The Sixth Lamentation (15 page)

While I was in hospital I met Grandpa Arthur, who was recovering
from a broken foot. I found him talking to Freddie and Elodie. He introduced
himself Over the next few weeks I told him everything. From then on I didn’t
need to say any more. He understood. After that I knew I never wanted to leave
him. I long to see him again.

When I was discharged I went to what was left of my home. Nothing
remained of Madame Klein’s life, or mine, or anyone I had known. I made
enquiries and pieced together what I could. Victor betrayed us all. Each and
every member of The Round Table had been arrested on the same day as me, mostly
that afternoon, in one swoop. Jacques’ family had managed to escape but he’d
stayed behind. He must have waited for me in vain, for I did not come. He was
arrested that night, in his own home.

I tried to keep my promise, to look after the children, but I
failed. And I have never been able to forget the little boy who cried because I’d
left him with strangers at the social club. Arthur helped me find out what had
happened. My boy had been taken to an orphanage. All of the children were
deported to Auschwitz in July 1942. The Red

Cross told me the obvious: no one with his name had survived. At
least I spent some time in the place where he met his end. That has been a
comfort.

Well, that is
what happened, and that is why I am who I am. Do you remember reading out loud
with Grandpa Arthur on Sunday afternoons, doing silly voices with serious
plays? Do you recall King Lear, when he finally understands that his failures
have cost him the lives of his children? He says, ‘I am a man more sinned
against than sinning.’ Can you bring yourself to think that of me?

Part Two

‘All burns! The reddest rose is a ghost;

Sparks
whirl up, to expire in the mist …’

(Laurence Binyon, ‘The Burning of the Leaves’, 1942)

Second
Prologue

‘I shall be your
amanuensis,’ said Wilma with theatrical gravity. Agnes nodded. It would be the
only way now that she could not write. ‘There isn’t much to say but I’d like it
set down.’ Ever since she had completed her notebook, Agnes had pored over that
dreadful time, rehearsing the order in which things had happened. The act of
committing herself to a narrative had lit the past with a new light. She saw
new shapes and the hint of an outline she partly recognised.

Agnes
opened the drawer of her bureau and took out the remaining school notebook she’d
bought six months earlier. She gave it to Wilma, who settled herself down at
the table.

‘Start
when you are ready,’ said Wilma ceremoniously pen poised.

Agnes
closed her eyes, feeling her way And then she began:

“‘Night
and day I have lived among the tombs”, comma, “cutting myself on stones”. Full
stop. ‘

Wilma
wrote slowly, in great swirls. ‘I like that story.’

‘What
story?’ asked Agnes sharply wondering if this was a sign of things to come.

‘The
one about the poor chap in the hills. He was possessed by so many demons that
no one could control him. He lived night and day just as you said, among the
tombs. Like we do.’

‘Why do
you like it?’ enquired Agnes with feeling.

Wilma
put down her pen. ‘Because help eventually came, after everyone had given up
and when he was unable to ask for it.’

Agnes’
memory flickered. ‘What happened?’

‘The
Saviour sent the lot of them into a herd of pigs grazing on the fat of the
land.’

‘That’s
right,’ remembered Agnes. ‘The demons were called “Legion” because there were
so many of them: Father Rochet had likened them to the German army in France,
just as the Roman legions had occupied Palestine.

‘They
charged over a cliff into a lake and drowned,’ said Wilma with great
satisfaction. ‘And the poor young man was returned to his family’

Oh yes,
that’s it, thought Agnes. Father Rochet had said there were plenty of pigs, but
no cliff, and as yet, no Messiah. ‘So we have to act while we wait,’ he’d said.

‘Did I
say who this was addressed to?’ breathed Agnes, weakened by a new, unexpected
certainty.

‘No.’

‘Go
back to the beginning them, please.’ She closed her eyes, trying to conjure up
an old friend.

‘Dear—’

Chapter Fourteen

Alone at last in the
first-floor sitting room overlooking the sea, the old man opened once more the
letter from his wife, penned just before she died while he slept in a chair by
her bed. She’d told him to read it every time the guilt threatened to overpower
him.

My Dearest Victor

I’ve often watched you while you sleep. The bad times
have even marked your peace. They’ve never really left you and I doubt if they
ever will. But you must believe me: you acted for the best in the most difficult
of times. 1 was right when I said all those years ago that sometimes there have
to be secrets. What a relief it would be if a great wind would blow and sweep
it all away! But that is not going to happen. For twenty-six years we’ve had
each other and you could turn to me, and now, well, that is coming to an end.
So this is what I have to say. Just look at Robert! Look at all his children!
Look at them all! This is your testament. They only see the good man I married,
even if the world comes to judge you one day out of hand. I know, and I bless
the day I met you.

Your ever-loving

Squirrel

Pauline
the squirrel: because she never threw anything out. He folded the paper and put
it back in his pocket diary. The words had no effect. They never had done. It
wasn’t that Victor didn’t see the wonder of his family He did. But each shining
face was only a flickering candle against the endless shadow of slaughter he
had known.

After
his wife died Victor went on a binge. Not a single monumental blow-out but
rather a gradual build-up of solitary chaotic sessions, a ritual that gathered
pace and eventually left him flat on the floor almost every day He learned what
only the gravely fallen know: there’s a sincerity to drinking, a bravery. It’s not
an escape — that’s at the amateur level, carried out with newfound comrades,
takeaways and taxis. It’s the opposite. It’s standing your ground, utterly
alone, as the demons rise to dance and sneer.

