All That I Am Read Free

possibly been loved this morning.
    ‘Good morning, Clara.’
    Today she wears an apricot faux-silk shirt with lavish sleeves and three-button cuffs–a cheap copy of luxury that lasts but a season and may just be the essence of democracy. ‘Peachy’, as they’d say here in America, although in English I can’t tell poetry from a pun. She brings with her morning air, new-minted for this day, the 16 th of May 1939.
    Clara looks around the room, assessing the damage of the night. She knows I do not sleep. Her gaze comes to rest on me, in the armchair. I’m fiddling with a tasselled cord. Its green and gold threads catch the light.
    ‘I’ll do it,’ she says, springing forward. She takes the cord and ties back the drapes.
    But the cord is not from the drapes. It is from my wife Christiane’s dressing gown. When she left me, six weeks ago, I took it as a keepsake. Or an act of sabotage.
    ‘No mail?’
    Clara collects it each day from the postbox on her way in.
    ‘No,’ she says, her face averted at the window. She takes a deep breath, turns, and walks purposefully to the table. Then she rummages in her bag, still standing, for her steno pad. ‘Shall we finish the letter to Mrs Roosevelt?’ she asks.
    ‘Not now. Maybe later.’
    Today I have other plans. I reach over and pick up my autobiography from the table. My American publisher wants to bring it out in English. He thinks that after the success of my plays in Britain, and my American lecture tour, it should sell. He is trying, God love him, to help me, since I gave away all my money to the starving children of Spain.
    I don’t need money any more, but I do need to set the record straight. As sure as I sit here today, Hitler will soon have his war. (Not that anyone in this country seems to care–his opening salvo, the invasion of Czechoslovakia just weeks ago, has slid down to page thirteen in the New York Times .) But what people don’t realise is that his war has been on against us for years. There have been casualties already. Someone needs to write their names.
    Clara is staring out the window at Central Park, waiting for me to gather my thoughts. While her back is still turned I ask, ‘Have you read I Was a German ?’
    ‘No. No, I haven’t.’ She swivels, placing a stray curl of dark hair behind her ear.
    ‘Good. Good, good.’
    She laughs–Clara has a PhD from Frankfurt and a fine mind and can afford lavish self-deprecation. ‘It’s not good!’
    ‘No, it is.’
    She tilts her face to me, the freckles strewn across it as random and perfect as a constellation.
    ‘Because I’m going to be making some changes.’
    She waits.
    ‘It’s incomplete.’
    ‘I should hope so.’
    ‘No. Not updates. Someone I left out.’
    My memoir is subtly, shamefully self-aggrandising. I put myself at the centre of everything; I never admitted any doubts or fear. (I was cunning, though, telling of isolated childhood cruelties and adult rashness, to give the illusion–not least to myself–of full disclosure.) I left my love out, and now she is nowhere. I want to see whether, at this late stage of the game, honesty is possible for me.
    When I open the book in my lap its pages stand up like a fan, held tight to a midpoint. The National Socialists took my diaries–probably burnt them on their pyres as well. I must work from memory.
    The girl sits down at the table, side-on to me. Clara Bergdorf has been working with me for five weeks. She is a rare soul, with whom silences of whole minutes are calm. The time is neither empty, nor full of anticipatory pressure. It expands. It makes room for things to return, to fill my empty heart.
    I light a cigar and leave it smoking in the ashtray. ‘We’ll start with the introduction. Add this dedication at the end.’ I clear my throat. ‘I call to mind a woman, to whose courageous act I owe the saving of these manuscripts.’ I breathe deeply and look out at the sky, today a soft, undecided colour.
    ‘When in January,