Russell showed him his picture of the Rosenberg family.
Mohlmann studied it closely. 'You know, I think I saw this girl. A month, six weeks ago – I can't be sure. I was on my way to lunch with a friend in the station and a girl like this was sitting on the seat outside. She was with a young man. I remember thinking what an odd couple they looked – she was so dark and Jewish, and he had this tousled blond hair. Perhaps they went off together. A Silesian Romeo and Juliet.'
'I'm afraid not. She was seen on the train to Berlin. Alone.'
'Just one life,' Mohlmann murmured, unconsciously echoing Thomas. 'But that's all any of us are.' He drained the last of his beer. 'Were you ever in the SPD?' he asked Russell.
'I was in the KPD until 1929. After my son was born it seemed sensible to leave. Although that wasn't the only reason.'
'Social Democrats and Communists – we should have fought together,' Mohlmann said. 'That was the one big mistake.'
They talked for another half an hour, mostly about Germany's problematic history, but Russell's mind was already made up. Mohlmann dropped him off at the Monopol, after extracting a promise from Russell to share an evening on his next visit to Breslau. A lonely man, Russell thought, as he trudged upstairs to a new room. And an angry one, with no distracting responsibilities. He would make a wonderful spy, but not for the Americans. What use would a knowledge of train operations in south-east Germany be to them? For the Soviets, on the other hand, they might be the difference between life and death. Looking round the Monopol's breakfast room the following morning, Russell could understand why Hitler had stayed there. It was the first time he had seen it in daylight, and it was impressive in a Fuhrerish sort of way. Huge brass chandeliers hung from the high ceiling, which was held up by enough dappled marble columns to support a small Egyptian temple. Portraits of earlier German megalomaniacs featured on all but one panelled wall, which carried a mirror large enough to encourage serious delusions of grandeur. Rolls and coffee hardly did the setting justice.
The hotel receptionist told him that the Polish Consulate was a fifteen- minute walk away, on Oderstrasse, a small street between the Ring and the river. Or at least it had been. She couldn't remembering anyone mentioning it for several years.
Russell walked north up Schweidnitzer Strasse to the Ring, the market square at the city's heart. The six-hundred-year-old Rathaus which occupied the square's south-eastern corner was famous throughout Germany, and it wasn't hard to see why – the gable at the eastern end was both huge and elaborate. Walking down the swastika-draped southern side he came to the square's open space, a long cobbled rectangle flanked by classic five-storey houses in pastel shades. At the north-western corner the soaring spire of a shadowed church glinted in the morning sunshine.
The entrance to Oderstrasse was beside the church, and Russell was nearing its far end when he found a plaque announcing the Polish Consulate. A typed notice in a small glass case beside the door gave opening hours of 10am to 3pm, which left him with at least two hours to kill. Assuming the place was still in business. He looked up at the windows for any sign of life, and found none. There was still glass in them, though, which might mean something.
It was worth coming back, he decided. There had been five thousand Poles in Breslau in 1918, and it would be interesting to know what had become of them. In the meantime, another coffee.
He walked on to the Oder and across its southern channel, then stopped to watch two lightermen manoeuvre two fully-laden coal barges into the lock on the canalized section. Away to his right a cluster of spires rose out of the trees on the far bank, a picture of peace until a clanking tram drove across it.
Retracing his steps to the southern bank, Russell walked east past a row of university buildings, and finally found an open cafe close to the Market Hall. Music was playing from the loudspeaker on the street corner, and Russell just had time to order his coffee before a voice started droning. It was the Chief of the German Police, giving a speech on the perils of alcohol in the workplace. The authorities' answer, needless to say, was 'sterner measures'. Like all his Nazi buddies, the Chief was not given to moderation in thought or language. 'Pitiless proceedings' would be taken against canteens where workers got drunk.
Pitiless, Russell thought, was the word that characterised the bastards best. They just loved the concept.
He gulped down his coffee and tried to leave the voice behind. It was easier imagined than done – Breslau seemed unduly blessed with loudspeakers, and only the smallest streets offered areas of relative immunity. Russell suddenly remembered that Breslau had been officially designated 'Adolf Hitler's Most Faithful City' during the previous year's Sportsfest. A future badge of shame if ever there was one.
He reached a crossroads which had been spared an outlet for the regime's rantings. Not by accident, though – the loudspeaker was there, but two lonely lengths of wire hung down beside its host pole. Someone had got fed up with listening. Russell had a mental picture of a figure creeping out under cover of darkness, wire-cutters at the ready.
A small church occupied one corner of the crossroads, and a boy was sitting outside its gate, a rough pile of books beside him. Intrigued, Russell walked across. The books were all the same – a twenty-year-old collection of Johann Scheffler's poems.
'Angelus Silesius,' the boy explained. The Silesian Angel.
Russell knew who the poet was, and he recognized the book. Ilse had been reading it in the Moscow canteen when he first spoke to her.
'He's buried inside,' the boy said helpfully. 'The books are two marks.'
