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young woman below her pushed bravely at her backside, until the old lady found herself perched on a branch twenty feet
off the ground.
    ‘Little birdies go cheep, cheep, cheep.’
    Only the sound of women weeping.
    The Germans pointed their rifles at the tree. One woman softly said, ‘cheep’, and the others joined in . . . a pathetic chorus of ‘cheep, cheep, cheep’.
    ‘Cheep, you birdies!’
    And to the men, ‘Eat you pigs!’
    The women chirped, the men chewed. The Germans hooted with laughter.
    ‘All the little birdies go cheep, cheep, cheep! All the little piggies go chomp, chomp, chomp!’
    They lowered their rifles and doubled up in spasms of near hysteria.
    And then they left. As suddenly as they had arrived.
    Hummel found himself naked, a cool summer breeze on his buttocks, an awful taste in his mouth, as though he had awoken from the archetypal Freudian dream of public nudity to find it was real
after all. He had been briefly acquainted with the mind of the Nazi, the merest insight into the dark pit that passed for mind, and felt it a lesson learnt at a high price – part of the
tragedy of the Nazi, he felt, pulling on his trousers, was that to the Nazi the world must be a terrifying place, being, as it was, full of kikes and niggers.

 
§ 18
    Smith had left them in Paris. At Victoria Station, London, the Freuds were met by their eldest two children, Martin and Mathilde, by the Superintendent of the Southern Railway
and by the Station Master of Victoria – a man privileged to wear the highest top hat in Britain. Freud would have loved to ask him about the phallic symbolism involved in wearing a hat more
than eighteen inches high, wearing one’s cock on one’s head as it were, but Lockett had arrived with his motor car to whisk them away. Past crowds of reporters and well-wishers, out
into the strange freedom of a country that, whilst he had never chosen it, finally seemed to have chosen him.
    ‘The short way or the pretty way?’ Lockett asked.
    Freud already had his Bartholomew’s Street Map of London and his Baedeker open in front of him.
    ‘Oh, I think the pretty way . . . the long way . . . I would like to see Piccadilly Circus . . . and Regent Street . . . and the BBC . . . and . . .’
    Lockett slipped the car into gear and headed off in the direction of Buckingham Palace.

 
§ 19
    It was a light night in the middle of August. Bemmelmann knocked on Hummel’s door and said, ‘We are leaving. Come with us.’
    ‘Leaving how?’
    ‘Downriver. By boat. A boat that will take us down the Danube, out into the Black Sea and then on to Palestine.’
    ‘What about the Germans?’
    ‘What about the Germans?’
    ‘How will you get past them?’
    ‘Trager will help us.’
    ‘Trager?’
    ‘Our German.’
    ‘ Our German? We have a German?’
    ‘The one who patrols the street, Joe. His name is Trager.’
    ‘I know. I’ve just never thought of him as being ours . Why would he help you?’
    ‘The Germans want us to leave. They have established an office of Jewish Emigration.’
    ‘Herr Bemmelmann, I have heard of this office of Jewish Emigration, we have all heard of it. It’s a front for bribery. There are wags who call it Adolf
Eichmann’s Piggy Bank.’
    ‘There are even representatives from Palestine here to assist us to leave.’
    ‘Jews from Palestine? Zionists? In Vienna? How do you know this?’
    ‘Rabbi Lippmann at the Leopoldstraße synagogue told me so.’
    ‘Yet, Herr Bemmelmann,’ Hummel plodded on. ‘The Germans demand we apply for exit permits, for which they charge all our jewellery, all our savings and even our furniture
– and if they aren’t demanding exit permits, how many countries do not have an entry visa requirement? Schuster is even now stuck in Paris waiting for his British visa. Herr Bemmelmann,
this is so risky.’
    ‘You said it yourself that day in the Prater, Joe. They’re having fun. They want us all to go. They’d be happy if we all went