A Mind of Winter

by Shira Nayman

  Every so often, a house reminded me of home; I pushed this from my mind. London, I kept saying to myself—and in English (practice, practice)—London on its own terms.

  The streets got wider, the houses more grand. Here and there a rupture in the neat array: a house or two in ruins. A skeletal stairway or slab of wall presiding over mounds of brick and the entrails of a family’s life—broken crockery, pieces of metal twisted to beautiful shapes, partly burned items of furniture. I paused to examine one such ruin—a slim pillar of wall, the ghost of each story evident in panels of discolored wallpaper: rose chintz at the bottom, green velvet above, then embossed blue, and finally, at the top, capped in a remnant of red roof tile, the serviceable gray of what had probably been the attic. A fragment of floorboard jutted between the upper two patches of wallpaper; absurdly, a china teapot balanced on this tiny ledge.

  And then, it was upon me. 47 Park Street. Miraculously intact. An impressive entryway, flanked by four columns, was set back a little from the street. A brass knocker in the shape of a leopard was affixed to the carved door. I shivered in my thin suit. A faint cry, no more than a whimper, echoed in my mind: for an instant, the feel of my sister Else’s cheek on my lips. I reached for the leopard and gave two firm raps.

  The maid looked at me oddly when she opened the door, and quickly ushered me into an opulent foyer, unmarked by wartime scarcity. I waited until the maid returned, followed by a handsome middle-aged woman dressed in a gray velvet dress, her brown hair swept up off her face.

  “Mrs. Harcourt,” the maid announced.

  There was a strange look in the woman’s face.

  I tried to quell the panic that had arisen on hearing her name—not the name I was anticipating, not the last name of the uncle of Else’s school friend.

  “It is a Mr. Pettigrew I am looking for. Edgar Pettigrew,” I stammered.

  “I’m so sorry,” Mrs. Harcourt said, the peculiar look still on her face. “He lived at number 13. Our neighbor. But he passed away in the spring. I understand his widow has retired to their Yorkshire estate. Their house has been closed for months.”

  Harcourt. The wrong address. Not the uncle of Else’s old schoolmate: that would have been number 43 Park Street. Mr. Pettigrew gone these six months, the widow in seclusion up north.

  And me standing there speechless, the worn scrap of paper dangling from my hand.

  “I’m so sorry,” Mrs. Harcourt repeated. Yet she seemed strangely exalted. “Come. We’d be more comfortable in the parlor.”

  She turned toward the hallway. Hatless, I followed, taking in the faces of Harcourt ancestry floating on the wall in hunting gear, morning suits, frothy gowns. Sharp faces, angular and fine-boned, the same blue eyes in different configurations, wider or rounder, with more humor or less, or a hint of timidity; and in more than one portrait, a potent gleam of intelligence. All of them gazing out from the past, neither curious nor accusing. A sense that these painted forms were awaiting something—the breaking of a spell?—so that they might resume what they were doing, get on with things. I paused before a life-sized portrait of a man, youthful but prematurely gray, dressed in military attire from a long-past era, astride a palomino. Something in his hand—a parchment covered in writing; in the background, a battlefield, still smoking from the fire of cannons. There was a sober expression on his face: not victory, not defeat, but something uncannily modern.

  Mrs. Harcourt pushed open curved mahogany doors to reveal an elegant parlor: plush chairs, velvet walls, heavy curtains in different shades of hunter-green, and here and there a shiny, well-cared-for wooden piece—a rolltop desk, a sideboard inlaid with mother-of-pearl, a small oval table with clawed metal feet. My eyes flew to the framed photographs arranged on the marble mantelpiece, and to one in particular: a portrait of a youth in uniform, touched up with watercolors. The youth had pale eyes, the same hue of the ancestors hanging on the hall.

  “Andrew Harcourt. My son,” she said simply. “He was killed early on, shot down over France.” She fell silent.

  We stood there together in that opulent room, strangers from such separate worlds, worlds which had no business colliding as they had astoundingly, absurdly, against all the odds done. Joined now, without any sense or reason, by an impossible coincidence—though of course this word, now that I think it, rings hollow and nonsensical. And yet, I can find no other.

