by Judith Kerr
“It would certainly be a good idea if you wrote to your mother more often,” he said, “and if your brother did too. But that is not the reason why she tried to kill herself.”
“Then why?”
There was a pause. He looked away from her, over her right shoulder, as though he had suddenly seen someone he knew in the distance. Then he said stiffly, “She had grounds to believe that I was no longer faithful to her.”
Her first reaction was, impossible, he’s making it up. He was saying it to comfort her, so that she shouldn’t blame herself if Mama died. For heaven’s sake, she thought, at their age! Well, she supposed that if she had ever thought about it, she would have assumed that Mama’s relationship with him had not been entirely platonic. But this!
Very carefully, she said, “Are you in love with someone else?”
He gave a sort of snort of “No!” and then said in the same stiff voice as before, “I had an affair.”
“An affair?”
“It was nothing.” He was almost shouting with impatience. “A girl in my office. Nothing.”
She tried to think of a reply to this but couldn’t. She felt completely out of her depth and climbed into the car in silence.
“You’ll want some lunch.”
He seemed so relieved to have got the bit about the affair off his chest that she thought it must really be true.
As he started the car, he said, “I want to make your stay here as pleasant as possible. In the circumstances. I know it’s what your mother would wish. If possible even like a little holiday. I know you didn’t get away in the summer.”
For God’s sake, she thought.
He made a gesture of impatience. “I understand, of course, that you’d give anything not to be here but at home with Richard. I only meant that when you’re not at the hospital – and at the moment there is not much you can do there – you should have as pleasant a time as can be arranged.”
He glanced at her from behind the steering wheel and she nodded, since he seemed so anxious for her to agree.
“Well,” he said, “we may as well start by going somewhere pleasant for lunch.”
The restaurant was set among the pine trees of the Grunewald, a popular place for family outings, and on this fine Sunday it was packed. Some people were even drinking at small tables outside, their overcoats well-buttoned against the chilly air.
“Do you remember this place?” he asked.
She had already had a faint sense of recognition – something about the shape of the building, the colour of the stone.
“I think I may have come here sometimes with my parents. Not to eat, just for a drink.”
He smiled. “Himbeersaft.”
“That’s right.” Raspberry juice, of course. That’s what German children always drank.
Inside, the dining room was steaming up with the breath of many good eaters, their coats hung in rows against the brown panelled walls, and mounted above them, two pairs of antlers and a picture of a hunter with a gun. Their voices were loud and comfortable above the clinking of their knives and forks, and Anna found herself both moved and yet suspicious as always, at the sound of the Berlin accents so familiar from her childhood.
“This thing with your mother has been going on for nearly three weeks,” said Konrad in English, and the voices with their complicated associations faded into the background. “That’s how long she had known.”
“How did she find out?”
“I told her.”
Why? she thought, and as though he had heard her, he went on, “We live in a very narrow circle. I was afraid she might hear from someone else.”
“But if you don’t really love this woman – if it’s all over?”
He shrugged his shoulders. “You know what mother is like. She said that things could never again be right between us. She said she’d had to start again too many times in her life, she’d had enough, that you and Max were grown up and no longer needed her—” He waved his hand to indicate all the other things Mama had said and which Anna could only too easily imagine. “She’s been talking about killing herself for nearly three weeks.”
But he hadn’t actually said that it was all over between himself and the other woman.
“The affair, of course, is finished,” he said.
When the food arrived, he said, “We’ll go to the hospital after lunch. Then you can see your mother and perhaps talk to one of the doctors. In the meantime, tell me about yourself and Richard.”
She told him about Richard’s serial, about the flat and about her new job.
“Does this mean that you’ll eventually become a writer?”
“Like Richard, you mean?”
“Or like your father.”
“I don’t know.”
“Why don’t you know?” he asked almost impatiently.
She tried to explain. “I don’t know if I’d be good enough. Till now I’ve really only tinkered with other people’s plays. I’ve never done anything of my own.”
“I could imagine you being a good writer.” But he added at once, “Of course I know nothing about it.”
They tried to talk about general subjects: Hungary, but neither of them had listened to the radio that morning, so they did not know the latest news; the German economic recovery; how long it would take Max to get a flight from Greece. But gradually the conversation faltered and died. The sound of the Berliners eating and talking seeped into the silence. Familiar, long-forgotten words and phrases.
“Bitte ein Nusstörtchen,” a fat man at the next table told the waiter.
That’s what I always used to eat when I was small, she thought. A little white iced cake with a nut on the top. And Max had always chosen a Mohrenkopf, which was covered in chocolate and had cream inside. They had never wavered in their preferences and had both come to believe that the one was only for the girls and the other for boys.
“Ein Nusstörtchen,” said the waiter and set it down in front of the fat man.
Even now, for a fraction of a second, Anna was surprised that he let him have it.
“You’re not eating,” said Konrad.
“I’m sorry.” She speared a bit of potato on her fork.
“Try to eat. It’ll be better. The next few days are bound to be difficult.”
She nodded and ate while he watched her.
“The hospital your mother is at is German. It’s just as good as the American for this kind of case, and it was nearer. Also I thought that if your mother recovered, it would be easier for her if the Americans didn’t know about her suicide attempt.” He waited for her to agree, and she nodded again. “When I found her—”
“You found her?”
“Of course.” He seemed surprised. “You understand, I’ve been afraid of this happening. I stayed with her as much as possible. But the night before, she seemed all right, so I left her. Only next day I had such a feeling… I went round to her flat and there she was. I stood and looked at her and didn’t know what to do.”
“How do you mean?”
“Perhaps…” he said, “perhaps it was really what she wanted. She’d said again and again that she was tired. I don’t know – I still don’t know if what I did was right. But I thought of you and Max, and I felt I couldn’t take the responsibility.”
When she could eat no more, he stood up.
‘Come along,” he said. “We’ll go and see your mother. Try not to let it distress you too much.”
The hospital was a pleasant, old-fashioned building set in a wooded park. But even as they approached the front door, past a man raking leaves and another shovelling them into a wheelbarrow, her stomach tightened on the lunch she had not wished to eat, so that for a moment she was afraid she might be sick.
Inside the hall, a very clean nurse in a starched apron received them. She had a tight expression and seemed to disapprove of them both, as though she blamed them for what had happened to Mama.
“Follow me please,” she said in German.
They went, Anna first with Konrad behind her. It was more like a nursing home than a hospital – wood panelled walls and carpets instead of tiles and lino. It’s more like a nursing home than a hospital, she said to herself, so as not to think about what she was going to see. Corridors, stairs, more corridors, then a large landing crowded with cupboards and hospital equipment. Suddenly the nurse stopped and pointed, and there, behind a piece of dust-sheeted machinery, was a bed. There was someone in it, motionless. Why was Mama not in her room? Why had they put her here, on this landing?
“What’s happened?” she shouted so loudly that she frightened all three of them.
“It’s all right,” said Konrad, and the nurse explained in disapproving tones that nothing had happened: since Mama had to be under constant observation, this was the best place for her. Doctors and nurses crossed the landing every few minutes and were able to keep an eye on her.
“She’s being very well looked after,” said Konrad, and they went over to the bed and looked at Mama.
You could not see very much of her. Just her face and one arm. All the rest was covered with bedclothes. The face was very pale. The eyes were closed – not just closed normally but closed tight, as though Mama were keeping them shut on purpose. There was something sticking out of her mouth, and Anna saw that it was the end of a tube through which Mama’s breath came thinly and irregularly. Another tube led to the arm from a bottle suspended from a stand near the bed.
“There doesn’t seem to be any change,” said Konrad.
“It is necessary to bring her out of the coma,” said the nurse. “For this we must call her by her name.” She leaned over the bed and did so. Nothing at all happened. She shrugged her shoulders. “Na,” she said, “a familiar voice is always better. Perhaps if you speak to her she will hear.”
Anna looked down at Mama and the tubes.
“In English or in German?” she asked, and immediately wondered how she could have said anything so stupid.
“That you must decide for yourself,” said the nurse. She nodded stiffly and disappeared among the dust-sheeted equipment.
Anna looked at Konrad.
“Try,” he said. “One doesn’t know. It may do some good.” He stood looking at Mama for a moment. “I’ll wait for you downstairs.”
Anna was left alone with Mama. It seemed quite mad to try and talk to her.
“Mama,” she said tentatively in English. “It’s me, Anna.”
There was no response. Mama just lay there with the tube in her mouth and her eyes tightly shut.
“Mama,” she said more loudly. “Mama!”
She felt oddly self-conscious. As though that mattered at a time like this, she told herself guiltily.
“Mama! You must wake up, Mama!”
But Mama remained unmoving, her eyes obstinately closed and her mind determined to have nothing to do with the world.
“Mama!” she cried. “Mama! Please wake up!”
Mama, she thought, I hate it when your eyes are shut. You’re a naughty Mama. Clambering on Mama’s bed, Mama’s big face on the pillow, trying to prise the eyelids open with her tiny fingers. For God’s sake, she thought, that must have been when I was about two.
“Mama! Wake up, Mama!”
A nurse carrying some sheets came up behind her and said in German, “That’s right.” She smiled as though she were encouraging Anna in some kind of sport. “Even if there is no reaction,” she said, “your voice may be getting through.”
So Anna went on shouting while the nurse put the sheets into a cupboard and went away again. She shouted in English and in German. She told Mama that she must not die, that her children needed her, that Konrad loved her and that everything would be all right. And while she was shouting, she wondered if any of it were true and whether it was right to tell Mama these things even when she probably could not hear them.
In between shouting, she looked at Mama and remembered her in the past. Mama tugging at a sweater and saying, “Don’t you think it’s nice?” Mama in the flat in Paris, triumphant because she’d bought some strawberries at half-price. Mama beating off some boys who had pursued Anna home from the village school in Switzerland. Mama eating, Mama laughing, Mama counting her money and saying, “We’ll have to manage somehow.” And all the time a tiny part of herself observed the scene, noted the resemblance to something out of Dr Kildare, and marvelled that anything so shattering could also be so corny.
At last she could bear it no longer and found the nurse who led her back to Konrad.
She felt sick again in the car and hardly saw the hotel where Konrad had booked her in. There was an impression of shabbiness, someone leading her up some stairs, Konrad saying, “I’ll fetch you for supper,” and then she was lying on a large bed under a large German quilt in a strange, half-darkened room.
Gradually, in the quiet, the sick feeling receded. Tension, she thought. All her life she had reacted like this. Even when she was tiny and afraid of thunderstorms. She had lain in bed, fighting the nausea among the frightening rumbles and flashes of lightning, until Max got her a freshly-ironed handkerchief from the drawer to spread on her stomach. For some reason this had always cured her.
They had slept under German quilts like this one, not sheets and blankets as in England. The quilts had been covered in cotton cases which buttoned at one end and, to avert some long forgotten, imaginary misfortune, they had always shouted, “Buttons to the bottom!” before they went to sleep. Much later, in the Hamburg hotel after Papa’s death, she had reminded Max of this, but he had not been able to remember anything about it.
That had been the last time they had all been together, she and Max and Mama and Papa – even though Papa was dead. For Papa had left so many notes and messages that for a while it had felt as though he were still with them.
“I told him not to,” Mama had said, as though it were a case of Papa going out without his galoshes on a wet day. She had not wanted Papa to write any farewell notes because suicide was still a crime, and she did not know what would happen if people found out. “As though it were anyone’s business but his own,” she said.
She had left Papa one evening, knowing that after she had gone he would take the pills she had procured for him, and that she would never again see him alive. What had they said to each other that last evening? And Papa – what would he think of all this now? He had wanted so much for Mama to be happy. “You are not to feel like a widow,” he had written in his last note to her. And to Max and herself he had said, “Look after Mama.”
There was a shimmer of light as a draught shifted the curtains. They were made of heavy, woven cloth, and as they moved, the tiny pattern of the weave flowed and changed into different combinations of verticals and horizontals. She followed them with her eyes, while vague, disconnected images floated through her mind: Papa in Paris, on the balcony of the poky furnished flat where they had lived for two years, saying, “You can see the Arc de Triomphe, the Trocadero and the Eiffel Tower!” Meeting Papa in the street on her way home from school. London? No, Paris, the Rue Lauriston where later, during the war, the Germans had had their Gestapo headquarters. Papa’s lips moving, oblivious of passers-by, shaping words and phrases, and smiling suddenly at the sight of her.
The boarding house in Bloomsbury on a hot, sunny day. Finding Mama and Papa on a tin roof outside an open window, Papa on a straight-backed chair, Mama spread out on an old rug. “We’re sunbathing,” said Papa with his gentle, ironic smile, but specks of London soot were drifting down from the sky, blackening everything they touched. “One can’t even sunbathe any more,” said Mama, and the bits of soot settled on Mama and Papa and made little black marks on their clothes, their hands and their faces. They got mixed up with the pattern on the curtains, and still Mama and Papa sat there with the soot drifting down, and Anna too was drifting – drifting and falling. “The most important thing about writing,” said Richard, but the plane was landing and the engines made too much noise for her to h
ear what was so important, and Papa was coming to meet her along the runway. “Papa,” she said aloud, and found herself in the strange bed, unsure for a moment whether she had been asleep or not.
At any rate it could only have been for a minute, for the light had not changed. It’s Sunday afternoon, she thought. I’m in a strange room in Berlin and it’s Sunday afternoon. The draught moved the curtains again, and little patches of light danced over the quilt, across the wall, and disappeared. It must still be sunny outside. She got up to look.
Outside the window was a garden with trees and bushes and fallen leaves in the long grass. Near the dilapidated wooden fence something moved, flashing orange, leapt, clung to a wildly dipping branch, scrabbled the right way up and sat swinging in the wind. A red squirrel. Of course. There were plenty of them in Germany. She watched it as it sat washing itself, with the wind ruffling its tail. She no longer felt sick at all.
Papa would have liked the swinging squirrel. He had never known about Richard, or about Max’s baby daughter, or that the world, after years of horror and deprivation, had once again turned into such a delightful place. But I’m alive, she thought. Whatever happens, I am still alive.
Konrad came to collect her at six o’clock. “We’re spending the evening with friends,” he said. “I thought it would be best. They’d originally invited your mother and myself for bridge, so they were expecting me anyway. Of course they only know that she has pneumonia.”
Anna nodded.
As they drove through the darkened, leafy streets, she was filled again with the sense of something half-familiar. Yellow lights flickered through the trees, casting wavering shadows on the ground.
“This is all the Grunewald district,” said Konrad. “Where you used to live. Do you remember any of it?”
She did not remember the streets, only the feel of them. She and Max walking home after dark, playing a game of jumping on each other’s shadows as they slid and leapt between one street lamp and the next. Herself thinking, this is the best game we’ve ever played. We’ll play it always, always, always…
“It was hardly touched by the bombing,” said Konrad. “Tomorrow you might like to have a look round near your old home.”
