Free All That I Am by Anna Funder Page B

in the local papers of hamlets, looking for sudden increases in population–more weddings, births–and would find, when he visited, young men on the football field being drilled twice a week in ‘gymnastics’, with batons standing in for weapons. Alone in his attic Bertie had calculated, from the huge number of men on its official payroll alone, that the German military was in a position to take command of one million troops. And they were not, as Hans put it, ‘training for nothing’. Bertie’s mission left him no time for formal study, but in our circles his articles brought him the respect of a zealot, or a savant.
    The morning he arrived he stood just inside Dora’s room and put a hand on his chest. ‘Berthold Jacob,’ he said, as if the rest of us might not know, as if we hadn’t been waiting for weeks.
    Hans sprang up. ‘Bertie!’
    I watched Hans shake his friend’s hand, holding him at the elbow. Bertie was not what I expected a famous, fearless radical pacifist to be. He had hunched shoulders and a neck that bent forward. His small brown eyes looked at us from behind round, rimless glasses. A goatee only partly covered his gas burns, nasty things that reached like pink and hairless stains down under his collar. (Wasn’t the gas so cruel? Always attacking the tender bits: lips, groin, ears.) His hair rose in tufts in all directions and he wore too many clothes, like someone insensible to heat and cold, or someone wearing all he owned. His voice was high, friendly, uncertain.
    ‘You must be Ruth,’ he said, blinking and extending his hand. ‘Hans has told me all about you.’ I held his small hand and nodded. I thought, for some reason, of a ferret.
    And that, I suppose, was where the five of us became joined–a five-pointed constellation, held together by forces we could not see–Dora, Toller, Hans, Bertie and me.
    ‘Sit down, everybody,’ Dora said, brisk as usual. The personal matters, for her, could wait.
    Perhaps it was because she was the most brilliant speaker in the party, or perhaps it was simply because we met in her room that Dora had assumed the leader’s role. I don’t think Hans wanted it for himself, but it didn’t sit too well with him either. He motioned Bertie to the armchair and pulled Dora’s desk chair to one side for himself. I was on the bed. Dora remained standing, her hands on the back of a bentwood chair, shifting her weight from hip to hip.
    She began by listing the activities in our campaign to release Toller: letters, meetings, posters, speeches. Before she’d finished, Hans’s knee was jigging up and down, out of his control. Like many returned men, he had a need for action in his blood; if he sat still too long, things could come into his mind he did not want there. But that wasn’t it. I looked at him and I felt it too. In the same room as Bertie, our efforts seemed suddenly amateurish, undergraduate. By the time it was Hans’s turn to speak he’d subtly switched from being part of our campaign to being its critic. He complained about our nightly sorties gluing up leaflets, ‘only to make work for the police who rip them down’.
    ‘Any suggestions then, maestro?’ Dora asked, her voice cool. Suggestions, of course, should have come before we were in such illustrious company.
    Hans leant his chair back on two legs against the wall, practising moving a pencil over his knuckles. He glanced at Bertie. ‘Why don’t we get Toller’s own views on his situation, and put them in the paper?’ he said. ‘Let the man speak for himself.’
    Dora flicked her head sideways, a practical gesture to push back her hair that doubled as a sign of impatience. ‘I hardly think the prison authorities are about to let him campaign for his own release,’ she said.
    ‘He’s allowed visitors, isn’t he?’ In one swift movement Hans righted his chair and collected the pencil from the floor. ‘An interview might just do the trick.’
    I looked from Hans to Dora and opened