  “It’s remarkable, isn’t it,” Mrs. Harcourt breathed after a while. I looked again at the photograph. I knew I should be amazed: to be here at the wrong address, as it turned out, peering into the face of a felled English soldier who, on the basis of physical likeness, might well have been my brother, almost a twin. And yet, I found myself looking into those touched-up eyes—fierce beneath their surface gentleness—with an uncanny sense of inevitability. The wrong house, the Harcourts’ son no longer alive; all these years, a boy growing up in London, bearing such a close resemblance to me. And why not? My own mother not who she was, me not who I’d thought myself to be, all of it pieces of colored glass that tumbled and shifted into vivid, random arrangement.

  Mrs. Harcourt was staring at me with a disturbing mixture of disbelief and joy. I stood, in my worn suit, which had most likely once belonged to another young man killed in battle, shredding the scrap of paper with Else’s faded schoolgirl script.

  A smell of baking bread wafted into the room. Faint with hunger, I stared down at the lacy pattern of light sifted through leafy trees and falling through glass onto the floor. My face felt wet and I wondered how I could be sweating profusely when it was so cold outside.

  Mrs. Harcourt came toward me, holding something out: a white handkerchief. I took it; it was made of the softest silk. I wiped my nose, wiped my dripping eyes, felt something slightly itchy on my skin. I unfolded the handkerchief to see the spidery lines of embroidered initials, A.B.H. I wondered what the B stood for. I moved to hand the handkerchief back.

  “Keep it. Please,” Mrs. Harcourt said.

  I have it still, that handkerchief. On occasion, I place it in the breast pocket of my jacket.

  Mrs. Harcourt invited me to move in with them that very day. Just the two of them, she said, she and her husband, rattling around in their large house. She seemed to take it as a favor when, without really thinking the matter over, I accepted her invitation.

  “So”—a whisper, through the film of sleep—“I understand you’re leaving. I wanted to wish you luck.”

  I opened my eyes to see my fellow refugee, Oskar, sitting in the gloomy light of a yellow taper. Before he’d been made to wear the yellow star, Oskar had been a concert pianist. Around us, in cots along the length of both walls, the other residents of the Internment Center slept their unsteady sleep.

  We’d been fast friends since the day I arrived at the Center, almost a year earlier. We’d worked together on a crew clearing rubble after air raids and attended the same language school, though we’d already begun to take different directions—me attending a night course at the business school, Oskar training as an assistant teacher at a primary school in Hendon.

  There were unspoken rules at the Center. First and foremost: the residents spoke only English—to the staff, to each other, in the outside world.

  “I can hardly believe you’re getting out,” my friend had continued.

  Oskar’s fingers rapped a complex rhythm onto the narrow bed, off beyond the reach of the candlelight.

  “Who are they, these people with the big house, who hand out jobs?”

  I told him about the Harcourts and their unexpected offer of help.

  “When do you leave?” he asked, averting his eyes.

  “Tomorrow.”

  His fingers were still lightly drumming. I was aware of our silenced mother tongue, hanging between us like a lament.

  “This is it, then,” he said, his voice suddenly distant. “You’re pointed in the right direction. The future. That’s what we’re all of us here supposed to be thinking about.”

  He w
aved his arm to indicate the room, the steady sounds of sleep issuing from the dozen other beds floating in the tarpaper darkness.

  “I have a favor to ask,” he said, lifting a silver object from his lap.

  I saw in the flickering candlelight that it was shaped like a small flute, and intricately engraved. Some religious article, I supposed, though I’d never seen anything like it.

  “You don’t know what this is, do you?” he asked, a slightly odd look on his face.

  I gave an almost imperceptible shake of my head. I knew that, through this little gesture, I was revealing more about myself than the etiquette at the Internment Center generally allowed—the second and most important unspoken rule: no stirring the ashes of the past.

  We were all Jews, or appeared to be—whether from enemy or collaborator states: Germany, Italy, France. It was generally understood that our internment was a formality; the residents saw themselves as refugees and were treated that way by the staff.

