The Devil's Playground (22 page)

Jon looked up. ‘Yes. I don’t really know what to say. I’m

not very good at describing such things. Who was she? Tell

me about her, I don’t know anything.’

Suze smiled and he realized he’d said the right thing. First

time in a long time.

‘She was a Berlin Jew. Good family, father a surgeon and

war hero, nice house. The Nazis came into power. The family

stayed on even though they lost their posts and livelihoods.’

He leaned back and lit a cigarette, listening to her talk; he

loved the way she spoke, the hard, cutting rhythm of her

syntax. He’d always had a fetish for American accents, some

peculiar after-effect from watching too many films perhaps,

but had never really known any Americans. He stared at her

short-cut brown bob and green eyes framed by delicate silver

glasses, and sipped slowly on his latte as she continued.

‘Eventually her father sent her to the South of France,

near Nice, where her grandparents had fled to earlier in the

war. It was better than Berlin. There she did all her paintings.

In one year she sat alone in a small hotel room in St Jean

Cap Ferrat, while Nazis marched all around, and painted

over a thousand pages of her autobiography.’

‘She painted all that in a year?’ He found it funny how she

preferred to talk about Charlotte than about herself but he

also understood that it was a way of holding back the world

and for that he had great sympathy.

‘Yep. All from memory.’

‘And then what?’

‘And then what,’ her face visibly sagged, ‘and then what

happens in all these stories. She met a man, they got married

and she got pregnant. That’s all we know. Not the how they

met, kissed, cuddled — there’s just an old certificate. It was

1944. The Nazis were losing the war and trying to kill as

many Jews as they could before the inevitable surrender.

Charlotte and her husband were put on to a cattlecar and

taken to Auschwitz. They got off the ramp. Charlotte was

pregnant, so the doctor on duty that morning sent her straight

to the gas chamber. She was twenty-seven. No more art,

nothing. The gas chamber and then the furnace, shaved of

hair and fed to the fires.’

‘Christ.’ He thought there would be a happy ending despite

the fact that he knew there were no such things in these

stories, even Anne Frank had found only one way to escape

the Nazis. The story depressed him and they sat quietly, not

talking much, staring out into the street.

‘I saw those paintings as really hopeful when I was in

there,’ he finally said. ‘I’m not sure I’ll be able to see them in the same way again.’

‘I’m sorry for that but you would have found out sooner

or later.’ She wanted to put her hand on his, but she didn’t,

not quite sure why.

‘I suppose so,’ he replied, thinking back to Jake and

wondering whether finding out was really all it was cranked

up to be. It didn’t seem to bring much joy or hope most of

the time. But he didn’t want to think about Jake, not now,

not with a pretty girl across the table from him. The pills

were working, the pain in his ankle was minimal and it was

a sunny day.

‘What first got you into her?’ he asked, noticing again how

beautiful her hands were, long fingers ending in the smudge

of red nail polish.

‘Same thing as you probably, the humour, the vivacity and

sheer vision of the work. Also as an art historian, shit — she

was doing things other artists wouldn’t do for years to come,

not until the seventies maybe. The whole nature of private

and public art, the mixing of styles and genres, the endless

allusions to literature and music. I don’t know about you,

but I believe everyone has their own special artist, the one

that clicks for them more than any other and I guess Charlotte

was the one for me.’

‘And it didn’t depress you knowing what became of her?’

‘Sure it did. If she could do that in a year, imagine what

she could have done in a lifetime. You know she was so

young and it was such a waste,’ she sipped her coffee, ‘but it

was also that very facet of her work that both intrigued and

depressed me.’ ‘How’s that?’ He was struck by the passion that exploded from her when she talked. He could sit here happily listening

to her all day.

‘Well, on the one hand, it was a beautiful reassertion of

the importance of Jews to German cultural life while on the

other — listen, am I boring you? I sometimes go on about

this and not realize that…’

‘No, carry on. I want to hear more.’

She smiled, opening up to him, feeling herself expanded

in this dialogue. “Well, as I was saying, on the other hand it

seemed, to me at least, to be a wilful refusal to face up to or

represent the horrors and atrocities that were going on at the

time. Your people are being killed wholesale and all you can

paint is your own little family history. I used to get so angry

at her …’

‘And now?’ He loved the way she stared him straight in

the eyes when they spoke and he didn’t want her to stop.

‘And now I don’t know any more, now I suspect she

knew exactly what she was doing and that she was right to

do it.’ She looked at him, feeling something swim between

them, not necessarily understanding, no, not yet, but at least an acceptance of its possibility. ‘That girl that was murdered last month.’ She chewed on the end of her cigarette.

‘I knew her.’

Jon didn’t know what to say. The non sequitur jarred him

out of the cosiness they’d fallen into. He felt a definite chill.

But he didn’t say anything about Jake. Instead he let the

silence pull them together.

They sat there all afternoon as people came and went, and

spoke about Charlotte, Amsterdam and about each other.

While she talked Jon felt himself lighten up, as if ten years

had just been taken off his life. It took him away from why

he was there and that felt good. Now was no time to talk

about Jake. He didn’t want to go into that. The sun was too

bright. Later there would be rain, but not yet. She in turn

told him about the desert, the long star-smeared nights and

jagged mountains that still haunted her. She told him about

her father’s death, about her mother screaming at her in the

middle of the night, accusing her of everything but mainly

of draining her gin, leaving her dry. He didn’t say anything

about his mother, another accident, not wanting to diminish

Suze’s story in any way, leaving it for later, presupposing,

already, that there would be a later. He understood that there

were areas that had to be left unspoken, that sitting over a

coffee can sometimes be the most fragile of things, easy to

splinter or shatter with too many revelations and he knew

that he too had to keep certain things hidden.

