The meaning of home. Coming home. Walking down the path, the sound of the heavy wooden door opening, smell of woodsmoke, Corinne getting up from her chair to greet me. That face. That smile. Hands extending, reaching out to embrace. Hello, love! Here, together, now. Never taken for granted. And after supper, we sit facing each other, the table of books and papers between us, in the autumn and winter the fire burning in the hearth. A cat often on our laps. And we talk. We talk the world right. We talk for hours – feelings, politics, books. But that’s equivalent to saying that rain reaches the ocean by ‘river, estuary, sea’. It captures none of the movement, the lithe energy of streams of thoughts and words intertwining. Your hand periodically reaching for a Silk Cut, the blue smoke coiling above you in unruly haloes. Me sipping red wine. How often I have thought about trying to capture these times. But soon realising that it would be as elusive as trying to bottle the light from the stars. Trying to trap the essence of happiness itself.
Once I wrote about us. Only once did I capture something of this love. It was late. You’d gone to bed. I was in the bathroom, and through the wall I could hear your deep breathing as you slept. I then imagined a future time when that sound would no longer be in the world. And what that would feel like. And how impossible it is to express the love that connects us. This short piece still haunts me. I remember showing it to you, and the expression on your face as you read it, the way you squeezed my hand afterwards.
Maddeningly, I cannot find this writing any more. Occasionally I search through old journals, boxes of papers, hoping to stumble across it with a stab of delight and recognition, but it hasn’t happened yet. The tantalising nature of a lost piece of writing. Another voice, of course, tells me that if I did find it again, this piece could only disappoint. That, over the years of being lost, it has grown in its beauty and poignancy, to impossible levels of emotional power which the original piece could never have possessed. I guess all writers have similar stories about their lost pieces of work – the ones that got away …
I look back on these pages a couple of days after having written them. Truly wild weather now, rain battering the cottage in sheets, the wind ripping the leaves from the trees. Two further thoughts come to mind; maybe you’ve got there before me? If our past is always with us, then it follows that our past suffering and pain is carried with us too. This can be seen at its starkest with people who’ve survived traumatic experiences such as torture (as we’ve seen with Jean Améry, for example), but all of us know there are experiences lodged in our minds that we wish we could forget. Batteries of pain that we try to keep at a distance. Often inexplicable, sometimes not. Death, loss, the end of love. As integral to life as birth, growth and the beginning of love. But I feel now that all of these experiences need to be accepted, as part of our present realities, not ushered away into a neglected corner marked ‘the past’.
The other thought is perhaps a more disconcerting one. If we accept that the vast majority of the people I’ve been discussing in these books, involved with different kinds of desk killing, are not a different species from you and I. If we accept that only a very small percentage of these people could be termed ‘sociopaths’ or ‘psychopaths’ (i.e. people incapable of feeling empathy or love, in the common meaning of these terms), then it follows that the overwhelming majority of desk killers have also experienced the intense rush of joy that comes with new love, the paralysing beauty of watching your lover sleeping, the grief that comes when love ends.
Do we really believe this, though? Can we allow ourselves to think of the joy that Adolf Eichmann felt at the birth of his first child? Or the wild love that Albert Speer experienced for the first time late in his life? Or the intense happiness that Steven Bradbury and his wife experienced on their wedding day? Because the harrowing reality is not that the desk killers do not feel love, empathy, pain, grief and all the other intense emotions that are part of the human experience – it is that they have found a way to be selective in their humanity. They can stroke their child’s sleeping face in the night, and in the morning send the email that kills people they have never met.
‘They’ve taken out insurance against pity …’
Leo Tolstoy, Resurrection
19
The Wood Pigeons and the Train
If we simplify so much when remembering our own pasts, then what does this tell us about the writing of history – our collective past? Not for the first time I wonder how we have been taught to see, or not to see; how we have been trained to look at only certain aspects of the past. I sense that so much of what we are taught to regard as ‘significant’ or ‘central’ is often no more than the accretions of hundreds of years of repetition, a million examination paper questions and answers. And conversely, many astonishing realities lie just out of sight, or sometimes surprisingly manage to sneak into our peripheral vision. For instance, many years ago now, this two-inch paragraph appeared before my eyes, buried at the bottom of page 17 of the Observer newspaper. One of those items considered of only limited importance, and covered in single paragraphs in the ‘In Brief’ section:
Europe’s biggest insurance company, Allianz, insured SS companies and barracks in Auschwitz, Cracow and other concentration camps during the Second World War, according to documents found by the German news magazine Der Spiegel. It was one of a number of German insurance companies that profited from victims and perpetrators alike by earning money on the insurance of deported Jews and the policies for forced labour companies run by the SS.
‘We certainly came seriously close to the Holocaust … however, the SS would also have been capable of continuing their criminal activities without Allianz,’ admitted Herbert Hansmeyer, a board member.
Allianz insured SS weapons factories and prisoners’ barracks, material stores and vehicles in the concentration camps from 1940 to 1945. Representatives regularly inspected the factory halls. Allianz is being sued in New York by nine Holocaust survivors who claim that it profited from Jewish life insurance policies during the war.
An incredible reality that I’d never even considered – Auschwitz and all the concentration camps had been insured! And the insurance company profited from both sides, having policies for both the SS and the Jews. Could there be a more vivid example of the ‘banality of evil’ than the knowledge that Allianz’s ‘representatives regularly inspected the factory halls’ during the years of extermination? This knowledge makes me want to ask other questions about the realities of the past. About the staggering cynicism of corporations only interested in their financial return. And about the connection between the Allianz of today – the largest insurance company in the world, in fact the largest financial services corporation on the planet, with total assets (in 2017) of €901.3 billion – and the Allianz of 1943 – the company that insured the extermination camps.
Today if you stopped people in the street and asked them about Allianz, they might tell you that they are a major sponsor of Formula One motor racing, or that the Allianz Arena is home to German football’s most famous club – Bayern Munich. They also sponsor golf, tennis and rugby across the world. If you look at their Wikipedia entry you’ll find twenty-nine lines on the company’s varied sponsorship activities, compared to just eighteen lines on Allianz’s ‘Nazi-era activities and litigation’. But even here you will struggle to find more than the sketchiest summary of what these ‘activities’ were – few facts about the collusion of Allianz and Nazism.