A Small Person Far Away (6 page)

At last she could bear it no longer and found the nurse who led her back to Konrad.

She felt sick again in the car and hardly saw the hotel where Konrad had booked her in. There was an impression of shabbiness, someone leading her up some stairs, Konrad saying, “I’ll fetch you for supper,” and then she was lying on a large bed under a large German quilt in a strange, half-darkened room.

Gradually, in the quiet, the sick feeling receded. Tension, she thought. All her life she had reacted like this. Even when she was tiny and afraid of thunderstorms. She had lain in bed, fighting the nausea among the frightening rumbles and flashes of lightning, until Max got her a freshly-ironed handkerchief from the drawer to spread on her stomach. For some reason this had always cured her.

They had slept under German quilts like this one, not sheets and blankets as in England. The quilts had been covered in cotton cases which buttoned at one end and, to avert some long forgotten, imaginary misfortune, they had always shouted, “Buttons to the bottom!” before they went to sleep. Much later, in the Hamburg hotel after Papa’s death, she had reminded Max of this, but he had not been able to remember anything about it.

That had been the last time they had all been together, she and Max and Mama and Papa – even though Papa was dead. For Papa had left so many notes and messages that for a while it had felt as though he were still with them.

“I
told
him not to,” Mama had said, as though it were a case of Papa going out without his galoshes on a wet day. She had not wanted Papa to write any farewell notes because suicide was still a crime, and she did not know what would happen if people found out. “As though it were anyone’s business but his own,” she said.

She had left Papa one evening, knowing that after she had gone he would take the pills she had procured for him, and that she would never again see him alive. What had they said to each other that last evening? And Papa – what would he think of all this now? He had wanted so much for Mama to be happy. “You are not to feel like a widow,” he had written in his last note to her. And to Max and herself he had said, “Look after Mama.”

There was a shimmer of light as a draught shifted the curtains. They were made of heavy, woven cloth, and as they moved, the tiny pattern of the weave flowed and changed into different combinations of verticals and horizontals. She followed them with her eyes, while vague, disconnected images floated through her mind: Papa in Paris, on the balcony of the poky furnished flat where they had lived for two years, saying, “You can see the Arc de Triomphe, the Trocadero and the Eiffel Tower!” Meeting Papa in the street on her way home from school. London? No, Paris, the Rue Lauriston where later, during the war, the Germans had had their Gestapo headquarters. Papa’s lips moving, oblivious of passers-by, shaping words and phrases, and smiling suddenly at the sight of her.

The boarding house in Bloomsbury on a hot, sunny day. Finding Mama and Papa on a tin roof outside an open window, Papa on a straight-backed chair, Mama spread out on an old rug. “We’re sunbathing,” said Papa with his gentle, ironic smile, but specks of London soot were drifting down from the sky, blackening everything they touched. “One can’t even sunbathe any more,” said Mama, and the bits of soot settled on Mama and Papa and made little black marks on their clothes, their hands and their faces. They got mixed up with the pattern on the curtains, and still Mama and Papa sat there with the soot drifting down, and Anna too was drifting – drifting and falling. “The most important thing about writing,” said Richard, but the plane was landing and the engines made too much noise for her to hear what was so important, and Papa was coming to meet her along the runway. “Papa,” she said aloud, and found herself in the strange bed, unsure for a moment whether she had been asleep or not.

At any rate it could only have been for a minute, for the light had not changed. It’s Sunday afternoon, she thought. I’m in a strange room in Berlin and it’s Sunday afternoon. The draught moved the curtains again, and little patches of light danced over the quilt, across the wall, and disappeared. It must still be sunny outside. She got up to look.

Outside the window was a garden with trees and bushes and fallen leaves in the long grass. Near the dilapidated wooden fence something moved, flashing orange, leapt, clung to a wildly dipping branch, scrabbled the right way up and sat swinging in the wind. A red squirrel. Of course. There were plenty of them in Germany. She watched it as it sat washing itself, with the wind ruffling its tail. She no longer felt sick at all.

