Interpreters (9 page)

‘So what’s my homework for this evening, dear?’ he asked. 

I hesitate outside Ben’s door, then go back and look into Catherine’s room again. I stand in the doorway and try to remember Susanna’s bedroom in Dorset. If I shut my eyes I can see her paintings, with their exuberant, watery patterns on rough, cream-coloured paper; her dream-catchers; her hand-woven hangings; her pieces of pottery; her photograph of me with my arm around her on the bedside table that she and Max had made from driftwood, a garland of dried daisies draped around the frame. I think she must have been about eight in that picture. On a visit to Togo. She has Max’s wide, generous smile.

I think of my visits to her and Max – two or three times a year, much more often when I came back to live and work in London. It seemed that nearly every time I went, there would be a new foster brother or sister; a visitor who had come for a few days and stayed on for months; a new member of the household; or a woman, invariably sad and beautiful, who thought that maybe – just maybe – she would be the one. I watched Susanna grow and thrive in her chaotic, loving, fluid family, with Max the calm and constant centre, and eventually I stopped begging him to try to persuade her to go back with me to Cameroon or London.

I close Catherine’s door and head back towards Ben’s room. On the landing is a large framed black and white portrait photograph of the Plaistow family, probably taken a couple of years ago, the six of them arranged artistically over
bean bags, the background pure white nothingness. Everyone is smiling at the camera, even the oldest girl who is clearly trying hard not to.

I wonder if a photographer could catch the essence of Max’s extensive, ever-shifting family. I doubt it, somehow.

Above Clara’s sofa was a massive oil painting of two men standing over an iron cot in which lay a curly-haired infant. Both men were bald. The older one had round,
black-rimmed
glasses and appeared to be explaining something to the younger man.

‘Who are the men in the picture,’ I asked once.

‘They are your grandfather and your great-grandfather. The picture commemorates the opening of the paediatric hospital my father founded. It is a copy actually, but a good one. You can hardly tell. The original is in the Kunst-Palast – the museum – in Düsseldorf.’

‘Crikey!’

‘Perhaps I’ll take you there one day.’

‘So how did you and my grandfather meet? Was it at that hospital?’

Well, one day, my father brought home his new registrar Arthur Rosenthal. And my father said, Clara, you must make him feel at home here, for by then my mother had already died. So we saw a lot of each other.

And then, after some time, my father said to me – that Dr Rosenthal is such a good doctor, the best I have ever seen. I would have to shoot anyone who wanted to marry him and take his interest and attention away from his work. And I said to my father, well, you had better shoot me, then, for Dr Rosenthal and I are engaged. And then he was so delighted – he loved my husband so much. For he was not only a brilliant doctor, he was a most marvellous person. Often my father would say how he loved my husband more than his own son.

‘Who was he?’

‘So much interrupting! Who was who?’

‘Your father’s son?’

‘That was my brother Ernst.’

‘What happened to him?’

‘In former times he was a pharmacist. But he didn’t have so much luck, for many different reasons. He too left Germany with his wife, Berthe, but a little later, in 1938, and they went to New York. And then for the next twenty years he pressed the lift buttons in a big department store and went up and down, up and down all day while Berthe made clothes in some sort of a factory. Later she had a little shop in Orchard Street, selling ribbons and buttons, and all those kinds of things.’

‘Poor them!’

‘Ach, it wasn’t so bad. That way they managed to pay for their son Helmuth to go through Harvard, and of course you know what happened to him.’

Though I’d never met Helmuth, I knew he’d become a very eminent economist, frequently quoted in the pages of
Time
magazine. He then made millions in the newly emerging computing business and lived a life of modest plenty just outside Washington DC. My grandmother would occasionally show us photographs of him standing by his pool with his very large wife and four very large all-American children. Beside them, he looked rather small and serious.

