Dietrich Bonhoeffer woke up in a plane
to Australia, next to Kevin Rudd, who flew
from India, still astounded that Julia
Gillard was selling it uranium
without first consulting him. He napped
fitfully beside Bonhoeffer, initially
unaware who his companion was, although
he’d discussed things with Dietrich before.
Bonhoeffer was always careful not
to seem too Christian with Rudd, discerned
that despite Rudd’s self-definition as very
spiritually existential, Kevin’s schooling
at a cruel Catholic boy’s school
had made him almost phobic about
clerical authority. Bonhoeffer hummed
‘Deep River’ reassuringly, reminded
of his passion for Harlem spirituals. ‘My
home is over Jordan ...’               He
said, in his soft, correct English:
‘I was offered the opportunity
to study passive resistance with Gandhi.
I’d have done so willingly, but
knew I must return to Germany. That
was all before the War, of course. I loved
America, the black congregations.’ Kevin
said glumly, ‘So you worked for the Abwehr
to assassinate Hitler. How does that square
with your pacifism?’ It was like a catechism,
this conversation that they’d had before.
‘Assassinating Hitler would have brought
about peace and anyway I organised
missions to the English to arrange
peace but they were rejected always
by Churchill and Anthony Eden.’ ‘Yes,’
said Rudd, ‘one should beware
of the one-track Foreign Secretary. Eden
tried to invade Suez after that.’
Bonhoeffer left off spirituals, but
– perhaps suggested by ‘Eden’ – sang
‘Annchen Von Tharau’ to himself, the song
– my spirit, my flesh and my blood – as sweet
as it was to any other German child. ‘She was real,
you know. She married three Lutheran
priests in succession, as they did
in those days when one died.’ But not
the poet who wrote it’, sighed Kevin flatly,
feeling like a public servant’s footnote.
‘No, but he spoke it at her wedding. Her
husband was a very tolerant man.’ ‘You are
tolerant sometimes, you Lutheran priests,’ said
Rudd. He added, ‘Do you know that sometimes
I still take Catholic communion?’ ‘That
is just to show that they do not still scare
you,’ explained Bonhoeffer, ‘and, anyway,
I was ecumenical before my time, hence
Gandhi. You do know the Indians
will use your uranium to release
other uranium to reprocess plutonium,
achieve more weapons-grade ore?
And that the villagers around the nuclear
power stations are terrified of another
Fukushima, do you not? I do not think
he would have liked that, Gandhi. He would
have said the villagers are right.’
‘We are saying it’s the only way in which
India can develop economically,’
murmured Rudd, who wished he slept, except
that Bonhoeffer’s face was so kind in profile
before a window full of tiny stars. Rudd
said, ‘They had made me afraid, and your death
also made me afraid, but I did mean
to somehow be like you, although I wouldn’t
make a good martyr, a Luther or a spy.’
Bonhoeffer laughed through his nose, as Germans
do sometimes: ‘Nor I.’ He considered: ‘I
was narrowed to those roles, but before
that my future danced quite plural, as
did yours. Unexpectedly, one’s good humour
increases on the way.’ He thought that he had never
actually seen anyone purse their lips as much
as Rudd did, even Germans, but the jokes
Rudd made were flirtily Teutonic, his slang
as strangely stylised as an Eden from a culture
he knew had never been, as if to say,
‘Okay:
So we’re all self-constructed out of trauma.
Standing here,
I defy you to file me away.’

CONTENTS: FEBRUARY 2012