by Alex Miller
‘So what did your dad do during the war, Max?’ she said and laughed. ‘You’d better tell me and get it over with.’ She laughed again and leaned forward to set the glass on the coffee table, then sank back into the couch. Nursing the cushion at her breasts once again, she closed her eyes. ‘Just talk,’ she commanded. ‘Say anything.’
I stood looking down at her. The little dream of gentle companionship that she and I had celebrated together in the bar had quite vanished now, and might never have been. What was I to say for myself? I was born in central Europe in 1936 and my early years were fashioned by the war. My life was fashioned by the war. The war was something that had happened to this young woman’s grandparents, in a past as remote as Winifred’s grandmother’s Vienna had been for her. A past, in other words, about which it was possible to be nostalgic. The war was not something I could ever be nostalgic about. The war had trapped my generation in an iron cage of remorse and silence. ‘I remember the war vividly,’ I said.
Vita opened her eyes and looked up at me. ‘You don’t have to talk about the war,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean it. I was joking. It’s an Australian joke. Okay? Don’t be so earnest, Max, for God’s sake.’
‘I don’t mind,’ I said. ‘I’d quite like to talk about the war with you. I feel as if I could.’ She had closed her eyes again. Was I about to become an old bore who had drunk too much wine and would insist on unloading his past onto this poor girl? ‘The war determined my life.’ She did not respond. ‘It’s late,’ I said. Any minute now she would open her eyes and gather herself and ask me to call a taxi for her. Most of the whisky was still in the bottle.
I was suddenly deeply tired. My limbs, my arms and legs, my neck even, were weighted with sandbags, and my lungs were unable to extract sufficient oxygen from the air. I sat heavily in the armchair opposite her and took a gulp of whisky—the whisky which had been meant to set me on my way. After a moment she began to snore.
‘So,’ I heard myself murmur, ‘you are not dead then?’ Perhaps I was dead. It was difficult to tell. Had I blinked and missed the trip across the border? Had it all been managed so smoothly that I had not felt a thing—something like an open-heart operation? After all, almost anything can be done these days and it is difficult to know what state we are really in. Here I was, back in the apartment, with a beautiful young black woman asleep on our couch where I had sat myself that fatal evening. And Vita was beautiful. Very beautiful. There is no point being coy about it. I sat there sipping the whisky admiring her beauty. She was a meteor that had arrived out of the sky and struck me a glancing blow. Soon she would be on her way again, slightly deflected in her own course by this fleeting contact with the old professor in Hamburg. But where would I be?
She did not snore evenly but snuffled and jerked about. It was delightful. Winifred had also snored. Hers had been a regular, deep, throbbing snore originating like the note of a trombone deep in the back of her throat, or even in her diaphragm. It was a reliable sound and I had found it soothing and had for years happily gone off to sleep to it. Winifred’s snoring had been my lullaby. Vita looked older than her forty-one years now. The teenager was gone. Older? No, not older. Perhaps ageless would be a more accurate way of putting it. Altered, at any rate. Yes, she was altered. Not a meteor after all but a storm-tossed bird from a remote tropical island come to rest at last after a long and hazardous migration, wrapped in the soiled and broken fabric of her gaudy wings. But no, that will not do either. Vita was far too voluptuously constructed to be a bird. Even in this world in which the exotic has become the everyday, Vita was exotic. I am sure she would be pleased to hear me say it. The impression was not accidental, but was the result of a considered strategy. Sitting there on my couch, she was not of my world, and she did not wish to be mistaken as being of it. She did not belong in Hamburg. I do not mean that she was unwelcome in Hamburg. On the contrary. We may make strangers welcome and even love them and take them into our homes and into our hearts, but that does not make them belong. To belong is something else. Belonging, home, the meaning of such things is not to be settled through argument and the presentation of evidence, or even facts. Such things are enigmas and their truth is not rational but is poetic, their uncertainties not resolvable into facts and proofs. Indeed the less that is decided about such things in public life the better it will be for all of us.
Of course I was still thinking about her question: what did your dad do during the war? How could I not think about it? I had been meditating on the question all my life. Although my parents were not devout Christians, my mother and my sister and I knelt beside my mother’s bed every night throughout the war and prayed to God to bring my father home safely to us from the front. I retain an image among my collection of childhood images; it is of the three of us in the dim lamplight of my mother’s bedroom, kneeling side by side, our hands clasped, our heads bent, our eyes firmly closed against our doubts. That was us, the devotional family. There were even moments in those days when I believed in God’s mercy. It was a wonderful feeling. It was faith, I suppose. Childhood faith. For a time my prayers went straight to heaven. Later, something began to block them and they ceased to get through to Him. All my early experiences were of the war. I knew little else until I was nine. My world until that age consisted principally of God, death and an awful silence. If I did not speak about those things all the time later in my life, it was not because they were not continuously murmuring their lament to me, but because I was a member of a strict monastic order that required from its adherents a vow of silence. I am not speaking literally, of course.
