by John Lawton
He barged his way out, took his men with him. Rod looked down at the body, looked at Jacks, looked down at the body, at the posse of uniforms gathering around it.
Hummel was standing behind them. Poked his head between them and he too looked down.
‘Always they yump,’ he said and turned away.
Rod turned back to the room, a sea of frightened faces, and found his voice.
‘Who?’ he said. ‘Does anyone know who?’
And no one did.
Later, cold and miserable, craving a blanket, ramrod straight again between Hummel and Herr Rosen, Rod heard Billy say over him, ‘Ummer?’
‘Ja, Billy.’
‘You said “always they yump”.’
‘That’s because they do.’
‘Sure. All I meant to say was it’s “jump” with a J.’
‘Thank you, Billy.’
Later, Rod heard Billy start to snore and knew then what the music of the night would be, the bass rumble of his snoring underscoring the arpeggios of urine landing in firebuckets as the elderly got up to pee, one after another, all night – but then why should he sleep? When had he ever known two deaths in a day before, let alone two suicides? It was a recipe for eternal insomnia. The stuff of which dreams are not made.
§ 107
Roused at six. No breakfast. No Medical Officer. Shuffled back onto a train, unwashed, unshaven, bleary. Eynsford-Hill sticking his head in through the carriage window to say, ‘What you’ve got to understand is –’, only to be cut short by Rod’s curt ‘Fuck off’ and the train juddering into motion.
At Liverpool Pier Head Rod finally realised his brother had been right. They were headed for the Isle of Man. They lined up for the noon crossing to Douglas aboard the RMS Ben My Chree.
For a while, for the few hours it took to cross the Irish Sea on a calm, beautiful summer’s day, it was almost possible to ignore war, captivity and the rumbling of his stomach. It was bliss to watch land fall away, it was bliss to watch nothing but sea, it was bliss to watch new land come into sight. Even half a dozen Spitfires circling briefly on a training exercise did not dent the illusion.
Late afternoon brought them to disembarkation in Douglas harbour, another stupid sergeant bellowing at them. A miserable, downtrodden private to march them off again. A haphazard path across the town, up the hill to another ring of barbed wire.
It seemed to Rod that ‘camp’ was hardly a good description. The Army had cordoned off whole streets of seaside boarding houses. Simply rolled out barbed wire and declared what was within a camp. The landladies of these establishments had been told to pack and go, the houses stuffed to the eaves with refugees of all (enemy) nations and, in the absence of proper screens, the windows painted black. It looked bizarre. The bright, garish colours of the seaside punctuated by the lightless panes of black.
They stood at the gates and waited. Voices from behind the wire called out names to men in line . . . Manny, Asa, Yonny? . . . it’s me . . . Hans, Josef, Willi!
The miserable private on guard duty came out to talk to the miserable private who’d marched them up from the quay.
‘Wot? More? We can’t take this lot. We’re stuffed. Where do they all come from?’
‘They just marched up the hill.’
‘Well march ’em back down again, they can’t come in here.’
‘Maybe Port Erin will take ’em?’
‘Maybe. So long as they don’t come here.’
Rod could hardly miss this.
‘I say . . . do I understand that you’re moving us on somewhere else?’
‘S’right mate. They reckon this place is full.’
‘So . . . more walking?’
‘Bound to be some walking.’
‘No,’ Rod said firmly. ‘I’ll walk, and so will the younger men. But the sick and the elderly get off now. They’ve been travelling for two days. You push some of these chaps an inch further and they’ll collapse.’
The two soldiers exchanged glances.
‘But . . . that’s most of ’em. Most of ’em look sick or old.’
‘Then they’d better stay here, hadn’t they?’
The guard looked behind him as though seeking support, as though an officer might helpfully appear on the scene at any moment, but none did. Only a bobbing sea of heads still waving and calling out to those they recognised.
‘Alright, nobody wants any bother. But just the sick uns and the old uns. OK?’
‘OK,’ Rod said.
The gates opened. Rod called out in German that anyone who felt unwell or was over sixty should go inside. Men shuffled past him. Men who looked sick, men who looked old, men who looked neither and the two who spoke no known language. This whittled their numbers down to a handful. Nobody stood still long enough to be counted.
