A Mind of Winter

by Shira Nayman

  It started as a game. I felt a certain glee, watching the little rubble of gold coins my mother had sewn into the waist of my jacket grow into the town house I bought in Kensington, not three years after being taken to the Internment Center on the outskirts of London. Magic, sorcery, call it what you will; the pleasure was in the trickery, in the feeling that I was making restitution, irrational as that seems to me now.

  I sold paintings too. Was that also a game?

  Mail from Germany is taking an inordinate amount of time to reach us. Normalizing relations—that’s the term that’s used. But an astounding amount of disorganization remains; even six years later, the newspapers give no indication of the extent of bureaucratic disarray that is still to be found there. I have exhausted all the relevant bureaus dealing with displaced persons and have decided that I must now widen the search to include those horror pits I can scarcely bring myself to think about. I find myself fighting the deed, so afraid am I of what I might discover. But I will grit my teeth and barrel through. Tonight, I will stay up until dawn, if necessary, writing to the relevant authorities that have been set up to deal with inquiries for each of the camps. How elastic language is—this word, once innocent enough, now yielding to its heinous new meaning.

  Here am I, my identity confused with that of an SS officer, second-in-command of one of the smaller camps, at the same time as I am forced, in my search for my mother and sister, to consider that such a place was their fate.

  And me, a Jew, accused of such things.

  I tell myself that I owe the fortune I amassed to that odd precognition I had—the ability to map developments in the theater of war onto the happenings of the stock market. (Although why should this have assuaged any hidden sense of guilt? After all, is there not something unsavory about putting to use a talent for bleeding the jugular of the war organism?)

  In any case, there were also monies made elsewhere.

  I have never tallied the amount I made selling paintings. Now, despite my efforts to silence the inner voice, the numbers ricochet in my mind, sums in pounds sterling, as if they are insisting on being counted. Large sums, defying me to ignore them. Sums I ploughed back into my workaday financial schemes, which then multiplied beyond any expectation I might have had.

  Memories of that sorry undertaking of my life visit too, unbidden. This happens often when I am sitting with Marilyn, late at night in the stainless steel surrounds of the darkroom I constructed on a whim when I first took possession of Ellis Park.

  I find myself reliving negotiations, deals, the handing over of the booty. Last night, for example, to take just one of the many moments I would rather forget, I was sitting in the basement with Marilyn, trying to read the newspaper, and one face kept insinuating itself into my mind’s eye. I tried to push the image away, to no avail. This inner tousle ended as it always does: with the meeting of long ago playing over in my mind from start to finish, like a newsreel.

  The gentleman, whom I shall not name, was titled. By that time, I had become accustomed to the homes of the aristocracy, partly because of having lived those two years with the Harcourts, and partly through escapades of my own. So I was not particularly overwhelmed by the splendor of his home, though I did register the massive entrance hall, the sweep of the curved stairway, the sequins of refracted light sloughing from the cut-glass surfaces of the chandelier.

  The butler showed me into a private rear parlor. Though we had corresponded, the gentleman and I had not actually met. I was thrown off by his appearance—not the silk smoking jacket or his refined features, but the unexpected and baffling expression he wore: a mixture, it seems now, looking back, of high sensibility and prurient greed.

  “I see you have brought it with you,” he said, even before rising or offering his hand. And when he did come toward me with an outstretched arm, it was not to perform the appropriate social gesture but to relieve me of the package I was holding, which was wrapped tightly in brown paper and tied with twine.

  “Do forgive me,” he added, a head nod to his discourtesy. “I’m just so anxious, finally, to see it.”

  He went at the twine with some dexterity and in less than two minutes was gazing at the rich reds and gold of the Cranach, a panel from one of the lesser, yet still startlingly beautiful altar pieces. I stood in the shadows, beyond the lamplight, watching his face, a face soft with privilege and lit from within by inspiration. The dead artist had crossed the Channel, the centuries, the Life-Death boundary, to chase out the lassitude and frivolity of this parlor with a breath of truth.

  “I trust you’ve made the necessary arrangements,” he said, searching the details of the canvas.

  “Everything’s taken care of,” I replied, feeling suddenly defenseless, as if the brown package I’d been clutching had been a shield.

  “You’ll find the funds in place as we discussed,” he explained. “It will take no longer than two or three days.”

  This was typically the moment of awkwardness, and I found myself thinking that a more precise etiquette for such situations would certainly be helpful. I imagined, for an instant, writing a manual myself: Manners for the Black Marketeer. I bowed slightly before making a discreet exit.

  This evening, my visitor was carrying a portfolio under his arm. The usual courteous greeting, and then instead of positioning himself by the window (I now make sure the curtains are properly drawn), he sat in the hard-backed chair by the door, placing the portfolio on the side table next to him.

  “I will repeat my earlier recommendation,” he began. “For your protection we strongly advise that you engage legal counsel. This is not to say that proceedings against you are imminent. They are, however, a possibility. I have here copies of the relevant documents.”

  Stepping around my desk, I glanced at the portfolio, which was made of heavy black card and embossed in gold with the seal of his office.

