Second Violin

by Lawton, John

  He opened his eyes. He was in his study in Hampstead, stretched out on the chaise longue reserved for the analysands. His daughter, Anna, was standing over him.

  ‘The telephone?’ he said.

  ‘Made it through to the dream, eh? Yes, it was Alex Troy returning your call.’

  ‘You should have woken me. I would have taken the call. I have been trying to meet him since we got here. Somehow we always seem to miss one another.’

  ‘Plenty of time,’ said Anna. ‘Would you like to tell me about your dream?’

  ‘My dream told me there was not plenty of time. I saw the grim reaper. He had a bell rather than a scythe but I knew him all the same. I saw myself go from anonymity to fame to oblivion in the course of a rather large cup of coffee.’

  ‘Chastening.’

  ‘Quite.’

  § 39

  Hummel walked as far as the Île St Louis without opening his Baedeker. It pleased him to drift without words, without guidance, albeit in the right direction. On the Pont St Louis that linked the small island to the larger Île de la Cité, he opened his case and took out the Baedeker, looking for the address from which Schuster had written to him – Rue Mouffetard in the 5th arrondisement.

  He unfolded the maps, turned the book this way and that to find the Quartier Latin. He must have stood too long. By the time he found the Rue Mouffetard on the pink map he realised that he had been caught by a street artist. A man wearing a cloth cap back to front, a blue canvas jacket stained with pastels, sitting on a folding stool by the bridge wall, was rapidly sketching him in charcoal. By the time Hummel had folded the maps back in and was ready to set off again, the man had leapt from the stool to offer the portrait to him.

  It was accurate, Hummel knew. It was chilling. The man had caught the way he felt. The way he knew himself to be. The gauntness, the hollow cheeks, only emphasised by the big ears, the lines etched into his face by the months since the Germans marched in, the cold light of grief that had lingered in his eyes like impending rain since the death of his father. And to crown it all, shaving and washing and brushing had not prevented him from doing up the buttons on his overcoat wrongly. He looked like an overgrown child, clutching his case too tightly as comfort. He looked an oddity, big ears, big feet, wrong buttons. He looked like what he felt he was – another Jujf Errant.

  Honesty earned its reward. Hummel gave the artist a couple of schilling and took the portrait. He’d never had a portrait before, not so much as a snapshot from a box camera since he was a child – but if he had to have one he wanted one that was honest.

  § 40

  Hummel found the apartment Schuster lodged in. Halfway down the Mouffetard, up a staircase, above a bouchier chevaline. He’d passed two or three on his walk down the street, along with fishmongers, wine merchants, coffee shops and greengrocers. It was a street of bustle. In total contrast to the street of tailors he and Schuster used to live in. There, silence had not so much reigned as ruled. Noise was unwelcome. Whole days passed without the sound of a voice, the background burble of a wireless – often as not just the rattle of the treadles on the sewing machines. He rather thought Schuster must enjoy the contrast.

  Confronted by the landlady he kicked himself. What folly had led him to presume that Schuster would lodge with Jews? That he would be able to get by on the lingua franca of Yiddish? This woman – short, late-forties, dark hair done up in a greying bun – was about as Jewish as the pope. Madame Birotteau, that much he could grasp, and all she seemed to grasp of his was the word ‘Schuster’.

  She encouraged him inside, rattled off a few sentences of bafflement, and, seeing his incomprehension, picked a photograph off the sideboard and pointed. Herself and a teenage boy.

  ‘Mon fils, Charles!’

  Hummel deduced that he was her son. Easy. What he didn’t deduce was that she was telling him the boy would be home from college in an hour and spoke German. He accepted a cup of coffee, took off his coat, sat silent and nervous on a straight-back chair and waited for he knew not what.

  Shortly after five o’clock, a tall, pretty young man bounded up the stairs, dropped his books on the floor, threw his cap at the peg on the wall and began a fulsome account of everything that had happened to him since breakfast; the bus ride, the lecture, who he had chatted to over lunch . . . before noticing Hummel.

