The Invisible Victory

'It is a sad failing of us academics to gossip with the well-rehearsed and well-relished maliciousness of beautiful actresses.'

'I suppose Fleming was the discoverer of penicillin, like a shiek who discovers oil in the desert and uses it to light his camp fires. Florey was the prospector who extracted it.'

'Then how do the Americans come into it?'

'They made the money.'

'With both products,' Greenparish observed. 'Elgar, I had a message to give you last night.' Spotting a new issue of Lilliput, he grabbed it and took the armchair opposite. 'It came in a roundabout way from an ancient medico I was interrogating-he's a perfectly clean record, now the poor old thing's trying to cope single-handed in what's left of the local hospital. Apparently he's got a patient in there, he said someone you'd remember, one Gerda Dieffenbach-'

I dropped the paper. 'What's the matter with her?'

'A very common feminine complaint, I fear. She's had a baby.'

I exclaimed, 'But she must be at least thirty-five-'

'Really? I had the impression she was a young girl. Like a lot of people in Wuppertal, she knows you're here, and what you're about. She'd like to see you. It's up to you, of course, if you want to risk disobeying standing orders.'

'Do you know anything of the husband?'

'Alas, she has no such encumbrance. She was raped by some SS man, when things began to break up earlier in the year. I wouldn't go near her if I were you, she obviously wants to get something out of you.' Greenparish started reading his Lilliput._

I was appalled at this casual revelation. I knew that in Nazi Germany, where personal feelings were as irrelevant as leaves blowing across a battlefield, SS men who made any Nordic type of female pregnant faced nothing but the congratulations of the State. But a woman of Gerda's sensitivity and intelligence, and with her whole family killed…

'I might warn you that we arrested her,' added Greenparish, without looking up from his magazine. 'Someone denounced her because she was a Nazi schoolmistress. But in the end we let her out. She claimed she had to strike a compromise with her conscience under Hitler. Don't all the women? I expect even those blonde maidens who scattered rose-petals before the tyres of Hitler's Mercedes, when he came home from the surrender of France. So dreadfully vulgar, the Nazis.'

I stood up and walked in the fresh air of the small garden. I could not face Greenparish a second longer. But he was right. Why should I go against my country's orders and risk seeing Gerda? She was cared for in hospital, better off than the millions of Germans living on bomb sites. She had been raped, but millions more had been killed. But she had asked to see me. And the war had left me perhaps the person nearest to her in the whole world. That evening I put on my duffle-coat and walked to the same hospital where the earliest cases had been treated with Domagk's sulphonamide.

It had been bombed, its windows replaced by boarding. Inside was dim and cold, and you could see the marks on the wall where Hitler's portraits had been removed.

'I'm from the Control Commission,' I said to the middle-aged woman in an old-fashioned folded nurse's cap, who was sitting at a table with neatly arranged piles of forms in the hall. She gave me a hard look when I asked to see the doctor attending Frдulein Dieffenbach. She clearly did not approve of unmarried mothers.

The doctor was wizened, bent, white-haired, in a patched white coat with a stethoscope sticking from the pocket. I explained briefly who I was, and what I knew.

'Yes, Frдulein Dieffenbach was delivered safely of a daughter four days ago.' He clasped his bony hands together. 'You knew about her parents? That was terrible, terrible. Dr Dieffenbach was one of our most esteemed practitioners, and did enormous good here in Wuppertal.'

'May I see her?'

'I think that would be inadvisable. She is very, very ill.'

I asked in alarm, 'What's the matter?'

'Puerperal fever,' he told me starkly. 'We try to keep infection down as much as we can, but it is difficult with the sterilizing plant worn out like everything else.'

'You're treating her with sulphonamides?' I asked at once.

'Unfortunately not with the effect I should have hoped,' he replied wearily. 'She may be infected with the staphylococcus-we cannot tell, with our restricted facilities. Culturing pus to identify the infecting germ is a luxury we must forgo. And of course the sulpha drugs don't touch the staphylococcus. I have to use my clinical nose-' He tapped his nostril.

'What about penicillin?'

He sighed. 'Ah! That is not for us Germans.'

'Her life's in danger?'

'That's undeniable. Of course, much depends on her natural strength. But none of us is bursting with health these days.'

'I must see her. I knew her family well before the war. It might put heart into her, to fight the illness off.'

I went up an ill-lit stone staircase in the company of the doctor and the memory of Rosie. Gerda lay in a bed at the end of a small ward, separated from her neighbour by a white screen. She had not changed as much as I had feared. Her hair was two long plaits of pale gold, tied by the nurses with a pair of bows made from bandages. She was flushed with fever, thin, her face lined. Her mouth was a little open, and looked as soft as ever.

'Oh…!' She lay against a pile of pillows staring at me, no expression on her face at all.

I smiled. 'Remember how we went to work together on the Schwebebahn?' I asked in German.

'Herr Elgar…'

She stretched out her hand. I clasped it, hot and damp. I suddenly recalled _Blondie of the Follies._

'You know why I'm here?' she said in a whisper.

I nodded. 'I know all about it. I'm enormously sorry for you.'

'It was something sudden, unexpected. I never thought it could happen to me.' She dropped her eyes, the effort of looking up at me too much. 'I often thought about you during the war, hoping that you were all right. And that American with the big white car…I wondered if he was alive or dead. He had so much money.'

'He's alive, and has even more.'

She made a feeble smile. 'I'm not very well. I have a fever which sometimes complicates this state. But the child is all right, thank God.'

I felt simple astonishment at her affection for the cause of her pitiful state. Then it struck me that a man can never understand such emotions. And that Gerda was one of those women who long for motherhood but are frightened by its means. 'You'll get better soon.'

She made no response. Turning her eyes to me again, she said, 'I'm not a Nazi, you know. I never was. I had to say and do certain things which I was ashamed of. But the alternative…

Mindful of the old doctor in the background, I said, 'You mustn't strain yourself. I'll come and see you again. I'll bring you some chocolate.'

'We'll have so much to talk about, Herr Elgar.' For a second she had a shade of her old vivacity. 'The war was such a pity, such a pity. The Nazis spoiled life for everyone in the world, not only for their own people. I should have gone to England with you, shouldn't I?'

We went downstairs. The doctor remarked, 'Perhaps we should try Ehrlich's intravenous arsenicals?'

'That's useless, useless.' I strode into the gloom of the winter evening, fastening the toggles of my duffle-coat, realizing that I was facing a choice more agonizing than Florey's over the disposal of his meagre, early supplies.

Gerda needed penicillin. It was denied the German population. I could have tried squeezing some from David Mellors, but the drug was scarce, carefully checked in the British and American military hospitals, a serious offence to give away. I had heard recently from Greenparish of some ampoules stolen and fetching enormous prices on the black market. It would be useless asking David, I quickly decided. And unfair, forcing him to choose between the chance of a court-martial and offending an old friend.