Free All That I Am by Anna Funder

police description: ‘Toller is slightly built, about 1.65 to 1.68 metres tall; has a thin, pale face, clean-shaven; large brown eyes, piercing gaze, closes his eyes when thinking; has dark, almost black, wavy hair; speaks standard German.’ I looked at the photo on the poster. An intense young man stared through the camera as if to somewhere else. He didn’t look like a dangerous revolutionary to me. He looked like someone riding backwards on a horse.
    Dora slid her arms around me from behind and gave me a squeeze. Her cheek came up to my shoulder. ‘We’re getting there,’ she said. ‘Thomas Mann and Albert Einstein have both written to the newspaper in support of the campaign.’ She let go and turned away to her desk, feeding a piece of paper into the typewriter. ‘Glad you’re here, by the way.’
    I started to unpack. My things were strewn all over the bed when there he was at the door. A tall man with blue eyes and a full mouth. He wore an open white shirt belted at the waist in the latest style, like an urban pirate. He had a newspaper rolled up in one hand.
    ‘Am I i-interrupting?’ he smiled. The voice was big, lazy, deliberate.
    ‘Not at all,’ Dora said. ‘This is my cousin Ruth.’ She gestured loosely. ‘Ruthie, this is Hans.’
    He nodded at the bed. ‘Nice underwear,’ he said. ‘“Koenig’s, when only the best will do.”’
    Dora rolled her eyes and laughed. ‘This is not normal, Ruthie,’ she said, ‘a man who can tell the brand of silk at fifteen paces.’
    Hans chuckled. ‘It can be a useful thing to know,’ he said, looking at me squarely.
    I wasn’t affronted, or even embarrassed. I wanted to get into this adult realm, the new world they were making where intimacies might be public and desire stated plainly. I felt the thrill of it in my stomach.
    I cleared a space and sat down on the bed. Hans sat on the floor and leant against it, opening out his newspaper. He had come to show Dora an article about another Independent. I heard their words, but I wasn’t taking them in.
    ‘Bertie’s really taking it up to the government now,’ Hans said.
    A man called Berthold Jacob had publicly accused the government of assassinating a pacifist. I saw over Hans’s shoulder a picture of the dead pacifist, his head leaking blackness onto the cobblestones, and next to him one of Berthold Jacob, a thin-faced fellow with round glasses and a goatee. Hans’s fingers, long and smooth, held the paper apart.
    ‘If Minister von Seeckt only talks about it in parliament but doesn’t lay any charges against Bertie, it’s proof that he’s right.’
    ‘I’m sure he is,’ said Dora, turning and leaning over her chair back, chin on her hand. ‘They’re trying to stamp out the last embers of the revolution.’
    ‘Bertie’s moving to Munich, you know. Next month. Wants to come to our meetings.’
    ‘Really?’ Dora’s eyes lit up. She took the pencil she was chewing out of her mouth. ‘That’s great.’
    The two of them spoke of Bertie as one might a famous person, or a shared, important secret. I had never heard of him. I noticed a rivalry in their admiration, a ratcheting up of the details each of them knew about this man, ostensibly in order to tell me, but really as a game with one another.
    Hans said, ‘He’s taken an apartment in Schwabing.’ Dora countered, ‘He works twenty hours a day, they say, summer and winter.’ Hans, whose friendship with Bertie went back to the war, had deeper sources. He parried: ‘He was gassed at Mons, you know.’ They became absorbed, sparring and laughing. I stopped listening. I watched Hans’s chest moving under his shirt, the soft sheen of his skin. I forced my gaze away to his feet but my eyes travelled back up over his legs, long and splayed, and I wondered how he was made.
    When Hans was leaving I stood to shake hands, but he pulled me in. ‘Welcome, Comrade Becker,’ he smiled, and gave me a kiss.
    The door closed behind him. I touched my