  “Witness depositions.” He fixed me with his green eyes. “Memos. A portion of our correspondence about your case with the Department of Immigration and Naturalization.”

  I could feel it tonight quite distinctly—that he was watching me. And waiting, I’m not entirely sure for what. For some sign, perhaps, some indication that would help him move this business along? Was he wondering if I perhaps planned to do myself harm? I can’t help imagining there’s more to it. He’s a difficult man to read. Something about the way he looked at me tonight makes me think he has a personal stake in this: that he’s looking to me, or rather to my case, as he calls it, for clues that might settle some important dilemma of his own.

  He’s an interesting young man; one senses in him a pureness of spirit, but also an element of mystery. One of those people who seems to have no dark secrets and at the same time everything to hide.

  It’s been awhile since he left—maybe an hour. The black folder is sitting where he left it on the side table. From here, the seal looks like an upside-down smile, and the lettering on the inside of it like polished little teeth.

  I’ve fallen behind in the matter of my search. There is so much to do. How could I have energy or time to take steps in the direction of my own protection or defense? The search for my mother and sister seems so much more urgent, so much more the driving reason for my life.

  Half of this week’s mail is still lying unopened on my desk. I will stay up as long as I need to catch up on the correspondence. I find myself once again, as in the early days, holding on to the possibility of finding them.

  Between calls from my visitor, my efforts to keep this business out of my mind are, for the most, successful. Every now and then, however, I catch myself in the midst of a disturbing daydream. Someone I’ve never seen is holding a photograph with trembling hands. Sometimes it is a man, sometimes a woman, and the age of the person varies from very young to quite old. Once, the figure I pictured was not much more than a child, a girl with long brown hair and a self-possessed air. In this reverie I watch, alarmed, but also horribly fascinated, as a hundred recollections and
feelings flitter across the face: slight shadings of a taut skin when the face is a young one, a deepening and rearranging of creased furrows when it is old. In this daydream, no words are spoken. There is only the awful pulse of recognition as he or she examines the photograph, the play across the face of the kind of memory that excites all the senses, that is relived the instant it is aroused. The individual then looks up, gives a quick nod, and hands back the picture, holding the corner pinched between forefinger and thumb, as if to avoid being contaminated. It is usually at that point that I catch myself and try to dissolve the image, though it is already too late.

  At these moments, I have the urge to leap to some kind of action—to call for the car and rush into town and somehow try to set things right. To search out those nameless souls and change their lives, bringing to bear whatever resources I now have at my disposal: to undo their experiences, that they might never have set foot in that place where these witnesses now say I committed the crimes of which I stand accused.

  Memory can be tamed, I want to say. Let me show you how. I look over at the portfolio with its insinuating upside-down smile. The actual accusers—not the changing, nameless faces that have been haunting me of late—are listed there. Their names are perhaps neatly written in my visitor’s professional hand—no surnames, no addresses, I should think; the agency would be cognizant that these people would surely fear me still, or, should I say, fear the person they believe me to be.

  And here, of course, I must stare another irony in the face: that having spent a good many years pretending to be someone I’m not, I am now taken for another someone far removed from any impersonation I have in fact committed.

  I see I have used the word committed.

  And aptly—for how could I not be aware that, along with everything else, I have also betrayed the past?

  In the nightmarish daydream, after the accusing faces flash before my mind’s eye, the thought of myself frantically tracking down these people inevitably brings me to my senses in such a way that makes me want to laugh out loud. Were any of them ever to see me in the flesh they would recoil in horror, for they are my accusers, and the face in the picture they cannot bear to touch is my own, staring bleakly, unblinking, into the closing black shutter of my visitor’s sophisticated miniature lens.

  And in any case, there is no setting this right. I know that in my bones.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  We never did talk about Christine, Barnaby and I, except for briefly, the day we first met.

  Christine bequeathed Barnaby to me (or perhaps me to him), informing him of how he might track me down. I do not believe she did this lightly; Christine was not a person who did things lightly. I think you and Oscar could be friends: according to Barnaby, those were the words she’d used.

  I knew, when I first saw Christine in that bleak little classroom at the Language School in London’s East End, that she would change my life. I’d been at the Internment Center five months, and though I’d made good progress, building on the solid English-language instruction I’d received at school, my accent was appalling. Christine was known for working miracles with pronounciation, so I was delighted to learn that for my third session—the last we were entitled to as alien, “interned” refugees—I’d been assigned to her class.

  I believe Christine felt it that first day too, though she maintained a professional posture.

  On the last day of the six-week session, as we all filed out of the small bare room, that was painted the sickly wartime green of all government agencies, Christine asked me to remain behind. It was then that she offered me private lessons, insisting on waiving the fee. Desperate to eliminate the guttural German burrs from my speech—and eager, too, for an opportunity to be alone in Christine’s company—I swallowed my pride and accepted her offer, assuring her I would reimburse every farthing, once I’d secured employment.

  Sitting with her that first evening, the two of us alone in the sterile classroom, it was as if someone had flipped a switch, effacing the appalling numbness that had engulfed me since leaving the redbrick house on Kirchstrasse. It was cold in that room: the bare walls and tile floor set up a disconcerting echo that reduced us both to whispers. Looking into Christine’s vivid green eyes, aware of her subtly mobile features, which remarkably displayed both world-weariness and great cheer, I felt warmed back into the fullness of life.