Papa would have liked the swinging squirrel. He had never known about Richard, or about Max’s baby daughter, or that the world, after years of horror and deprivation, had once again turned into such a delightful place. But I’m alive, she thought. Whatever happens, I am still alive.

Konrad came to collect her at six o’clock. “We’re spending the evening with friends,” he said. “I thought it would be best. They’d originally invited your mother and myself for bridge, so they were expecting me anyway. Of course they only know that she has pneumonia.”

Anna nodded.

As they drove through the darkened, leafy streets, she was filled again with the sense of something half-familiar. Yellow lights flickered through the trees, casting wavering shadows on the ground.

“This is all the Grunewald district,” said Konrad. “Where you used to live. Do you remember any of it?”

She did not remember the streets, only the feel of them. She and Max walking home after dark, playing a game of jumping on each other’s shadows as they slid and leapt between one street lamp and the next. Herself thinking, this is the best game we’ve ever played. We’ll play it always, always, always…

“It was hardly touched by the bombing,” said Konrad. “Tomorrow you might like to have a look round near your old home.”

She nodded.

A group of shops, unexpectedly bright, throwing rectangles of light on to the pavement.
Apotheke
, a chemist. A newsagent. A florist.
Blumenladen
said the illuminated sign above it, and as she read the word she had a sensation of being suddenly very near the ground, surrounded by great leaves and overpowering scents. Enormous brilliant flowers nodded and dipped above her on stems almost as thick as her wrist, and she was clutching a huge hand from which a huge arm stretched up into the jungle above her.
Blumenladen
, she thought softly to herself.
Blumenladen.
Then the shop vanished into the darkness and she was back in the car, a little dazed, with Konrad beside her.

“Nearly there,” he said in English, and after a moment she nodded again.

He turned down a side street, through a patch of trees, and stopped outside a white-painted building, one of a number placed fairly close together among scrappy lawns.

“Purpose-built American flats,” he said. “The Goldblatts have only just moved in here.”

They climbed a flight of stairs and as soon as Hildy Goldblatt opened the door Anna felt she was back in wartime England, for with her frizzy hair, her worried dark eyes and her voice which sounded as though someone had sat on it, she seemed like the epitome of all the refugees she had ever known.

“There she is,” cried Hildy, opening her arms wide. “Come all the way from London to see her sick Mama. And how is she today?”

Konrad replied quickly that Mama’s pneumonia was fractionally better – which was true, he had telephoned the hospital before leaving – and Hildy nodded.

“She will be well soon.”

Her husband, a slight man with grey hair, had appeared in the hall beside her. “Today pneumonia is nothing. Not like in the old days.”

“In the old days –
na ja.
” They raised their hands and their eyebrows and smiled at each other, remembering not only the intractability of pneumonia but all the other difficulties overcome in the past. “Things are different today,” they said.

As Hildy led the way to a lavishly laid table (“We eat now,” she said, “then it will be done.”) Anna wondered how they had preserved their refugee accents through all the years in England and of working with the Americans in Germany. It must be a special talent, she decided. She could almost have predicted the meal Hildy served, as well. In wartime London it would have been soup with knoedel, followed by apple tart. In Berlin, with the American PX to draw on, there was an additional course of steak and fried potatoes.

While Hildy heaped her plate (“So eat – you must be tired!”) the conversation slid from English into German and back again in a way which she found curiously soothing. Erwin Goldblatt worked with Konrad at JRSO, the Jewish Restitution Successor Organization, where they dealt with claims from the millions of Jews who had lost their families, their health and their possessions under the Nazis. “Of course you can’t really compensate them,” said Erwin. “Not with money.” And Konrad said, “One does what one can.” They talked of work, of the old days in London (“I can tell you, Finchley in 1940 was no summer holiday!”), of colleagues in Nuremberg where they had all first met.

