by Michael Pye
“Read it,” she said. “I have to get home now.”
“I’m not going to read this.”
Helen said: “We’re going to have to—”
Nicholas was round, kind, quiet; his form of anger was perfect stillness.
Helen said: “It’s important—”
“You do not talk to me that way,” Nicholas said. There was nothing at all in his voice except the words.
Helen stood up. “I met a woman called Sarah Freeman. I don’t know why she was crying, except that she mentioned a table. A table just like everything else that came from Berlin.”
Nicholas looked toward her, but not at her: she had become a gap in the light, nothing more.
Helen cleared her throat; she sounded almost nervous.
“Obviously,” she said, “we have to do something.”
He said, very softly: “Don’t you think I have longed to do the right thing? Somehow?”
She slapped the papers against the table. He didn’t react.
She bustled out of the house.
She drove back through a landscape ruled by the full moon, trick shadows, iced light. She didn’t see that she had done anything but remind her father of a reality: of Lucia’s past and actions. It was essential, obviously, to face all this: a matter of health. It was good, too: a matter of justice.
But her father opened his filing cabinets and put away the court papers at random, among the offprints and conference papers and thin carbon copies of old letters to colleagues. They had the bulk and faint gray of recycled papers; they were still obvious.
He poured himself cold water and sat down. Then he stood up again, and fetched a bottle of whisky and colored the water with it, a little oily gold settling in the glass.
He didn’t even know where to begin.
Helen had to know it was not always comfortable, or even easy, to put knowledge away. Sometimes you had to do it, in order to live. He couldn’t have spent fifty years being just the child of his mother’s crimes.
He’d known very young that he had to separate himself from his mother. He had the oddest memory of Jelmoli’s department store, a New Look fashion show, a little theater made with pale screens in the corner of a floor. His mother took him: a boy of thirteen. He was dressed up; so many of his memories of his mother involved a collar that grazed his chin. There was a string quartet with varnished hair, potted palms, little round tables with economical lilies; and the women, stalwart, serious, and the men who particularly did not smile at the girls even when they came daintily down the steps, print frocks and tipped hats, seeming just for a moment to be in need of a little judicious help. One girl caught his eye and he blushed ruinously.
That was when he knew, as he remembered. His mother needed his presence, so she’d be accompanied and respectable, so she could pretend; and he must never know how much she needed that pretense. From that moment on, he separated from her.
He knew he had not moved far enough.
“I suppose we’ll be the youngest,” Sarah said. “Everyone else will be eating chopped salads. They’ll be staring at the mountains and the mountains won’t be able to get away.”
So Peter Clarke was on his mettle, determined not to act unacceptably old.
He tried to see what she saw through the train windows. She let the city pass. She looked out at a fast river, without much interest. She saw the summerhouses put up at the end of allotments, little wood refuges each with curtains at its window, and her eyes stayed with the summerhouses as the train ran on.
She started to say something. She thought better of it.
They took the boat from Lucerne, drank coffee as it marked a zigzag across the black water, evaded a waiter projecting goodwill.
Clarke saw an eagle overhead. Sarah saw it, too, and frowned. She sensed all the grand romantic spirit she so much dreaded: bright air cut up with terrible crags, high meadows, dark woods, houses too high up and too far from other people for a proper social life. There were also stories of William Tell jumping overboard to escape old man Gessler, and walkways symbolical of Swiss identity: which, she thought, would probably be very well cleaned.
Clarke knew, somehow, he shouldn’t point out the eagle. Instead, he said: “I can’t tell what is rich and what is poor here. It’s very upsetting for an Englishman. I can’t even be a snob.”
This raised faint interest; he was relieved.
“I mean: those chalets up in the mountains look so picturesque, but they’re just for the men who stay with the cows all summer and make cheese. Then the streets, they all seem much the same. Some of them are more cramped, I suppose. Some of them have shops and trams, so I don’t suppose the very rich want to live there. But those subtle differences, the ones I’m used to—”
“I know,” Sarah said. She felt the need of absolutely anything that would sabotage the consensus, the perverse sense of flatness in among all these grand mountains.
“I talk too much,” Clarke said.
She shrugged.
“You talk a lot when you think someone is obliged to listen. At our age. We tell people stories.”
There was something she had to tell him if he was to be her ally. She owed him a duty of listening.
He said: “I could tell you a story. If you’re interested.”
He had settled himself like an old man in touristland, coat wrapped around him, looking out to the next stop: a rustic sort of halt, all wood. A bright gaggle of walkers disembarked.
Almost all his years, he’d gone walking: but it was always on the same paths, up, down, up, down, between the same rectangular patches of earth, one hundred yards or so one way, fifteen feet the other. He owned the ground with his feet.
“I was paid to look,” he said. “It’s called ‘roguing.’ You look for the variations—a pink patch on a yellow flower, doubles among singles, the dots on a plain flower. Things that are wrong, but that make them useful.” He remembered, though, the colors: every break and variant in color that plants can provide. He watched them, he chose them, he checked off the valuable freaks with metal labels, which were always blank. “You lift them after a day or so,” he said. “A fork in four places round the plant, so it comes up with a ball of root and soil. Then you take it away.”
