Hannah & Emil

by Belinda Castles

  He peered past me to make out Emil in his wheelchair in the dark and rain. ‘It is no good for his health, you know.’

  ‘I believe he is past caring, Doctor.’

  He nodded, and drew from his coat pocket a box of Swan Vestas. He rattled them as he handed them to me. An odd, jaunty gesture, like children laughing in church. ‘Tell him he may keep them.’

  I watched Emil in the weak light from the building smoke his cigarette, which I had inexpertly rolled for him. It kept going out in the rain, growing heavier by the moment. ‘Thank you, Hannah,’ he said, and smiled as he threw the butt onto the grass. We stayed in the rain for a few moments. I held his cold, wet hand where it lay on the arm of the wheelchair. His fingers were permanently nicked from his years of working with his hands. I could feel those old grooves, like weathered wood. I wanted to tell him something but my mind was empty and my throat thick. His face was wet with the rain, his hair stringy and awry. His smile had gone. It had been only a brief interruption to the expression he had worn most of the time since he had come to this place, an appearance of having just been told something he could not quite comprehend. He looked—unravelled. I stared for a moment at his tired old face and tried to imprint it on my memory, his real face, how it was for me, not what I would see later in a photograph. I saw in it for the briefest instant the man who had stood under the window at the Maison du Peuple in his ill-matched clothes. Something closed like clasped hands, pressing together, at the centre of me. I saw that he was getting terribly wet, and wheeled him back inside.

  There was a commotion on the ward. The sister was running towards us, a nurse at her back, calling, ‘In the common room, Sister!’ I had a mad thought that we had set off some sort of alarm with our disappearance, but the sister rushed past us along the tiles, ignoring us altogether. The nurse reached us a moment later, flushed with news. ‘Sister is going to bring out the television,’ she said. ‘They’ve shot the president! Kennedy is dead!’

  Emil made a noise that I realised after a moment was laughter, setting off a coughing fit. ‘What on earth is there to laugh about?’ I said as I pushed him back into the ward to await the arrival of the sister with the television set. ‘Do you think it can really be true?’

  When he had finished coughing, he said, ‘I have outlived Kennedy!’ and then looked lost again. He liked Kennedy very much, especially since he had gone to Berlin. He had listened to him on the radio, and heard the cheering Berlin crowds, smiling to himself.

  The television arrived and people came from all over the hospital, it seemed, to gather round. We watched the news, the American newsreaders stunned, round-eyed, two of our nurses crying. For myself I could barely take it in. What might it all mean? It was troubling in the way that it made life strange suddenly, unstable and unfamiliar.

  I went home soon after to sleep for a while. I had barely rested since he had come in here, and the nurse told me she would telephone me if he looked any worse. I returned in the morning with a paper for him to see what we could find out about Kennedy, but it was all over of course. They even had the man who fired the shots. When I went back into the ward it was quiet, one old fellow snoring gently, the dirty breakfast trays not yet collected. Emil’s eyes were closed. This was how he rested, even though he was not one to nap. It was his way of ignoring the complaining old men, as he called them, of creating privacy. I so wish I could have afforded a private clinic for him, some quiet place of peace and calm. The National Health is a marvel, of course, but still.

  I sat on the plastic chair beside him, unfolding The Times, readying myself to read him the article. I glanced at his tray on the bedside table where his breakfast sat untouched. I began to read, ‘As the citizens of the United States mourn the violent death—’ I stopped. I don’t know how one knows these things, but as I looked at Emil’s face, waiting for him to open his eyes, I saw that the man I knew, beneath the skin, had gone. The moment had come in which it was too much, finally, to draw another breath, and so he had not. The newspaper crumpled in my lap as I leaned over him, crushing it between us, laid my head on his body, still warm, still mine. You are still here, Emil, I thought. I will not say goodbye.

  Later, I felt a nurse’s fingers close around my wrist. She whispered to me for a while, until I heard her and allowed her to lead me away.

  At home, I gathered the last things and put them in a box that he had made for me to house my passport and documents when I was not travelling, so that I could always find them. He had kept his bits and pieces in a drawer in his room. It was not much to stand as proof of a life. No papers, except for his notice of reparations from the German government, which stated that his wife was entitled to a German widow’s pension. An ancient copy of Grimm, in old German script. Two medals. A compass. A green tin plate with childish flowers painted on it. A small globe. I added to these things a tape. He had made up a silly song for me on our anniversary and sang it at the hostel, all the young people laughing and clapping. I could not listen to it just then and I am still afraid to wear it out or break it. When it is gone his voice shall be irretrievably lost from the world. And then I saw poking out from under the other things a dull silver key. I know this key, I thought, the layers of time clearing. I saw it again in my hand, held up under a streetlight outside a Brussels pension, and I found that my heart was beating as quickly as it did then, thirty years before.