  But I knew that I stood out among my fellow internees. There was the matter of my looks but also, I sensed, something about my deeper being that aroused discreet curiosity. Here, now, was another of those little queries I’d become accustomed to. Not knowing what else to do, I allowed the ripple of revelation—that I had no knowledge of Jewish rituals or customs.

  “It’s called a yad,” Oskar continued. “It’s used as part of the ceremony for bringing the Sabbath to a close. My grandmother used to carry this around with her—she wore an old blue cardigan, I would see the tip of it poking out of the pocket. She’d brought it to Germany with her when she fled Poland—the pogroms—forty years ago. I think she believed it protected her.”

  I remember the way my friend stared at the pointed silver object, as if imploring it to yield some answer.

  “I grabbed it—I don’t know why—when I left. Perhaps I shouldn’t have. I don’t know how I managed to hang onto it …” His voice was barely audible. The candle was almost burned to nothing. “When I used to play the piano on Shabbat, my grandmother would pace back and forth by the door of the music room, muttering to herself in Yiddish. You’ve forgotten who you are! she would say. What does any of it matter if you’ve forgotten who you are?”

  Oskar crossed one knee over the other and studied his foot, his face clenched in private thought.

  “She was always so afraid. I hate to say it, but it disgusted me.”

  Now he leaned so close that shivering under the thin blanket I could see tiny beads of sweat high on his forehead where his thick hair sprouted.

  “You don’t know about that kind of fear, do you?” he asked, an urgent glow in his eyes.

  “I’m not sure I know what you mean,” I replied.

  My friend’s shoulders sagged; his eyes went dull. “Forgive me,” he murmured.

  I remained very still, I remember staring down at the worn border of the sheet peeking out from under the blanket. My friend cast his eyes hesitantly around, as if discovering for the first time his whereabouts. The tuneless music that had poured from Oskar’s fingers had stopped; his strong hands lay crumpled on his thighs.

  “When I heard you were leaving, it made sense. I can’t explain it, but I realized that all this time, I’d been imagining that you were going to lead the way out. Not just for me, but for all of us.”

  Imperceptibly, the deep breathing around us altered. It was as if the collective dreaming of the sleeping residents had simultaneously ceased, leaving the room adrift in the shallow pause between sleep and wakefulness.

  “Take this,” Oskar said, pressing the pointed silver rod into my hands. “I’m not asking you to remember anything about it. Not my grandmother, not me: not her fleeing from Poland to Germany or me fleeing Germany for here.”

  “What do you want,” I asked softly. “What is it you want me to do?”

  “They’re not your memories. I know it’s crazy, superstitious, I don’t know what. Just take it. I believe it will bring you luck.”

  Mr. Harcourt, being the man of influence he was, was able to provide the necessary assurances and guarantees to gain my release from the Internment Center. And in offering to take me into his venerable financial institution, Harcourt and Goode, it was clear there was more to it than a passing altruistic whim. Clearly, for the Harcourts, I was stepping into the shoes of their dead son, whom I so uncannily, impossibly resembled.

  You might think that my precipitous success in the company was spurred by a desire to repay my hosts and mentors for their extreme generosity and faith. I wish I could claim this as a motive. The truth is, I was driven by what felt like a demon: ugly and vengeful, greedy and frothing with lust. A demon with appetites I did not understand or care to understand. The effects of my success, however, gratified my new “family” as if my efforts were aimed solely at this end. This pleased me, as they were kind souls and deserved some rewards for the belief they had placed in me.

  Two months before sailing for New York, I paid a visit to the city Deed Poll office to change my name. When the clerk remarked, “Oh, a refugee—refugees often request a name change,” he seemed to pointedly, rudely eye the expensive cloth of my suit. When I spoke, the name Harcourt fell from my lips: as if it were meant to be, as if it were already fully mine.

