A Traitor to Memory (29 page)

He read my hesitation. He said, “Take it, Gideon. It's all I have left of her.”

So I took it, hardly daring to wonder what I might see, but somehow fearing what I would see all the same. I swallowed and steeled myself. I looked.

What was in the picture was this: a baby cradled in the arms of a woman I did not recognise. They were seated in the back garden of the Kensington Square house, on a striped deck chair in the sun. The woman's shadow fell across Sonia's face, but her own was fully exposed to the light. She was young and blonde. She was aquiline featured. She was very pretty.

“I don't … Who is this?” I asked my father.

“That's Katja,” he said. “Gideon, that's Katja Wolff.”

GIDEON

20 September

This is what
I've been wondering ever since Dad showed me that photograph: If Mother took with her every picture of Sonia that was in the house, why did she leave that one picture behind? Was it because Sonia's face was so much in shadow that she might have been any baby and consequently not memorable to my mother, not something she could cling to in her grief … if grief was indeed what took her from us? Or was it because Katja Wolff was in it? Or was it because Mother didn't know about the photo in the first place? Because, you see, the one thing I cannot tell from the picture—which I have now with me and which I will show you when next we meet—is who took it of them?

And why did Dad have this particular picture, this picture in which the focal figure is not his daughter his very own daughter who died, but a young and smiling and golden woman who is not his wife was never his wife never became his wife and was certainly not the mother of that child.

I asked Dad about Katja Wolff because asking was the natural thing to do. He told me that she was Sonia's nanny. She was a German girl, he said, with very limited English. She'd made a dramatic and foolhardy escape from East to West Berlin in a hot air balloon that she and her boyfriend had manufactured in secret, and she'd gained some notoriety from that.

Do you already know this story, Dr. Rose? Perhaps not. You would have been less than ten years old at that time, I expect, and living … where? In America at that point?

Living here in England so much closer to where it all happened, I don't remember it myself. But it was, as Dad told me, quite a story then because Katja and her boyfriend didn't attempt their crossing from somewhere in the countryside, where it would have been at least marginally safer to go from east into west, but instead they sailed from East Berlin itself. The boy didn't make it all the way. The border guards got him. But Katja did make it. She earned her fifteen minutes that way and became a standard-bearer for freedom. Television news, front-page headlines, magazine stories, radio interviews. She ended up being invited to England.

I listened carefully as Dad told me all this, and I watched him closely. I looked for signs and for inner meanings, and I tried to make inferences, leaps, and deductions. Because even now in the situation in which I find myself—sitting here in the music room in Chalcot Square with the Guarneri fifteen feet away, taken from its
case
at least and surely that's progress God tell me that's progress, Dr. Rose, although I can't bring myself to lift the violin to the height of my shoulder—there are questions I'm afraid to ask my father.

What sorts of questions? you want to know.

Questions like these, questions that rise to my mind without effort: Who took that picture of Sonia and Katja? Why did my mother leave only that single picture behind? Did she even know about it? Did she actually
take
the other pictures or did he destroy them? And why, above all, did my father never speak of them before now: never speak to me of Sonia, of Katja, of my mother?

Obviously, he hadn't forgotten they existed. After all, once I brought Sonia up, he produced her picture and from its condition I'd swear before God that it was something he's held and contemplated hundreds of times. So why the silence?

People sometimes avoid, you tell me. They dodge subjects too painful for them to face.

Like Sonia herself? Her death? My mother? Her leaving? The pictures?

Katja Wolff perhaps?

But why would Katja Wolff be a painful subject to Dad? Except for the most obvious reason.

Which is?

You want me to say it, don't you, Dr. Rose? You want me to write it. You want me to stare at it sitting on this page, and thus to weigh its truth or its falsehood. But where the hell is that going to get me? She's holding my sister, she's cradling her just beneath her breast, her eyes look kind and her face is serene. One of her shoulders is bare because she's wearing a dress or a top with straps too loose and it's brightly coloured, bizarrely coloured, that dress or top, so much yellow and orange and green and blue. And that bare shoulder is smooth and round and yes all right it's an invitation and I'd have to be blind not to see it so if a man
is
taking that picture of Katja and if that man is my father—but it could be Raphael it could be James the Lodger it could be Granddad or the gardener or the postman or
any
man because she is splendid beautiful seductive and even I a cocked-up mess of a paltry excuse of a healthy laughable male can see who she is and what she is and how she's offering what she's offering—then that man has an alliance with her and I've a fairly good idea what sort it is.

