I Am David (15 page)

David answered politely that he had nothing to talk about, and the woman did not appear to find anything odd about that. She went on painting and left David to watch her at his leisure.

She was not a young woman, but she was not old, either. She was thin, and David did not really know whether he liked the look of her. She was not Italian for she did not speak the language properly: she could say anything she wanted to, but she did not always know what was masculine in Italian and what was feminine. Her hair was quite fair, and her eyes were grey. She was not pretty or good-looking, and yet there was nothing about her face that was unpleasant. And she was intelligent: you could always tell from people’s faces whether they were intelligent or not.

She did not think it necessary to question or talk to him, and when she said anything she spoke properly, not in the silly manner some people adopted when they were speaking to children, as if you were bound to be stupid just because you were a child.

Several hours passed by. The sun sank lower and lower, and the shadows grew longer. Suddenly the woman said, “You’re a fool, boy. Why didn’t you say it was late? You must be dead beat with all this sitting still!”

“No, I don’t mind,” David replied.

“Well, if you’re hungry, you’d better help me pack up, and then we can go home and get something to eat.”

She lived in a beautiful house. It was not very big, but it shone with a fresh coat of yellow colour-wash. It had green shutters and little balconies outside the windows, and there was a garden all round it with cypresses and palm trees. The inside of the house was very pretty, too. Pictures and other interesting things hung on the white-washed walls, and the furniture was very fine and quite different from anything David had ever seen before.

The woman said he could set the table while she prepared a meal for them — if he could manage it, that is. But he was not to break anything.

It was fun. The children had often said something was fun, and David had never quite understood what they meant. But being left alone in a beautiful room to find the right things to put on the table and setting them out to his liking — that was certainly fun.

“Heaven preserve us!” exclaimed the woman as she came in. David had not been able to find a white cloth, nor were there any silver plates to put under the ones you ate from. But he discovered a piece of cloth the colour of the mountains where he had lived by the sea — something between red and brown. the woman had pretty plates, and her knives and forks were silver. She had beautiful fine glassware, too, tucked away at the back of a cupboard, and David had placed one of the two candlesticks from the chest of drawers at one end of the table. And there was a black bowl, beautifully shaped, which David had set beside the candlestick. He picked a pink flower from outside the window and laid it in the bowl.

“Where did you learn to set a table, young man?”

David looked at her. “I like it to look pretty — I mean beautiful, when I eat,” he said seriously.

“I beg your pardon. I’d no intention of being nosy, and you’re perfectly right: what one does every day should be done beautifully. It’s very sensible and proper.”

Yes, she was a clever woman. She had noticed that he had not given her a direct answer.

David was gradually growing to like her better and better. They talked of many things while they ate, food and furniture and colours, and she never once seemed surprised by anything he said. And she spoke to him all the time as if he were a person who understood what she was saying. David decided to ask her all the things he wanted to know. He would not tell her where he came from, but it no longer mattered if he aroused suspicion … and it would be a good thing to risk asking questions, just for once, without wondering if he were giving himself away.

But no matter what David asked about, she just told him what he wanted to know without asking him anything in return. Finally David said, “Is there a king in Denmark?”

“Yes, there is. I must see if I can find a picture of him. How did you know I was Danish? Of course, you probably live down in the village.”

“No. I didn’t know you were. I only wanted to know whether there was a king.”

“Well, I am Danish, anyway. My name’s Sophie Bang.”

“I’m called David.”

The woman had not asked him, but he thought it was only right that she should know who he was when she had told him who she was herself.

“David?” said the woman. “One rarely hears that name, outside Britain.”

“Do you think it’s a British name?”

“No, it comes from the Bible — most names do originally. It’s found in many places, but I’ve only known one person of that name myself — and him I never even saw …”

David looked at her with interest and waited for her to tell him more, but she said hastily, “But there’s no reason why I should tell you about that: it was a very sad story, a story of great wickedness.”

So they spoke of other things. She showed him a magazine with a big picture on the front cover, a photograph of the king and queen of Denmark. David examined it closely. The king was wearing a uniform with epaulettes on his shoulders and many orders on his breast, and the queen was dressed in a long sleeveless gown. On her head she wore a sort of large piece of jewellery.

“Well, do you think it’s a good photograph?” asked Signora Bang.

“I don’t know what a king and queen ought to look like,” David replied. “But they don’t look like people who would break their promises or think they had a right to take other people’s lives or freedom away from them. So they must be all right … Thank you for showing them to me.”

David lay in a bed again that night. Signora Bang had told him he could stay overnight if he had nothing else to do and then spend the next day with her. David had told his tale of the circus. He did not like telling it, but what else was he to say? And he had to say something when she asked if he were expected anywhere.

It had been interesting to talk with her. If it had happened before he had decided life could never be worth living, his meeting with her would have given him a lot of pleasure and satisfaction. He was beyond caring now. But she had beautiful things around her and it was beautiful by the lake, so he might as well spend the day there. She had to go to Rome the next day, she had told him.

David found it difficult to go to sleep. He was not quite so miserable any longer. After all, he had always known it did not matter whether you died or not: it was only after he had made his escape that he had come to think he really did want to live. But he could not get back to his old habits. He went on turning things over in his mind, and could no longer think of nothing as he had trained himself to do in the concentration camp.

When he woke the next morning he could hear the signora talking to someone and he decided to stay in bed until she was alone again. they were speaking in French, and the other person was a man who wanted her to go out sailing with him. She told him she could not because she had a visitor, a boy she was painting. The man asked if it were one of the youngsters from the village and the signora said no, he belonged to a circus. But she did not add, as David expected, that he “was a strange boy”. She said, “Someone’s broken his spirit.”