“I loved my garden in London,” Sarah said. “I never spent enough time there.”
“It was my life,” Clarke said. “I was out there seven in the morning, seven at night in the summer. You just never know. You get little specks of dark on something brilliant, and in a year or so, you’ve got a flower nobody ever saw. You have to chase everything. There’s a love-lies-bleeding,” he said, “which came up a perfect dark Oxford blue, and we bred it true, and that’s how we got a red. That’s how it works. It was red like a ruby.”
“All those colors,” Sarah said. She shivered.
“It never made sense to people, really.”
“I suppose your wife understood.”
He said: “She got used to me.”
Sarah, having other things to consider, calculated how long it would be before the boat docked in a town with a railway station.
“She was in the church choir,” he said. “I was in the choir, too. And I rang bells. And so forth. I was always about the church. And Frances did know how to listen. And sometimes we’d be lying there in bed and her side against my side and we seemed like one body of warmth. One body.”
Sarah said: “Why did you settle for that?”
“It’s a long story.”
They had the boat to themselves now, just peaks, black water, and the steady progress to the end of the lake.
“But I did go back to Frances. I always did.”
They constituted a system, after all. Frances had kept the indoor plants, the pelargoniums, the amaryllis for Christmas carefully starved of water through the summer, the azaleas bent and tied into pyramids, the Easter cactus that flowered too late in glorious Technicolor red, the bulbs raised in a warm cupboard for church sales. Peter was in charge
of a practical garden, nothing else. Every year, when autumn settled morosely on the flat land, he’d start to clean out the weak and the dead, cut back roses to stumps, take out annuals which still had flurries of pale flowers in order to plant onions, crocus, broad beans. Every year, Frances would be out in the garden at the same time, trying to save this plant which was still pretty, trying to stop the surgeon’s work with secateurs and saw. She didn’t want to argue out loud, so she followed him in silent disapproval. She hated bonfires, whose heavy smoke stayed in the air long after the last flowers had burned.
“Once she broke six plates while I was out,” he said. “I never asked why.”
Sarah asked how long it was to Flüeli. He looked at his watch and told her: a half hour.
“I came to London in 1945,” she said. “I was Sarah Lindemann then.”
“You don’t have an accent.”
“What accent was I supposed to have?”
She couldn’t tell him what he most ought to know. She had to go sideways around the reality. She couldn’t let some great horror, hooked and beaked, break into their talk, not two old tourists talking on a bright day.
“I remember 1945, too,” he said.
But she went on talking.
London she wanted to like, even the heavy coal fogs in the night, even the ruins and the rationed food and the righteous drabness of the streets. She was, very likely, going to be there forever.
She was already not supposed to talk about the past. She could sense that. In London, the meaning of war was victory, and sometimes taking pride in having lived with pain; but mostly it was starting again, not remembering. She had nobody then who shared and understood what she knew. The pictures of the camps didn’t help; they shocked people into silence.
She had a tiny room with some friends of friends of her husband. At night she slept on the floor so the bed and chairs would hem her in, and in the morning she scuffed up her bed to make it seem used. She had nightmares about being terrifyingly free to open doors.
Clarke was right to wonder about the accent. Sounding German didn’t help. In some parts of London, they knew what it meant; but she took tea in a Corner House, with a lady’s orchestra and a serve-yourself bar of mean cakes, and people fell away from her: the wrong kind of foreigner. She was cut, and tutted at, forcefully. She heard people calling her a German, Boche, Kraut, Hun, alien, and not even quite to her face.
She came back and she threw herself on the wife of the friend of friends: Marje, a woman of huge certainties, a taste for motherly organizing. Marje said she knew what had to be done.
Sarah Lindemann disappeared.
At first it was a matter of language. Marje made her listen to the radio, Women’s Hour, Saturday Night Theater, a saturation of English, until the tight vowels and informal structures started to seem almost more natural than her German. In a sentence now she could get one word, two words as precisely right as someone on the BBC. Marje set exercises, had her sit at a little table to do them; Marje had a school at last. Marje stopped her when she slipped into a German construction or a turn of phrase or an order of words at table, and Marje’s husband rolled his eyes, but Sarah listened hard.
Then it was checking. Marje had proofreading work for a publisher, and she handed some to Sarah and then checked it. Sarah had to spot the details of everything that was wrong in another language.
Then it was invisibility. Sarah thought she knew all about this: she had stayed alive only because she went out of sight for so long. But the English kind of invisibility turned out to be different from hiding; it was a matter of not asserting yourself even as you queued for bread, or a bus. Everybody hid from each other.
Then it was being who people expect you to be: being placed. The peculiarity of her story was slowly wiped away; instead, she had a presence that required no explanation at all. A war widow, on her own, needing work. Sometimes, she wanted to shout at Marje, wanted to tell her that she had lived through so many years of denial and anonymity and not being able to be what and who she was and that she would not go on this way.
Then she went on, because there was no choice.
She found a job, thanks to Marje’s husband, in a tiny office in a little frock company off Oxford Street, where she pushed requisitions and reports into filing cabinets, and sometimes did a little typing. After a month, she was so used to the qwertyuiop keys that she asked Marje why she couldn’t just stay in the needle trade: a useful, quiet life.
