg-and-spoon races and sack races and a tug of war – I remember thinking that I wasn’t sure if I wanted to be on the winning side, which meant falling backwards, or the losing side, which meant falling forwards.

I convinced fourteen patients to take part in the trial, treating them with the Vitaliser while they also received conventional therapy. There was a melanoma on a forearm, I remember, and a transitional cell carcinoma of the bladder. A colonic carcinoma, a cervical squamous carcinoma. A lymphoma, I think. And even though the outcome was inconclusive, the survival rate after three years statistically insignificant, the Monthly Journal of the Struggle Against Cancer published my findings; it was new and trying to prove itself too. But young men are full of vast ideas that wither to nothing, Lotte; passions that shrink and perish. While there was some interest on the fringes of the medical community, most of my colleagues dismissed the experiment as quackery. There is no miracle hidden in young Doktor Weber’s varnished box, wrote a Berlin specialist. The fact that two of his patients appear to have entered remission must be seen for what it is: pure chance. Another cautioned against offering false hope to those fighting the number one enemy, and suggested that my machine was as reliable as a ouija board. The editor of the German Medical Weekly even questioned its safety: It is all very well for Doktor Weber to declare that he has tested the device on himself and his young wife with no ill effects, but how can we be certain that a patient whose health is already compromised will not worsen or even die when exposed to his ‘healing frequencies’? Surely conventional treatment alone offers better results than a gadget cobbled together by a junior physician in his spare time? Far better to focus on prevention, they said. The most important measures of the government – in genetics, education, sport, home hygiene, the Hitler Youth, the SA and SS – can all be regarded as prophylactic against cancer.

My mother told me I shouldn’t take their comments to heart; they were just jealous. I kept on sitting up late every evening, listening to my recordings of Lotte Lehmann and adjusting and refining my machine, attaching the contact plates to myself to test them – though no longer to Anna, who by that time had fallen pregnant with you and was quite unwell. Mama tended to her when I was at the Holy Spirit, fussing about with chamomile tea and hot-water bottles and cold compresses as if she were still a nurse. She adored Anna, adored having her under our roof after we married. I started a list of patients I could select for a second, bigger trial – but Herr Baumhauer kept delaying his approval. It was our duty to wait and see what became of the two from the first trial, he told me, and that’s what I told Anna and my mother as well. In reality, though, I suspected he didn’t want me drawing attention to myself and his hospital given I was married to a Jewess. Every week, another of my colleagues appeared in a brown or black uniform.

In January 1936 I requested another meeting with Baumhauer, and we sat in his office with its hulking furniture carved in the Black Forest style, all boars and stags. Framed hunting scenes covered the walls, and above the desk a painting of the Führer glistened as if the paint were still wet.

‘I was wondering if you’ve reached a decision on the second trial,’ I said. ‘I have a list of almost thirty suitable candidates, and just this week another promising case has arrived.’ In my mind I was already buckling the contact plates to their bodies; I was already flicking the switch.

‘The thing is,’ he said, ‘we’d need proof it would be of value to the Reich. To the German people. You’d need to show me some convincing numbers. The two survivors have both died, I understand?’

‘Later than they should have,’ I said. ‘Between them they achieved six years of remission. Six full years of extra time.’

‘It’s certainly something,’ he said. ‘It is. It is. But I don’t know that it’s enough.’ And then, finally, he came out with what he actually meant. ‘If you could resolve your domestic situation, perhaps we could consider it.’

‘My domestic situation?’

‘A divorce, Doktor Weber. That would clear the way for you to stay on here.’

‘What do you mean, stay on here?’

He spread his hands. ‘You know how difficult things have become. It’s out of my control. We may not be able to keep someone with your sort of connections.’

‘What would you do, in my position?’ I asked. I wasn’t looking for advice; I really wanted to know.

‘Well, I wouldn’t have married a Jewess in the first place.’

I knew if I lost my job it would be impossible to find another. I stopped pursuing a second trial; I packed the machine away in the attic and just kept going to work, hoping things might improve. Every morning I passed the painting from the original hospital’s old collection box, though the box itself was long gone: the Holy Spirit descending in the form of a dove, wings spread wide, a host in its beak. Give to the poor in hospital, as God commands. I didn’t tell Anna that Herr Baumhauer had suggested a divorce; for months her pregnancy had confined her to bed with a nausea that left her as limp and pale as a paper doll. Your body was drawing on her own flesh, it seemed, Lotte, paring away her muscles and binding them into its new little self – and I sat at her bedside and felt you move beneath my hand, an unknown pulsing orb, and I loved you already. You were born in the springtime of 1936, and we named you after Lotte Lehmann on account of your extraordinary lungs.