  But when I leaned over to sign my new name, it came as some surprise to find myself prefacing Harcourt, the name of my patron, which had rung out over the generations in the House of Lords, with Oscar, the anglicized spelling of my friend’s German name, not particularly Jewish in character, and yet steeped in the Jewishness of his family history. In snatching my old friend’s name, I gave birth to a peculiar hybrid that the real Oskar would surely have cringed to hear. Without his knowledge, without his permission. And a deeper shame, still: that I’d made a point of not keeping in touch. That I’d taken the yad he’d asked me to keep, pillaged the luck that had come with it—yes, the paintings again, they tighten around my neck like a noose—and then sloughed Oskar off as quickly, as silently, as I had all the rest.

  The search was over. I could scarcely hang on to this fact. It slipped through my fingers like sand. I stared at the papers littering my desk, rested my head on my arms for a moment in the hope of clearing my head. I must have dozed off. Wallace’s firm rap on the door roused me. I will not quickly forget the ashen look of resolve with which he greeted me. In the years I have known him, I do not believe Wallace has ever before issued me a direct instruction: advice, certainly, a casual suggestion phrased with his customary tact in the form of a tentative if pointed question, but never more than that. So, when he announced that he had taken the liberty of packing my bags, and had brought the car around to the back of the house where it now sat idling, I searched his face, finding nothing there that might lead me to question his judgment, then quickly set about gathering the papers and files from my desk.

  “Will you really be needing those, sir?” Wallace asked.

  I nodded, packed what I could of them into my briefcase, passing over the black binder with the gold grinning teeth that still lay unopened on the end table, and followed Wallace through the door, taking care not to glance back at the room where so much and so little had taken place.

  Wallace appears to know what he’s doing. He’s taken care of everything to the last detail. He must have been planning this for some time. Outside, it is pitch dark; the car seems to be moving in complete silence.

  * * *

  I have been writing in this notebook now for some weeks—since the unwanted visitor first appeared at my house. I grabbed it, along with the papers on my desk, when Wallace appeared at my door to tell me that the car was waiting and that we had no choice but to steal away, as we did, like criminals. These last entries, I have penned as we speed along through the night.

  I know where Wallace is taking me; I’m not sure I’m up for the journey. But what choice do I have?

  Wallace is convinced that his scheme will take care of matters once and for all. I’m not so certain. To go along with it
would be to repeat myself in a way that has shown itself to be a failure of the greatest magnitude.

  And what would it mean to enact another erasure? To erase all I have been, all I have done, here, in Long Island, at my estate?

  What does it mean to cover tracks that were themselves a cover?

  It is now very dark outside. Earlier, the moon was fairly bright, but now it seems to have disappeared, and I can scarcely see the paper I am scribbling on; what I am writing is no doubt illegible. I do not mind this—there is no purpose to this scrawl beyond the slight relieving of pressure in my chest, and the distraction from all I have left undone.

  I can hear my trunk rattling in the capacious boot of the car. It surprises me that Wallace failed to secure it. But then, we left in some haste. The very trunk, it occurs to me, that I so carefully packed in preparation for the journey that brought me here, to America. (I have so few objects from that time; I could probably count them on one hand.)

  I put my pen down on the seat of my car. The darkness outside is whirring. I open the window, close my eyes, give myself for a moment to the cool moving air of the night. I rewind the window and sink back into the soft leather. From where I sit in the backseat, diagonally behind Wallace, who is steering us along at skillful speed, I can see the determined set of his profile. He has been a fine and trustworthy friend. It is a mercy to be in his hands.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Oscar

  Atlantic Crossing. September, 1951.

  I don’t see how the plan can work. Wallace, however, is resolute: convinced that his Man Overboard scheme—those are the very words he used—will take care of matters once and for all.

  My attorney, a trusted friend before I ever requested his legal services, is in on the plan; Wallace saw no way around it. He called him just before we left Ellis Park, waking him, no doubt, as the hour was late. It was my lawyer who suggested a five-year clause; that we allow some time to pass before the will is activated. Give the “heat” of the accusation a chance to dissipate. I realize we are putting him in a highly compromising situation, in effect making him complicit in my escape. This troubles me a good deal, though it is too late to undo it.