Leontine Damont. Hannah sat and stared at him as the name came slipping off his tongue. Baroness Von Aachen, Daniel’s Leontine. Marie’s glamorous friend. Leontine von Aachen.
The story had gone on and on. How Charles had waited in Berlin cafés and walked in Berlin Streets, trying to find a chance to speak to her alone, working as a waiter, as a street sweeper, any work he could get, freed from service by the German authorities because of his tuberculosis.
‘Tuberculosis?’ she had whispered and Gerhard had looked at her in irritated surprise at the interruption. Of course, tuberculosis. After two years in hiding in Amsterdam, half starved most of the time, bitterly cold, in damp rooms, no medical care, how else should it be? Did he not have it himself? Did not half of Holland? Of course tuberculosis.
He had gone on then, as though she had not interrupted, telling how at last Charles had managed his objective which was to take the huge risk of speaking to the important Baroness von Aachen whose husband was such a pillar of the Third Reich, so busy a member of Adolf Hitler’s advisory staff, an telling her that he new her history, knew that her brother, her Jew brother of Amsterdam had gone safely to America, and that he, Charles, would, if necessary, denounce her for a Jew to the powers that be, unless she helped him.
Helped him. Such strange help it was that he wanted. To go to work in one of those camps to which the Jews of Holland were being sent. That was what he wanted, and she, terrified that the secret she had managed somehow to hide from the Nazis might be exposed, had been more than willing to help. So he had gone there, Gerhard said. Gone to a little village in Lower Saxony, not from from Celle. ‘Belsen,’ he said. A place called Belsen.
She stared at him uncomprehendingly, and he had leaned back and laughed, then again, loudly, the whisky rattling in the sound.
‘Well, it will be heard of soon enough,’ he had said and then had gone on. And on and on, until she could bear it no longer and tried to cover her ears, but he leaned forwards and pulled her hands away and made her listen.
She saw it all. The rows of huts, the people skeletally thin with eyes bigger and darker and even more remote than Gerhard’s staring at her so burningly across her familiar drawing room. People who would kill each other for a crust. People who despaired so much that they threw themselves against the high tension wires that enclosed the place and burned with a reek of cooking flesh whilst soldiers in grey uniforms laughed and watched and made ribald jokes about feeding the remains to the watching blank-faced hordes in the compounds. About the stench from the high chimneys that belched their greasy black smoke into the soft skies of Lower Saxony while the local farm workers went serenely about their business and paid no attention at all. About the women screaming as they were dragged from their children and pushed towards the waiting buses which had pictures of happy people painted on the blacked out windows. About the young women who were taken at the camp hospitals and could, would not, say what happened to them when they came out again grey faced and blank eyed.
It went on and on until she felt first numb, and then, suddenly, hugely angry.
‘You're a liar,’ she said, shouting it at him. ‘Liar! It’s not true. I don’t know why you're here, why you're telling me this … this fifth, but it’s not true, and I won’t listen to it.’
'I said the same,’ he said, and nodded at her, solemn as a child in school. ‘I said the same to Charles when he came back. I did not believe it could be true, but he had been there and he had seen.’
‘I don’t believe you,’ she shouted again. ‘I don’t believe you! How could he have come back to Holland to tell you? And how are you here? It’s all a mad lie and I don’t know who you are and why you’ve come to tell me all this wickedness but I won’t listen.’
'Oh, you can warm yourself with disbelief if you choose,’ he said, and now sounded weary. ‘I tried the same. I could not see how he could have made such discoveries and got away to come back to us, but Charles is Charles. Resourceful is I believe the English word. Resourceful. He worked there, you see. On the ovens. Would you believe, on the ovens? He wanted to cry out, he wanted to make the people there cry out, to fight back, but they weren’t people any more. They could not fight back, and where would be the profit in dying with them? So he scratched inside his throat with a pin, he told me, and spat blood, and the village doctor said he must go away from there, so he did. Resourceful, my friend Charles, I want some more scotch.’
‘No,’ she said, but he grinned at her and got up and went to the table in the corner and fetched it for himself. She could not stop him, for she was now frightened to do anything at all. A madman, come to tell her mad lies. Cold terror filled her legs and weakened her knees and made movement impossible.
‘Henk and I, still in Amsterdam, feeling good because the Dutch went on strike, you know that? They went on strike, our dull Dutch workers who only care for their bellies and their sacks of potatoes, they went on strike! The German soldiers shot some of them for their pains but they went on strike and Henk and I were in the middle of that, so proud, so hopeful, and the Charles came back. Back to Amsterdam, and told us it all and we said he lied. We too said he lied. And then the strikes … the Germans came and took Henk. I got away, you see. I got away.’
She said noting, staring at him, at the face now even more pale, but with tight spots of colour in each cheek so that he looked doll like. ‘I have to think of that, you know. I have to think of that all the time. I went to the organization and told them I must get out and there was a chance now after Arnhem. Oh! God, but I am tired!’ He peered at her, his eyes gleaming a little in the lamplight. ‘So tired. I left them there. Henk taken by the Germans, and Charles in the little room in Kaisersgracht, on his own. I could say no longer, so I left my friends. You hear me? I left y friends. Such a friend for such men to have.’
To her amazement she left a sudden stab of pity for him. She did not believe what he was saying, could not believe, yet she felt sorry for him.
‘And then in the little herring boat, sick as a dog on the North Sea there was a man, a sailor, and he told me the same tale. He had heard it from a seaman who had heard it in Hamburg. It isn’t only that place in Saxony. There are others, full of Jews and gipsies. Full of Jew and gipsies…’
He was very drunk now, standing swaying a little there in the middle of her drawing room and the thought, he’s going to be sick on my carpet. He’s going to be sick all over my carpet, and suddenly that mattered more than anything else. She got to her feet, awkwardly as usual because of her stiff ankle and said firmly. ‘You must go now.’
He peered at her a little owlishly and then, very solemnly nodded. ‘Yes, I have told you, and I must go. Charles said I must tell you. He said he will hope to see you again soon. Holland will soon be liberated everywhere, not just the south, and he will return to London, he said. I have given you the message and now I must go.’
To her surprise, he did. He put down his glass, now empty again, and moving with the studied care of the very drunk walked to the door and along the passageway outside to the front door and let himself out. By the time she reached the door after him, leaning on her stick, he was gone, walking along the pavement with his back very straight and very controlled, lifting each foot a little higher than was necessary, as drunken men do.
She watched him go, leaning heavily on her stick and thinking only of the way he was walking, and wondering, vaguely, whether he would fall over. But he reached the corner safely and turned it, disappearing into the greater blackness of the King’s Road as the moon, once more, slid behind a cloud.
67
She tried very hard, to pretend nothing had hapened. When Cissie and Florrie came home full of talk of the film, she behaved just as they expected her to, listening, smiling, making them their hot cocoa, saying goodnight, going to bed. But she lay awake a long time forcing herself to think of the work she had in mind. Mrs Jean Goldman’s coat and she was making out of pre-war brocade curtain, and Barbara Cohen’s parachute
silk wedding dress, anything to blank out the image of Gerhard De Jongh had etched in her mind.
But it was not possible to pretend it hadn’t happened, that he had been just a madman, come out of nowhere, gone back to nowhere, leaving no more than a wraith behind. Everyone she looked at in the succeeding says seemed to be overshadowed by that cadaverous face with the deep dark eyes; every thin child she saw in the street made her think of the children he had described in Belsen, every bent old man shuffling along the pavement made her recall the old men who had thrown themselves on the high tension wires.
Florrie and Cissie worried about her, asking anxiously whether he ankle was playing up again, whether she was sleeping, nagging her because she seemed not to have her usual appetite until, uncharacteristically, she lost her temper and shouted at them and there had been days of stiffness and unhappiness about the house, until she manage to coax them back into being comfortable again. But the old peace was gone; the shutting out of the war that they had managed for so long had failed and she knew it.
