the Emigrants (2 page)

He was aiming a gun with two inordinately long barrels up into the blue. When at last he fired the shot, after what seemed to me an eternity, the report fell upon the gardens with a shattering crash. Dr. Selwyn later explained that he had been finding out whether the gun, which was meant for hunting big game and which he had bought many years ago as a young man, was still in working order after decades of disuse in his dressing room. During that time, as far as he could remember, it had been cleaned and checked over only a couple of times. He told me he had bought the gun when he went to India to take up his first position as a surgeon. At that time, having such a gun was considered obligatory for a man of his caste. He had gone hunting with it only once, though, and had even neglected to put it to inaugural use on that occasion, as he ought to have. So now he had been wondering if the piece still worked, and had established that the recoil alone was enough to kill one.

Otherwise, as I have said, Dr. Selwyn was scarcely ever in the house. He lived in his hermitage, giving his entire attention, as he occasionally told me, to thoughts which on the one hand grew vaguer day by day, and, on the other, grew more precise and unambiguous. During our stay in the house he had a visitor only once. It was in the spring, I think, about the end of April, and Elli happened to be away in

Switzerland. One morning Dr. Selwyn came up to tell us that he had invited a friend with whom he had been close for many years to dinner and, if it was convenient, he would be delighted if we could make their twosome a
petit comité.
We went down shortly before eight. A fire was blazing against the distinct chill of evening in the vast hearth of the drawing room, which was furnished with a number of four-seater settees and cumbersome armchairs. High on the walls mirrors with blind patches were hung, multiplying the flickering of the firelight and reflecting shifting images. Dr. Selwyn was wearing a tie and a tweed jacket with leather patches at the elbows. His friend Edwin Elliott, whom he introduced to us as a well-known botanist and entomologist, was a man of a much slighter build than Dr. Selwyn himself, and, while the latter inclined to stoop, he carried himself erect. He too was wearing a tweed jacket. His shirt collar was too large for his scrawny, wrinkled neck, which emerged from it accordion-style, like the neck of certain birds or of a tortoise; his head was small, seeming faintly prehistoric, some kind of throwback; his eyes, though, shone with sheer wonderful life. At first we talked about my work and our plans for the next year or so, and of the impressions we had, coming from mountainous parts, of England, and particularly of the flat expanse of the county of Norfolk. Dusk fell. Dr. Selwyn stood up and, with some ceremony, preceded us into the dining room next door. On the oak table, at which thirty people could have been seated with no difficulty, stood two silver candelabra. Places were set for Dr. Selwyn and Edwin at the head and foot of the table, and for Clara and me on the long side facing the windows. By now it was almost dark inside the house, and outside, too, the greenery was thickening with deep, blue shadows. The light of the west still lay on the horizon, though, with mountains of cloud whose snowy formations reminded me of the loftiest alpine massifs, as the night descended. Elaine pushed in a serving trolley equipped with hotplates, some kind of patented design dating from the Thirties. She was wearing her grey full-length apron and went about her work in a silence which she broke only once or twice to mutter something to herself. She lit the candles and shuffled out, as she had come in, without a word. We served ourselves, passing the dishes along the table to one another. The first course consisted of a few pieces of green asparagus covered with marinated leaves of young spinach. The main course was broccoli spears in butter and new potatoes boiled with mint leaves. Dr. Selwyn told us that he grew his earlies in the sandy soil of one of the old glasshouses, where they reached the size of walnuts by mid April. The meal was concluded with creamed stewed rhubarb sprinkled with Demarara sugar. Thus almost everything was from the neglected garden. Before we had finished, Edwin turned our conversation to Switzerland, perhaps thinking that Dr. Selwyn and I would both have something to say on the subject. And Dr. Selwyn did indeed, after a certain hesitation, start to tell us of his stay in Berne shortly before the First World War. In the summer of 1913 (he began), he had completed his medical studies in Cambridge, and had forthwith left for Berne, intending to further his training there. In the event, things had turned out differently, and he had spent most of his time in the Bernese Oberland, taking more and more to mountain climbing. He spent weeks on end in Meiringen, and Oberaar in particular, where he met an alpine guide by the name of Johannes Naegeli, then aged sixty-five, of whom, from the beginning, he was very fond. He went everywhere with Naegeli - up the Zinggenstock, the Scheuchzerhorn and the Rosenhorn, the Lauteraarhorn, the Schreckhorn and the Ewigschneehorn - and never in his life, neither before nor later, did he feel as good as he did then, in the company of that man. When war broke out and I returned to England and was called up, Dr. Selwyn said, nothing felt as hard, as I realize now looking back, as saying goodbye to Johannes Naegeli. Even the separation from Elli, whom I had met at Christmas in Berne and married after the war, did not cause me remotely as much pain as the separation from Naegeli. I can still see him standing at the station at Meiringen, waving. But I may