And so, where was I? Ah, yes. We married in nineteen hundred twenty-five and in nineteen hundred twenty-six there came your father. And immediately I got a very excellent wet nurse so I could continue my work, for in those days I no longer practised as a doctor but was in charge of the orphanage. And in any case, in former times, there was not all this nonsense feeding of babies whenever they demanded it. The nursemaid would put your father in his pram at the end of the garden between feeds so neither we nor our visitors
needed to be disturbed by any of his horrible crying. For in former times we had a very big garden. So many times when you and Max were babies, I would say to your mother, ‘Put the baby down – all this nonsense picking it up when it cries and carrying it around will spoil the child. Let it cry itself to sleep.’ But she never listened.

But then in nineteen hundred thirty-five my husband lost his job in such a depressing and humiliating way. And we knew that it would not be safe to stay much longer in Germany. And then came a phone call from the Foreign Office, which was not yet fully under Nazi domination, that the Turkish Minister of Health was there and was looking for German professors for the hospital in Ankara, so as to promote it into a university hospital. As well as that, the paediatrician was to build up the entire system of infant- and child-care in Turkey – the same task that my father had started for Germany at the turn of the century.

So I was first the daughter of a famous doctor and then I became the wife of a famous doctor and now I am the mother of a famous doctor.

Max had long been marked out to be the next to take on the mantle of medical greatness.
And when you become a doctor
… my grandmother would proclaim as she got out the chessboard and set out the meerschaum pieces. Or,
And when you become a famous doctor
… when she felt particularly proud of her ancestors and descendants. For some reason, I didn’t mind that I was never included in this family hall of fame. Max never commented, he just smiled and nodded slightly, but that was enough for my grandmother to feel reassured that the dynasty would continue.

I hated chess, with its endless silences and brooding pawns. My grandmother’s efforts to teach me didn’t last long.

‘It is lucky Max isn’t as unintelligent as you,’ she observed. ‘And your father, when he was only eight, he was chess champion of all the schools in Germany.’

‘Big deal,’ I muttered.

‘You are right,’ she said approvingly, unfamiliar with the phrase. ‘It was a very big deal and a great honour. So, as you are far too stupid for chess, I had better play with Max. Come, Max, you set up the pieces again. Here, Julia, you can sort out my sewing box while Max and I play. And if you are very quiet, I’ll tell you some more family stories later.’

So, after the breaking off of relations with Germany and the entry of Turkey into war on the Allied side, the members of the German embassy had to leave Turkey. On the day they were being transported away, my husband was called to the commercial attaché, whose child had a very high temperature. He was among the leading Nazis in Turkey and his office was the headquarters of spying. As my husband was about to leave the house, the attaché said to him, ‘I thank you for your help – perhaps I can do something for you in Germany – I have influence, if you should have any relatives there.’ To which my husband answered, ‘They have already been killed, all of them.’ Tante Louisa had committed suicide, Sofie had died in Theresienstadt and Renate had been transported away from there to we knew not where and we never heard of her again, though we tried for many years to find out what had happened to her. We were informed exactly by the Jewish Agency what was going on in Auschwitz and elsewhere. The gassing and all the other horrors. The attaché then asked, very embarrassed, for almost no one in Germany knew much about what was going on in Auschwitz or any of the other camps, ‘May I ask for your bill?’ My husband only said ‘Your money is too dirty for me!’ and turned his back on him and left.

Max and I would go to see my grandmother every couple of months, together when we were younger and then separately when my grandmother announced that we were quite old enough to survive the train journey on our own –
surely we were no longer such little babies?
She was very good at organising people. The first time I went to stay with her on my own, she said, ‘Ah, Julia, now you are here as my guest, you can do whatever you like for the next four days. First we will go to the Pitt-Rivers Museum and then we are going to go swimming. And then, after supper, we will look through the photograph albums.’

My mother hated us making the journey to Oxford, though she never tried to stop us. She would stand in the drive, grim-faced, not waving, watching the car drive round the green and out of the cul-de-sac towards the station. She had an unnerving ability to foresee death and destruction in the everyday. If she heard an ambulance’s siren just after we left the house for school, she would be filled with an overwhelming sense of doom that would only lift when a few hours had passed without a call from Casualty, or from our schools querying our absence. How we used to laugh at her when she told us about the sirens.