Eventually she did hat she had always done when she was distressed. She went to Uncle Alex.
His seventy-five years sat lightly him. He was just a little more lined and perhaps a little fatter, but not much. His hair was as white and crinkled and as thick as ever, his clothes as natty, and his tongue as sharp. He still spent half of each day at his Pall Mall office, keeping a close control on every aspect of his business. Theatre trade had fallen off in London because of the flying bombs, but was brisker than ever in the provinces and he had three tours traipsing the county with Rudolph Friml revivals and Priestely plays and was making money hand over fist. Even the restaurants were doing well, in spite of the continued shortages of food and in spite of his determined refusal to seek extras on the flourishing black market.
‘It ain’t so much I got an excess of virtue, dolly', he told her earnestly. ‘It’s just that it’s bad business. Sooner or later these shysters get themselves caught and then what? If I do it, I get labelled as another lousy Jew profiteer. Not me. I'll give ‘em what I can get for the restaurants and they'll have to settle for that. It can’t last much longer, this war. Then the food comes back again. The people want fun again and my restaurants make money again. Meanwhile I got this idea I might start a few dance halls. I think dance halls is where it’s going to be, you know?’
She had listened and laughed and told him yes, maybe he was right, dance halls were a good idea, and he had launched himself happily into plans for them. Now, when she went to see him, she found him surrounded by eager bandleaders all trying to convince him that theirs was the one and only outfit that could possibly open his brand new place near Tottenham Court Road.
She stood in the doorway of his office leaning on her stick and he looked up and waved jovially at her and opened his mouth to say something and then looked more sharply and said to the men clustered round him, ‘Later, fells, later. Right now I got some urgent family business.’ They had looked at her curiously and gone away, leaving her there with him fussing over her, leading her to a seat, shouting for his secretary to bring her tea.
‘So, dolly? Tell me what’s happened.’
‘How do you know something’s happened?’
‘How do I know? Fifty years you been my girl, dolly. Fifty years my niece, and she asks me, how d I know? So I look at your face, I see your eyes, I know. What more do you want? Diagrams?’
She smiled for the first time since Gerhard De Jongh had come into her life three weeks before. ‘No diagrams. Yes, I'm - look, this will take time. Are you busy right now? Shall we meet later? If you’ve got business.’
‘It can wait. Business never comes to no harm you keep it cooking a bissel. Those fellas, they want me more'n I want them, so they'll sit out there and they'll stew a little and that'll improve their flavour and make ‘em cheaper. Talking to you'll be good business. So talk, already.’
She talked haltingly at first and then more fluently, telling him what had happened, and, eventually, all that Gerhard had told her. That had been hard to start with, hard to get the words out of her mouth, but gradually, as she reproduced those painful images, she began to feel better, and she realized, suddenly, that letting it all out was having a cathartic effect.
‘I - I'm beginning to think his telling me helped him,’ she said. ‘I thought he was mad, vicious, imagining it, trying to make me ill, unhappy, but now … Please, Uncle Alex., tell me I was right. That this man was crazy? That for some reason I don’t know he was making it all up?’
Alex was silent, sitting behind his big polished desk and staring down at the cigar between his fingers.
‘You know, I remember the last time, 1914. The stories they put around then. About Germans bayonetting Belgian babies, killing pregnant women, raping nuns, burning hospitals. Your remember. And everyone talked about it, everyone said it was dreadful and told everyone else. And then, afterwards, we found it wasn’t true. Atrocity stories, all to get us stirred up. Not true. So, slowly, everyone tells everyone else it ain’t true and nobody believed it no more. You remember any of that?’
She shook her head impatiently. ‘I don’t know - what does it mater what people said in 1914? It’s now I'm talking about.’
‘It matters, dolly. You see, people don’t forget that easy. Last time it was atrocity stories all made up? Then,’ he shrugged, ‘it’s the same this time. That’s what I said At first.’
She was silent for a long moment looking at him carefully, her forehead creased but he did not look at her. ‘Uncle Alex! Are you saying - what are you saying?’
