Black Dogs (12 page)

‘But Bernard,’ I said. ‘What was the story? What did he say those dogs had been trained to do?’

Bernard shook his head. ‘Another time. Dear boy, thank you for coming along.’ Then he raised his rubber-tipped stick, partly in salute, partly as a signal to the attendant who nodded to me curtly and wheeled his passenger away.

I was too restless to make good use of my hour’s wait. I lingered by a bar wondering if I needed one last coffee, one final German thing to eat. At the bookshop I browsed at length without buying even a paper, having glutted on them for three hours the day before. I still had twenty minutes, time enough for another slow wander round the terminal. Often, when I am in transit in a foreign airport, and not bound for England, I glance up at the departure board, at the London flights, to gauge in myself the tidal pull of home, Jenny, family. What came now as I noted only one flight announced – on the international flight map Berlin was a backwater – was one of my earliest memories of my wife, prompted by something Bernard had just said.

In October 1981 I was in Poland as a member of an amorphous cultural delegation invited by the Polish government. I was then the administrator of a moderately successful provincial theatre company. Among the group were a novelist, an arts journalist, a translator and two or three culture bureaucrats. The only woman was Jenny Tremaine, who represented an institution based in Paris and funded from Brussels. Because she was both beautiful
and rather brisk in her manner, she drew hostility from some of the others. The novelist in particular, aroused by the paradox of an attractive woman unimpressed by his reputation, had a racing bet with the journalist and one of the bureaucrats to see who could ‘pull’ her first. The general idea was that Miss Tremaine, with her white freckled skin and green eyes, her head of thick red hair, her efficient way with her appointment book and perfect French, had to be put in her place. In the inevitable boredom of an official visit there was a good deal of muttering over late-night drinks in the hotel bar. The effect was souring. It was impossible to exchange a word or two with this woman, whose sharp style, I soon discovered, merely concealed her nervousness, without some of the others nudging and winking in the background, and asking me later if I was ‘in the race’.

What made me angrier was that in a sense, only in a sense, I was. Within days of our arrival in Warsaw I was stricken, lovesick, an old-fashioned hopeless case, and for the gleeful novelist and his friends, a hilarious complication. The first sight of her each day at breakfast as she made her way across the hotel restaurant towards our table caused in me such a painful tightness in the chest, such a hollow, falling sensation in my stomach that when she arrived I could neither ignore her nor be casually polite without revealing myself to the others. My hard-boiled egg and black bread remained untouched.

There were no opportunities to talk to her alone. All day long we sat in committee rooms or lecture theatres with editors, translators, journalists, government officials and Solidarity people, for this was the time of Solidarity’s ascendancy, and though we could not know it, only weeks from its end, its banishment after General Jaruzelski’s coup. There was only one conversation.
Poland. Its urgency swirled around us and pressed in as we moved from one dim, grubby room, one cigarette haze to another. What was Poland? What was Solidarity? Could democracy flourish? Would it survive? Would the Russians invade? Did Poland belong in Europe? What about the peasants? Food queues were growing longer by the day. The Government blamed Solidarity, everyone else blamed the Government. There were marches in the street, baton charges by the Zomo police, a student occupation at the university and more all-night discussions. I had never given Poland much thought before, but inside a week I became, like everyone else, foreigners and Poles alike, a passionate expert, if not in the answers, then in the right kind of questions. My own politics were thrown into turmoil. Poles whom I instinctively admired urged me to support the very Western politicians I most distrusted, and a language of anti-communism – which until then I had associated with cranky ideologues of the right – came easily to everyone here where Communism was a network of privileges and corruption and licensed violence, a mental disease, an array of laughable, improbable lies and, most tangibly, the instrument of occupation by a foreign power.