They sat and talked more, eating chocolate cake and

listening to Steely Dan on the house stereo, watching the day

fade, until Suze said, ‘I’ve gotta go, got a meeting to attend.’

‘Can I see you again?’ Jon asked, surprised at himself,

finding it much easier to voice such things in a foreign city.

‘What are you doing tomorrow evening?’ He noticed her

smile, then turn half away as if embarrassed.

‘Nothing, I’m a tourist, remember?’

*Want to come to a concert? I’m going anyway, but I’d be

happy if you could come.’

‘I’d love to,’ he replied, a little too quickly.

‘Okay, it’s at the Paradise’

‘Sounds great.’ And he gave her the phone number of his

room and she gave him her mobile number, saying she’d call him with the exact time.

She stared down at him, hesitant, not wanting to screw

anything up, trying to read his expression. He looked up at

her. She leaned down and planted a small kiss on his cheek,

Jon watched her legs sashaying as she walked back into

the gloom of the museum’s elegant, dead rooms and wondered,

had she just chatted him up? Had that really happened?

God, he hadn’t been chatted up like that for so many years.

It felt fucking great, he thought, listening to the clicking of

her heels fading into the distance, feeling as if anything were

now possible.

He walked back to the hotel, all thoughts of the past

fading quickly like the light, and when he got there he saw

the message from Van Hijn.

A small, scrawled note jotted down on a ripped-out piece

of paper. ‘I see you’re still here,’ it said. ‘You should have

taken my advice.’ Then, below, ‘Meet me tomorrow.’ The

time and place of a film. The unspoken assumption that he’d

done something wrong. He crumpled the note, tossed it into

the waste-bin. How the hell had the detective known?

SPRING, 1940. VILLEFRANCHE

Grandmother threw herself out of the window today.

The sun was brilliant like all the days before and the sea

quiet, like it knew what the hours would hold. We knew it

was coming. Grandpapa had joked about it often enough. I

had seen it in her eyes, in the way her breath slowly escaped

her mouth as if loath to do so, in the distant echoes of her

speech, her faded skin, the weight of the collapsing world.

She went towards the window and cast herself down.

We sat in the small courtyard of L’Ermitage and ignored

the blazing sun. I did not even feel it against my skin, I who had always burned so quick. Grandpapa stared at the small tree in the middle distance, its branches twisted and

dying, turning black, turning in on themselves like witches’

fingers coiling. Its roots had come through the ground and

now spread like spiders around its weathered and broken bark.

‘Today was a day I always knew would come.’

‘Shut up, Grandpapa.’ I turned to look at him but his eyes

were fixed yet on the tree. ‘You couldn’t have known that

this would happen, none of us could have.’ Though I knew

that this was not the truth, I also understood that in its own

way it held as much truth as anything else for whatever we

think we know about people, we’re always wrong, surprised

or disappointed, depending on what the case may be.

Grandpapa laughed. I looked away, towards the sea, the

smell of it still a new pleasure recently discovered. ‘My

darling, if only you knew.’ He coughed into a small handkerchief,

which he then folded neatly in four and placed back

in his jacket pocket.

Suddenly his head snapped around, as if it were a weathercock

caught in an unexpected gust. His eyes looked deeply

into mine. ‘They all killed themselves, all of them, all the

women in your family. It is only amazing that she lasted

so long.’

I sat there dumb. Staring at his unblinking eyes. My

mother had died of the influenza, my aunt of the same.

‘Grandpapa, the sun has got to you. Today is not a day to

be sitting out here.’

‘Listen, Lottchen.’ He raised one spindly arm, so like the

branches on the tree, and pointed at me, a gesture he hadn’t

used since I was a child and his shadow long and endless.

‘You too will succumb. You all have done. Your mother, my

dear girl, threw herself out of the window, your aunt too,

my only other daughter. The women in Grandmama’s family

have always done it.’

‘You are crazy, Grandpapa.’ I felt the heat all of a sudden

then, as if my arm had brushed a raging fire.

‘No, it is you who is crazy. Mark my words, Lottchen, you

too will follow your inheritance.’

‘No!’ I stood up. My legs nearly buckled. My head spun.

I could hear the sea rushing and breaking but the sound was

inside my head. ‘No, I will not,’ I screamed at him, the old

fool, and ran through the courtyard and up to my room.

The sun here is different from the sun I knew. In Berlin it

was scared, occasionally showing its face between the blocks

of apartment houses and shops, but mostly it hid behind dull

shapeless clouds, smearing an ugly greyness over the city

and everything in it. Here the sun makes all discrete, every

object its own. I look around the room, the light spilling

through the high window facing the courtyard and I see

every piece of furniture and every object so clearly that it is

like a dream. The pencil balancing on the table there is so

sharp and beautiful, its hexagonal planes reflecting mirrors

of light across the old burnt wood of the table. In Berlin I

had forgotten how to see. I walked through the streets blind,

concerned only with where I was going, rarely looking at

anything but the air in front of me. Here everything

announces itself. Is of itself. Here there is light and beauty

and difference. Here the world is shown as it should be,

cleared of all the dust and grime of cities, refreshed in the

late evening sun that slips behind the sea like a promise from

the lips of a lover. Oh, if only Alfred could see this. My sweet

Alfred, my one love, would understand me. His eyes would

see what I saw just like back in Berlin where our bodies

melted into each other like paint running on a canvas.

Where is my sweet Alfred? I think about him most. I