“Such a waste,” Marje said.
“I don’t mind,” Sarah said.
“You’re just tired.”
“I’m going to be tired for the rest of my life.”
Marje shook her head and again she turned on the radio.
Sarah came to realize that she was now a moral example, and she had to do as she was told if she wanted her little room, the company of friends, some comforting limits to the whole world she had to manage and fight. If she gave up, she would be alone. And although she was now undercover, a spy on the streets, not what she seemed, she could preserve what she knew: the books she had read, the music she heard, what she knew about Klimt and Picasso and Chagall.
She could do it. After all, she hid some things even from Marje: like the way she kept rehearsing in her mind, like a speech she’d one day have to give, her wish to die.
Peter Clarke said: “We were nobody when we came back.”
“I knew Sarah Freeman. She could walk about London on her own. She knew where to go, and she went just where she was expected, and she did all the proper things. She wasn’t work anymore. Some days, she was me.”
“Yes,” Clarke said, not quite understanding.
“And it didn’t matter that I prayed at night, and didn’t sleep well. I knew how to manage the days, you see. You learn that if you’ve been underground for a while. And to tell the truth, I never bothered to contradict all the men in suits all around me because at least I was in a comfortable trap. I knew more than they did, and I knew how much worse it could all be.”
“What did you do?” Clarke asked.
She explained. She had gone to work on a Sunday paper, recommended as a literate, clever girl by Marje’s publisher friends. Those were eight-page-edition days when everything was cut to fit, when the open columns belonged to gentlemen who had just dined at All Souls and belonged to more than two London clubs. She was the not-quite-pretty little thing among the suits.
She read the proofs. For that work, she came highly recommended. On Saturdays, she shut herself in a small cream-painted room with coffee and the smell of strong cigarettes still in the air, and she read half the paper on narrow, inky sheets, and she cut what seemed wrong or fatuous, too long or misspelt. She read, usually, the cultural and foreign half. People could not place her exactly, but they thought she would be more at home with the cultural and the foreign.
“I remember,” Clarke said, abruptly. “Frances always used to read you.” Then he worried for a moment, punctiliously, about the pronoun. “I mean, she used to read Sarah Freeman’s articles, out loud. We never watched television very much, but she always read the column.”
“There weren’t many women on the paper then,” Sarah said. “All suits. All ties. All clubs. But television was like movies, and movies were a woman’s job like fashion. And I was a woman. QED.”
“You were very funny.”
The steamer settled by its last quay.
“I was a very good Sarah Freeman,” she said. “I had my friends, even my lovers sometimes. I had my house and my garden. I had a perfectly occupied life.”
She stood up, picked up her bag, took Clarke’s arm down the steps to the wide main doors.
She said: “You see what it means, of course. I take an interest in this table, in this Lucia Müller-Rossi I used to know in Berlin, and I’m back to when I talked like a German. I worked so hard to be Sarah Freeman and now I can’t be Sarah Freeman anymore.” The doors opened on the gangplank. “Do you see?”
At teatime
in Zurich, she was still distant. He tried small talk; she put on a perfectly adequate smile. He discussed the cakes, and she did not. She asked for one glass of water, and then another.
She let this empty busyness continue for a bit, and then she said: “You’re angry.”
He stared at her.
“I don’t know why you’re angry,” she said.
He wanted to say he wasn’t angry, not at all, but he didn’t want to lie to her. He was furious at hearing stories about the choices other people made; he wanted to talk about his own choices. He wanted her to listen to his stories, as he listened to hers, to establish some equal seriousness between them, or else she was the only one whose life was all about war, loss, pain, change, and every huge matter of life and death.
He fussed with a napkin.
“It’s that,” he started. He started again. “It’s not easy to say.”
Sarah smiled: the smile of a thoughtful, but over-occupied, nurse.
“I had to make choices, too,” Clarke said. “I knew a woman, saw her every so often. I was married. She lived at the other end of the country. She died, and I didn’t know for five whole months that she was dead. I just missed her phone calls at work. Officially I didn’t know her, so I couldn’t mourn her, and then my wife died, and I was allowed to mourn at last and everyone got it wrong and nobody wanted an explanation. They all thought they knew.”
“It can be easier that way,” Sarah said.
Clarke said: “You don’t have to patronize me.”
He put his napkin down.
“What was your name before you were Sarah Freeman?” he asked.
“Before?”
“It isn’t a very German name. And you were married. So either way, you must have had another name.”
“An alias, you mean?”
“No. Just another name. My wife had another name before she was Mrs. Clarke.”
Sarah said: “My name was Sarah Lindemann. I told you that. Before, it was Sarah Becker. I never had any other names.”
Jeremy called from Los Angeles, full of business. He’d seen one minor, aspirational star at home, two directors, a studio executive who definitely had money and two who wanted to make it seem they did. He’d been interviewed by an agent, which he found odd. He’d been taken to lunch at a proper industry grill by a minor museum director who wanted to stage an Anselm Kiefer retrospective; they ate only vegetables.