‘Why don’t you drive us to school, then?’ we’d ask, always keen to avoid the long walk and the groups of children from the local primary school who would knock off my grey felt hat and throw Max’s navy cap over the privet hedges whenever they got the chance. Why we didn’t just carry our hats or shove them into our satchels and avoid this ordeal, I still don’t know.

But my mother could rarely pull herself out of bed in the morning before we left for school.

When we arrived in Oxford, one of us would manage to distract our grandmother in the kitchen while the other would creep into the sitting room to ring home and announce our safe arrival. Until we learned to do that, we would be exposed to a line of questioning that always filled me with a deep unease.

‘Can I use the phone to ring Mum, please?’

‘Is she still so very nervous?’

‘Not really. She just likes to know we’ve arrived safely.’

‘And all those medicines she was taking?’

‘I don’t think she’s taking them any more.’

‘So perhaps now she is able to look after your father again properly.’

‘I think he can look after himself, really.’

‘Yes, but if she isn’t working, that is something useful she could do, no?’

‘She is working, some of the time.’

‘Yes, but not in an important job such as your father’s.’

‘It is, in a way.’

‘I can imagine she’ll be busy now, preparing your father’s supper. He must be so tired when he gets home from the hospital. So phone her quickly and don’t talk for long and then we’ll eat. And afterwards, Max, you and I will play chess.’

I imagined my mother alone at home, putting down the phone after my call, making my father’s supper which would usually be ruined by the time he eventually came home, watching television, wondering what her mother-in-law was saying about her, while Max and I sat in our grandmother’s cosy house listening to her stories of ‘former times’ and eating dumplings, wurst and
rote grütze.

‘Come, Julia. Why the long face? Nothing wrong at home?’

‘No, everything’s fine.’

My grandmother moved from Germany – where she and her husband had returned some years after the war – to England in the early ’60s. She bought a house in what must have once been quite a pleasant, semi-rural area of Oxford not far from two of her favourite second cousins who had been in England since the early 1930s. Very quickly, it was encircled by new streets, houses and flats. Gradually the trim verges began to sprout more litter than grass, the neat curtains in the windows were replaced by pieces of material draped
over string, and by the time Max and I were in our teens the little shopping parade opposite the house was deserted apart from a tobacconist’s with a permanent grille over the window and a convenience store which boasted a display of brightly coloured plastic fruit and vegetables and little else. Some architectural quirk meant that the parade acted as a wind tunnel, and, every time we went there, plastic bags and chip wrappers would be dancing in the currents of air, lending a festive atmosphere to the otherwise bleak concrete surroundings.

Going shopping with my grandmother was a kind of mild torture. She had a very continental attitude to queuing. Max and I would spend much of our time smiling apologetically at large, fierce-looking women in tight crimplene slacks with cigarettes hanging out of their mouths, or pockmarked teenagers who would find their place in the queue taken by a tall, gaunt, foreigner in her late seventies who appeared not to notice that they existed. If the checkout girls were too slow, my grandmother would declare very loudly, ‘Ach, these stupid shop girls! I haven’t got so much time to waste,’ leave her basket of unchecked-out goods on the end of the conveyor belt and stride out of the shop.

Every day, whatever the weather, my grandmother would swim in the local outdoor pool, only reluctantly going to the indoor sports centre when it closed for the winter months. Until Max and I learned to ‘accidentally’ leave our swimming things at home, we would reluctantly swim up and down the pool a few times, shivering, while my grandmother, resplendent in a pink bathing cap sprouting yellow rubber flowers, did her twenty lengths. Whenever the bitter winds stopped whipping up ripples on the grey water and the rain clouds cleared, we’d be joined by a handful of other swimmers, who quickly learned to give my grandmother a wide berth as she ploughed up and down, oblivious of any oncoming traffic. Her lengths completed, she would
haul herself up the steps, and walk slowly but purposefully to the changing rooms like one of those ancient, wrinkled Galapagos tortoises.