  Hummel stood, held out a hand and said, ‘Hummel. Aus Wien.’

  And the boy understood at once.

  ‘You’ve come all this way to see Manny?’

  ‘I’ve come all this way to escape the Nazis,’ Hummel said.

  The boy sat down, pulled up a chair, closer to Hummel, reassured his mother with a smile.

  ‘Herr Hummel, Manny Schuster has already moved on. He has been in London since September.’

  Hummel’s heart sank. Another presumption, for which he could kick himself. He’d counted on – felt as though he had staked his life upon – Schuster being here.

  ‘But,’ the boy went on, ‘his room is still empty. I could talk to my mother. Perhaps you could stay here, at least until we can make contact with Manny.’

  ‘I have money,’ Hummel said. ‘I can pay. It must be dangerous to take in Jews.’

  ‘Not yet. Jews are not popular. Foreigners are not popular in a country flooded with refugees. But I cannot yet say that it is dangerous to take in a Jew.’

  ‘All the same . . . I can pay.’

  ‘It isn’t about money, Herr Hummel.’

  § 41

  Madame Birotteau let Schuster’s old room to Hummel without hesitation. Charles Birotteau showed him up to the attic. A single white-painted iron bedstead, big enough for Schuster but short for Hummel, a hand-sewn cover in blue and white, a jug and bowl on a tiny deal table, a view over the rooftops towards the Panthéon and the Jardins du Luxembourg.

  ‘It’s a chilly room,’ Charles said, ‘but an hour before bedtime we could light the paraffin stove and warm the room.’

  Hummel wanted to tell the boy that for a week he had slept in a shed and for three nights had been suspended beneath a goods train. Chilly did not matter – clean and dry mattered. To be safe mattered. To be still mattered. For the whole world to stop moving around him mattered. But he found he could say none of this. He found that the power of speech had dwindled to almost perfunctory answers to questions. His capacity to initiate conversation seemed to have been abandoned in Vienna along with everything else.

  At ten o’clock, after a meal of haddock, cabbage and potatoes that left Hummel both silent and grateful, Charles lit the stove for Hummel and said, ‘Don’t let the bedbugs bite.’

  Hummel looked shocked, but said nothing.

  ‘A joke, Herr Hummel. A joke! Bedbugs in my mother’s house?’

  ‘Ja,’ said Hummel. ‘Joke.’

  As though he had forgotten the meaning of the word.

  The boy wished him goodnight. Hummel heard his feet banging down the stairs, then silence – only the odd sounds of the city wafting up from the street below.

  He looked around once more. Bed, chair, table, bowl, jug, window – noticed for the first time the chamber pot under the bed – noticed how in its simplicity the room was like a van Gogh. It was his room. Didn’t matter for how long, it was his. Bed, chair, table, bowl, jug, window, chamber pot. They none of them moved. In the wall by the crucifix over the bed was a drawing pin. Hummel removed it, pinned up the sketch of himself next to Christ, thought better of it and moved it to the opposite wall. He would get used to living with this stranger, the man he had become.

  He lay in bed, light out, wishing he had really brought a novel with him not just a dust jacket. Tomorrow he would change money, find a foreign language bookshop and buy something. Told himself he had never been able to sleep without reading. Then slept.

  § 42

  Charles warned Hummel that the black market in currency would cheat him, but what else could a man with no papers do? He said he could introduce him to half a dozen men who would gi
ve him francs for schillings, but that each would be as bad as the other. The rate of exchange would be lousy.

  The rate of exchange was lousy and Hummel took it.