only be imagining it, Dr. Selwyn went on in a lower tone, to himself, since Elli has come to seem a stranger to me over the years, whereas Naegeli seems closer whenever he comes to my mind, despite the fact that I never saw him again after that farewell in Meiringen. Not long after mobilization, Naegeli went missing on his way from the Oberaar cabin to Oberaar itself. It was assumed that he had fallen into a crevasse in the Aare glacier. The news reached me in one of the first letters I received when I was in uniform, living in barracks, and it plunged me into a deep depression that nearly led to my being discharged. It was as if I was buried under snow and ice. But this is an old story, said Dr. Selwyn after a lengthy pause. We ought really, he said, turning to Edwin, to show our guests the pictures we took on our last visit to Crete. We returned to the drawing room. The logs were glowing in the dark. Dr. Selwyn tugged a bell-pull to the right of the fireplace, and almost instantly, as if she had been waiting in the passage for the signal, Elaine pushed in a trolley with a slide projector on it. The large ormolu clock on the mantelpiece and the Meissen figurines, a shepherd and shepherdess and a colourfully clad Moor rolling his eyes, were moved aside, and the wooden-framed screen Elaine had brought in was put up in front of the mirror. The low whirr of the projector began, and the dust in the room, normally invisible, glittered and danced in the beam of light by way of a prelude to the pictures themselves. Their journey to Crete had been made in the springtime. The landscape of the island seemed veiled in bright green as it lay before us. Once or twice, Edwin was to be seen with his field glasses and a container for botanical specimens, or Dr. Selwyn in knee-length shorts, with a shoulder bag and butterfly net. One of the shots resembled, even in detail, a photograph of Nabokov in the mountains above Gstaad that I had clipped from a Swiss magazine a few days before.

Strangely enough, both Edwin and Dr. Selwyn made a distinctly youthful impression on the pictures they showed us, though at the time they made the trip, exactly ten years earlier, they were already in their late sixties. I sensed that, for both of them, this return of their past selves was an occasion for some emotion. But it may be that it merely seemed that way to me because neither Edwin nor Dr. Selwyn was willing or able to make any remark concerning these pictures, whereas they did comment on the many others showing the springtime flora of the island, and all manner of winged and creeping creatures. Whilst their images were on screen, trembling slightly, there was almost total silence in the room. In the last of the pictures we saw the expanse of the Lasithi plateau outspread before us, taken from the heights of one of the northern passes. The shot must have been taken around midday, since the sun was shining into our line of vision. To the south, lofty Mount Spathi, two thousand metres high, towered above the plateau, like a mirage beyond the flood of light. The fields of potatoes and vegetables across the broad valley floor, the orchards and clumps of other trees, and the untilled land, were awash with green upon green, studded with the hundreds of white sails of wind pumps. We sat looking at this picture for a long time in silence too, so long that the glass in the slide shattered and a dark crack fissured across the screen. That view of the Lasithi plateau, held so long till it shattered, made a deep impression on me at the time, yet it later vanished from my mind almost completely. It was not until a few years afterwards that it returned to me, in a London cinema, as I followed a conversation between Kaspar Hauser and his teacher, Daumer, in the kitchen garden at Daumer's home. Kaspar, to the delight of his mentor, was distinguishing for the first time between dream and reality, beginning his account with the words: I was in a dream, and in my dream I saw the Caucasus. The camera then moved from right to left, in a sweeping arc, offering a panoramic view of a plateau ringed by mountains, a plateau with a distinctly Indian look to it, with pagoda-like towers and temples with strange triangular facades amidst the green undergrowth and woodland: follies, in a pulsing dazzle of light, that kept reminding me of the sails of those wind pumps of Lasithi, which in reality I have still not seen to this day.

