A Small Person Far Away

by Judith Kerr

  Anna followed her, making sure that all doors remained open so that she could hear the telephone, and they sat down near the depleted buffet.

  “Well then,” said Hildy, tucking into some bread and sausage, “your Mama is quite better. I told you everything would be all right. But your husband must be worried about you: the Suez business now as well as Hungary. When are you going home?”

  She looked at Hildy, her frizzy hair sticking out untidily from her clever, affectionate face, and wondered how much she had guessed.

  “I don’t know,” she said carefully. “I’m waiting for a call from him now.”

  Hildy nodded and chewed.

  “I want to go home,” said Anna. “Only Max has to leave tonight, and I’m not sure…”

  “If your Mama can manage without both of you.”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes,” Hildy polished off the sausage with one bite. “I can’t stay long,” she said. “My Erwin is not well – something with his stomach. In any case, one should never give advice. But if it’s any use—” She hesitated. “It’s only what I think,” she said. “But I think that Konrad… will do what needs to be done. I think – I think one can trust him. You understand what I mean?”

  “Yes,” said Anna.

  “He is a kind man. And anyway,” said Hildy, “you should be home with your husband now. I know we have had a lot of frights and always, at the last minute, the politicians draw back, but at such times it is not good for people to be apart.” She heaved herself out of the chair. “I really must go. My poor Erwin. He has vomited, you know, and that is something which, for him, is not at all normal.”

  As they entered the other room, the party appeared to have quietened down. A number of guests must have left, and the rest were sitting rather than standing, some of them on the floor, and talking in undertones.

  “Always the same faces,” said Hildy. “What can they find to talk about?”

  Konrad hurried towards them. “Are you going, Hildy? We ought to go as well, to get Max to the airport.”

  “But I’m still waiting for my call from Richard,” said Anna, and at that moment the telephone rang. She cried, “That’ll be him,” embraced Hildy quickly, and ran to the bedroom. Someone had closed the door again. She threw it open and found herself looking straight at a girl with her dress unzipped and pulled halfway down off her shoulders. Immediately behind her, a man with a handlebar moustache was making a great play of adjusting his tie over his unbuttoned shirt. The telephone was still ringing.

  “Excuse me,” she said, edging past both of them, and answered it.

  At first there seemed to be no one there, then there was a buzzing sound and an unidentifiable voice saying something a long way off.

  The man and the girl – her dress now pulled up again – were watching her uncertainly.

  “Hullo?” she said. “Hullo?”

  The voice faded, but the buzzing continued.

  “Hullo,” she said more loudly. “Hullo. Hullo. Hullo.”

  Nothing happened, but the handlebar moustache suddenly appeared very close to her face, exuding alcoholic fumes.

  “Just-look-ing-for-her-hand-bag,” its owner explained, pronouncing each syllable with great care and lifting up one of the coats to show what he meant.

  She nodded impatiently and waved him away.

  “Hullo?” she shouted into the telephone. “Hullo? Richard, is that you?”

  Somewhere infinitely far away, she heard Richard’s voice. “Hullo, love. Are you all right?” and at once all her anxieties and tensions melted away.

  “Yes,” she shouted. “Are you?”

  He said something she could not catch, and she shouted, “Mama is out of danger.”

  Richard’s voice suddenly came through loud and clear.

  “What?” he said.

  “Mama is out of danger. She’s going to be all right.”

  “Oh, I’m glad.”

  Out of the corner of her eye, she could see the girl self-consciously straightening her hair and leaving the room, followed by the man. Thank God, she thought.

  “Richard, it’s lovely to hear you.”

  “And you. When are you coming home?”

  “Well, what do you think? What do you think about this Suez business?”

  “It’s difficult to—” The buzzing began again and drowned the rest of his words.

  “I can’t hear you,” she cried.

  He repeated whatever he had said – she could tell he must be shouting – but all she could catch were the words “if possible”.

  “Do you want me to come home? Richard? Would you like me to come straight away?” She was shouting at the top of her voice.

  There was a little click. The buzzing stopped, and a German operator said loudly and clearly, “Charlottenburg exchange. Can I help you?”

  “You cut me off!” she shouted. “I was talking to London and you cut me off. Please reconnect me at once.”

  “I’m sorry,” said the voice. “There is a three hour delay to London and we are accepting no more calls.”

  “But I was talking to them. I was talking to them, and you cut me off in the middle.”

  “I’m sorry, but there is nothing I can do.”

  “Please!” cried Anna. “I’ve waited all day for this call. It’s really important.”

  But of course it was no use.

  After she had put down the receiver, she stayed sitting among the coats for a moment, fighting an overwhelming urge to break something, to be sick, to walk straight out and catch the next plane to London. Then she stood up and went back to the party.

  “All right?” said Konrad. He was waiting for her with Max’s briefcase in his hand. “Come on, Max,” he called before she could answer. “We really must go.”

  Max was having some difficulty in disentangling the blonde who appeared to be offering to come to Athens with him. Behind him, someone had rolled back the carpet and a number of people, mostly middle-aged, were dancing to the radio.