When I was a boy I longed to know my father was an honourable soldier. What can honour signify to us today? What does it mean? Honour is like faith, surely. It is something from our childhood. A myth our ancestors needed but which as grownups we are content to do without. Honour is as much a part of history as muzzle loaders. These days it is something that mafia capos die for in Hollywood films. Honour is part of our nostalgia for a past that was never real, but which has its imaginary existence only in such places as Winifred’s calm, serene, civilised, ancestral Vienna. What a place! What a fairy tale! We are enjoined somewhere by some authority or other—it is probably in one of the Gospels—Honour thy father and thy mother. I did. I loved my father and mother. Winifred and I knew we could never say anything that would change the way things had been for our parents’ generation. It was too vast to deal with. Too awful. Without ever making a pact, we nevertheless permitted each other to keep silent about it. We expected each other not to speak of it. We respected our fathers and mothers by taking a vow of silence. It was a mistake, no doubt. It was fear and weakness that made us do it. We felt ourselves to be inadequate to the history they had lived …
I saw, suddenly, that Vita was watching me and knew I had been murmuring my thoughts aloud.
‘There’s nothing I can’t ask my dad,’ she said.
I refreshed her glass and my own. ‘A German could never have asked me that question,’ I said. ‘Not even as a joke. What did your father do in the war is not a question a stranger of your generation could ever ask a man of my generation in this country.’
She blinked and sniffed and drew herself together. ‘If you’d really loved your father and he’d loved you, you would have been able to ask him anything.’
I took a mouthful of the whisky and swallowed it. It had ceased to have a taste. ‘It was because I loved my father that I could not ask him such a thing.’ The possibility that my father had not been a good and decent soldier but had exercised some other terrible duty had been too hideous to ever risk such a question.
I got up to stand at the window. The streetlights glittered through the shifting web of the chestnut trees. It was raining. A young couple was walking home along the other side of the street. They were not hurrying but were sauntering, as if the sun were shining on them. He was holding his coat over their heads. She leaned against him, her arm through his, her head resting on his shoulder. Surely
he was telling her a story about their future together? Behind them the dome of the university library was silvery with the rain, as if it were the dome of an oriental mosque. Winifred and I often stood at the window with our arms around each other, looking out at the street before going to bed.
‘After the war was over,’ I said, ‘we held our breath in case anyone ever dared ask such a question as the one you asked me. It sounds a simple thing to you, but to me, to all of us, it was impossibly difficult. We just wanted to be viewed as human beings again. To be ordinary people. To be part of life and not have to apologise for being the children of our fathers. I’ve felt all my life that I’ve had to apologise for my existence. I’ve always known myself to have been on the wrong side. You might think that has been a small price to pay. And of course it has been. It was never that I didn’t want to ask my father what he did during the war. I couldn’t ask him.’ I did not turn around to see if she was listening to me. The young man and the girl were gone now and the street was deserted.
‘When he was home with us again after the war, in the evening, at the table doing my homework, I watched my father reading the newspaper by the fireside and I often imagined myself asking him, Dad, what did you really do in the war? But I could never say it out loud. In this little play of mine, my father responded to my question without the least sign of tension. Why, my son, I was the captain of a company of infantrymen. They were fine soldiers, a loyal company, and we behaved as good men do even in the terrible circumstances of war. After this reassurance, in my little play, we all breathed freely. That is what I wanted. To breathe freely. That is all. To know that our lives were built on something morally sound and decent and that the touch of a single question would not drop me and my entire family into the void. But it was an impossible dream. I knew, we all knew, that we had forfeited the right to such a dream. That perhaps we had forfeited it forever.
‘After a while my father felt me watching him and he looked up from his newspaper and asked me if I needed help with a maths problem. He was an engineer by profession. I let him help me, even though I did not find maths difficult and knew the answer to the problem in front of me. After he helped me he went back to his newspaper, and the little circle of our family remained closed, the seal in place. My mother looked across at me with gratitude, then she went on with her sewing; or she got up and gave the fire a poke and suggested we have a cup of hot chocolate before going to bed. Or, sometimes, she came over to me and stood behind my chair and rested her hands on my shoulders, and she looked over my homework and in her quiet voice she congratulated me, as if it was the quality of my work that pleased her. But really it was that I had respected our secret vow of silence.’
I realised I could hear the faint tinkling through the wall of Signore Ciciriello playing Bach on his beloved clavichord. I imagined the light around him thronged with the dancing figures of the old Italian master’s dreams. He was far older than I, nearly a quarter-century older, and his memories of war were more vivid than mine. I turned from the window.
Vita was watching me. She was holding the rim of her glass against her chin. ‘Do you hear it?’ I asked, entranced—I am always more responsive to Bach’s voice when I hear him muted by distance, as if I overhear him, receiving him not as something from my own world, but as if he leaks through to me from another, purer place of far deeper enchantment than this world can ever be.
‘I am sorry,’ I said, ‘that I never asked my father the question. I regret it. At the time of his death I congratulated myself on allowing him to die peacefully. He was holding my hand when he died. He smiled at me. We kept the faith of our silence to the end. We learned something about deep silence. But it was not the right thing to do. I still regret it. Looking back I see that to have insisted on knowing the truth was the least I might have done, no matter what the consequences. But I lacked the courage.’