We should have paid closer attention. By that time, Jews could no longer marry Aryans. They couldn’t raise the national flag; they couldn’t vote. They couldn’t hire German maids under the age of forty-five. Our mayor had been especially eager to enact the new legislation even before it was passed: all Jews employed by the city lost their jobs at the law courts, the schools, the university and the hospitals. Our neighbours stopped greeting us, and Anna’s oldest schoolfriend crossed the street to avoid her. Businesses advertised their Pure German Skin Cream, their Aryan Shoes. Each time I met with Herr Baumhauer, he asked me if I had come up with a solution to my domestic problem. We had to think of the greater good, he said. In November 1938, when I was at the Holy Spirit, I heard the news: they were burning down the synagogues, ransacking the Jewish shops, throwing people’s belongings from the windows of their apartments: gramophones, bedding, sewing machines – even a piano. I ran to the synagogue on Börneplatz to see if it was true, and yes, there on the square, a crowd of people watched the smoke and flames bursting from the great dome. Next to me a group of Hitler Youth boys were jostling one another and laughing. We caught one of them, and cut off his beard and ear locks. He looked like a turnip by the time we finished with him. Two fire engines came, but they didn’t turn their hoses on the fire – only on the burning debris that fell too close to the neighbouring buildings. After that, the authorities arrested thousands of Jews, picking them up on the streets or at the railway station, even in their homes. Anna’s parents and her brother left Dresden for Shanghai, where they would admit Jews without visas. We should have known. We should have felt it coming. All the parades and the torchlit marches, the blaring trumpets and the thudding drums, the voices roaring Heil! Heil! Heil! The shudders in the ground beneath our feet.

And then, early in 1939, Herr Baumhauer called me to his office.

‘I’ve been doing a bit of digging,’ he said. ‘And the thing is, it seems you’re part Jew.’

‘I beg your pardon?’ I said.

‘It’s a terrible shame, of course. I was hoping there’d been some kind of mistake, but the records prove it. This polluted blood – you never know where it’ll turn up.’

‘But I was baptised,’ I said. ‘And confirmed. My parents, too. We have the certificates.’

‘Your mother’s father is the sticking point,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid it does make things tricky.’

‘But there must be something you can do . . . ’

‘The thing is,’ he said, ‘you’re still married to a Jewess.’

‘She’s baptised as well,’ I said.

‘Makes no difference.’

‘There must be something . . . ’ I said again.

‘I can keep it quiet for now, but as I’ve already mentioned, it would be much simpler all round if you had your marriage dissolved. Much safer – and then you could keep working here. Have a think. I’ll need an answer before too long.’

‘Well, yes,’ said my mother at supper that night. ‘There was something like that with Papa. But look at you – blond hair, blue eyes, just like me. You couldn’t be more German.’ She accepted another tiny serving of herring from the platter Anna passed her. ‘I really shouldn’t, but it’s too delicious.’

‘Your father went to church every week, though,’ I said.

She nodded. ‘He was no Jew – he’d be horrified.’

Anna burst into tears.

‘Oh,’ said my mother, ‘oh – no no, my dear – that came out wrong. You’re not a real one.’

‘What does that mean?’ I said.

‘Just – well, they are different. And they must have done something, otherwise they wouldn’t be in so much trouble. Maybe it would be better for everyone if they went back to Palestine.’

‘Back?’ I said. ‘Back?’

A tight little shrug.

Anna wiped her eyes with her serviette. ‘I hope you’ve left some room,’ she said. ‘There’s Pfefferkuchen for dessert.’ She began to clear the plates.

‘So if your father was Jewish, Mama,’ I said, ‘that means you’re Jewish too. Legally speaking.’

‘What?’ she said, staring at me, eyes wide with fright.

I avoided Herr Baumhauer as much as possible for the next month, though twice when I passed him in the corridor he reminded me that time was running out, and that he would need an answer very soon. Finally, in March 1939, it was Anna herself who suggested we divorce.

‘A lot of couples are separating,’ she said, her voice too bright. ‘It wouldn’t mean anything. Not really.’

‘It would mean we couldn’t live together,’ I said. ‘Couldn’t see each other. Wouldn’t it?’

‘Only for a little while.’

‘How long? Months? Years?’

‘Nobody knows.’

‘What about Lotte?’

‘We’d be doing it for Lotte.’

And the truth was, we had no other way of earning enough to live on.

We had to act as if it were a real divorce. We couldn’t tell anyone, not even our closest friends, not even my mother – though she died of cardiac arrest soon afterwards, and I still believe it was the separation that killed her. I packed my photographs of Anna away in the attic; I dared not keep them on display, since the merest hint of contact with her could see me tried for race defilement and Anna sent to Ravensbrück. If people asked, we hinted at an infidelity that was too painful to discuss. On our last night together, as we lay for the last time in our bed, we made up the woman who had led me astray.

‘A French duchess,’ said Anna. ‘I don’t want my replacement to be just anybody.’

I smiled into the dark. ‘How did I meet her?’

‘She came to the hospital for some kind of embarrassing operation. She didn’t want her social circle in Paris to know about it.’

