Out of Such Darkness Read Online Free PDF Page A

be true. Beautiful boys like Wolf were in demand and I often wondered why he had chosen to spend his time with me. I was generous, of course, and I knew he held a genuine affection for me – but I was only one of … how many?
    “Ssh, Wolfie. Don’t worry about that now. You can tell me anything. Where have you been?”
    “I’ve been staying with an SA troop at a barracks in Munich. I will be too old for the Hitler Youth soon and I, and some other boys, had been singled out for officer training with them. I always wanted to join the SA.”
    I didn’t let him know how much this disappointed me. The SA rabble were the worst of Hitler’s thugs. They beat people nearly to death for no more than not giving way on the sidewalk. The sight of their brown uniforms made Jews scurry in any direction to avoid being in their path. “So it was a recruitment weekend?”
    “An induction. We were introduced to the SA tradition.”
    It was difficult to imagine an organisation of quasi-criminals having “a tradition” when it had only been in existence for a decade but I declined to demur.
    He closed his eyes. “The Hitler Youth boys were all chosen because we are … the way we are. They paired us up with experienced men – men who are also like us. We were all in the dormitory together.”
    I had heard rumours that Ernst Roehm, who founded and led the SA, had adopted the Sacred Band of Thebes as the model for his bodyguard. “You were to become lovers?”
    He covered his face with his hands. “Yes. For the good of the unit. We would have incredible fighting spirit – willing to sacrifice ourselves for each other.”
    I shuddered. “Tell me what happened.”
    His tears started and I held his shaking shoulders as he leaned forward, head bowed, sobbing. “We were settling down after … you know … it was an orgy … I am so ashamed.”
    “Try to tell me, calmly,” I said, stroking his back.
    “Suddenly, the doors at the far end of the barrack-room burst open and the Blackshirts ran in. They lined up against the wall and started shooting. My man, Max, was hit in the first seconds. I used him as a shield. I could feel more bullets hit him. I slid back onto the floor. I was one of many scrabbling around. My clothes were there next to me so I grabbed them and crawled under the beds to the end of the room where the showers were. I escaped through a window. I ran away naked. Others stopped to get dressed. I don’t think they made it.”
    His forehead was touching the water. I spooned some suds onto his blond hair and began to rub the soap into his scalp. “Go on.”
    “I hid in some trees and put my uniform on. I knew better than to go to the railway station. I got my bearings and walked to the road. I waved down a truck and the driver took me to Leipzig. I hid there for most of the day and then persuaded another truck driver to bring me to the outskirts of Berlin. Then I walked here. I knew you would look after me. You will, won’t you, Cammie?”
    “Can’t you go home to your parents?”
    “The SS will have my papers. They know I was in Munich. They will go to my house looking for me. You are my only hope.”
    I knew then my time in Berlin was over. I would leave and, somehow, I would smuggle Wolf out with me.
     
    In his book Isherwood admits that “To Christopher, Berlin meant boys.” This implies that he was an open and obvious bugger in those days but none of us was ‘out’ in the same way as we are now. If you were like Crisp – which I never was – you flaunted your campness in London and risked ridicule, arrest or outright hostility and violence. For the rest of us it had to be enough to move in the same shadowy circles and haunt the same dubious nightspots. I could never live truly as myself.
    I went to live in Berlin because of money. I had written the first Dexter Parnes mystery,
The Silver Eagle Device
, when I was still at Oxford. After I came down I had a job in a dreary insurance office in Cheapside,