  “Coming,” said Max, managing to ditch the blonde at last. Ken handed them their coats and they hurried towards the door. “So sorry you have to leave… regards to your Mama…” Teeth bared in smiles, handshakes, auf Wiedersehens, and then they were outside in the dark, and Konrad was driving very fast towards Tempelhof.

  “Did you get Richard?” asked Max, turning back in his seat, while shadows of trees and lamp posts raced across them.

  She shook her head. “I couldn’t hear him, and then we were cut off.” If I’m not careful, she thought, I’m going to weep all over the car.

  He made a face. “Don’t worry. Any sign of trouble and you go straight home. All right?”

  “All right.”

  Konrad was leaning forward over the steering wheel, and the car was tearing along through the night. “I hope we’ll make it,” he said without taking his eyes off the road.

  Max glanced at his watch. “Christ,” he said. “I didn’t know it was so late.” He began to drum with his fingers and stare tensely into the darkness ahead.

  She sat in the back, her coat wrapped round her for warmth, feeling alone. Her chin tucked into her collar, her hands thrust deep into her pockets, she tried to think of nothing. Then she felt something under her fingers, something thin and rustly – a piece of paper. She pulled it out and, by holding it very close to her eyes, could just distinguish the word “Heals” printed across the top. It must be the bill for the dining-room rug.

  It seemed like something from another world, from the infinitely distant past which had gone and would never come again. She clutched it in her cold hand and suddenly felt desperate. I’ve got no business to be here, she thought, surrounded by Russians when there might be a war. I don’t belong here. I should be home with Richard. Suppose I never get home? Suppose I never see him again? She stared at the dark, unfamiliar landscape racing past the window and thought in terror, I might be here for ever.

  At last there were lights. The car swerved an
d braked.

  “See you in London, little man,” said Max and scrambled out before it had properly stopped.

  She watched him run to the airport entrance, his shadow leaping wildly beside him. There was a dazzle of light as he opened the door, and then he was gone.

  “I think he’ll just catch it,” said Konrad.

  They waited in case he didn’t and wanted to come back, but nothing happened. The door remained closed. After what seemed like a long time, Anna climbed into the front seat and they drove slowly back to the centre of town. It was one o’clock in the morning and very cold.

  “I’m sorry you couldn’t speak to Richard,” said Konrad after a few kilometres.

  She was too depressed to do anything but nod. It suddenly seemed a familiar feeling. Of course, she thought. All those times in Putney when Max had gone back to the Air Force or to Cambridge. This was how she had felt then. It did not seem so very long ago. Back with Mama, she thought. Trapped. She could almost sense the Russians all around.

  “I entirely agree with Max, you know,” said Konrad. “At the first hint of trouble, you get on a plane to London.”

  She could see his face, greenish-grey in the glimmer from the dashboard. Behind it, indistinct dark shapes fled through his reflection in the glass.

  “I wish—” she said.

  “That you were at home with Richard instead of driving round Berlin in the early hours of the morning.”

  “Not just that. I wish Mama lived in a house. I wish she liked cooking and made large meals which nobody could eat, and fussed about people’s appetites and the cleaning.” For a moment she could almost persuade herself that it was possible.

  “Where?” said Konrad.

  “Somewhere.” She knew it was nonsense. “Not in Berlin.”

  They were off the main road now, into lamplit side streets – the beginning of the suburbs.

  “She’s never been keen on domesticity,” said Konrad. He added loyally, “Thank God.”

  “Well, if she could just take life as it comes. Make the most of what there is, even if it isn’t perfect. Rather than this awful romanticism, this rejection of everything that isn’t exactly as she’s dreamed it. After all, there are other ways of solving one’s problems than by committing suicide.”

  His eyes left the road for a moment and flickered towards her. “Aren’t you being rather hard on her?”

  “I don’t think so. After all, I’ve lived with her a lot longer than you have.” The anger and frustrations of the day suddenly boiled over inside her. “You don’t know what it was like,” she said, and was surprised how loud her voice sounded.

  They had reached a familiar arrangement of shops and houses. The car turned a corner, then another, and there was the street with her hotel.

  “I think I can imagine,” he said. “She’s often told me about it. The worst time of her life, as she calls it. I know how she talks, but it must have been quite difficult for her as well as you.”

  He stopped the car outside the hotel, switched off the engine, and they sat for a moment without talking. In the silence she could hear a faint, distant tremor. Thunder, she thought, and her stomach contracted.

  “That’s one of the things I feel worst about,” he said.

  “What?”

  He hesitated. “Well, look at me. I’m not exactly a film star. With my paunch and my slipped disk and my face like the back of a bus. Hardly the sort of man for whom women commit suicide. And yet, somehow, I’ve driven your mother…”

  The thunder was getting closer. She could see the drawn expression on his face, very pale in the light of a street lamp.

  “… I’ve driven her to do something which, even during the worst period of her life, she was never tempted to do.”

  “How do you know?”

  “That I drove her to it?”

  “No.” Part of her was too angry to think, but another part knew exactly what she was saying. “That she was never tempted to do it before.”

  He stared at her in the dimness of the car, and she stared back. There was another rumble of thunder – strange in November, she thought – and then she suddenly realized that it was not thunder at all.

