‘Thank you, Geoffrey. I know this is a strange thing. I have to make a plan. Then I will tell Hannah, and Ava. I need to make a plan first.’
He stood at the window in Hannah’s room, the layers of the park—the water, the rows of trees, the hills—shades of deep blue. In another ten minutes it would be dark and it would all disappear. Down on the pond in a rowing boat was Hans, laughing as though he would hurt himself. Facing away from him was Benjamin, in his uniform, his hat on the boy’s head. He could not hear what Benjamin was saying but his head was moving around, as though he were pulling faces. He was glad Hans liked him. He was still a little wary of Geoffrey, with his big, gloomy eyes and worried mouth. The telephone rang in the downstairs hall. The ring went through him like the sounding of a raid. Don’t pick it up, he thought. I need time to think.
The ringing stopped and he heard Geoffrey’s voice, quiet, muffled by the door between them. ‘Yes they are, but you mustn’t tell her yet.’
He heard her voice, tinny in the receiver, from the top of the stairs. She must be shouting.
‘I am only telling you so you don’t call the police. If you must tell her something, tell her only that he has been in touch with friends, that they are safe. I don’t want her beating my door down.’ Another pause. He cut her off. ‘You say this as though I had something to do with it. Keep her calm until morning. I’ll see if he’ll ring you then.’ He replaced the receiver, looked up the stairs, gave Emil a weary shake of the head, and went out.
In the night he woke, rose stiffly from the sofa and went upstairs to check on the boy, asleep in Hannah’s room. It took a few seconds for his eyes to adjust to the dark as he stood at the door, and he felt that his heart had stopped as he saw that the bed was empty. He made himself move forward into the room to put his hand on the bed, to be sure, and tripped against something on the floor, a bony leg. ‘Hans?’
‘Yes, Papa.’ He had not been asleep.
‘What are you doing on the floor? Why are you not in the bed?’
‘I thought—it might not be clean.’
Emil was kneeling next to him, finding his shoulder with his hand. ‘What do you mean?’ He was still confused from sleep, from the dream. Is that what he had said? That the bed would not be clean?
‘I saw some things, in the old woman’s room.’
‘In Hannah’s mother’s room? What do you mean? When were you in there?’ He felt ill, short of breath.
‘When Geoffrey sent me to look for the trophies. There was a funny bible. And photographs of old people. There was one of those rabbis.’
‘What of it, Hans? Why are you sleeping on the floor instead of in a perfectly good bed?’
‘Father,’ he whispered, shifting against him on the floor, ‘they are really Jews! We should not even be here.’
He reached forward, thrust his hands into Hans’s armpits, lifted him clear of the blankets, set him heavily on the bed. He could just about see his face, big-eyed, staring at him. ‘There is nothing wrong with being Jewish,’ he made himself say in a harsh whisper. He wanted to strike the boy across the face, hard enough for him to remember. ‘These are people, good people, that is all. Don’t ever listen to anyone say those things. You are much too clever for this. Any one of these people would do anything to help you. Anything you needed they would give to you in a second. That is what you must always remember. Promise me. Always.’
There was silence. His hands were still under the boy’s arms. He lifted him a little, let him bounce on the bed. ‘Promise me!’
‘Yes, yes, all right, Papa. I liked Benjamin. I didn’t want to believe it.’
‘There is no reason not to like Benjamin.’ Emil took him in his arms. He wanted to apologise for the urge to strike him as he pressed his little head to his neck. ‘I like him as much as I’ve liked anyone.’
‘Me too, Papa. He gave me his compass, and I thought I would not be able to keep it.’ The boy was crying, but trying not to show it. Emil felt him will his shoulders to be still, shifting his face onto his father’s shirt so that he would not feel his tears.
The telephone rang again at six. He was at the hall table from the sofa in seconds. He stared at it for a short moment, lifted it to his ear. ‘Becker,’ he said.
There was a sound he did not know, a wailing, and then Hannah, speaking loudly to make herself heard. ‘Oh Lord, you must come back. I cannot do anything with her. She slept for a little while but when she woke she was worse.’
Then she was talking to someone else, in German. ‘No, it is not him. No, please, Ava, please calm down. We will sort it all out.’
That sound grew close suddenly. Ava had the phone now. It was terrible, but he had to listen. Eventually she spoke, her voice without any control, only just making words. ‘Bring him back or I will go to the police. And then I will tell the German police. When they find you they will kill you. I know who to speak to, to make it happen.’
Hannah’s voice returned. ‘This isn’t going to work, Emil. There isn’t any way for this to work. I thought perhaps you might be able to find a way, but you can’t.’
‘All right.’
‘You will bring him back today?’
‘When he wakes.’
He replaced the receiver. He could hear Ava’s wail until it clicked in the cradle. He hoped it had not woken the boy.
When he spoke the words, he had still been thinking perhaps, perhaps there is a way. By the time he was through the hallway and the kitchen and out in the wet grass, striding up towards the heath, wet hems whipping his ankles, he knew that there was not. He imagined making that sound that he had just heard, but it was not possible for him. He would instruct his body. He had done it before. It must simply be made to let go of one more thing that was too much to live without.
Part IV
Hannah
WINCHESTER, 1940
I appear to have lost a large part of the 1930s. There is little in my notebooks and the gaps between entries are dark hollows in my memory. It was difficult to write at all in that period. The first years in England were terribly insecure financially. We were continually moving about the country at the scent of work, and then there was the absolute windfall of our hostel in Winchester: a secure home and income. I was a refugee in my own country until we lived there. Still, those years were laid end to end with long days, rising at six to feed the young people, falling into bed after supper for sixteen had been eaten and the remains cleared away. I was too busy, too steamrolled by exhaustion to keep up my journals through that later part of the 1930s and so those years have tipped into the dark sea, irretrievable. I see too as I go on with this that writing came with movement, that when I was still, so was my pen.
There are a couple of bits and bobs clinging to the slippery deck. I remember disturbing and somehow comical news from Spain via Geoffrey, who ran a news agency in London dealing with information from the front. I do wonder whether it is Orwell’s book whose details I have retained though. I read passages to Emil from it I remember, following him about the place as he made the dinner or put a screw into a wobbly chair. Then there was the dire news on the wireless. We never knew what to feel. Poor Czechoslovakia, poor Poland. But perhaps, perhaps it could be over quickly, now that it had started. Wars make one selfish. Our main wish was that it would be finished before Emil’s boy had any part in it. He was still very young when the war began. There was time. The thought of it not going well for Britain we did not discuss. Neither of us would be treated well in the event of invasion.
Emil’s pale-headed boy is like silver panned from dust. I see him. He carried all our hopes with him as he dashed about amid our legs. One’s heart ached to look at him. Then there was the mother, the image of a pale reed trembling at the edge of any room that contained her son. Ava. I have not heard that name mentioned in thirty years and yet for a moment just now she was standing before me, here in the sitting room, with that look she used to give me. It said, ‘Whatever it is he sees in you, I assure you that
it will soon wear off.’ I was very young, and did my best to be polite. It was not her fault Emil had had to leave Germany, and there was great sensitivity about the child. We had to take care not to upset her. Emil was trying to convince her to stay. After they returned to Germany she sent her photos of us all together that summer, and that was the last we heard from her.
And the water. I could not forget that. It rushed beneath us unceasingly, day and night, the last sound one heard at night, the first in the morning. One felt cool, always, and a little damp, which was lovely in summer and oppressive in winter, when the aim was always to be warmer and drier.
The one blessing granted by the onset of war was that we occasionally had some time to ourselves, and I was free to restart my journal. I began it by fuming at Chamberlain’s spinelessness while Hitler marched into Czechoslovakia, and then, when we finally declared war, began to worry about almost everything: how Benjamin would fare in the RAF (though his job was to train other pilots now, thank God), whether we would be able to stay open and in employment and shelter, what the outcome of the categorisation of ‘enemy aliens’ might be. As it turned out they had Emil down as ‘B’ category, which seemed to mean they weren’t quite sure about him, but did not definitely view him as a fascist. In any case, we had both applied to work for intelligence, translating German intercepts or some such, but were rejected soon after his placement in the B category. Presumably they had fluent German speakers coming out of their ears, that they could leave two to waste.
Our guests were mostly London children after war was declared. Many parents were glad to have them out of the city, in case the bombing began without warning one night. But there were those who worried about our proximity to the coast, and vulnerability to invasion, and so the groups were neither large nor frequent.
That was not the only reason for the silence that dropped over the mill like snow in that first winter of the war. Emil could no longer make any kind of contact with those he had left behind in Germany. Though the boy’s mother had not been in touch, Emil’s mother and sister had gone to great lengths to keep him supplied with news of the boy. Now there was nothing at all. I remember the Itchen frozen beneath us, the mill silent, and he padding quietly through the house, down the stairs to the millrace, standing on the icy boards to pour water on the frozen pipes, or walking out into the snow without hat or scarf to fetch the groceries, with never a word. I was afraid, for myself as well as for his relatives. It felt as though I too were unreachably distant from him, across some impenetrable border.
In England we were both apart now from those around us. It had been possible to explain to people before the war that he was a refugee, even though he was not Jewish. Now we were adrift on a little island, separate from the townspeople, and not married, still. It was more important than ever that I not risk my citizenship. Apart from anything else, the youth hostel was run in my name. Here we were, with a home, a living: safety. My being British was our anchor, keeping us in place while all around us bodies were simply picked up and carried along with the surge.
When spring came, it was lovely, as it always is. It was as though we had some presentiment that the war could not remain such a timid, polite affair for much longer, that every English lane lined with wildflowers and sprouting hedgerows was old and precious, that this pretty little town with its students and cathedral could not remain as it was for much longer and so must be treasured in each moment of its continuing existence.
On the ninth of May, 1940 they extended conscription to include those up to the age of thirty-six. This meant Geoffrey joining up but he was given a special role with intelligence, reporting back to the government on conditions in the forces, and though it would be dangerous, at least he did not have to fight, or cross enemy lines. Mother rang to tell me about it, in tears. I suspected Geoffrey would love it. I imagined his long form in uniform doubled up with his notebook on a bouncing army truck or on the deck of a troop ship.
On the twelfth of May I woke to country noises, birds, a cow in a field, and one of those sparkling early summer days that England produces every now and then. I knew before I opened my eyes that Emil was awake. He always woke before me. This morning, something had lifted in him. He laid a hand on my stomach. For a brief moment, he did not carry his losses so heavily. It was the morning itself I think. I could hear a pigeon cooing above the rushing of water beneath the building. The scent of wildflowers in a little jam jar on the window ledge I had picked on my walk along the river the day before filled the room. When I opened my eyes, the sky was pale blue through the open window. The hostel was empty, silent but for the water below. I placed a hand on his shoulder, kissed the skin there, near the scar of an old bullet. He was older than I was, but still young.
It was unusual for us to be alone in the building, surrounded by quiet. You could hear for once the sounds of the town above the river: the milkman’s horse clopping over the bridge, the bells of the cathedral. We were alone for now, and we took a moment for ourselves, in that private, silent moment of the war.
Afterwards, as we lay in our small, quiet room, he took my hand and pulled me up from the bed. He smiled, the possessor of a secret. He led me down the narrow creaking stairs to the common room. We were naked, still. I was and am a small, round woman, but I have never felt self-conscious about nakedness. Perhaps that is something only the beautiful suffer. The sound of the water gave me gooseflesh. We stopped at the trapdoor over the millrace. He pulled it up by its rope, the water rushing beneath us.
He was smiling as he released my hand. ‘Don’t do it today,’ I said. ‘I’ll wash you. I’ll boil water for a tub.’ He laughed again, brought up the rope that hung down through the trapdoor and steadied his feet on the lip of the wooden floor. ‘One day you’ll hit your head and that will be the end of it.’
Then I was falling, the iron of his forearm crushing me into his body. The water seemed thick with the cold, as though we were submerged in a jellied ice. I couldn’t breathe. When my head surfaced I screamed, my lungs bursting. I have not used my voice in that way before or since. I was as alive in that moment as I ever have been. My legs and arms thrashed about, resisting the cold. And yet the stripe of his arm across my stomach and the press of his chest on my back were hot in the water.
He was laughing, one arm in the air, holding the rope. I made myself still. Our bodies flowed in the rapid water. It was dark under the building. Light crept beneath in little shoots, illuminating an inch of water here and there.
‘I read about a boy who had a heart attack jumping into a cold river.’ My teeth chattered as I spoke. I could not see his face. He kissed the top of my head.
‘Hold onto me, Hannah,’ he said. I twisted around. The curve beneath his chin was just visible in the darkness. He let go of me and reached a hand towards the stone stairs. ‘Here, climb up.’
My scrambling onto stone was a graceless thing, but he managed not to laugh. He followed me up, and fetched towels from the linen cupboard, and I sat naked and dripping and warm at the mess table while he made tea.
At ten they came. The knock on the door was gentle and courteous. He looked at me. We were peeling potatoes at the bench, and though I had not known before, I knew now. ‘Don’t answer it, Emil.’
‘What difference does it make?’
I wiped my hands on my apron and walked the length of the common room, all the chairs empty where our young people ate and sang, and the knock came again, a little sharper, more business-like.
On the steps in the courtyard were two policemen. Navy blue uniforms, bobby helmets. I knew them—we knew everybody in Winchester, running the hostel—and yet suddenly I did not know them. The younger, PC McIlray, coloured to his ears. ‘Mrs Becker,’ said his partner, PC Baldwin. Baldwin, according to Emil, was as often as not in The White Lion in the evening before dinner; he generally left late, the worse for wear. You could see the evidence of it here in the spring light: a mottled nose, pink threads in the whites of his eyes.
‘It’s Miss Jacob, actually,’ I replied. It really was a beautiful day. The blue of the sky above the rooftops was deepening and the wisteria that spilled over the brick walls of the courtyard was just beginning to open its lilac blooms. The stream glistened in the sunlight. Everything was fresh. I felt as though my heart had stopped.
He looked puzzled. McIlray gazed at his shoes. Emil appeared at my shoulder. ‘Mr Becker,’ Baldwin said, glad, I think, to be past the moment of dealing with the woman. ‘There’s time to collect a few necessaries, but you must come with us now.’
Emil stepped out from behind me. He was carrying my suitcase, the one I used for work. He did not have his own at that time in his life. He possessed almost nothing. He sighed deeply as he set down the case on the street and took me in his arms.
‘How long is this for?’ I asked Emil, as though he were the one in charge.
‘Just a few days, Mrs—’ Baldwin said. ‘It’s for his own good, with the way things are just now.’
I found myself shouting. ‘And how will they be different on Friday? Will Hitler have seen sense by then?’
‘Write to your friends,’ Emil whispered into my hair, and released me. And they were opening the car doors on the little bridge, and guiding him into the back seat, and driving away from the river towards the guildhall, around the corner, gone. I stood on the steps in the sunlight for several moments, dazzled, thinking nothing just for a moment, before my mind began its frantic whirring.
I wrote, I wrote to everybody, of course, and one thing about wartime: there’s no time to wallow. The day after he was taken away, twenty Land Girls arrived to dig for victory for the rest of the summer. And so I worked from the second I woke until I fell into bed exhausted, legs aching, to feed them, clean up after them, shop, do the accounts, help the laundrywoman who was now spending most of her time on her husband’s farm where they too were growing wartime supplies. It was as well the girls were here, nevertheless. The last of my translation work had dried up and the Home Office had not yet replied to my second application to do translation work for Intelligence, which I had, I confess, sent accompanied by a long and rather angry letter. If the hostel closed I should be destitute.
Hannah & Emil Page 24