“And your brother?” asked Hildy. “What is he doing? Something in Greece, your mother said.”

“He’s got a big case for a Greek ship owner,” said Anna. “He had to go there for a conference, and the ship owner lent him a house for a holiday with his family afterwards. The trouble is, it’s so far away even from Athens, on a tiny island. It’s bound to take him a long time to get here.”

Hildy looked surprised. “Max too is coming to see his mother? Is it then so serious?”

I shouldn’t have said that, thought Anna.

Konrad swept in calmly. “Pneumonia is no joke, even today, Hildy. I thought it best to let him know.”

“Of course, of course.” But she had guessed something. Her shrewd eyes met her husband’s briefly, then moved back to Konrad. “So much trouble,” she said vaguely.

“Ach, always trouble.” Erwin sighed and offered Anna some cake. “But this young man,” he said, brightening, “such a young barrister, and already ship owners are lending him their country houses. He is making quite a career.”

“You’ve heard her talk about him,” cried Hildy. “The wonder boy. He got a big scholarship in Cambridge.”

“And a law scholarship after that,” said Anna.

Hildy patted her hand. “There, you see,” she said, “it will be all right. As soon as the mother sees her son, no matter how ill she is, she will just get up from her bed and walk.”

Everyone laughed, and it was quite true, thought Anna, Mama would do anything for Max. At the same time another part of herself thought, then what in heaven’s name am I doing here? But she suppressed it quickly.

Hildy went into the kitchen and reappeared a moment later with a jug of coffee. “The girl looks tired,” she said, passing Anna her cup. “What can we do for her?”

Erwin said, “A glass of cognac,” but Hildy shook her head. “Cognac afterwards. First I know something better.”

She beckoned, and Anna followed her out of the room, feeling suddenly at the end of her tether. I don’t want any cognac, she thought, and I don’t want any more cake or coffee, I just want to be home. She found herself standing beside Hildy in the hall. There was nothing there except a telephone on a small table. Hildy pointed to it.

“So why don’t you ring up your husband?” she asked.

“Really?” said Anna. She felt tears pricking her eyes and thought, this is really ridiculous.

“Of course.”

“Well, if you’re sure.” She blinked to stop the tears from running down her face. “I don’t know what it is – I feel so—” She couldn’t think what it was she felt like.

Hildy patted the telephone.

“Ring him up,” she said and left Anna alone in the hall.

When she went back into the living room, they were all drinking cognac.

“Look at her,” cried Erwin when he saw her, “she has another face already.”

Konrad patted her shoulder. “Everything all right?”

“Yes.” Just hearing Richard’s voice had made her feel different.

Out of respect for Hildy’s telephone bill, they had only spoken a few minutes. She had told him that she had seen Mama – but nothing about Konrad, it would have been impossible with him in the next room – and he had told her that he was trying to get on with the script and that he had cooked himself some spaghetti.

Halfway through she had suddenly asked, “Am I speaking with a German accent?” but he had laughed and said, “Of course not.” Afterwards she had felt reconnected to some essential part of herself – something that might, otherwise, have come dangerously loose.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s all been a bit disorientating.”

They gave her some cognac which she drank, and suddenly the evening became very cheerful. Erwin told various old refugee jokes which Anna had known since her childhood but which, for some reason, she now found hilarious. She saw that Konrad, too, was leaning back, laughing, in his chair.

“Ach, the troubles we’ve had, the troubles we’ve had.” Hildy had produced another cake, a chocolate one, and was pressing it on everyone. “And in the end, somehow, it’s all right, and you think, all that worrying – better I should have spent the time learning another language.”

Everyone laughed at the thought of Hildy attempting another language on top of her refugee English, and she pretended to threaten them with the chocolate cake.

“You can laugh,” she said, “but all the same it’s true what I say. Most things are all right in the end.” She glanced at Erwin. “Not everything, of course. But most things.”