Events moved quickly after that. Perhaps if I had not won The Prize, the newspapers would not have taken as much interest in me but of course I had acquired some small measure of celebrity that was pure oxygen to the fire of publicity that followed. Also, it was 1989 and the last of the war criminals were still being discovered in places as far removed as South America, Australia and Africa. To add the name of a small provincial English university town to that list provided a scandal that the columnists could live off for months. As a writer, I could hardly blame them for drawing as much blood from the story as possible.
The authorities at Cambridge suspended me immediately, issuing a press statement to the effect that they had known nothing of my wartime activities and had taken me at my word that I had engaged in no criminal behaviour during the Nazi era. They summoned me to an emergency meeting but I declined the invitation, as perhaps I should have declined all invitations over the previous year, and offered my resignation instead by letter, which they gratefully accepted by return of post.
Bookshops across the world removed my novels from their shelves, although the organizers of The Prize itself refused, in the face of staunch criticism, to rescind my award, saying that it had been given to a book, not to an author, and that Dread remained a sublime work, regardless of the monstrous actions of its creator. In response to this a great number of writers boycotted The Prize that year, refusing to enter their books, and only when the fuss died down did they seek the approbation of a small glass trophy and a sizeable cheque once again. A film adaptation of Dread, scheduled to begin shooting two months later, was promptly cancelled, while representatives from my publishing house – a company with whom I had worked since my debut novel appeared in 1953 – contacted me to say that in the light of recent events they felt they could no longer offer the level of support to my writing that they had done in the past. I was released from my contract with immediate effect, they added, and my six novels would soon be allowed to fall out of print. （They made no mention of my ill-advised collection of poetry, although I can only assume that this was an oversight on their part.） So my work was to be obliterated, my contribution to literature over half a century expunged from the record as if I had never once put pen to paper. And I accepted all of this without rancour. What, after all, could I possibly have said to justify myself?
It took me some time to move my belongings from my rooms. There was a lifetime’s worth of books there, not to mention decades of correspondence and papers to organize, and to my great dismay some five hundred students, many of whom I knew personally and with whom I had formed what I’d believed to be friendly connections, paraded through the streets while I remained in situ. They held banners with my picture in the centre, a Hitler moustache drawn above my upper lip and a red line slashed through my face. Nazis out! they cried. Nazis out! A stone was thrown through my window and the culprit, an undergraduate in the history department, was suspended from classes for three weeks. A petition was delivered for his reinstatement and he acquired heroic status among his peers, even appearing on an episode of Newsnight to defend his actions. Oh, how the young people delighted in their outrage!
Most of the major newspapers and media organizations contacted me directly with requests for interviews – my agent had stopped representing me, of course, so their invitations came by phone to the college porter – offering ridiculous amounts of money in exchange for putting what they termed as ‘my side of the story’ in the public domain, but I declined every bid, making it clear that I had nothing to say in my defence. I committed the acts of which I am accused, I told them. I am guilty as charged. What more do you want from me?
I chose not to read Maurice’s novel at first but then one afternoon, as I was making my way through Heathrow Airport for the last time, I saw it displayed in considerable numbers at the front of a bookshop:
Two Germans
by Maurice Swift
I thought it a lazy title and, had I been in his position, might have gone for something a little more sensational, but I picked it up nevertheless and glanced at the endorsements on the back cover. Naturally, both Dash Hardy and the Spanish novelist had offered glowing praise for the book.
I did, however, eventually read it over the course of a single afternoon. It had many flaws. For a start, it was too long. Over three hundred and fifty pages for a story that could have been told in half that amount. There were an extraordinary number of anachronisms, place names that didn’t exist at the time, and some of the prose was unnecessarily purple. I had warned him about this in the past. Just say what you have to say, I had told him, and then move on and say something else. Sometimes, after all, the sky is just blue.
But then I recalled something else I had told him in Copenhagen and felt rather proud that he had taken me at my word. Everyone has secrets, I had remarked. There’s something in all our pasts that we wouldn’t want to be revealed. And that’s where you’ll find your story. He must have scribbled that down in his ubiquitous notebook and, when a story began to be revealed to him, he knew exactly what to do with it. I had, quite literally, been the author of my own misfortune.
A photograph of Maurice appeared on the inside jacket and he looked a lot more adult than before. Gone were the checked shirts, blue jeans and stubble; now he wore an elegant suit with an open-necked white shirt and a pair of black horn-rimmed glasses. The great mess of dark hair had been tamed too for a more mature look. The photographer’s name, I noticed, was Clémence Charbonneau, and I wondered about that. Was this the friend he had met in Paris who had photographed him nude?
It took quite some time for me to have an emotional response to my relationship with Maurice but it happened at last after I had returned to West Berlin, where I rented a small apartment at the top of a building quite near what had once been the B?ttcher Tavern but was now a supermarket. It was in this flat that I had chosen to spend whatever remained of my life, close to the happy memories of my childhood. I was sorting through some paperwork one evening and happened to come across the receipts for the air and train fares that I had purchased for him over the course of our time together. Copenhagen, Rome, Madrid, Paris, New York and Amsterdam. The cities where we had talked, where I had revealed so much about myself, and where I had behaved foolishly in the hope that this manipulative boy would fall in love with me. I broke down as I threw them in the wastepaper basket, wondering whether the pain that he had inflicted, the heartless manoeuvring and theft of my life story, had been worth it to him. And as I sat there weeping, I thought of Oskar, Alysse, her younger brother and the rest of her family and felt that my heart was ready to give way with grief and guilt. What right had I, I asked myself, to feel aggrieved over Maurice’s actions? All he had done was take my memories and turn them into a bestseller that would be forgotten in time. How could I possibly compare his crimes to my own?
I saw him once more.
It was a few months after I’d moved back to West Berlin and by then his novel had not only been translated into German – ironically, by the same publisher who had once produced my own books – but had become an enormous success, the biggest of the season, and I saw an advertisement in a newspaper for a reading and public interview that he was due to give at the Literaturhaus. I debated whether or not to go but, on the evening itself, my feet took me there as if by their own design. I adopted a slight disguise in case anyone present might recognize me, a pair of old glasses that I had no real use for and a hat. Plus, I had recently grown a beard and moustache, and had aged considerably.