They marched back down the hill to the railway station, to a quaint narrow gauge railway, where pot-domed little tank engines pulled brightly coloured carriages along a three-foot track.
Their guard handed them over to another with a tired, ‘All yours, mate’ and ‘Watch out for the big bugger with the posh voice, he’s a trouble-maker.’
Their latest escort didn’t seem a bad sort. Grinning rather than smiling, but that was at least an expression and far better than the way the soldiers had behaved last night or this evening. He ignored the warning, turned his grin on Rod and said, ‘You’re one of the lucky ones, mate.’
‘Lucky. We don’t even know where we’re going. We just get bounced from pillar to post.’
‘Trust me, mate, in less than an hour you’ll be in heaven.’
The grin had become a smile, Rod could not but trust to the honesty of the man. ‘In heaven’, clearly, was no euphemism for meeting one’s maker – they weren’t about to be put up against the wall and shot. After all, the British didn’t do that sort of thing, did they? And as soon as the thought had achieved language in his mind he realised how difficult it would be explaining that to the Jews, the Germans and the Austrians on this train, who had fled persecution, who had fled camps, and probably did think they had leapt from frying pan to firing squad. They had seen two countries that they may well have thought above that sort of thing descend into casual murder and political thuggery. Who, prior to 1914, would not have considered Germany amongst the most civilised of countries? Why should it not happen here?
§ 108
It was like the descent into a dream. The descent from a dream. He would never be sure which. Steam from the locomotive wreathed around his ankles, the smell of a childhood summer drifting to his nostrils, smoke and soot mingling with the steam, the racing clouds across the sky, the heavy hint of rain in a summer evening, rounding off a day of glorious summer sunshine, the awed, gentle hush of Mitteleurope hissing behind him, soft as smoke and steam. And as the last puff from the engine dies away, the platform clears, and in front of his eyes the station name board, Heaven’s Gate. And a poem of Edward Thomas’s surfacing in his mind, Adelstrop, remembering the slow train stopping in obscurest Oxfordshire or Gloucestershire, the singing of a blackbird and of all the birds for miles around – and then a blackbird did sing, and it seemed to him he was wrapped inside the dream, wrapped in birdsong, wrapped in steam, wrapped in a soft, shlooshy murmur of enquiring Yiddish. How improbable was Heaven’s Gate? How much the stuff of dreams?
‘Told yer.’
It was the soldier who’d chatted to him on the platform in Douglas.
‘Not quite,’ said Rod. ‘You dropped a hint.’
‘Nah, if I’d told you there was a place called Heaven’s Gate, it’d ruin the surprise and you’d never have believed me.’
‘I’m not sure I believe you even now.’
‘Suit yerself, but don’t hang about. If you ask me it’s going to piss it down.’
Out of the dream. Rain and night. Out of the dream. Piss it down.
§ 109
It was a matter of less than a quarter of a mile to their destination. Rod did a head count to please th
e soldier and realised for the first time that they were down now to less than twenty. Mostly middle-aged. Indeed the youngest seemed to be made up entirely of those with whom he had shared a compartment on the journey from London. They’d lost the two Incomprehensibles at Douglas, and they’d lost Klemper. The five remained – Rod, Jacks, Hummel, Spinetti and the still rather enigmatic Herr Rosen. He shrugged off the word survivors – unbidden in his mind and not yet appropriate, and said to the soldier, ‘I make it nineteen.’
‘Me too.’
‘How many of us should there be?’
‘Search me. I’ll just tell ’em nineteen delivered and leave it at that.’
Rod and he walked side by side, down a dusty lane, thick with dog roses and honeysuckle, away from the station, the raggle-taggle band of old Jews trailing along behind, all a-mutter. They dribbled to a halt at two large stone gateposts. The gateposts had lost their gates, no doubt being melted down to make spitfires or dreadnoughts, the iron hinges stuck out like severed limbs, but two inscriptions remained. The newer read ‘St Margaret’s School for Girls. Est. 1921’, and the one above, its lettering black with age, the contrast between stone and carving almost dead flat, read ‘Heaven’s Gate, Convent of the Sacred Heart. 1866.’
