It was five days since Emma and Carl unexpectedly found themselves in Geneva: a tour of duty with Carl’s boss, Adam Trott. A special mission, during which Emma was permitted to accompany her husband as his secretary, a ploy they had used successfully before. Emma had telephoned her father from the hotel, and Oscar had taken the first train from Berne to meet them. They had been discreet, he thought, but was that true? Switzerland was rife with German spies, more so than any other country. It was in the restaurant, when Carl absented himself from the table for a moment, that she told him. Barbarossa. So that’s what they called it, the barbarians.
They had fallen silent when Carl reappeared, after which Emma made some remark about her mother. But her words kept pounding in his brain.
The train back to Berne took him past Nyon, Rolle, Morges, Lausanne. He noted the names of the stations, each one a small paradise, and was struck by the baffling ordinariness of everyday life as seen from his carriage window. Riding on a Swiss train often reminded him of being ill in bed as a child, listening to the reassuring street noises – the rag-and-bone man’s cry, the refuse collector ringing his bell – and feeling soothed and snug. Not today, though. On this train, passing through innocent stations along the lake, with hayfields creeping up the mountainsides and sailing boats on the mirror of water, Emma’s whispered message weighed like a stone on his heart. The content defied the imagination, while the fact that he knew became ever more terrifying. The long-expected attack on Russia was finally to be launched. And he knew the date and the hour.
Operation Barbarossa, a code name for murder, obviously, even as it was a childish appeal to old myths and legendary heroes. Super-kitsch, if it weren’t for the deadly intent. Emma had been incapable of keeping the news to herself. She had blurted it out to her father, who she was sure would know what to do. The fear in her tone had been unmistakable, as well as the urgent, unvoiced appeal for action.
At the station of Lausanne he had got off, feeling choked by the stuffiness of his compartment, and even more by the turmoil in his mind. He had no appointments in Berne that evening, so there was plenty of time for a stroll by the lake. Trees and bushes were heavy with blossom on this late afternoon of May 28, in the second year of the war. The boulevard was agreeably alive with strolling couples, cyclists, sailors, tourists. Oscar wandered off in the direction of the music he could hear in the distance. It came from the terrace of Hôtel Beau Rivage, where a small orchestra was playing English tunes – emphatically English, he thought. A few tables were still vacant. He sat down, ordered a glass of Dôle, and waited. Spring on the shore of Lake Geneva. As though time stretched out into forever.
He watched the gulls flying in wide arcs over the water. Where on earth did all those birds come from? They belonged by the sea, surely. He remembered standing at the window as a boy and throwing out crusts of bread for the gulls to catch, which they did with ease, somersaulting through the air, watching him with their orange beady eyes.
And so Oscar sat, wrapped up in his thoughts, at a neatly laid table not far from the band: violinists in dinner jackets, pianist in evening dress, trombone player in red. Uniforms of peace, clownish outfits of neutrality. He picked up a newspaper left behind on a nearby table.