The man said a boy’s spirit was not so easily broken, and the signora replied that she did not think it had been done easily but they had succeeded in the end.

The man thought she ought to do something about it. If the child were really wretched, he said, and was wandering about by himself, it was their duty to inquire into his circumstances and help him. But the signora only said, “What can one do to help a broken heart? And as for his circumstances, I’ve no right to interfere. He could be given money so that he could go by train to join his circus and wouldn’t have to walk, but neither you nor I have any money to spare, Pierre, and it won’t do the boy any harm to walk. Anyway, I gather he thumbs lifts most of the way … that’s what they generally do these days.”

When the stranger had gone, David went downstairs and found the signora had breakfast ready for him. Then he sat for her again, and while they were resting after lunch, she said he could look through her books.

He did not settle down to reading anything, however. There was a large photograph-album on the bookcase. There were photographs from many countries and some of them had names of the places written underneath. There were photographs of people as well, and in some of them he could recognize the signora. Some of the pictures lay loosely in the album, and from the back of the book one bigger than the rest fell out.

David did not know how long he had been sitting with it in his hand when the signora came in.

“Who’s that?” he asked as he saw her, and showed her the photograph.

“That’s a friend of mine. She’s called Edith Hjorth Fengel.”

“Will you tell me about her?”

“What for?”

“Because her eyes look as if … as if she’d known a great deal, and yet she’s still smiling.”

“You’re a sharp boy, David. Her story’s mostly a sad one. She lived abroad with her husband in a country where … where the political situation made it necessary to be very careful. And her husband wasn’t … It’s a very grown-up story, David, which I hope you’re still not old enough to understand. One night the police arrested them — all three of them, her husband, herself and their little boy who was then only a year old — he was the one who was called David just like you, and whom I never saw … They killed her husband and the child, and Edith only got away because one of the guards knew her and was in love with her. He got papers for her and smuggled her across the frontier, and now she lives at home in Denmark and is as … well, as well as you can be when you’ve once been through great unhappiness. All suffering has an end, David, if only you wait long enough. Try to remember that. Sorrow has its life just like people. Sorrow is born and lives and dies. And when it’s dead and gone, someone’s left behind to remember it. Exactly like people.”

The wind was blowing icy cold and the snow was falling so thickly that David could not see his hand in front of him. He knew he had very little strength left, and yet he struggled on step by step. He was determined not to die. He would go on and on until he came to Denmark and found the woman whom he knew must be his mother. He would let nothing stand in his way now. Neither snow nor cold nor mountains could stop him. He was David, a boy on the run, but one who knew where he was going to.

The day before he had had a lift in a car from Lugano. But when they reached a place called Faido, the driver would not go any farther. The weather was bad, he said, and the pass would be closed. David had slept in a stable outside the town, and that morning he had trudged on, the road climbing up and up and the air growing colder and colder until at last the snow came.

The Danish woman had told him he could go back to her when she returned from Rome. She had said he was to ask if there were any way in which she could help him, and she had added that if he did not care for the circus and had no near relatives to go to she would have him to live with her. But David had only half listened to what she was saying.

Fortunately he was well used to hiding his thoughts and feelings. He had answered politely and remembered to thank her, and had behaved just as if nothing had happened. And he had told her he had an uncle in the circus who was very nice to him. He had told her all the lies he could lay tongue to, and he no longer felt it was wrong of him. He had to get to Denmark, and he would have to lie himself out of any situation that stood in his way or might lead them on his tracks. Hadn’t the Frenchman talked about investigating his circumstances? Nothing and no one should stop him now. Yet he knew himself that the Danish signora would have understood if he could have told her.

He had asked her the name of the camp guard, and it was the man. David understood everything now … or nearly everything. The man had saved the woman’s life because he liked her, in the way grown-up people liked those they wanted to marry. He had not saved her husband because he hated him for being her husband. He had saved David’s life because he was her child. He had not told her the child was still alive, however, perhaps because he could only get papers for one, though David did not think that could be the whole reason. They always wanted revenge. Because the woman did not care for him, the man had got his revenge by turning David into a boy from a concentration camp … Yes, that’s how it was. And yet the man had seen to it that he did not die. He had given him milk and vitamins and had always insisted that “the boy knows nothing”.

David began to understand a lot of things now. they had let Johannes starve and freeze and made him work, even when he fell ill, but apart from that they had not ill-treated him as they had the other prisoners. And David had believed that they could not lay hands on Johannes when he looked them straight in the eye. But he now saw that that was not the only thing … The man had seen to it that Johannes should be there to look after David.

Johannes said that the older one grew, the more complicated and involved one’s feelings became, and sometimes they were quite opposed to one another, as, for example, when you would like to stay awake but felt at the same time that you wanted to fall asleep. that was how the man had felt. He had hated David on account of his mother who would have nothing to do with him, and at the same time he had looked after him, also on account of his mother.

And that was how David himself felt about the man. No one had bribed the man. There was no one to do it since nobody knew of David’s existence. And if you knew anything about them, then you knew, too, the danger the man had risked in letting a prisoner escape. And yet he had done it.

David’s steps grew slower and slower. He had lost all feeling in his feet now and he was soaked to the skin. The snow continued falling. He felt an irresistible urge to lie down, if only for a moment. But he dared not give way — he might die of cold out in the snow. He could no longer follow the road. Everything was covered in snow, and he could see nothing at all through the thickly falling flakes. There had not been a signpost for a long time.