The church door creaked and groaned as Russell opened it, and even in high summer the interior felt chilly and damp. It was beautiful, though, the stained glass-filtered sunlight throwing a kaleidoscope of colour across the pews and walls.
He found Scheffler's tomb and portrait in a patch of sunlight and sat down in the nearest pew. He remembered wondering on that day in 1924 why an ardent young communist like Ilse Schade would be reading religious poetry, and he also remembered teasing her about it after they had become lovers. How could she take such nonsense seriously?
'Easily,' she'd told him, and showed him one of Scheffler's epigrammatic verses: In heaven life is good: No one has aught alone. What one possesses there All others too will own. 'See,' she said. 'He was a communist.' Russell had expressed doubts. 'It's how you read them,' she told him. 'Look at this one – The nearest way to God Leads through love's open door; The path of knowledge is Too slow for evermore.' 'Yes, but…'
'Just substitute socialism for God, and apply the rest to our Revolution. We need love and a socialist spirit more than we need science and organization.'
It had seemed a stretch at the time, but Scheffler and she had been right, Stalin and Trotsky wrong. 'Believers,' he muttered to himself. They had all been believers then – or had aspired to be. But the world had caught up with them.
He looked up at the poet's portrait, the serene certainty in the eyes. The world had moved a lot slower in Scheffler's day – grab hold of a vision and there was a good chance you'd make it to the grave before someone tore holes in it.
Back in the sunlight he handed over his two marks, more because the seller looked hungry than because he really wanted the book.
It was almost ten o'clock. He walked back to Oderstrasse but the Polish Consulate was still devoid of life. He banged a fist on the door rather harder than he intended, the noise echoing down the narrow street. The only answer came from behind him. 'They're gone,' a woman shouted from a first floor window. 'And good riddance!'
According to the timetable there were trains to Wartha every two hours, but only, it appeared, when the Wehrmacht was not practising in the neighbourhood. It was almost two o'clock when Russell's three-coach train trundled out past the Breslau locomotive depot and turned off the main line to Upper Silesia and Poland. Wartha was supposed to be ninety minutes away.
It was a pleasant ride, flat vistas of golden fields as far as Strehlen, followed by gently rolling country, the fields vast, lone trees standing sentry on the ridges, the occasional red-roofed farmhouse nestling beside a copse of beeches. The telegraph poles that followed the tracks, and occasionally broke away towards a distant village, were the only evidence of modernity.
The mountains to the south slowly rose to meet them. Wartha backed onto a gap in the foothills, a widening valley to one side, the Silesian plain to the other. The station was a simple affair, a single platform with a wooden awning, a house for the stationmaster. No one was waiting to get on, and no one else got off. In the yard beyond the station building two open lorries stood unattended, and a youngish man sat, apparently waiting, on the bucket-seat of a horse-drawn cart.
Russell asked him if he knew the Rosenfeld farm.
The man looked at him coldly. 'What do you mean – do I know it?'
'Do you know where it is?' Russell asked patiently.
'Of course.'
'Will you take me there?'
The man hesitated, as if searching for an adequate response. 'I have other business,' he said eventually, and flicked his horse into motion.
Russell watched the cart disappear into its own cloud of dust, and walked back round the station building in search of staff. Knocking on a door marked 'Stationmaster', he found himself face to face with a fat, red-nosed man in a Reichsbahn uniform. Mention of the Rosenfelds elicited a doubtful sniff but no outright hostility. Their farm, it transpired, was about five kilometres away.
'Is there any way I can get a ride out there?' Russell asked.
'Not that I know of.'
'The lorries out front?'
'Their owners took the train to Glatz. They didn't have the petrol to drive there.'
Five kilometres wasn't so far. 'Can you give me directions then?'
'You do know they're Jews?'
'Yes.'
The man shrugged, shut his door behind him, and led Russell back to the front of the building. 'Straight up this road,' he said, pointing westward, where the cart's trail of dust was still hovering above the track. 'You go across two crossroads, straight towards those hills, then you'll come to a fork. The road on the left follows the slope round. There are two farms on it, and you want the second.'
It sounded straightforward enough, Russell thought, and he soon reached the first crossroads. The outskirts of Wartha began a short distance down the road to the left, and the spire of the town church rose above the roofs a kilo-metre or so to the south. He kept going, down a rutted and well-shaded dirt track. An endless field of grain stretched away to the north, and the sound of a distant tractor carried over on the wind. When the motor cut out the silence was almost palpable, and the sudden bark of a dog seemed like a desperate attempt to fill the void.
It was really hot. When he reached the second crossroads Russell stood for a minute in the shade of a convenient oak, wiping his brow with his handker-chief. What was he going to tell the Rosenfelds? Everything, he supposed.
He resumed walking. In a couple of hours the sun would be behind the mountains, and as far as he could remember there had been no moon the night before. He wasn't at all sure he fancied this walk in the dark. And he hadn't even asked about trains back to Breslau.