A Ladder to the Sky(28)
‘Erich, I said I don’t want to live there.’
‘But it’s such a beautiful city. Sometimes I’ve thought it might be nice to buy a house,’ I added, making up new ideas as I went along. ‘You could have a room there,’ I added, unable to look him in the eye now but staring down at the floor. ‘A room of your own, of course. And as I have no children, then someday—’
‘I’m tired, Erich,’ he said. ‘I’m going to bed.’
‘Yes, of course,’ I said, turning away, my voice barely audible in my distress. ‘It was a foolish idea.’
I began to make my way down the corridor towards my room but his voice calling out to me made me turn around.
‘What was his name?’ he shouted.
‘What?’ I asked, confused by his question. ‘What was whose name?’
‘The boy. Alysse’s younger brother. Do you remember his name, or was his life as meaningless to you as hers? What was his name, Erich?’
I stared at him, swallowing hard. I looked around me, at the carpet, the paintings, the lampshades, hoping for inspiration, but nothing came to mind. I turned back to him and shook my head.
‘I don’t remember,’ I said. ‘I’m not sure that I ever even knew.’
He smiled at me, shook his head, and then he was gone.
The following morning, when I came downstairs with my suitcase, I enquired after him and the receptionist told me that he had checked out an hour earlier.
He had left no message for me.
8. West Berlin
True to his ambitions, Maurice’s debut novel was published the following year to both positive reviews and strong sales and, in his first interviews, he revealed that his central character, a young homosexual falling in love with his best friend in pre-war Berlin, was based on me.
‘All of Ernst’s actions in my novel come from stories that Erich Ackermann told me about his own life,’ he repeated time and again on television, on radio and in the newspapers. ‘Although I’ve invented some characters and amalgamated others to serve the story, the basic facts remain true. Having been a great admirer of Herr Ackermann’s work since my teenage years, I was naturally shocked by some of the things he revealed to me about his past, but while no decent human being could condone his behaviour, whatever he did fifty years ago does not detract from the power of his fiction. He remains a very impressive writer.’
The first I knew of any of this was during a lecture I was giving at Cambridge on Thomas Hardy. It was one that I had given many times in the past and I was interrupted halfway through when the door swung open to reveal a cameraman and a young news reporter who stormed towards the lectern without introduction to ask the question that I had been expecting for most of my adult life:
‘Professor Ackermann, do you have any reaction to claims by the novelist Maurice Swift that you wilfully sent two Jews to their deaths in the Nazi death camps in 1939 by reporting them to the SS, and also provided information that led to the murder of two other young people on the same night?’
The silence that filled the hall seemed to go on for a terribly long time. For me, it was like time itself had stood still. I looked down at my notes with a half-smile, and it was difficult not to feel the finality of the moment as I shuffled my papers and returned them to my satchel, glancing around the lecture theatre in the certain knowledge that I would never speak from that or any other dais again. Looking out at my students, I saw them staring back at me in a mixture of disbelief and confusion and my eyes settled on a girl whose hand was covering her mouth in shock. She was a mediocre student and I had recently given her a low grade for one of her essays, and I knew immediately that she would take pleasure in my downfall, revelling in the fact that she had been present to witness it. I was there, she would tell her friends. I was there when they confronted the old Nazi and told him they knew all the things he’d done. I wasn’t surprised. I could always tell that he was hiding something. He broke down and cried. He started screaming. It was horrible to watch.
‘In fact, it was three young people who were shot that night,’ I said to the reporter, stepping off the stage and making my way towards the door without undue haste. ‘Although you’re correct that two were sent to the camps. So the number of deaths on my conscience is actually five.’
Events moved quickly after that. Perhaps if I had not won The Prize, the newspapers would not have taken as much interest in me but of course I had acquired some small measure of celebrity that was pure oxygen to the fire of publicity that followed. Also, it was 1989 and the last of the war criminals were still being discovered in places as far removed as South America, Australia and Africa. To add the name of a small provincial English university town to that list provided a scandal that the columnists could live off for months. As a writer, I could hardly blame them for drawing as much blood from the story as possible.
The authorities at Cambridge suspended me immediately, issuing a press statement to the effect that they had known nothing of my wartime activities and had taken me at my word that I had engaged in no criminal behaviour during the Nazi era. They summoned me to an emergency meeting but I declined the invitation, as perhaps I should have declined all invitations over the previous year, and offered my resignation instead by letter, which they gratefully accepted by return of post.
Bookshops across the world removed my novels from their shelves, although the organizers of The Prize itself refused, in the face of staunch criticism, to rescind my award, saying that it had been given to a book, not to an author, and that Dread remained a sublime work, regardless of the monstrous actions of its creator. In response to this a great number of writers boycotted The Prize that year, refusing to enter their books, and only when the fuss died down did they seek the approbation of a small glass trophy and a sizeable cheque once again. A film adaptation of Dread, scheduled to begin shooting two months later, was promptly cancelled, while representatives from my publishing house – a company with whom I had worked since my debut novel appeared in 1953 – contacted me to say that in the light of recent events they felt they could no longer offer the level of support to my writing that they had done in the past. I was released from my contract with immediate effect, they added, and my six novels would soon be allowed to fall out of print. (They made no mention of my ill-advised collection of poetry, although I can only assume that this was an oversight on their part.) So my work was to be obliterated, my contribution to literature over half a century expunged from the record as if I had never once put pen to paper. And I accepted all of this without rancour. What, after all, could I possibly have said to justify myself?