All That I Am Read Free Page B

previous correspondence in this matter. As you are aware, the Mayflower Hotel is to be demolished at the end of 2001. The building is being emptied in preparation for this.
    Um Gottes willen! How would I be aware? Sitting here in Bondi? And what ‘previous correspondence’? Then again, it might have slipped my mind.
The enclosed documents, belonging to Mr Ernst Toller, were found in a safe in the basement. The material consists of a first edition of Mr Toller’s autobiography, I Was a German , together with sheets of typed amendments to it. A handwritten note with the words ‘For Ruth Wesemann’ was found on top of them. The German Restitutions Authority has confirmed that you were formerly known as Ruth Wesemann.
Should you so decide, the Butler Library of our university would be honoured to house this material for future generations. We already hold first editions of all of Toller’s plays, and his correspondence from his time in the United States. We have taken the liberty of making copies for safekeeping.
If I or any member of the university faculty can be of assistance to you, we would welcome the opportunity.
Yours sincerely,
Mary E. Cunniliffe
Brooke Russell Astor Director for Special Collections
    Toller!
    His book is brittle as old skin, or a pile of leaves. The spine is broken, sprung loose from the cloth cover because of the sheets of paper thrust between its pages. Something from him to me: it can only be about her.
    I reach to put it for a moment on the coffee table but my hands are shaking and some of the papers fall out onto the glass, then slip off to the floor. Inside me a sharpness–my hand moves to check the patch over my heart.
    In his presence, and hers, I am returned to my core self. All my wry defences, my hard-won caustic shell, are as nothing. I was once so open to the world it hurts. The room blurs.
    When I pick the book up again, it falls open at the first, typed insertion:
I call to mind a woman, to whose courageous act I owe the saving of these manuscripts. When in January, 1933, the Dictator of Braunau was given power against the German People, Dora Fabian, whose life has ended sorrowfully in exile, went to my flat and brought away to safety two trunk-loads of manuscripts. The police got to know of what she had done and sent her to prison. She said that the papers had been destroyed. After she was released from prison she fled from Germany, and, shortly before her death, she got the papers out of Germany with the assistance of a disillusioned Nazi.
Ernst Toller
New York, May 1939
    Toller was always a master of compression.
    I pull a rug over my knees. I’d like to crawl back inside the night, perhaps to dream of her. But one can control dreams less than anything in life, which is to say, not at all.

TOLLER
    I am so settled here I might never leave this room. The Mayflower Hotel, Central Park West, is quite a good hotel–not the best, by any means. Still, if I am honest, better than I can afford. But honesty is so hard. If I look too closely at the truth I might be unhinged by regret and lose hope in the world.
    Then again, I may be well and truly unhinged already. Last week on the subway, a man hanging absent-mindedly onto the leather hand-strap stared at me a little long. Without thinking I flashed him what Dora called my ‘famous person’s smile’. The poor fellow turned away as if ignoring a tic.
    I fled Europe for the land of the free, but I didn’t quite count on invisibility. In Berlin or Paris, in London or Moscow or Dubrovnik, I couldn’t take two steps without wading into autograph hunters. Once in a tender moment, Dora said it was good for me to know my work was appreciated. But I had been famous a long time; I was on first-name terms with the phantom-Toller the press had made. Though I needed applause like oxygen, I never believed the love and plaudits were for the real me, who, because of my black times, I kept well hidden.
    Clara has gone to get coffee. We are in a