  WEST HAMPSTEAD, 1972

  When everyone had gone, I realised I was free to do as I chose, to make my home where I wanted it to be, not where the fates decided to set me down. I found a flat that I could afford, and from which I could walk to the heath, and it is truly my home. My desk is in the window of my lovely, light sitting room and I sit at it and watch the interesting people that still love this part of the world go by. My desk and the dining table are covered in papers and books. I like to see them, to have them close. Emil would think it a disgrace. There is a bedroom for the boys, when they visit, amid their work and travels and busy lives. Geoffrey is here now, with his new wife and the baby girl. I hear them, the little one is crying, they make gentle noises and walk her about, as we did with him when he was small.

  This morning I took my daily walk on the heath. It is well into spring and the air felt clean and refreshing. I looked forward to Geoffrey’s arrival, with the new baby, my first grandchild, as I walked past the pond, and Mother’s old house, Mother gone too, not long after Emil. I walked past a young woman. She was smiling as she walked, either a little mad or brimming over with some new experience. Probably a man, but I like to think she might have just got herself a really excellent job, for which she was superbly qualified. After she had passed, and I was thinking of that smile and what it might signify, I caught the scent of the soap she used, an old kind, lemony in a very particular way, and I was flooded with memories of a hundred places. Though it was the soap I used as a young woman travelling alone, it was a whole life that rushed at me, and a thought: I have made a home in movement. That is what I would say about myself, about my life.

  I sat on a bench and looked at London, changed now, with that odd space-age Post Office tower. These past months I have spent separating the details of my life, itemising them, and now, sitting on that bench, they all surged over me together in an irresistible wave. I felt very weak, that I must eat, and so I stopped at the bakery on the way home for a wonderful buttery croissant.

  So, I find, I have just about finished. I have written it again. In all this life, I have at last written a book. It is not someone else’s that I have translated. It is mine. When I first ran home from school, saying, ‘Father, I know what the letters mean,’ and he put the chocolate upon my tongue, and I saw in my mind my name on the blackboard, the sweet dissolved and I began. Now this last sheet of paper rolled into the typewriter will be enough.

  This afternoon, after lunch, we sat on the lawn at the back of the flats, Geoffrey and his wife with their long hair, their odd perfume, their loudly patterned clothes, chatting and laughin
g, the baby between us. She rolled on her blanket, mesmerised by the movement of the trees above. I watched her, astonished by her toes, and her laugh. Emil once said that we should have more children until we had a girl, but two noisy, relentlessly curious boys were enough for me.

  If the young people were to wander off for a moment or two into the gardens, I thought, I would lift her up, stand her soft feet on my knees and speak closely into her ear: Little one, I would tell her, it is a gift to live life as a clever, beloved girl. Here is what I have to send you on your way: half a story, the half that is mine to give. Of the rest, make what you will.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I wish to thank the Australia Council for a grant that made the initial travel and research for this project possible. I would also like to thank Varuna, the Writers’ House for the space and time to write large sections of this book.

  While I have drawn from many sources for historical detail, I would like to acknowledge the use in the last pages of the novel of the phrase ‘a home in movement’ from The Holocaust and the Postmodern by Robert Eaglestone.

  Ivor Indyk and Gail Jones have read my drafts with enthusiasm and insight and have always given me something new to take into my writing. My publisher Annette Barlow has been a model of patience and my editors Catherine Milne and Ali Lavau have approached the manuscript with impressive care and sensitivity.

  My cousin Freyja Castles provided translation and company during a crucial early trip to Duisburg. On that trip, my grandfather’s cousin Helmut Schmitz generously shared his memories of our grandfather’s life, without which we would know very much less. He also made valuable comments on a late draft of the novel. Also on that trip, Mr Dzudzek of IG Metall took us to the memorials to the murdered unionists, including my great-grandfather Johann Schlösser, and told us much about this episode in our family and the town’s history.

  I am very grateful to my father Frank Castles and my uncle Stephen Castles for their memories, papers and photographs and for their encouragement in writing a fictional version of the lives of their parents. It must be very strange to read such a thing. Thanks too to Dad and Beth for the use of the Moruya house. According to Philip Pullman, ‘We need books, time, and silence.’ Thank you for those. For time and silence I must also thank the lovely Gail Shiach who regularly looked after my daughters while I was writing.

  To Brad Shiach and Ellie and Olive Castles for their unwavering patience and love: thank you. I never forget it.

  And finally to my grandparents, Heinz and Fay, I hope this is all right. Thank you for your story.