All This by Chance

by Vincent O'Sullivan

  ‘I have things in hand,’ Father tells the table. ‘Each week I am attending to it. Ruth knows that.’ He feels more determined by being able to say so. Sentiment too has its part in firm intentions. It is Ruth though who says, as Doctor Guzmann nods in agreement, ‘Nothing will improve. The sooner one plans the better.’

  ‘But the turmoil of it,’ her mother says. ‘Can’t you imagine the sheer business of it all.’

  ‘Others manage,’ Doctor Guzmann says, and Uncle Sol nods. ‘Times change.’

  Ephraim folds and unfolds his napkin, turns its pewter ring as he has done since he was a boy. He is glad he had never married. He will read late, which always comforts him. But one stays alert, of course. One does not cope with things the way the family is coping without staying alert. He looks across to his brother, smart practical Chaim, and thinks warmly of how much he owes him. A good man, praise God for him.

  ‘Yes,’ Father assures them, ‘Ruth and I keep our eye on things, believe me.’ Ruth who sometimes thinks, have we left it too late as it is? There are so many more like ourselves, Mother reminds them, who are not to be panicked. As were the Blumhardts, the pastry people.

  Then one Friday Doctor Guzmann does not arrive for Shabbat dinner. He has sent a note apologising, there are unforeseen problems. Father too comes in later from work than usual, but in time to light the candles. He asks Uncle Sol to say the kiddush. The old man’s voice takes on a richer tone as he holds the cup of wine and begins, ‘Barukh atah Adonai . . .’ But the evening is already sombre. There is silence until Maria the Polish maid has left the room, and he tells the news. That Guzmann and his wife are in Riga. The doctor had permission to attend a medical conference, and his invalid wife surprised neighbours a few days before as she walked towards the car that she steps into as any other woman may have, not even a stick to aid her. They had spoken of it to no one.

  It is the deep hurt of his friend not confiding in him that so brings it home. Father says to Ruth that he could have been so—but leaves his sentence in the air.

  ‘Words run out,’ Ruth says. They are sitting in the office before walking home. How he has depended on her for years, yet looks at her now, this solid, reserved young woman, as if there is so much he has been too occupied to take in. He had never thought of her as clever. Not as her younger sister is. Sarah who so easily learned things, who at fourteen won a city prize for an essay on Goethe that was published in a newspaper. Sarah with her golden hair as if she stepped from a storybook. But it was Ruth who now took the two folders from the safe, the letters and details from shipping lines that he had left it to her to assemble, to have on hand, ‘in case’, as he had been inclined to say. ‘To have on hand.’ In case. With things so different now, quite suddenly. As if Guzmann leaving like that, without confiding, was a blind sprung up and the room quite changed. Back home he would stand at the big bay window and look down on the shining trees, the stretch of water, a boy breaking its surface with his skidded stones. He would turn and light the candles and take his kippah from the sideboard and nod towards Sol, and smile at Lisabet and sit beside her. A little later, after the news of Guzmann, he tells the family again it is as well to be prepared.

  It was a dull, almost silent weekend. The weather was broken. No one suggested a walk even across the little bridge and along the promenade. Mother lay in bed until late, Hannah read a novel, Sol played his gramophone in his room so it sounded as though Vienna may have been at the far end of the house. No one enquired about Ephraim when he did not show up for lunch. On Monday morning Father joked, as he and Ruth had breakfast together, and Maria remarked they had scarcely touched the cheese or the dark bread, ‘We might see an accident later in the day to cheer us all up.’ And as he took his black hat from the antlered hatstand in the hallway, and Ruth lifted an umbrella from a deep porcelain vase, he said so they both smiled, ‘And so the workers go off, to support the bourgeoisie.’ Downstairs, he pulled at the ring in the lion’s mouth to click the heavy outer door.

  ‘You and Sarah have more in common than you think, talking like that,’ Ruth told him. And so they spoke of her as they often did, as they walked towards the office and its workroom in the dull street near the Bahnhof, but seldom spoke of her at home. Vati liked remembering what a delight it had been when she was there with them, Sarah his favoured one, which of course a father never said. Smart as a monkey, hadn’t his own mother said that when the old lady was still with them, the child hopping round, reciting rhymes she seemed to learn out of the air? Lisabet saying the child was spoiled beyond belief, closing her eyes in frustration as she used words copied from her grandmother, expressions used by villagers, some of them uncouth. But Sarah making from cardboard a little hand with a pointing finger that fitted over the end of a pencil so Lisabet could run it along the lines of her book, the way the Rabbi did with his scrolls, and winning her over. ‘Yet broke her mother’s heart, I make no apology for saying that,’ Lisabet repeats, ‘I make no apology for saying that.’ The girl with her political notions and going off to Berlin, writing for papers it was not sensible to write for, but at least she changes her name and spares her family shame. Doctor Guzmann would sometimes defend her, ‘Her views may be extreme but they are correct much of the time.’ Sarah who now had not been back home for three years, and only then for an uneasy few days, when she had said to the whole family, ‘Most people I respect no longer believe in marriage. There are so many more important things than labels others put on us.’

  As she spoke, her sister had watched her admiringly. The courage to say such a thing as that, at the long table that since childhood had been the centre of their world. Later in their bedroom she laments to Ruth, ‘They are living in an old world there is no room for.’ And with what is both sadness and scorn, ‘They are still proud of what they think their country is.’

  ’You can’t tell them that though.’

  The sisters looked at each other. Ruth says, ‘You have no idea how bewildered they are. Uncle Sol with the music he believes is his Germanic soul. His war medal to prove it over again. Our aunt still reading Jugendstil to show she is modern.’

  Sarah laughs, ‘You could write a satire page for us if you only believed how sharp you are!’ There is a minute when they joke again and reminisce. Does her sister remember, she asks, when she can have been no more than four, and had run off to find Uncle Sol in the bank in distant Albrechtstrasse, run across the bridge and past the bookshops near the White Stork and further on, crossing the tram tracks and through the little square that opened into the great square itself? When it was known she had run off Mother had telephoned their father and Aunt Hannah who hated the embarrassment of a family that could not watch its children, the neighbours too, the friends from the garment shop, all running about, imagining—well, whatever it was they imagined—that the Hungarian gypsies had inveigled her, the Cossacks had arrived expressly to hunt her out, the stories that had scared their own childhoods! Neither sister wanting the spell to break, this casting back together, ‘And you were the one who found me. You coming up to me by the statue of the bear outside the Town Hall.’

  ‘You were trying to feed it one of the chocolates Mrs Rosenheim gave you as you passed her shop. You had asked her to give you one for Uncle Sol and one for the bear that had stood there forever and no one had ever given him one.’

  They lay in beds on opposite sides of the room. Once the light was off Sarah sat up on her bed, drew the heavy velvet curtain back from the window beside her. ‘The sky, and silence at the same time. You forget in a place like the capital what that is like.’

  Then they spoke of course of the child. There were too many uncertainties to keep her with them, she and the girl’s father quite knew that. Once Sarah had thought there was nothing she would so much want Mother to know, to know her grandchild’s name was her own. But can you imagine if I had? That kind of shame that would destroy her. Vati thought that too.

  Ruth heard her sister slap her pillow, in irritation was i
t? Perhaps not. She said, ‘What different worlds we live in, Sarah. I can’t even guess at yours.’

  ‘The communists are the only ones who will stop them,’ Sarah said. ‘Everyone else accepts.’

  ‘There’s so little I know of anything,’ Ruth said. ‘A handful of people who matter to me. A few ideas I am easily muddled with. Beyond that so much becomes a blur.’

  ‘Which is the thinking we must destroy,’ Sarah said. ‘Think clearly and everything follows from that.’

  Last thing before they slept, Ruth said, ‘When we get up I must brush your hair. I can’t imagine how you ever get on without me there to brush it.’ She had wanted to cry, but laughed to cover it. Sarah saw through her at once. She stretched out her hand in the dark, to touch Ruth’s that was there to meet it. ‘Even Marx admitted Jews are sentimentalists. We have to work on that too.’

  They walked together to the station. Other passengers leaned from the windows, but Sarah stood back behind the glass as two uniformed men walked the platform until the train pulled out. Last thing, before she had stepped up into the carriage, she pressed her sister against her and said, ‘You mustn’t worry about young Lisabet at least. Her father is as devoted to her as I am. It’s the best we could do for her.’

  ‘I wish you’d told me more.’

  ‘She’s safe where she is. They’ll look after her.’

  And now three years further on. ‘Almost four,’ Father corrected her. It was late in the day. He locked the office door before bringing the folders to the desk. He had told the foreman from the workroom to leave them for an hour, make sure they weren’t disturbed. A good decent man, Palachek. He worried for the workers, Chaim knew that. Orders had fallen this last year, but he was determined not to lay men off. What sort of people would we be? Orders from Berlin, for the crafted furniture that was still in fact so in favour, the völkisch designs people seemed to believe appealed to their earthy patriotic hearts. Chaim not unaware of the irony of it, nor Palachek either, who joked with him, ‘I hear people in uniforms like to stack their homes with it?’ And Chaim and his foreman close enough to smile, as they understood, without needing to declare it, there must be another reason for the orders dropping off. Zimmer, of course, Zimmer with his handsome house in the Bayerisches Viertel, a man cannot do better than that; who had taken the furniture for years for his chain of stores in several cities, taken the tables, the carved-back chairs, the sideboards, as much as they could send him, things he praised for their workmanship and craft from the workshop behind the office where Ruth and her father now sat. But in this past year Zimmer’s name gone from his stores, the friendship and business of years brought to an end with a brief letter explaining nothing, beyond ‘We regret . . .’ The new owners regretted too, there were commercial demands more in tune with the times. The first time Chaim had seen a business letter ending with a salute.