In the
end, Robert found out what was happening from the parish priest, Father Lacey
who found Victor slumped in a confessional. Victor hadn’t eaten or washed for
days. A meeting was called. Father Lacey said he knew of a good place, out in
the country, but it was expensive. ‘You’ll have to face the grief, Dad,’ Robert
implored, and Father Lacey added knowingly, with a stare, ‘along with your past
.

All the
family helped, once they were allowed to visit. The professionals involved said
Victor hadn’t fully cooperated, implying he’d dodged about rather skilfully,
but that he’d ‘learned a lot about himself’ and they’d been over various ‘coping
strategies’. And so Victor came back to ‘normal life’. For most of the
observers it was a matter of a grief under control, a man who’d found a way of
living without his wife. Only Victor and his confessor, Father Lacey, knew of
the demon legion sleeping out of sight.

Victor
often returned to his wife’s letter, hoping the recitation of the lines might
yet have some effect, like the workings of a spell that only required a solemn,
heartfelt incantation. But he didn’t believe in magic. What about the fragile
light of candles? Yes, he believed in those. He lit them every week in the side
chapel for Robert. For — a gust of laughter suddenly burst through a door
somewhere downstairs — Robert’s wife, Maggie, and the grandchildren, all five
of them, two boys and three girls, all ‘grown and flown, to homes of their own’,
as Robert liked to say Victor smiled. Two of them were married.
Great-grandchildren had followed. The whole clan came to thirteen — a blessing
of biblical proportions. Only, it wasn’t that simple, was it? He caught his
reflection in the mirror over the fireplace. Even when he smiled he couldn’t
hide that ineffable, intractable sadness. Why was it that, after all these
years, whenever he looked in a mirror he thought of Agnes and Jacques, her long
thick hair and his dark beseeching eyes? And why oh why did their shades always
part, with a moan, leaving him with another remembrance that would not be
staunched? How could it be that even now, in his mid-seventies, he could not
see himself without seeing Eduard Schwermann? Was it any wonder he could not
explain to the children why there were no mirrors in granddad’s house?

Here,
in Robert’s home, there were many of them, unforgiving windows into his soul,
and that of his accomplice. He said under his breath:

‘Zwei
Seelen wohnen, ach! in meiner Brust.’

As they sat round the
crowded, laden dining table on the night of his arrival, conversation turned,
as Victor had anticipated, to the Schwermann case. In order to protect Stephen,
the eldest great-grandchild, key terms had to be spelled out. He’d reached the
dreadful age of four where listening and repetition went mercilessly hand in
hand.

‘From
all accounts he was a complete b—a—s—t—a—r—d,’ said Francis, Robert’s first
son.

‘He’ll
probably say they’ve got the wrong man,’ someone chipped in. Other voices
turned over the material they’d all heard and read:

‘Oh no.
Apparently there’s no doubt that he was there.’

‘Then
what’s he going to say? He’s got to say something.’

‘Didn’t
know what was going on, only obeying orders. It has to be one or the other.’

‘That’s
always struck me as odd.’

‘What
has?’

‘Well,
where I work, even the cleaners get to know all the dirt.’

‘That’s
an awful pun. Pass the chicken, please. ‘

‘It’s
the same at our place. I don’t know how they find out because no one admits to
telling them. At the end of the day, you can’t hide anything.’

‘It’s
not chicken, it’s soya.

‘And
you’d think “doing as you’re told” and “d-e-a-t-h c-a-m-p-s” don’t really
belong in the same sentence. Not unless you’re mad.’

‘And he’s
sane.

‘Either
way you’re right, Francis; he’s a b—a—s—t—a—r—d.’

‘What’s
that, Daddy?’ asked Stephen with a curiosity that, from experience, would not
be easily deflected.

‘Nothing,
son, nothing.’

‘Daddy,
what are you talking about?’

‘A
naughty man, that’s all. Now eat up.

The
words nearly made Victor sick.

‘But
Daddy …’

Victor
heard no more. Although he couldn’t be sure, for he kept his eyes on his plate,
he felt Robert’s gaze upon him, talkative Robert, who for some reason kept out
of the conversation.

That
ordeal was last night, his reticence passed off as old age worn out further by
the delayed train from London. Now he was alone in the sitting room, waiting.
There was no need to make an arrangement. Soon he would come. Repeating
snatches from his wife’s letter, Victor walked over to the bay window of Robert’s
much-loved home, The Coach House at Cullercoats — a rambling pile of creaking
rooms on a low cliff between Tynemouth and Whitley Bay overlooking the old
harbour. He could see the jagged black rocks collapsing over each other into
the incoming tide, the great rush of metallic water, always cold, always bound
to the sky, always seemingly inviting him to cross over, into the thin wisp of
evening light where memory was left behind. Great fat gulls swooped under gusts
of wind and then surrendered to the drift, floating high out of view.

God,
bear me up, help me.

A fire,
freshly made, crackled in the grate.

The
door opened quietly He heard the soft approach of familiar steps. A hand rested
on his shoulder. Now was the time. He would have to speak of things he’d vowed
never to say

‘Dad…?’

‘Yes,
son?’

‘Tell
me what’s troubling you.’ He spoke almost in a whisper. ‘Come on, I’m a
grandfather, you know’

Victor
breathed deeply; his eyes scanned the silent, tumbling sea, the long threads of
foam clinging on to light that vanished on the shore. Robert remained by his
side, as if he were a boy again, and together they faced the vast, brightening
darkness.

‘Son, I
am not who you think I am. I am another man, someone I buried fifty years ago,
after the war. Someone who, but for you, would have been better dead.’ .

No
questions came. And, not seeing Robert or the confusion that must be clouding
his eyes, Victor picked his way over all that might be said.

‘My
name was Brionne. I was a police officer seconded by chance to the Gestapo: