A thirst overwhelmed him. His right hand was not bloody. He traced a finger in the frost on the lamppost until it melted and then put his finger in his mouth. It was a tiny droplet on his vast arid tongue so he did it again and again until eventually some reached his throat. All the concentration of his body gathered towards the moisture at the tip of his finger, pressing upon his tongue.
His eyes were closing. Steel caps clicked across the icy cobbles. He could not open his eyes. The rhythm of the heels did not change. Quick, purposeful, someone was coming, for better or worse. He slipped down the pole towards whatever approached.
It was dark but changing. There was light against his lids and breath falling on his face. It took a moment to ungum his eyes. There was the boy, standing over him in the kitchen while he lay on the little sofa. Everything hurt. It seemed at first like an indiscriminate throbbing, but then he could identify gradations, places where it was worse. The boy studied him. There was a bandage, he felt it on his head as he shifted, another on his stomach, beneath his pyjamas. The boy’s face hovered against the indigo window. They looked at each other for many seconds without speaking, the boy’s long face making serious appraisal. He noticed after a while that Ava was at the bedroom door, watching them. ‘Hans,’ she whispered. ‘Let Papa sleep.’
The boy reached out a finger slowly and touched a cut above Emil’s eyebrow. His little nail hit new, soft scab. There came a momentary concentration of soreness around the boy’s fingertip where the pain gathered as though the finger was a magnet and the pain made up of filings. The boy removed his finger and the pain resettled in various pockets of his body.
He closed his eyes. When he opened them the boy had gone. It was daylight, a dull day outside, seeping in between the apartment blocks, and Ava was scrubbing the kitchen floor on her knees. ‘What are you doing?’ he said quietly, afraid to move anything.
‘Getting the blood out of the floorboards before the landlady sees it. She keeps dropping in unannounced.’
‘Come here,’ he said. She left the pink rag at the sink, washed her hands, leaned on the bench. ‘How did I get home?’
‘Someone knocked on the door and left you there. A man. I smelled his cologne after he had gone.’ She stood before the window, flushed from work, her apron pulled tight across her stomach, her dark figure a neat shape cut out of the grey light. She was a clean fresh thing. She did not want to come too close to his body, its smells and seepage, and yet it must have been she who dressed his wounds.
‘Ava. Sit with me.’ She bowed her head, remained in place, the table between them. ‘You’re angry with me.’
She was silent for a moment. ‘Why did you go? You cannot fight them! You should not be encouraging your father. He is not a young man.’
‘Father will always fight for workers.’
‘They are workers too. And they will win!’
‘No. They will only win if everyone gives up so easily. You fight them now, before they are too powerful. We will win. I know it. Please, come here. Everything hurts. Sit with me.’
She drew close, kneeled beside the sofa, looked him in the eye, the line of her lips straight, determined. She smelled of oranges and nutmeg. Where did she find these things? He leaned his head gingerly against her hair. ‘What did you tell Hans?’
She eyed the bedroom door, behind which the boy was supposed to be taking his nap, though he had been known to sit silently for an hour, sorting his marbles on his bed, making patterns in the dust on the window pane.
‘That you fell into a machine at the factory.’
‘My God. He’ll think his father is an imbecile!’
‘Better that,’ she murmured.
He closed his eyes, felt her weight shift from the sofa beside him, heard the rhythmic wiping of her rag across the floor.
He had been off work for a week when Peters came by at the end of the afternoon shift. The flat was empty but for Emil and he answered the door himself. He could move around so long as he took it slowly. Emil knew why the manager had come as soon as he saw him and so they did not discuss the matter of his job. He took a bottle of beer from the shelf, unstoppered it, poured out two glasses. They sat at the table. ‘Prost!’ Emil drank it back. Peters did the same, though only drank half the glass. Emil topped them up.
‘I hear it was brown shirts.’
Emil nodded, sipping the second glass more slowly. The pain was receding.
‘They will get theirs,’ Peters said so quietly he might not have said it at all.
Emil nodded again.
‘You were an officer, weren’t you, Becker? And decorated. Iron Cross?’
‘Second class. Two a penny.’
‘Not quite. In any case, you can organise men, can’t you? I have seen it.’
Emil laughed. ‘And yet I’m unemployed, with all my talents.’
‘There is other work to be done in times like these.’ The man’s voice faded as he forced out the words. ‘Don’t you think?’
‘Perhaps. But you know, I have a young son. My wife is already angry that I got myself beaten up.’
‘Then you have a future to fight for.’
‘Easy to say.’
Peters let out a nervous laugh. ‘Perhaps not so easy.’ He was sweating, though the kitchen was cold, the window running with droplets of condensation from the heat of their bodies.
Emil looked at him. He was Klaus’s age, more or less, but of a different class. He had no local accent. A neatly trimmed beard. He saw again the blood pouring from his father’s face, his eyes it seemed. He had no more recent image with which to replace this one, neither of them having permission from their wives to leave their flats. ‘No, not so easy to say.’
‘I know others.’
‘Yes, of course, there are the unions. The SPD. The communists even. And the Reichsbanner. They’re not taking it lying down.’
The man eyed him. ‘There are others,’ he said. ‘And other ways. There are soldiers, like you. Not everyone gave back their pistols.’
No one gave them back, Emil thought. But you need bullets. And something with a longer range.
Peters could see him thinking. ‘Thank you for the beer, Becker.’ He stood. ‘I’m sorry about the job. Perhaps your father can put you in touch with something else, something that fits your qualifications better.’
Emil pulled himself to his feet carefully, held out his hand. ‘Where can I find you?’
Peters handed him a piece of paper. ‘I play cards on a Friday night. Many people come and go. It’s a good place to chat.’
Emil opened the door, watched the bald circle on top of the man’s head weave a spiral down the stairs.
Hannah
PARIS, 1930
In Paris I slept in a narrow bed under the sloping roof of a tall apartment building in rue du Sommerard. The bed had springs that were coming through the ticking and by May it was sweltering under the eaves. I lay perspiring at night with the window open, listening to the voices and traffic spilling off the Boulevard Saint-Michel. The room was so small that the two-hob stove could be reached even when sitting on the bed. My neighbour Marie in the next room on the landing, a pale beauty with Chinese-black hair, also a teacher at the school, came in every afternoon and we sat on the bed playing cards on my counterpane and boiling eggs in the kettle without having to do more than stretch an arm out to the sink and the stove. When we let the whistle blow for the full three minutes it took the eggs to cook our landlady would tramp upstairs and rap on the door with her cane. But boiling eggs for tea, like living in these tiny rooms, was how we managed to live on our meagre wage, and so when she came to my door I feigned ignorance of French, one more stupid Englishwoman in Paris, and smiled haplessly over Marie’s shoulder like a simpleton.
One warm night, in my airless room sous les toits, after our tea of eggs and game of whist, Marie announced that she was going out. It was Friday and we only had Saturday morning left of the week’s teaching. That morning after class we had gon
e along to the office and been handed our little brown envelopes of francs, and so, I had hoped, we might go to the Russian restaurant on Saint-Michel as we often did and eat blintzes and drink Russian tea. Or I would eat a blintz and she would watch me wipe chocolate sauce from my mouth. She was careful of her figure. I hardly saw the point. Paris was a city where one walked and walked, tireless with wonder, and living in our rooms imposed a stringent exercise regime. When one came home at night and turned on the light in the foyer, it was then necessary to run up five flights of stairs before it turned itself off only a very few minutes later. I have never been so fit before or since.
The appeal of the Russian restaurant however was not merely in the desserts, or the borscht, which I found comfortingly similar to Mother’s; rather it was in the characters one found there. The proprietor was a fantastically ancient man with two silent middle-aged daughters with necks like swans and crumpling décolletages. They sat at the corner table and the father crammed food into his cavernous mouth, or did his accounts, or drank with fat criminal-looking men with shiny collars and the women sat, staring into space, remembering, we imagined, the beautiful rooms of their palaces.
Marie trounced me with a casually flung down card and a little shrug. ‘There,’ she said. ‘I win, Anglaise. Now, I must prepare to go out.’
‘But where are you going? It’s Friday! What about Misha’s?’
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘We can go next week. Jean-Paul is coming soon.’ She was already standing, my end of the bed sinking disconcertingly. Then she was gone with a little shake of her slippery black hair, as if to shrug off obligations to plain girls with no other way to spend a Friday evening than fantasising about Russian émigrés and eating wickedly fattening food.
A little later, as I sat on the narrow balcony in search of a breeze, the sky growing pale in the long evening, I saw her, five flights down on the street. A tall young student bent forward to kiss her cheeks. Four kisses, delivered slowly, his hands holding her elbows as though they were saucers. They strode out across the street and disappeared into a lane, his hand on her back, and I in a little funk jumped down from my post and pulled a comb through my tangled hair, preparing to go and see the Russians alone.
Later still, lying in the dark after midnight, I heard her return. The light fizzed on outside my room as she entered the foyer below, and her footsteps came slowly up the stairs. You won’t make it, I thought. Hurry. I had heard her complete only two sets of stairs when the light clicked off again. She continued at the same pace: step, step, step, no rush. In the dark room, the narrow bed, I imagined myself into her body, hand gliding along the wooden rail, stepping slowly in the dark, skin remembering the tall student, unable to quicken my pace. She was still climbing those stairs as I fell asleep.
The morning found me back on the balcony, shutters open to the city, the stone cooling the underside of my legs while the sun warmed my knees. A window box below was filled with red and white flowers and down on Sommerard there was a boulangerie on the opposite corner. Amid the flow of bicycles, carts and motorcars driving on the wrong side of the road Parisians stepped out from the shade of the trees and crossed the street for their bread. As customers emerged from the shop you could see whether they lived alone or in a house of hungry children by the number of baguettes and bags of croissants tucked under their arm or in a basket. The smells of Paris for me: those eggs boiling in my hot little room, geraniums and cooking butter.
The sun, slanting between the buildings onto my legs between the railings, slipped above the roofs and my hair and neck were emblazoned. This was a part of waking up to the world on these mornings. To sit and wait for the sun to warm my skin, listening to the sounds down in the streets, then reach back and boil the kettle for coffee. This morning I sat there for a little longer than usual. There was no sound from next door. Marie was sleeping off her late night while I let the sun warm me like an embrace.
All through college in Oxford I had dreamed of being abroad. I had got into Ruskin on a scholarship. It was not part of the university, but a college for the children of workers—I met half the future Labour Party among the teachers and students. It was a wonderful time in my life, filled with young people with all sorts of passionate ideas about the world, but even then, I longed to travel, to begin the grand adventure I felt was waiting. Anyway, when, after exams, a friend had told me that a new mixed school in Paris needed an English tutor, I had sat up all night while the others celebrated freedom from study and written a letter to the headmistress in perfect French, the wastepaper basket at my feet filling with discarded efforts. Ruskin College had lent me the passage and I had come to Paris the previous autumn, surviving a winter of feet-numbing cold, staying on alone in the apartment over a solitary Christmas, to bring me here to this May day, the trees full, my skin warm.
My friends had all by the end of exams found positions with Labour MPs or the trade unions and though I admired them I could not help thinking it a bit dreary to be moving to Leeds or Sunderland and pressing on immediately with the business of Labour politics. I had a more glamorous route towards social equality in mind. I would learn languages, live among the working classes of Europe and write about their lives, their writing and their education. I wanted to leave England, to speak in other languages, to transform myself from a well-brought-up English girl into a citizen of Europe, at home in a dozen countries. I had in mind days of toiling over a typewriter until the whorls of my fingers were coated in ink and evenings of attending parties for poor but brilliant intellectuals in worn jackets who smoked themselves half to death and drank wine in enamel mugs. If I had only known of the real writers milling about the place at the time! I would have stalked them in their cafés in every spare moment.
A knock came at the door. I was dreaming in the window, waiting for the kettle to boil, and jumped down quickly to pull on my robe. Our landlady, a woman who I imagined slept in her pressed Parisian clothes as I never saw her in anything more casual than a suit and high-laced boots, solemnly handed me a yellow piece of paper, a telegram. I wanted to refuse it. No, I thought immediately. This is where I belong. I have earned the right. But the piece of paper, as I knew that it would, possessed a higher authority. Geoffrey was the only one to whom I wrote. For him to splash out on a telegram augured badly.
Father v. ill, it read. Home straight away. Otherwise, regret. G.
The paper shook in my hand. It was still a month until summer holidays. I could not keep this job, nor spend the summer in Paris as an au pair as I had planned, if I left now. It had been six years, I realised, since I had seen Father. Outrage and shame did battle inside me, and I’m glad to say that shame won, though perhaps not by as much as it might have.
I poured my coffee while in the hallway Marie drifted along to the bathroom barely awake. Eventually she knocked quietly on my door and our shoes echoed on those interminable stairs for almost the last time. I waited out on the street beside her, bag in hand, looking out of the shade at the bright Paris street. Along came our carriage, the horses clopping slowly to a standstill under the low pale leaves. We bumped in our high seat down the avenues towards the school, all about us lucky people who were permitted to stay on these streets: to work, dream, plan, write. Beside me Marie dozed against the worn leather seat as we slowed on the gravel driveway. I shook her arm gently as we came to a stop in front of the steps of the grand old building, reclaimed for the children of workers, its plaster flaking, and the coachman climbed up and opened our door, held up a gloved hand to help us down. Our shoes crunched on the stones as we approached the steps. I felt the point of a little rock lodge in a hole in my shoe. I had to tread lightly on the step. It tapped, giving me away, as I went along the hall with its parquetry floor towards the English room, where the children greeted me with their ‘’Ello, ’Annah!’ for the last time.
Geoffrey was there to meet me off the tube. He stooped down to take my case as we met on the platform. He was tall now, implacable. His thoughts were his ow
n, like other adults. Somewhere in this young man’s face was the boy I had known. My anger dissipated as I took in his shabby trousers and worn jacket, his unwashed hair, his shoes as disgraceful as my own, his eyes distant, his fingernails bitten. To look at the distraction upon my brother’s face was to enter instantly a world of illness and imminent death. My separation from it, my life in Paris and before, at Ruskin, seemed artificial, dreamed.
We walked straight to the hospital at Hampstead. I had never in my life entered such a place. We were robustly healthy children, and if my parents had periods of illness, they kept them quiet. The long corridor smelled of school: disinfectant and a kitchen somewhere producing vats of unappetising stew by the gallon. Our shoes squeaked down the empty hallway as we went along to his ward.
At the end of a row of beds in a dim room lay a tiny man in a long white bed with a little head adrift at the centre of a large white pillow. Occupying the other beds was an array of unfortunate souls coughing and hawking. I looked back at the little man and saw that it was my father. Even his hand, wrinkled and small on the white counterpane, seemed shrunken. My dear father, the grand Russian merchant of my youth, whose desperate boyhood poverty was ever the fuel of his compassion and energy, had been miniaturised. It was as though he had been reduced to some earlier moment, had been brought back to a time when he had nothing and was nobody.
Geoffrey shook his hand. Father lifted his other slowly from the bed and laid it on top of Geoffrey’s long pink fingers. ‘Now, my Geoffrey. What did you bring me here?’ he whispered. This was followed by such a bout of coughing that a nurse hurried to his bed, giving me a stern look, and sat him up by wedging her bottom in beside him, arm around his shoulders. Father shook his head, shooed her away, beckoning me closer. His big wet eyes did not leave my face. ‘Is it you, my Hannah? Look. You are a woman now.’
Hannah & Emil Page 14