At every venue, somewhere, several chairs away, was Jenny Tremaine. My throat ached, my eyes stung from cigarettes in unventilated rooms, I was dizzy and sick from late nights and daily hangovers, I had a heavy cold and could never find tissues to blow my nose on, and I ran a constant high temperature. On my way to attend a session on Polish theatre I was sick in the gutter, to the disgust of the women in a nearby bread queue who thought I was a drunk. My fever, elation and affliction were, inextricably, Poland, Jenny, and the gloating, cynical novelist and his sidekicks whom I had come to despise and who loved to count me in their number and provoke me by disclosing
where, according to them, I stood that day in the running.

At the beginning of our second week Jenny astounded me by asking me to accompany her to the town of Lublin, one hundred miles away. She wanted to visit the concentration camp of Majdanek in order to take photographs for a friend who was writing a book. Three years before, in a previous job as a television researcher, I had been to Belsen and had promised myself that I would never look at another camp. One visit was a necessary education, a second was morbid. But now this ghostly pale woman was inviting me to return. At the time we were standing outside my room, just after breakfast. We were already late for the first appointment of the day and she seemed to want an immediate answer. She explained that she had never visited a concentration camp before and preferred to go with someone she could think of as a friend. As she arrived at this last word she brushed the back of my hand with her fingers. Her touch was cool. I took her hand and then, because she had taken a willing step towards me, I kissed her. It was a long kiss in the gloomy, un-peopled emptiness of the hotel corridor. At the sound of a door handle turning we stopped and I told her that I would gladly go with her. Then someone was calling me from the stairs. There was no time to speak again until the following morning when we arranged to travel by taxi.

In those days the Polish zloty was at its most abject, and the American dollar was supreme. It was possible to hire a car to take us to Lublin, wait for us there overnight if necessary, then drive us back, all for twenty dollars. We managed to slip away without being observed by the novelist and his friends. The kiss, the feel of it, the extraordinary fact of it, the expectation of another, and of what lay beyond, had preoccupied me for twenty-four
hours. But now, as we headed out through the drab outskirts of Warsaw, conscious of our destination, this kiss receded before us. We sat well apart on the back seat of the Lada and exchanged basic information about our lives. This was when I learned that she was the daughter of Bernard Tremaine whose name I vaguely knew from radio programmes and his biography of Nasser. Jenny talked about her parents’ estrangement and her difficult relations with her mother who lived alone in a remote place in France and who had abandoned the world in pursuit of a life of spiritual meditation. At this first reference to June I was already curious to meet her. I told Jenny about my parents’ death in a car accident when I was eight, and growing up with my sister Jean and my niece Sally to whom I was still a kind of father, and how adept I was at moving in on other people’s parents. I think that even then we joked about how I might insinuate myself into the affections of Jenny’s prickly mother.

My unreliable memory of the Poland that lay between Warsaw and Lublin is of one immense brownish-black ploughed field traversed by a straight treeless road. It was snowing lightly when we arrived. We took the advice of Polish friends and asked to be dropped in the centre of Lublin and set out from there. I had not fully understood how close the town was to the camp that had consumed all its Jews, three-quarters of its population. They lay side by side, Lublin and Majdanek, matter and anti-matter. We stopped outside the main entrance to read a sign which announced that so many hundreds of thousands of Poles, Lithuanians, Russians, French, British and Americans had died here. It was very quiet. There was no one in sight. I felt a momentary reluctance to enter. Jenny’s whisper startled me.

‘No mention of the Jews. See? It still goes on. And
it’s official.’ Then she added, more to herself, ‘The black dogs.’