We moved out of Prior's Gate in mid May 1971. Clara had bought a house one afternoon on the spur of the moment. At first we missed the view, but instead we had the green and grey lancets of two willows at our windows, and even on days when there was no breeze at all they were almost never at rest. The trees were scarcely fifteen metres from the house, and the movement of the leaves seemed so close that at times, when one looked out, one felt a part of it. At fairly regular intervals Dr. Selwyn called on us in our as yet almost totally empty house, bringing vegetables and herbs from his garden - yellow and blue beans, carefully scrubbed potatoes, artichokes, chives, sage, chervil and dill. On one of these visits, Clara being away in town, Dr. Selwyn and I had a long talk prompted by his asking whether I was ever homesick. I could not think of any adequate reply, but Dr. Selwyn, after a pause for thought, confessed (no other word will do) that in recent years he had been beset with homesickness more and more. When I asked where it was that he felt drawn back to, he told me that at the age of seven he had left a village near Grodno in Lithuania with his family. In the late autumn of 1899, his parents, his sisters Gita and Raja, and his Uncle Shani Feldhendler, had ridden to Grodno on a cart that belonged to Aaron Wald the coachman. For years the images of that exodus had been gone from his memory, but recently, he said, they had been returning once again and making their presence felt. I can still see the teacher who taught the children in the
cheder
where I had been going for two years by then, placing his hand on my parting; I can still see the empty rooms of our house. I see myself sitting topmost on the cart, see the horse's crupper, the vast brown earth, the geese with their outstretched necks in the farmyard mires and the waiting room at Grodno station, overheated by a freestanding railed-off stove, the families of emigrants lying around it. I see the telegraph wires rising and falling past the train window, the facades of the Riga houses, the ship in the docks and the dark corner on deck where we did our best to make ourselves at home in such confined circumstances. The high seas, the trail of smoke, the distant greyness, the lifting and falling of the ship, the fear and hope within us, all of it (Dr. Selwyn told me) I can now live through again, as if it were only yesterday. After about a week, far sooner than we had reckoned, we reached our destination. We entered a broad river estuary. Everywhere there were freighters, large and small. Beyond the banks, the land stretched out flat. All the emigrants had gathered on deck and were waiting for the Statue of Liberty to appear out of the drifting mist, since every one of them had booked a passage to Americum, as we called it. When we disembarked we were still in no doubt whatsoever that beneath our feet was the soil of the New World, of the Promised City of New York. But in fact, as we learnt some time later to our dismay (the ship having long since cast off again), we had gone ashore in London. Most of the emigrants, of necessity, adjusted to the situation, but some, in the teeth of all the evidence to the contrary, persisted for a long time in the belief that they were in America. So I grew up in London, in a basement flat in Whitechapel, in Goulston Street. My father, who was a lens-grinder, used the money he had brought with him to buy a partnership in an optician's business that belonged to a fellow countryman from Grodno by the name of Tosia Feigelis. I went to primary school in Whitechapel and learnt English as if in a dream, because I lapped up, for sheer love, every word from the lips of my beautiful young teacher, Lisa Owen. On my way home from school I would repeat everything she had said that day, over and over, thinking of her as I did so. It was that same beautiful teacher, said Dr. Selwyn, who put me in for the Merchant Taylors' School entrance examination. She seemed to take it for granted that I would win one of the scholarships that were available every year to pupils from less well-off homes. And as it turned out I did satisfy her hopes of me; as my Uncle Shani often remarked, the light in the kitchen of our two-room flat in Whitechapel, where I sat up far into the night after my sisters and parents had long since gone to bed, was never off. I learnt and read everything that came my way, and cleared the greatest of obstacles with growing ease. By the end of my school years, when I finished top of my year in the exams, it felt as if I had come a tremendous way. My confidence was at its peak, and in a kind of second confirmation I changed my first name Hersch into Henry, and my surname Seweryn to Selwyn. Oddly enough, I then found that as I began my medical studies (at Cambridge, again with the help of a scholarship) my ability to learn seemed to have slackened, though my examination results were among the best. You already know how things went on from there, said Dr. Selwyn: the year in Switzerland, the war, my first year serving in India, and marriage to Elli, from whom I concealed my true background for a long time. In the Twenties and Thirties we lived in grand style; you have seen for yourself what is left of it. A good deal of Ellis fortune was used up that way. True, I had a practice in town, and was a hospital surgeon, but my income alone would never have permitted us such a life style. In the summer months we would motor right across Europe. Next to tennis, said Dr. Selwyn, motoring was my great passion in those days. The cars are all still in the garage, and they may be worth something by now. But I have never been able to bring myself to sell anything, except perhaps, at one point, my soul. People have told me repeatedly that I haven't the slightest sense of money. I didn't even have the foresight, he said, to provide for my old age by paying into a pension scheme. That is why I am now practically a pauper. Elli, on the other hand, has made good use of the not inconsiderable remainder of her fortune, and now she must no doubt be a wealthy woman. I still don't know for sure what made us drift apart, the money or revealing the secret of my origins, or simply the decline of love. The years of the second war, and the decades after, were a blinding, bad time for me, about which I could not say a thing even if I wanted to. In i960, when I had to give up my practice and my patients, I severed my last ties with what they call the real world. Since then, almost my only companions have been plants and animals. Somehow or other I seem to get on well with them, said Dr. Selwyn with an inscrutable smile, and, rising, he made a gesture that was most unusual for him. He offered me his hand in farewell.