As at Engels’ mill, makeshift gates had been knocked up from three-by-two and barbed wire. One half lay propped open, and in the space another infantry man stood puffing on a cigarette in lazy expectation.
‘Another lot?’ he said simply.
‘Nineteen, Ted,’ said the first soldier, adding a truthless, ‘All accounted for.’
‘Anything to sign?’
‘Leave it out.’
Then the soldier smiled at Rod, said a gentle, ‘Good luck, mate’ and walked back the way he had come. The reluctant gypsies stood at the gates of heaven.
‘Well, you gonna stand there all night or are you comin’ in?’
Their new guardian pulled the second gate wide and beckoned to them.
‘Straight down the drive, up to the porch, can’t miss it. Kettle’ll be on. I bet you blokes are parched.’
Rod said, ‘Are you not meant to escort us or something?’
‘No mate, it’s going to piss it down. I wanna be back in me box. You lot toddle off to Little Vienna.’
‘Little Vienna?’ Rod said, but the soldier had gone back in his box.
They shuffled through the gates, down the driveway lined with peeling plane trees, under a sky now heavy with the threat of rain.
Jacks drew level with Rod. ‘You know that thing you get in detective stories, when the bad geezer “lulls his victim into a” . . . a wotsit . . . “a false sense of security”?’
‘Quite,’ said Rod.
‘I got that now. It’s like a tightness in yer bollocks.’
‘Indeed it is,’ said Rod.
Rod found himself thinking of the novels he’d read set in grand houses, Jane Eyre, Mansfield Park – more recently Rebecca – but soon settled on the image of his father’s house in Hertfordshire, of the way the driveway had been shaped to create and withhold revelation – little twists and little turns that presented the house in fragments, a window here, a glimpse of roof there, until the trees fell away and you arrived at a full view of the southern side of the crumbling Georgian pile in all its ramshackle glory.
Heaven’s Gate appeared to them as huge slate roofs, occasional turrets, high, narrow leaded windows, until the last bend in the drive, the last overgrown plane tree and the clear sight of a Victorian mansion, clad in ivy – gloom and neglect registered so well in a single plant.
As Rod set foot on the porch, the first drops of rain pattered onto the roof above him, the door flew open and a disembodied, accented voice said, ‘My word, just in time. Such a capricious summer. Come, come. Inside all of you. We were expecting you hours ago. You must all be starving!’
And they were.
‘Mehr licht, mehr licht!’
A chandelier high over their heads, missing half its bulbs, flickered on. Rod found himself facing a small, bright-eyed little man in his sixties, white hair and a goatee beard – every inch the cartoon professor. If David Low had ever caricatured Trotsky and Einstein – and Rod could not remember one way or the other – this man would be the hybrid.
‘Würden sie Deutschen oder Englisch bevorzugen?’
Offering him a choice of languages in the same tone in which one said ‘Indian or China?’
‘I’m fine with English,’ Rod said, ‘although there may be one or two who . . .’
‘Quite, quite. Let us proceed in English until we learn of another necessity. Let me introduce myself. I am Maximilian Drax, of Berlin. Welcome to the Isle of Forgotten Men.’
‘And I’m Rod Troy . . . of Hampstead.’
‘It helps,’ said Drax, ‘and it will not detain us long, if we state for the record our city of origin.’
He gestured towards a chunky mahogany dining table that had been trundled in to serve as a desk. Behind it sat a young man in his late twenties, pen in hand, a notebook splayed on the table before him, smiling benignly at them all. Smiling seemed to be the order of the day. On the far edge of the table sat a steaming, hissing urn of hot water and another man, back to Rod, bent over it filling tea pot after tea pot, thoroughly preoccupied.
‘Arthur Kornfeld, of Vienna, keeps records for us. We all feel it helps to know where we all come from. To have something written down by us rather than by the British. Helps us not to . . . not to lose touch. A matter of identity. No small matter you will agree.’
Rod did agree. It was a matter of identity that had brought him here in the first place.