These last words I ignored. As for the rest, even discounting the hyperbole, a residual truth was sufficient to transform Majdanek for me in an instant from a monument, an honourable civic defiance of oblivion, to a disease of the imagination and a living peril, a barely conscious connivance with evil. I linked my arm through Jenny’s and we went on in, past the outer fences, past the guardroom which was still in use. On its doorstep stood two full bottles of milk. An inch of snow was the latest addition to the camp’s obsessive neatness. We walked across a no-man’s-land, and let our arms drop to our sides. Ahead were the watchtowers, squat huts on stilts with steeply pitched roofs and shaky wooden ladders; they commanded a view between the double inner fence. Contained by this, the huts, longer, lower and more numerous than I had imagined. They filled our horizon. Beyond them, floating free against the orange-white sky, like a dirty tramp steamer with a single stack, was the incinerator. We did not speak for an hour. Jenny read her instructions and took the photographs. We followed a party of school children into a hut where wire cages were crammed full of shoes, tens of thousands of them, flattened and curled like dried fruit. In another hut, more shoes, and in a third, unbelievably, more, no longer caged, but spilling in their thousands across the floor. I saw a hobnail boot beside a baby shoe whose nursery lamb still showed through the dust. Life turned to tat. The extravagant numerical scale, the easy-to-say numbers – tens and hundreds of thousands, millions – denied the imagination its proper sympathies, its rightful grasp of the suffering, and one was drawn insidiously to the persecutors’ premise, that life was cheap, junk to be
inspected in heaps. As we walked on, my emotions died. There was nothing we could do to help. There was no one to feed or free. We were strolling like tourists. Either you came here and despaired, or you put your hands deeper into your pockets and gripped your warm loose change and found you had taken one step closer to the dreamers of the nightmare. This was our inevitable shame, our share in the misery. We were on the other side, we walked here freely like the commandant once did, or his political master, poking into this or that, knowing the way out, in the full certainty of our next meal.

After a while I could no longer bear the victims and I thought only of their persecutors. We were walking among the huts. How well they were constructed, how well they had lasted. Neat paths joined each front door to the track we were on. The huts stretched so far ahead of us, I could not see to the end of the row. And this was only one row, in one part of the camp, and this was only one camp, a smaller one by comparison. I sank into inverted admiration, bleak wonder; to dream of this enterprise, to plan these camps, to build them and take such pains, to furnish, run and maintain them, and to marshal from towns and villages their human fuel. Such energy, such dedication. How could one begin to call it a mistake?

We met up with the children again and followed them into the brick building with a chimney. Like everyone else, we noted the maker’s name on the oven doors. A special order promptly fulfilled. We saw an old container of hydrogen cyanide, Zyklon B, supplied by the firm of Degesch. On our way out Jenny spoke for the first time in an hour to tell me that in one day in November 1943 the German authorities had machine-gunned thirty-six thousand Jews from Lublin. They made them lie in gigantic
graves and slaughtered them to the sound of amplified dance music. We talked again of the sign outside the main gate, and its omission.

‘The Germans did their work for them. Even when there are no Jews left, they still hate them,’ Jenny said.

Suddenly I remembered. ‘What was it you said about dogs?’

‘Black dogs. It’s a family phrase, from my mother.’ She was about to explain more, then she changed her mind.

We left the camp and we walked back into Lublin. I saw for the first time that it was an attractive town. It had escaped the destruction and post-war building that disfigured Warsaw. We were on a steep street of wet cobbles which a brilliant orange winter sunset had transformed into knobs of gold. It was as though we had been released from long captivity, and were excited to be part of the world again, of the ordinariness of Lublin’s unemphatic rush hour. Quite unselfconsciously, Jenny held my arm and swung her camera loosely on its strap as she told me a story about a Polish friend who came to Paris to study cooking. I have already said that in matters of sex and love I was always reticent, and that it was my sister who had the easy way with seduction. But on this day, liberated from the usual constraints of selfhood, I did something uncharacteristically brilliant. I stopped Jenny mid-sentence and kissed her, and then I told her simply that she was the most beautiful woman I had ever met and that there was really nothing I wanted more than to spend the rest of the day making love to her. Her green eyes studied mine, then she raised her arm and I thought for a moment she was about to slap my face. But she pointed across the street at a narrow door above which hung a faded sign. We trod on gold nuggets to get
to the Hotel Wis
a. We spent three days there, having dismissed the driver. Ten months later, we were married.