  “Listen!” She could hardly get it out. “It’s gunfire.”

  His mind was still on what she had been saying, and he did not seem to understand.

  “It’s the Russians!” For a moment it was like water closing over her head. Then she felt quite calm. Goodbye, she thought. Goodbye, Richard. Goodbye, everything she had ever wanted to do. Mama and Berlin for always. It had caught up with her at last, as she had always known it would.

  “The Russians?” said Konrad, very surprised.

  She was struggling with the window and finally got it open. “Can’t you hear it?”

  “My dear,” he said, “my dear, it’s nothing, you mustn’t be so frightened. That’s not the Russians, it’s the Americans.”

  “The Americans?”

  He nodded. “Artillery practice. Every other Thursday – though usually not quite so early in the morning.”

  “The Americans.” She couldn’t have breathed for a while, for she felt as though her lungs had stuck together. Now she opened her mouth, and a lot of air rushed in. “I’m sorry,” she said and felt herself blush. “I don’t normally get so panicked.”

  “It was perfectly natural.” His face was even more drawn than before. “I ought to have warned you. But living here, one forgets.”

  “Anyway, I’m all right now. I’d better go to bed.” She made to get out, but he put out his hand.

  “I’ve been thinking,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Various things. First of all, I think you should go home.”

  Her heart leapt. “But what about Mama?”

  “Nu, she is no longer seriously ill. Of course I should have been glad of your support a little longer, but I had not realized how difficult all this has been for you. Could you still stay over tomorrow?”

  “Well, of course.”

  “Good. Then we will book you a flight for Friday, and I’ll send a cable to Richard that you’re coming.”

  Suddenly she no longer felt cold. She could feel the blood rushing into her toes and fingers, warming them. Her whole body was aglow with relief, and she looked at Konrad’s pale, heavy face, filled with an almost physical affection for him.

  “Are you sure?” she asked, knowing that it was quite safe to do so.

  “Absolutely.”

  The day after tomorrow, she thought. Tomorrow, really, for they were already well into Thursday. Then she realized that Konrad was still talking.

  “I hope you don’t mind my asking,” he said. “But you understand that it’s important for me to know. After all, I am very much concerned.”

  To know what?

  He hesitated how best to put it. “Has your mother ever, previously… Did she ever, before, try to kill herself?”

  What did it matter, now that she was going home? She wished she had never brought it up. “I don’t know,” she said. “I really don’t.”

  “But you were saying earlier—”

  She could simply deny it, she thought, but he was looking at her with his worried eyes, blaming himself. She did not want him to feel so guilty.

  “There was something,” she said slowly at last. “But I don’t honestly think it was very serious. In fact I’d forgotten all about it until today.”

  “What happened?”

  So, as lightly as possible, she told him about the Professor’s pills. “I think she knew they wouldn’t work,” she said. “I think she just had to do something, and so she pretended. After all, if she’d really tried to kill herself, I wouldn’t have forgotten.”

  “Wouldn’t you?”

  “Well, of course not. It would have been too awful to forget.”

  “Or too awful to remember.”

  Nonsense, she thought.

  “Look,” he said, “I’ve seen as many bad psychological thriller
s as you have. I have no wish to act like an amateur – headshrinker, isn’t it called? But those pills were supposed to be poison, and your mother did take them.”

  “I’m not even sure of that.”

  “I think she took them,” said Konrad.

  She had wanted him to feel less guilty, but he seemed almost exultant. There was an edge to his voice which she had not heard before, and she suddenly wondered what on earth she had done.

  Thursday

  During what was left of the night, she slept only fitfully. She dreamed endlessly of Mama – Mama wandering on a mountainside, in the streets, through the rooms of an ever-expanding house, and always searching for Konrad. Sometimes she found him and sometimes she only glimpsed him for a moment before he disappeared. Once Anna found him for her, and Mama hugged her on the beach and laughed delightedly with the sun on the sand behind her. Another time he slipped away from them in Woolworth’s while Anna was buying Mama a hat.

  She woke uneasy and depressed, much later than usual, and found the breakfast room deserted, with only a few dirty cups and plates still cluttered on the tables. The proprietress, engaged half-heartedly in clearing them away, stopped at the sight of her.

  “Have you heard?” she said. “The Russians are leaving Budapest.” As Anna looked at her, uncomprehending, she repeated it in her thick Berlin accent. “Sie gehen,” she said. “Die Russen gehen,” and produced a newspaper to prove it.

  Anna read it while the woman scurried about, clattering the used crockery and turning the stained table cloths. Incredibly, it was true. She could hardly believe it. Why? she wondered. The West must have acted. A secret message from the White House, leaving no room for doubt. All the free countries together, united as they had never been against the Nazis until it was too late. She looked for news of Suez, but only found a small paragraph. Nothing much seemed to be happening there.

  “They’ll be happy today in Budapest,” said the woman, putting down some coffee and rolls before her. “Dancing in the streets, it said on the radio. And they’ve pulled down a great statue of Stalin – whatever will they do with it, do you suppose? And they’re going to change everything and have things just the way they want them.”