‘In that case,’ he said, perfectly willing to play the game, ‘I’m Rodyon Troy, also of Vienna. Indeed, I think you’ll find more than a few of us are.’
Drax stuck out both hands to shake one of Rod’s, beaming at him as though he’d found a long-lost son. Behind him Rod heard Jacks plonk his gladstone bag on the table and say, ‘Billy Jacks, Stepney Green.’
Kornfeld said, ‘It won’t hurt, you know. And we’re all in the same boat.’
Billy shot a surly glance in Rod’s direction, looked back at Kornfeld.
‘OK, OK, whatever ’Ampstead says. Abel Jakobson, Danzig. Now, where’s me bleedin’ tea?’
The man at the urn turned with the deftness of a canteen lady in a cotton mill, splashed tea into half a dozen mugs at once, and said, ‘Right here, Danzig. Hot and wet, as they say in your part of London.’
He handed a cup to Billy, picked up another for Rod and stared. Rod stared back. It was Oskar Siebert – Detective Sergeant of the Vienna Police HQ.
Before Rod could speak, Kornfeld did, ‘Forgive me, Herr Jakobson, but I ask this of everyone, do you play the violin?’
Jacks said, to Kornfeld’s bafflement, ‘Worked a few fiddles in me time, never actually played one.’
Kornfeld sought explanation in Rod’s eyes. Rod took his eyes off Siebert and said, ‘As a matter of fact I do.’
‘Oh marvellous,’ said Kornfeld. ‘We have been so lucky here these last few months – we have a good library, we have been able to set up a small printing press and an active university and a patisserie, but our string quartet has always lacked a second violin. Herr Troy, would you care to be our second violin?’
Rod introduced a pause, looked at Siebert and said, ‘A patisserie? Are they kidding?’
‘No, Mr Troy, they are not. And you’ll find the coffee’s not bad either.’
A new face slipped in beside Kornfeld. Rod heard Hummel say, ‘Josef Hummel. Vienna. I play nothing.’
Then Kornfeld was waving at him.
‘Of course,’ Rod said. ‘Second violin. Why not?’
Herr Rosen stepped up to the table.
‘Viktor Rosen. Berlin. Piano. Sugar in my tea, if at all possible.’
Rod beckoned to Siebert. Other willing hands had appeared to man the tea, a new burble of voices and questions – ‘Anyone here from Hamburg . . . Berlin . . .
Düsseldorf?’ They would find a corner to talk in. Away from the refugees’ tea party. Then he heard Kornfeld say, ‘Max, Max, do you see who we have here. Viktor Rosen. Viktor Rosen! Mein Gott!’
Then Kornfeld too was on his feet, both hands extended to grip Rosen’s as Drax had gripped Rod’s.
‘I heard you play the Tchaikovsky First in 1932 with the Berlin Philharmonic. I have . . . I mean had . . . all your records.’
§ 110
Siebert showed Rod to his billet on the second floor. A small room with four narrow cots, neatly folded blankets and clean sheets. It looked to Rod to be a pleasant, light room, a panelled rectangle in pale oak and cream paintwork – high windows darkened only by the rain battering against them. It was all familiar.
‘It’s crowded, but better than dormitories. This place began as a nunnery, hence there tend to be small rooms, some absurdly small – I think you might even say cells – rather than dormitories. I share with Kornfeld. Drax has his own room. This room is entirely empty. Pick who you wish, although I would advise against anyone over sixty-five. They tend to piss all night and you get no sleep.’
Rod looked at the pegs on the wall next to the door, leftovers from the recent days when the house had been a girl’s boarding school – fading white labels in tiny metal windows – ‘Rosalind Twist’, ‘Eleanor Twist’, ‘Margaret Mayes’. To which list he added his own name, seeing once again the row of pegs at his old school bearing the names ‘Troy, R.A.’, and ‘Bentinck, J.P.Q.’ and half a dozen others. Bentinck J.P.Q. had the requisite three initials of an upper-class English public schoolboy, and had been Rod’s best friend in a small world where best friends lasted forever. Rod had lost touch with him years ago.
It was all familiar enough to be reassuring.
‘Tell me,’ he began.