  Charles said that perhaps they should go home now and write to Schuster in London. Hummel said perhaps they could go to a book shop first, preferably one with some German stock, and Charles led him to the Boulevard St Germain, to where La Hune Bookshop sat between the Café aux Deux Magots and the Café Flore. While Charles sat in the Deux Magots hoping for a glimpse of someone famous or literary or both, Hummel found the shop’s German section and bought a first edition of Der Steppenwolf (S. Fischer Verlag A.G., Berlin, 1927) by a writer he had never heard of called Hermann Hesse.

  When they got home Hummel wrote to Schuster.

  A week passed. Hummel walked the streets of the Quartier Latin, once ventured as far as the Champs de Mars and saw the legs of the Eiffel Tower vanish topless into mist, visited La Hune every other day and bought another novel, and, being a quick learner, acquired some basic French.

  Schuster wrote:

  11a White Horse Lane

  Stepney

  London El

  30th November 1938

  Dear Joe,

  So you finally took my advice and got out of Austria? Try to forget Austria, Joe, it is not so much a country now, more a memory. You will be very happy with Gabrielle and Charlie – a good woman and a nice boy – you may be very happy in France, but I am going to egg you on still more.

  I have a job here with a tailor in the East End of London, a Jewish firm set up by Poles after one of the pogroms. Kind people – I lodge with them too. The master, Billy, has landed a government contract for uniforms. Maybe the British are getting ready to fight after all? Who knows? But Billy says he can take you on, and maybe get the paperwork sorted to get you into England. You would be classed as an essential worker. What you have to do is get yourself out of France. You didn’t come in by the front door did you? I thought not. Then you will have to get some sort of paperwork. And with this I cannot help you. Charlie can. I will say no more. Talk to Charlie, Joe. Meanwhile Billy will set wheels in motion.

  Your father’s old friend and yours too,

  Emmanuel Schuster

  § 43

  ‘Of course we can get you papers,’ Charles said. ‘It will cost, everything does.’

  ‘Who do I bribe?’ Hummel asked.

  ‘Two people. An Inspector of Police, and his brother-in-law at the Prefecture. That’s how we did it for Manny.’

  ‘What does it gain me?’

  ‘A French visa, which would protect you from the round-ups the cops occasionally indulge in . . .’

  ‘Round-ups?’

  ‘They seem to hit each arrondissement with some sort of quota to fill. Find refugees without visas. Deport them. When they fulfil their quota they forget about refugees for a while.’

  ‘Deport them where? England?’

  ‘No such luck. Usually Belgium. They drive them to the border and dump them. Then the Belgians will jail them all for not having Belgian visas, and sooner or later they’ll all be shoved across the Dutch border in a giant game of pass the parcel.’

  Hummel nodded, quietly appalled.

  ‘And of course,’ Charles went on. ‘Manny had a passport. You don’t, do you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then there’ll be a bit extra for a Nansen passport.’

  ‘But they are for the stateless, are they not? For people from all those countries that seemed to disappear off the map during the last war. I’m Austrian.’

  The boy said nothing, waiting for Hummel to say it.

  ‘And, of course, Austria has disappeared now. Not so much a country more a memory.’

  ‘Joe, however much that hurts you as an Austrian, it doesn’t matter at the level of French bureaucrats and French paperwork. The visa will be real, the Nansen will be fake. Look at it this way, you won’t really be stateless on a fake passport.’

  § 44

  Alex had fallen asleep. To fall asleep after lunch annoyed him. It reminded him too much of the old man he was and freely admitted to being to his family but privately denied to himself.

  He could have sworn he had heard the telephone ring. It would pay him to fall asleep at his desk and not in the morning room in an armchair.

  The door opened noiselessly, Polly the housemaid peeped in.

  ‘Sorry boss, I thought you was ’avin’ another one of your kips.’

  ‘Another’ – Good God, was he making a habit of it?

  ‘I thought I heard the telephone.’

  ‘You did, but like I said I thought you was ’avin’ a kip. So I told ’em you weren’t in.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Some bloke with a German accent. Name like Frood or Fried.’

  ‘Freud?’