So write about her, you instruct me. Write about Katja. Fill a page with her name alone if that's what it takes and see where filling that page takes you, Gideon. Ask your father if there are other pictures he can show you: family pictures, casual pictures, snapshots of holidays, fêtes, parties, gatherings, dinners, anything at all. Look at them closely. See who's in them. Read their expressions.

Look for Katja? I ask.

Look for what's there.

21 September

Dad says I was nearly six when Sonia was born. I was just short of eight when she died. I phoned and asked him those two questions outright. Aren't you pleased, Dr. Rose? The horns were there and I actually grabbed them.

When I asked him how Sonia died, Dad said, “She drowned, son.” The answer seemed to cost him much, and his voice seemed to come from a place that was distant. I felt a tightness inside me, having asked him anything at all, but that did not stop me going on. I asked him her age when she died: two years. And the strain in his voice told me that she had been quite old enough not only to have established a permanent place in his heart but also to have made an indelible mark on his spirit.

The sound of that strain and the comprehension that accompanied it explained so much to me about my father: his focus on me throughout my childhood, his determination that I should have and see and be and experience the very best, his single-minded protection of me when I began my public career, his wariness of anyone who came too close and might do me harm. Having lost one child—no, my God, having lost
two
because Virginia his oldest had died young as well—he was not about to lose another.

So I finally understand why he's stayed so close, been so involved, finessed so much of my life and career. Early on I said aloud what I wanted—the violin, my music—and he did what it took to see to it that his remaining child was given just that, as if by providing me the means to my dream he would somehow assure my longevity. So he had two jobs; he sent Mother out to work as well; he employed Raphael; he arranged that I should be educated at home.

Except all this was
before
Sonia, wasn't it? It couldn't have been the result of Sonia's death. Because if, as he said, she was born when I was six years old, Raphael Robson and Sarah-Jane Beckett would already have been in place in the house. And James the Lodger would have been there as well. And into this already
established
group Katja Wolff would have come as Sonia's nanny. So that's what must have happened, isn't it: An established group was forced to accept an interloper in their midst. An intruder, if you will. A foreigner as well. And not just any, but a German foreigner. Briefly famous, yes. But German all the same: our wartime enemy and Granddad forever a prisoner of that war.

So Sarah-Jane Beckett and James the Lodger are whispering about
her
in that corner in the kitchen, not about my mother, not about Raphael, and not about those flowers. They are whispering about her because Sarah-Jane is like that,
was
like that from the first, a whisperer. Her whispering grows out of jealousy because Katja is lithe and pretty and seductive and Sarah-Jane Beckett—with her short red hair like a pudding bowl sprouting from her scalp and her body not much different to mine—sees how the men in the household look at Katja, especially James the Lodger, who helps Katja with her English and laughs when she says with a shiver, “
Mein Gott
, my corpse is not yet used to such rain in this country” instead of
my body
, which is what she means. She's asked if she would like a cup of tea, and she says, “Oh yes. Most voluntarily and with many gratitudes,” and they laugh the men laugh but it's laughter that's charmed. My father, Raphael, James the Lodger, even Granddad.

And I remember that. Dr. Rose, I
remember
.

22 September

So where has she been all these years, Katja Wolff? Buried with Sonia? Buried because of Sonia perhaps?

Because
of Sonia? You pounce upon the word, don't you? Why
because
, Gideon?

Because of her death. If Katja was Sonia's nanny and Sonia died when she was two years old, Katja would have left us then, wouldn't she? I would have had no need for a nanny with Raphael and Sarah-Jane attending to me. So Katja would have left us after two years—perhaps even less—and that would be why I'd forgotten her. I was, after all, only eight at the time, and she wasn't my nanny but Sonia's, so I would have had little to do with her. I was consumed with my music, and when the violin wasn't devouring my time, my school lessons were. I'd already had my first public performances, and the fallout from them was an offer to study at Juilliard for a year. Imagine that. Juilliard. What age could I have been: seven? eight?