  Ruth sees how her father, within these last few days, has become more obviously dependent on her. Since Doctor Guzmann’s letter, delivered by hand by another medical friend. Not excusing himself, but explaining his leaving as he did without a word. He said for his wife’s sake, but also his own, he could not risk telling even Chaim, his dear friend. Things were worse than they had tended to think, bad enough as that was. He knew from a patient of his, a high-ranking officer but a decent enough man, that things soon would become much worse for them. He implored his dear friend to decide at once. He gave him the name of an agent who would most certainly do what he could, if he used Guzmann’s name. That was all. A simple S at the letter’s end, as if already Shalom might not be written. Destroy the letter when it had been read.

  ‘We will destroy these too,’ Chaim said. The folders of private correspondence, the letters from old friends in America, in France. As if, Ruth thought, Vati thinks by rushing now, he makes up for the time we have lost. She bundled the answers from cursory queries about shipping lines and sailing schedules, and more personal letters, a postcard that amused her, of a giant head at a kind of fun park, a brief note on its back from a distant cousin, saying ‘This is at the end of a street where the konditorei would make you think you were at home and not in Melbourne.’ Letters with postmarks from Manchester, the Bronx, Argentina. For years it seems Chaim had written asking questions, and filed the answers away until the day they might be useful. ‘Better to get rid of them all,’ he said, and Ruth assures him, ‘We are not being searched you know, Vati.’

  ‘You read Guzmann’s letter,’ he said. ‘Nothing is safe.’ She sees his hands move nervously. This is not like her father at all. And before he unlocks the office door—it has never been locked so far as she remembers—knowing she watches his hands, he tells her, ‘Don’t be disconcerted by that, Ruth love. My head has never been more clear.’ He has already telephoned the number to the agent, as his friend advised. He will hear back for certain within a few days. In the meantime she will go to Berlin. She will take a bank draft for her sister. This is not the time to talk of it now, but he knows more of Sarah’s life in the capital than Ruth might think. The draft is on an English bank. ‘It will provide for them,’ he says. ‘You must do everything to urge her.’

  It is arranged as simply as that. She would take the Berlin train as Sarah had last taken it three years before. Father holding his daughter’s secret, as Ruth too has guarded it. And her thinking now, the tragedy of that, how we are the only ones to speak of it, Mutti having no idea. Was that perhaps too why her father had so delayed, not wanting to leave Sarah? It is too bewildering a fact to think of clearly. The dreadful muddle we are in. The fear, even from yesterday, that rises about them like a tide.

  It is so much later than usual when they begin to walk back home. The workmen had left hours before. It worries Chaim what will happen to them. He will leave all that to Palachek, whom he knows he can rely on. By the time she is back, in a few days’ time, he says to Ruth. As soon as that, they will know what they are to do. It will not be an easy time. He will have told the family. At least she will be spared that. ‘The wailing,’ he says, with heavy irony.

  His daughter takes his arm, his hand comes across to rest on hers. She tells him, ‘It’s cold enough for gloves. You should know that by now.’

  ‘Shh!’ Vati says. ‘How often can we listen to quiet like this?’

  Uncertain times, the inspector on the train complains as he goes through the carriage, explaining passengers must change at Guben, nothing is as it should be. Ruth sits in a waiting room where an elderly woman next to her, who wears a brooch with its small hooked cross set between silver leaves, says the delay is a small price to pay to be prepared. A freight train rumbles through the station without stopping, its covered wagons stretching on and on. The woman says she regrets her husband passed away the year before, he would feel as she did the exuberance of watching their country rise to its appointed task. She mouths ‘exuberance’ as though it were a word she heard another person say and had been excited by. Her face took pride in sharing it. She offers Ruth a section of the apple she placed on a white square of cloth and cut neatly with a pearl-handled knife. Ruth accepted the small gift. She says it was early in the year for such fruit? She encouraged the woman to talk about herself. When asked herself was she visiting relatives, as the woman was, she says it was work she was coming to the capital for. An interview for a government agency. ‘They have encouraged me to apply.’ There will be work enough for all, the woman confidently says. Where there is order there is work.

  Once the train arrived they mounted separately. Ruth took care that they sat apart. But the woman smiled across the distance between them, and a young man in uniform raised her suitcase to the netting above her seat. