A Small Person Far Away

by Judith Kerr

  On a small landing halfway up, he stopped again to get his breath. Anna caught Max’s eye, but there was nothing to be done and they had to wait alongside him.

  “Used to check the tickets,” said the old man. “In the old days. Before it was all took over by them in brown.” He flashed a look at Max. “You know who I mean, don’t you?”

  Max said, yes, he knew whom he meant.

  The old man nodded, satisfied. “Used to stand down there at the entrance of the stalls, and see them all go in,” he said. “All the gentlemen in their dinner suits and the ladies in their dresses. Quite grand, they was.”

  He sighed and started again on his slow climb, muttering to himself. A poster with Papa’s name and “Exhibition” appeared in the half-darkness. “The great writer and critic”, it said underneath.

  “Used to see him,” said the old man, jabbing a finger in its direction. “Come quite often, he did.”

  They looked at each other. “Did you?” said Anna.

  He seemed to think that she was doubting him. “Well, of course I did,” he said. “Used to check his ticket. Middle of the third row, he used to sit, never nowhere else, so he could write his little piece in the paper next day. And the others, they used to be real frightened of what he’d put. Once I fetch him a taxi to go home in after the show, and the manager, he come out of the theatre just as he drives off and says to me, ‘Herr Klaube,’ he said, ‘that man can make or break the play.’ A real nice gentleman, I always thought, always thanked me and give me a tip.”

  Anna saw Max’s face in the half-darkness. They both wanted the old man to go on talking about Papa at that time which they were too young to remember. She searched her mind for something to ask him.

  “What –” she said, “what did he look like?”

  He clearly thought it a stupid question. “Well,” he said, “he look like they all look in them days, didn’t he. He had one of them cloaks and a stick and a silk hat.” Perhaps he sensed her disappointment, for he added, “Anyway, there’s plenty of pictures of him in there.”

  They had arrived at a door with another, bigger, poster on it, and he unlocked it and switched on the lights, while Max pressed a coin into his hand.

  “Thank you, sir. I’ll drink to you with that,” he said as, perhaps, he had said to Papa thirty-odd years before, and tottered back into the semi-darkness of the stairs.

  The room he had opened for them was the circle bar, and now that the lights were on, she saw that the walls, not only in the bar but also in the passage outside it, were hung with photographs and reproductions. There was Papa with Einstein, Papa with Bernard Shaw, Papa making a speech, Papa and Mama in America with skyscrapers behind them, Papa and Mama on the deck of an ocean liner. Mama looked like herself, only younger and happier, but Papa seemed unfamiliar because of his habit, which Anna now remembered, of putting on a special expression for photographers.

  There were framed newspaper cuttings with explanations beneath them. “The article which caused such controversy in 1927”, “The last article to be published before he left Germany in 1933”. There were drawings and cartoons, a magazine Papa had edited (“I didn’t know he’d done that,” said Anna), framed pages of manuscript with his familiar, spidery writing, endlessly corrected.

  She looked at it all, touched and bewildered. “It’s so strange, isn’t it,” she said. “All the time he was doing this, we hardly knew him.”

  “I remember people asking about him at school,” said Max.

  “And visitors coming to the house. There was a man who brought us some marzipan pigs. I remember Mama saying that he was very famous. I suppose it might have been Einstein.”

  “I think I would have remembered Einstein,” said Max who had forgotten even the marzipan pigs.

  Already half dismantled against the wall was a glass case with a complete set of Papa’s books. They looked clean and almost unused – very different from his own shabby collection in the Putney boarding house. He had had to acquire the volumes piecemeal from friends who had managed somehow to smuggle them out of Germany.

  “He never did get a full set together for himself, did he?” said Max.

  “No.” She touched the glass case gently with her hand. “No, he never did.”

  From the far end of the bar, steps led to another passage, and here, too, exhibits had already been taken down and were leaning in a corner, face to the wall. She picked one up at random. It was an enlarged reproduction of a recent article assessing Papa’s work. She read, “… one of the most brilliant minds of his generation. The books, classics of their kind, are in every university library.” In another case nearby were the two thick modern volumes with his collected writings which Mama had worked so hard to get republished the previous year.

  “Look at this,” said Max. He had found a photograph of the four of them in the garden in Berlin, Papa posing like an author as usual, Mama smiling radiantly, and herself and Max in matching striped woollies, Max with a Christopher Robin haircut on a scooter, herself on a tricycle.

  “I remember that being taken,” she said. “I remember I’d just got the tricycle, and I was trying to look like someone who could ride a tricycle round corners.”

  Max considered it. “It doesn’t really come across,” he said, and added, “actually, you look exactly like Papa.”

  Suddenly there were no more exhibits, and it seemed they had come to the end of the show.

  “That’s it,” said Max. “It’s not really very big, is it?”

  They went to the end of the passage, through a door, and found themselves at the back of the circle, a curve of empty red seats sloping down on each side of them. In the vast dimness under the roof hung the usual theatre smell of glue and plaster, and from the well of the stalls came the hum of a vacuum cleaner. Peering down, Anna could see a foreshortened figure Hoovering along the aisle. She looked at the middle of the third row and tried to imagine Papa sitting there, but she couldn’t bring him to life.

  “It’s really just something for people to look at in the interval,” said Max, beside her. “But I think it must have been quite effective before they took half of it down.”

  She nodded and turned to go back the way they had come – and there, between two exits, like a saint in a niche, almost life-size and smiling, was Papa. He was wearing his old grey hat and the shabby winter coat which he had had as long as Anna could remember, and he seemed to be in the middle of saying something. His eyes were focused with interest on something or someone just to one side of the camera, and he looked stimulated and full of life.

  She knew the picture, of course, though she had never seen it so enlarged. It had been taken by a press photographer as Papa stepped off the plane in Hamburg on that day long ago – the last picture taken of him before his death. Papa had not known that the photographer was there, so he had not had time to put on his special expression and looked exactly as Anna remembered him.

  “Papa,” she said.

  Max, following her glance, stopped halfway up the steps, and they stood looking at it together.

  “It’s a perfect place to put it,” she said at last. “Looking out over the theatre.”

  There was a pause. The whine of the Hoover continued to rise from the stalls.

  “You know,” said Max, “this is the one thing here that really means anything to me. Of course the rest is very interesting, but this, to me, is Papa. What I find so strange is that to everyone else he was someone quite different.”

  She nodded. “I haven’t even read everything he wrote.”

  “Nor have I.”

  “The point about Papa—” For a moment she lost track of what the point was. Something to do with having loved Papa when he was old and unsuccessful and yet more interesting than anyone else she knew. “He never felt sorry for himself,” she said, but it was not what she meant.

  “The point about Papa,” said Max, “was not just his work but the sort of person he was.”

  When they start
ed back down the curved staircase, there were signs of activity in the foyer. The doors to the street were open, someone had taken over the glass-fronted ticket office, and an elderly man was trying to make a booking. They had reached the foot of the stairs, when a gaunt young woman appeared from nowhere, said something about Kulturbeziehungen and shook them warmly by the hand.

  “Did you enjoy it?” she cried. “I’m so sorry I wasn’t here to meet you. I do hope the janitor – he remembers your father, you know. Your mother came when it opened, of course, and seemed quite pleased, but one always wonders. There is so little room, so one had to select.”

  “I thought it was excellent,” said Max, and she lit up, as people always did when he smiled at them, and straightaway looked less gaunt.

  “Did you?” she said. “Did you really? One hopes so much always to have got it right.”

  “I wish he could have seen it himself,” said Anna.

  Later, over lunch in a small bar, they talked about Mama.

  “It rather hits one,” said Max, “when one’s seen this exhibition – the sort of person Papa was and the sort of life she used to lead with him. And now she tries to kill herself over someone like Konrad.”

  “He made her feel safe,” said Anna.

  “Oh I know, I know.”

  “I like Konrad,” said Anna. “What I find so amazing is the way Mama talks about the things they do together. You know – ‘we won three dollars at bridge and the car did eighty miles in an hour and a half – it’s all so boring and ordinary.”

  Max sighed. “I suppose that’s why she likes it. She’s never had a chance to do it before.”

  “I suppose so.”

  Max sighed again. “Papa was a great man. He took quite a bit of living up to. Being married to him and being a refugee – it would make anyone long for some ordinariness. I think in a way we all did.”

  Anna remembered a time at her English boarding school when she had wished for nothing so much as to be called Pam and to be good at lacrosse. It had been a short-lived phase.

  “Not you so much, perhaps,” said Max. “If one wants to paint or write, perhaps being different matters less. But me—”

  “Nonsense,” said Anna. “You’ve always been different.”

  He shook his head. “Only in quality. Best student, scholarship winner, brilliant young barrister tipped to be the youngest QC—”

  “Are you?”

  He grinned. “Maybe. But it’s all conforming, isn’t it? What I’m really doing is making damned sure that in the end I shall be indistinguishable from the very best ordinary people in the country. I’ve sometimes wondered, if we hadn’t been refugees—”

  “You’d always have done law. You’ve got a huge talent for it.”

  “Probably. But I might have done it for slightly different reasons.” He made a face. “No, I can understand exactly why Mama wants to be ordinary.”

  They sat in silence for a while. At last Anna said, “What do you think will happen now?”

  He shrugged his shoulders. “Konrad keeps saying he’ll assume complete responsibility for her. I don’t know whether that means he wants to pick up where they left off, as though nothing at all had happened. I suppose he may say something when we have dinner tonight.”

  “Yes.” She suddenly saw Mama very clearly, with her vulnerable blue eyes, the determined mouth, the childish snub nose. “She’ll be desperate if he doesn’t.”

  “Well, I think he might. I think he means to. What I’m frightened of is that he might feel we’re just taking him for granted, and that he’ll be put off. I think he’ll want some support.”

  “We could give him that, surely?”

  He said nothing for a moment. Then he looked at her. “I left Wendy and the baby on a remote Greek island. I can’t stay long.”

  “I see.” It hadn’t occurred to her, and she felt suddenly depressed. “Perhaps –” she said, “I suppose I could stay on a few days on my own—” But she hated even the thought of it.

  “If you could, it would make all the difference.”

  “I’d have just to think about it. I’ve got this new job, you see. It’s quite important.” The new job and Mama were jumbled up in confusion. Back to Mama, thought part of her mind with the usual sense of panic, and another part thought of Richard, but he seemed far away. “I’d want first to talk to Richard about it.”

  “Well, of course,” he said.

  He looked white again when the waitress brought the bill, and said, “Do you mind if we go back to the hotel? I’ve had practically no sleep for two nights and I suddenly feel rather tired. Konrad said he’d fixed up a room for me.”

  While he slept, she lay on her bed and stared at the patterned curtains as they moved very gently in the draught. She wished that she had not mentioned staying on. Now it would be difficult not to do it, she thought, feeling mean. And yet, she thought, why should it always be me? Still, she hadn’t actually committed herself, and at the worst it would only be a few days. I simply wouldn’t stay longer than that, she told herself. For a moment she considered trying to ring Richard. But it would be best to talk to Konrad first. After all, now that Mama was out of danger, he might not even want anyone to stay.

  The patterned curtains moved and flowed. She felt suddenly sharply aware of herself, of the shabby German house around her and of Max resting in the next room. There was Konrad in his office and his secretary watching him, and Mama waking up properly at last from her long anaesthesia and Richard trying to write his script and waiting for her in London, and in the past, behind them all, was Papa.

  This, she thought, is what it’s like. She felt that she could see it all, every bit of it in relation to the rest, and she knew everybody’s thoughts and all their feelings, and could set them off against each other with hair-trigger precision. I could write about it all, she thought. But the thought was so cold-blooded that she shocked herself and tried to pretend that she had not had it.

  They went to the hospital in the late afternoon, and when they opened the door of Mama’s room, they found Konrad already there. He was sitting on the bed, and Mama, who looked tense and on the edge of tears, was holding his hand. Her blue eyes were fixed on his and she had put on some lipstick, which looked strangely bright in her exhausted face.

  “Nu,” said Konrad, “here are your children who have come from all the corners of the earth to see you, so I’ll leave you.”

  “Don’t go.” Mama’s voice was still a little faint. “Must you?”

  “Yes, ma’am, I must,” said Konrad. He heaved his bulk off the bed and smiled his asymmetrical smile. “I shall go for a walk, which is good for me, which is why I so rarely do it, and then I shall come back and buy your children some dinner. In the meantime, you behave yourself.”

  “Don’t walk too far.”

  “No, ma’am,” he said, and Anna saw Mama’s mouth quiver as he went out of the room.

  “He always calls me ma’am,” she said tremulously, as though it explained everything.

  They had brought some flowers, and Anna inserted them into a vase which already contained some rather more splendid ones from Konrad, while Max took Konrad’s place on the bed.

  “Well, Mama,” he said with his warm smile. “I’m very glad you’re better.”

  “Yes,” said Anna from behind the vase. They were both afraid that Mama would begin to cry.

  She still seemed rather dazed. “Are you?” she said, and then added with more of her normal vigour, “I’m not. I wish they’d just left me alone. It would have been much simpler for everyone.”

  “Nonsense, Mama,” said Max, and at this her eyes filled with tears.

  “The only thing I’m sorry about,” she said, “is that I dragged you away from your holiday. I didn’t want to – I really didn’t. But it was so awful—” She sniffed through her little snub nose and searched for a handkerchief under her pillow. “I tried not to,” she cried. “I tried to wait at least until you’d be back in London, but e
ach day – I just couldn’t bear it any longer.” She had found the handkerchief and blew into it, hard. “If only they’d just let me die,” she said, “then you needn’t have come until the funeral, and perhaps you could have finished your holiday first.”

  “Yes, Mama,” said Max. “But I might not have enjoyed it very much.”

  “Wouldn’t you?” She saw his face, and her voice warmed to something almost like a giggle. “After all, what’s an old mother?”

  “True, Mama. But I just happen to be attached to mine, and so is Anna.”

  “Yes,” said Anna, through the flowers.

  “Oh, I don’t know, I don’t know.”

  She lay back on the pillow and closed her eyes, and tears damped her cheeks from under the closed lids.

  “I’m so tired,” she said.

  Max patted her hand. “You’ll feel better soon.”

  But she seemed not to hear him. “Did he tell you what he’d done?” she said. “He got another girl.”

  “But it didn’t mean anything,” said Anna. She had squatted down near the bed, and at the sight of Mama’s tear-stained face on a level with her own, as she had so often seen it from her bed in the Putney boarding house, the familiar feeling rose up inside her that she could not bear Mama to be so unhappy, that it must somehow be stopped.

  Mama looked at her. “She was younger than me.”

  “Yes, but Mama—”

  “You don’t know what it’s like,” cried Mama. “You’re young yourself, you’ve got your Richard.” She turned her face away and cried, to the wall, “Why couldn’t they have let me die? They let Papa die in peace – I arranged that. Why couldn’t they have let me?”

  Anna and Max exchanged glances.

  “Mama—” said Max.

  Anna discovered that she had pins and needles and stood up. She did not like to rub her leg, in case it looked callous, so she went over to the window and stood there miserably, flexing and unflexing her knee.

  “Look, Mama, I know you’ve had a bad time, but I think everything is going to be all right. After all, you and Konrad have been together a long time.” Max was talking in his reasonable lawyer’s voice.