  By the end of the lesson, something had changed between us: no longer the teacher with one of her refugee students, but two people, leaning urgently toward each other.

  Soon, I was spending long evenings with Christine at her lodgings in Bethnal Green. We continued to meet twice weekly at the school, teacher and student, the two involvements remaining distinct and yet drawing us closer together.

  Later, on the heels of my early success at Harcourt and Goode, when I was ensconced at my Kensington town house, we kept to my rooms there, enjoying the spacious elegance and grateful for being completely in our own space.

  I recall an odd thought. Christine and I were celebrating my birthday—perhaps two years after we met; Christine had fashioned an apple pie from coarse ration flour, lard, and a single spotted piece of fruit, and we were savoring a bottle of wine I’d managed to get my hands on. I remember thinking, looking into Christine’s clear eyes, startled by a happiness I thought I’d never again feel, that we were twins, both ageless and aged, outside of time, outside of place.

  Here I am now, sitting in the soft round of light cast by the desk lamp in my study at Ellis Park, the rest of the room sunk in comforting shadow, quickening to the feeling of being united with Christine. For six long years I have cast her from my mind, along with everything else; I had supposed her lost forever. And now I am almost giddy with the sense of her. I have only to close my eyes and she springs to life: here, really here—and also there, really there, back then. The past no longer the past. I see her crossing the room to where I await her by our usual table at the club. Other eyes, too, follow her progress; she is a figure one wants to watch—the strawberryblond hair pressed close to her small head in glossy ripples, the clear complexion, the nonchalant and absolute selfpossession of a woman who has all her life known the power of her own beauty. As she comes closer, I see the unsettled intelligence of her face—eyes in search of something, an unyielding impatience about the mouth. And when our eyes meet, the dazzle of her generous, uninhibited smile.

  I never tired of watching Christine move. I never tired of listening to her expound on this or that enthusiasm. I never tired of touching her, of breathing her in.

  I recall another moment at the club, something that puzzled me at the time but which I’d put from my mind until now. We were at the award ceremony, the night I was honored by Harcourt and Goode for the work I had done. All evening, I’d been aware of something slightly altered in the way Christine looked at me. I’d assumed it was simply the newness, for her, of the situation—seeing me, well, at the center of things. Toward the end of the evening (which had, to my embarrassment, been rather too glittering, given the circumstances; we were still a nation at war, though the end was in sight) I was surrounded by a little group of well wishers when I found Christine suddenly at my side, that odd, appraising look on her face. I was doing my best to utter the expected gracious remark to yet another compliment when Christine stood up on tiptoe—not easy, I imagine, in the high-heeled silk evening shoes she was wearing—and whispered in my ear: Who are you, Robert? (My old name. My real name. I was not yet Oscar.) Really, I’d like to know. I was more than a little thrown by the question and responded, I’m afraid, by simply pretending I’d not heard what she’d said.

  Upon meeting Barnaby, I saw in his eyes that he, too, had loved Christine. Strikingly, this inspired in me little jealousy. Though Barnaby has tremendous erotic magnetism, I imagined that Christine, with her near incapacity for returning love—I count myself as the only exception—would have had for Barnaby no more than light affection. He was simply too, well, conventional; and likely t
o have come in too close (I picture troops astride steeds, crashing across the drawbridge), not knowing how to keep the right distance. Another might suppose me self-deluded here, but I really knew Christine (I fancy I know her still) and feel certain that whatever the liaison with Barnaby, our own intimacy—exclusive, irrevocable—remained unrivaled. So rather than being the cause of any friction between Barnaby and me, our shared knowledge of Christine actually bound us from the start.

  As far as covering my tracks was concerned, it was my only lapse—dropping that postcard to Christine, newly arrived in Shanghai, into the mail. I sent it to the American Express office in the Foreign Quarter. Christine used the service in London; I assumed she’d do the same in Shanghai. In any case, the expatriate community was legendarily insular; I had no doubt card would end up in her hands.

  What sort of disappearing act is it, you might ask, if you let people know your new alias as well as your whereabouts? Well, it wasn’t people, it was Christine, and what I wrote on the postcard was my new name and the name of my solicitor in New York, nothing more. She knew my handwriting—she had, after all, been my teacher—so I was certain she would realize it was me.

  I’d had a premonition that one day she might need my help. Though I admit it cut more deeply than that: a feeling that I couldn’t go on, couldn’t seize my new identity, with Christine completely in the dark. It was easy to slough off the rest; I could quite happily never set foot on European soil again. But leaving behind Christine, truly disappearing from her consciousness: that was not something I could bear.

  * * *

  Had I not so assiduously covered my tracks (my reasons for doing so were, of course, entirely unconnected with the matter at hand), I would not now be under this suspicion. There are certain things, though, that one cannot foretell.

  “Two more witnesses,” my visitor said last evening. “I suspect the case will now proceed.” I detected a trace of sympathy in his voice.