She sat watching me for some time, saying nothing, her expression sober and thoughtful. She looked tired and strangely familiar, as if we had known each other for years instead of hours.
I said, ‘I have never told anyone this before.’
‘Your father must have known the question of his guilt or innocence was preying on your mind. It was cruel of him to remain silent. Why didn’t he speak to you? It wasn’t up to you. You were only a little boy then. It was up to him too. If he loved you, he should have reassured you. When he felt you watching him in the evening like that, he must have guessed what was really on your mind. Your mother too, she knew it wasn’t your homework. They must have both known. And what about your sister? Didn’t you talk about these things with her? Where was she all this time?’
‘You don’t understand,’ I said. ‘My father had survived the war. For men of his generation who survived there was no possibility of innocence. The pressure to remain silent was enormous, it was irresistible. Later, I turned my back on the present and looked away from the problems of my own times and the times of my parents and I lost myself in the endless beauties of the documents of the twelfth century. After the war it was no longer possible to believe in ourselves. There was an innocence in the remote past that we could never have in our own time. I could not face the truth of what we had done. No one could. It was impossible to face it. No matter how much we say about these things, no matter how truthful we are, no matter how ruthlessly we expose the terrible detail of those events, there will always remain something we cannot say. There will always be something left in the silence.’
‘What will it be?’ she asked.
‘We have no word for it.’
She sat there scrunched into herself, watching me. I could feel her trying to make up her mind, trying to decide whether she was to like or to dislike me. I very much wanted her to approve of me. I waited, with a considerable sense of unease, for her verdict.
She said, ‘It’s not a sin to have regrets, Max. It’s only a sin to deny having them so we don’t have to do anything about them.’ She fell silent then, thinking again. ‘Why you didn’t ask your questions and why you didn’t write your book on massacre is probably a good deal more important and interesting than what would have been in such a book if you had written it.’ She set her empty glass heavily on the table and heaved herself to the edge of the couch. ‘I’m right. I know I’m right. So no more bullshit. I hate bullshit. Get me a cab. It’s time I went home.’
‘You can sleep here,’ I said. ‘You can sleep in our old bed. I have a day bed in my study.’ She flopped back and closed her eyes. I stood looking down at her. After a minute she opened her eyes.
‘What is it now?’ she asked suspiciously. I must have been looking at her strangely. Before the night was over I wanted her to know the true significance for me of our meeting. In the morning it would be too late. In the morning we would be sober and it would no longer be possible for us to be candid with each other. ‘Before I met you today,’ I said, ‘I was planning to kill myself.’
‘Jesus!’ It was an exclamation of relief. ‘I thought you were going to ask me to sleep with you!’ She laughed, her laughter wild and filled with fatigue. She struggled into a sitting position and made an impatient, sweeping gesture at me with her hand. ‘So what? I’ve been going to kill myself heaps of times. Who hasn’t?’
‘I was serious.’
‘We’re always serious when we’re going to kill ourselves.’ She stood up, tugging impatiently at the elaborate layers of her clothes, pulling her skirts around and reaching behind her and jerking the various elements of her complicated blouse into position. ‘God I hate clothes!’ She stopped fiddling and turned to me. ‘The time to kill ourselves is after we’ve paid our debts, not before. Where’s this bed you’re talking about? Why do I always get drunk? Why can’t I do this for once without getting drunk?’
4
The promise
We picked up her bags from the hotel and drove in my old Peugeot along Grindelallee towards the airport. Neither of us had a lot to say. It was raining and the roads were black a
nd slippery. The morning traffic seemed to be particularly aggressive and impatient. I am not confident of my driving skills and was intimidated by the closeness of the other cars. I was very anxious that I might find myself in the wrong lane and would miss the turnoff to the airport. Vita was slumped in the seat beside me, her mood as dark and gloomy as the day. We were both suffering from hangovers and a lack of sleep. I have never liked driving and have avoided doing it as much as possible. Winifred was our driver. More than twenty years ago, when the Peugeot was new, she drove as fast as the car would go along the route to Lübeck and Travemünde, laughing and talking and looking around at Katya in the back, and pointing out interesting features of the scenery along the way. Winifred inspired confidence. I never felt nervous with her behind the wheel. And she never had an accident. Not even a small one. She was an exceptional woman.
This morning, with Vita sitting beside me, I was feeling a little panicked and was finding it a challenge to keep the Peugeot in the tiny space left to me by the other cars. It did not help my concentration that I was also grimly aware that in an hour or two I would be back in the apartment on my own, facing the problem of what to do with the remainder of my life now that I had pardoned myself from the death penalty. I did not fancy the idea of writing poetry, or making friends with the birds. We were waiting at a crossing for the lights to change to green and I was watching an old man cross in front of us. He did not have an umbrella and walked through the rain unaware that he was getting soaked, or beyond caring. The shoulders of his overcoat were blackly sodden. As he tottered forward, his head nodded and his mouth gaped, his watery eyes staring before him as if something terrifying lay in his path. His life, I suppose it was, that he contemplated. The miserable remnant of it that remained to him. In truth he was probably little older than I.