Now he did look at her, his old eyes a little rheumy and then managed a tight little grin.
‘I wish you got a about a bit more, dolly. Got to meet some of the refugees, you know? The ones that came here the past five years or so, the ones still managing to slip in. I meet 'em, you know? I'm on one of these committees, give a few shows for ‘em for raising money - you get the picture. And I talk to them, and they tell me things, about camps, about killings, about Jews being gassed, and I go home at first, and I say to myself, ach, Belgian babies on bayonets, that’s what this stuff is. Boobahmeisers, old stories told by sad people! Lost their money, lost their homes, got no one to look at them and say there’s a rich important man so they got to make themselves look important. This is what I tell myself at first. But then … ’
He was silent and she leaned forwards, pulling on his hand on the desk.
‘Then?’
‘Then I get it from the others. Refugees in Liverpool start telling me the same stories I get from refugees in London and in Cardiff and everywhere else I go to give them shows, and I begin to think. Alex, I think, you're being a fool. Maybe last time it was stories and there weren’t no atrocities like the papers was full of, but maybe this time it’s different. Maybe it did happen already, these terrible things. I don’t see these nebbish refugees getting together planning fancy stories to tell everywhere! These are ordinary people that have suffered so much they're angry. They sometimes hate each other as much as they hate the people they left behind and the people here they have to rely on. They don’t plot together, I say to myself. So I reckon the stories I hear are true. Got to be true.’
‘You knew,’ she said. ‘You knew? And it’s true?’
‘I knew. And I told you. I think it’s true.’
‘And you did nothing about it? My God, Uncle Alex, you heard all this, and from the people who’d been there and you did nothing about it?’
‘Don’t be a shlemeil, Hannah! What do you want I should do? Go get myself a train, a ship, hop over tho Berlin, Knock on Hitler’s door sas, "Adolf, Boobalah, you shouldn’t do such unkind things to my landsleit"? You want I should do that?’
‘But to say nothing, to hear such things and say nothing?’
‘Others heard the stories, others here who know the refugees, they heard them too, and what do they do?’
‘I don’t care what they did? What about you? Couldn’t you have -
’
‘Oy vey is mir, what does she want of my life? Sure I tried! I went to the papers, right? I tell the newspapers and much good it does me. They listen to me sure, the fancy editors. I'm Alex Lazar, so they listen and they nod and they tut-tut and they say. "Well, Mr Lazar," they say, "I agree if it’s true it’s a terrible terrible thing, but is it true? That’s the question," they say. "You bring me evidence and then we'll publish in our pages! But we got to have proof. You must understand this." And I ask ‘em what proof they want, there’s the refugees, go talk to them. And they say, "Oh, refugees," they say, "damaged people, they get a little mad in the head from their loneliness, they suffer a little, they tend, pour souls, to exaggerate. Remember the atrocity stories from last time," they say. So what more can I do. Go around telling you, telling my family, listen, in Germany the Jews are being exterminated like bed bugs? Much good that will do. And anyway, as editors say, and I have to listen to them, where’s the proof? I seen no pictures, no papers, no proof. Just angry lonely people talking of what … Ach, , what can I do?
They sat there silently for a long time and then she said, ‘Then this man, this Gerhard –’
Alex made a little grimace. ‘He sounds like the real thing. Another refugee. It’s always the same, dolly, in every generation. Jews suffer, and some get over it and use it and some are destroyed by it. Me and you, we were lucky. The ones that are here from Germany now, they're the sort that can’t do it. Most of ‘em.’
They sat therefor a long time in the darkening office, neither speaking. Hannah could hear the rattle of a typewriter from outside a mournful yet comfortable sound and beyond that the traffic in the street below. The thought of her house in Paultons Square and Gerhard De Jongh’s dark eyes gleaming at her in the lamplight and thought of Charles in a small room in one of the all houses that fringe the canal on the Kaisersgracht in Amsterdam.
The Running Years Page 67