‘No, I think I want a healthy one,’ I said. ‘A cleaning woman? I saw her on her hands and knees and couldn’t help myself.’

‘A cleaning woman?’

‘All right, not a cleaning woman.’

‘A cleaning woman! You might as well say the toilet attendant at the Hauptbahnhof.’

‘I’m sure she’s not unattractive . . . ’

‘I don’t think you’re taking this seriously.’

I felt Anna turn onto her side and pull the covers up over her shoulder. ‘You’re letting in the cold,’ I said.

‘And you’re having an affair.’

‘All right. A chorus girl? A tap-dancer? I saw her perform at the Schumanntheater and it was all over.’

‘You never go to the Schumanntheater.’

‘Maybe I do, but in secret. You thought I was up late, working on my machine.’

‘Not a chorus girl, though. A famous actress, celebrated for her beauty.’

‘Or a magician’s assistant?’

‘I’ll make her disappear, if I ever get my hands on her.’

‘She’s terrified of you,’ I said. ‘She’s always looking over her shoulder.’

‘So that’ll never last. What about the heiress to a family fortune?’

‘Perhaps. How have they made their money?’

‘Chocolate,’ said Anna. ‘We’d have an endless supply of pralines.’

‘Well, I would,’ I said.

‘Oh. Oh yes. I forgot.’

‘Not chocolate. I’d get too fat, and then she wouldn’t love me any more.’

‘And then you’d come back to me.’

‘Would you love me if I were fat?’

‘How fat?’

‘Enormous.’

‘Hmm.’

‘Not chocolate, then. How else could they have made their money? Tanks? Or paperclips. Something in demand.’

Anna rearranged her pillow, punching it into shape, and again the cold air rushed into the bed. ‘This replacement,’ she said. ‘What does she look like?’

I turned onto my side so I was facing her, though I couldn’t make her out. ‘You. She looks like you.’

Anna’s hand brushed my cheek just for a second, then withdrew. ‘Maybe she’s a youth leader from the League of German Girls. A Hildegard or a Waltraud.’

‘Mmm. Those uniforms . . . ’

‘Tall and blond and blue-eyed. Nothing like me. Mind you, she salutes so frequently that her right arm’s twice the size of her left. You don’t mind that, do you?’

‘All the better for hitting the children.’

‘Or she’s an older woman. The wife of a high-ranking Party member. She’s going to leave him and run away with you to Romania, where you’ll farm goats.’

‘We’d be stopped at the border. Taken outside and shot.’

We both fell silent. The only sound was our breathing. Then, in the next room, Lotte, you let out a single high cry, the way children do in their sleep. Some small nightmare, over before it began.

‘Good night,’ I said at last.

‘Good night,’ said Anna.

We did not embrace.

Since Anna couldn’t take over our apartment – the owner of the building decided he wouldn’t rent to Jews – she looked for a new place for the two of you, finally moving into a small flat in Ostend. You were too young to understand what was happening, and on the day that you left we behaved as normally as possible, calmly packing your clothes and toys, your favourite blanket. You thought it was a game and brought us other things to pack in the suitcase: my winter scarf, the egg timer. And then, at the last minute, you started to wail. You ran to me and flung your arms around my legs. You wouldn’t let me go.

‘No, Papa, no no no no no,’ you cried.

It took both of us to prise you free.

All these years later, I can still feel your arms tight around me.

We agreed that it was too dangerous for me to visit you at the new flat, but I sent money every month, folded into letters from an ‘Onkel Theo’ who was living a life nothing like mine. I didn’t even dare write that my mother had died. I left the envelopes in the old part of the cemetery in Nordend, under a rock hidden in the bushes, and occasionally Anna wrote back to Onkel Theo, also using a false name and no return address. You were both in good health, she said, and enjoyed going to the Jewish symphony orchestra and the Jewish swimming pool. Even when the war began, I still thought we would be all right. With so many doctors called away to the front, Baumhauer couldn’t do without me, and so I was able to keep sending money from Onkel Theo, securing the envelopes under the rock.

Then, in October 1941, the mass deportations began. I saw the people herded together at the Großmarkthalle in their best coats, their suitcases strapped shut to hold everything inside.

‘Where are they going?’ I asked an elderly man standing next to me.

‘Palestine, I expect,’ he said. ‘Or maybe Madagascar. Who knows? Anyway, good riddance, eh?’

I scanned the crowd for you and Anna. I didn’t see anyone I recognised, but there were so many people, so many hundreds of them, the mothers holding on tight to their children’s hands.

Anna’s letters still found their way to the rock in the bushes at the cemetery, though. The two of you were still in Frankfurt.

One December day, a woman bumped into me in a quiet corridor of the Holy Spirit and dropped all her papers.

‘I’m so sorry,’ she said. As I bent to help her pick them up, she glanced over her shoulder, then said, ‘Anna has had to leave the flat, and