  ‘Yeah, that was it.’

  Bugger.

  § 45

  Schuster was late. Hummel sat with two dozen others on a long wooden bench in a cold corridor, in a cold, cold February, in a cold, cold, cold 1939.

  He had gained weight in the last two months, run through most of his money, learnt some French, and thanks to Charles Birotteau’s facility with languages, a little elementary English that went some way beyond ‘please’ and ‘thank you’, but not far enough to let him understand what was happening to him now.

  Schuster had insisted – do not sail into Dover or any of the coastal ports . . . ‘they have the refugee business down pat, you could find yourself in gaol or worse, on a boat back to Calais, before Billy and I have waved the right pieces of paper in front of them.’ So it was a devious route out of Boulogne on a freighter and into Tilbury in the Thames estuary. Hummel and two dozen ragamuffins, clinging to their respectability as tightly as to their suitcases.

  The man in the blue uniform stood at a high-legged desk at the end of the corridor, like the head clerk in a counting house, called out ‘Wixstein’, pronounced with a W not a V, a stain not a stein, and the man sitting next to Herr Wixstein had to nudge the old man to recognise his own name. He got up and before he reached the desk and the official, another man in a blue uniform had called ‘Hummel’ – and there were no two ways to pronounce Hummel.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Hummel said, hoping nothing in his inflexion sounded impolite.

  The man was leafing through the eighteen crisp pages of Hummel’s Nansen. Hummel knew the cover by heart, so much had he treasured it like a love letter since the day he had received it. He looked at the cover now, held up in front of him.

  ‘France – Passeport Nansen – Gratuit.’

  Now there was a joke, the Nansen had been far from ‘free’ – it had cost him a week’s wages.

  ‘No. AS4424 – nom Hummel – prenom Josef – Certificat d’identité et de voyage.’

  And that had been the beauty, the wonder of this fake – the word ‘voyage’ had almost moved him to tears the day Charles had brought the passport home in a slip of cellophane. Voyage, quite possibly the most beautiful word in any language that day.

  The official pulled out the visas Hummel had folded into the passport; a British Entry Visa that Schuster and his boss Billy had posted to him, and the French Residency Visa that he and Charlie had paid for with bribes. Neither was a fake, but he took more time over these than he had over the passport, but, then, apart from Hummel’s name, the passport was blank. He hadn’t been anywhere to get it stamped.

  ‘There are two men outside who have come to vouch for you,’ said the official. ‘They appear to be offering work and accommodation. So you’re in. One of the lucky ones. If I had my way you’d all be on a boat back to Yidland at dawn. But I don’t make the rules. I just enforce ’em. On yer way . . . you’re just what England needs right now . . . another Jew.’

  Fortunately Hummel understood not a word of this.

  § 46

  If one knew at any given moment the significance of that moment, would one behave differently or merely take notes?

  Confr
onted by the sight of two short men, one of whom he knew well, the other he had never met before, Hummel took notes. One look at Billy Jacks, master tailor of Stepney Green, and he knew. This was one of the moments that changed lives. And his changed.

  ‘Billy Jacks,’ said the scowly, fat-faced little man in the homburg hat. ‘We been waitin’ for yer.’

  His was accented Yiddish, but perfectly comprehensible to Hummel. Hummel did what he had done in Paris, stuck out a hand and said, ‘Hummel. Aus Wien.’

  The grip was tight, a big, muscular hand on the little man that went with the broad shoulders and the barrel chest. The scowl, which Hummel took to be merely the natural lack of upward inflexion in the facial muscles and the preponderance of five o’clock shadow, broke into something like a smile and the troubling hint of brutality vanished from his face.

  ‘Yeah, well. Billy Jacks. Aus Stepney. And the sooner we drum some English into you the better. My wife won’t understand a bleedin’ word you say!’

  Left to himself Hummel would have embraced Schuster. He had known Schuster all his life. It seemed at once natural and impossible.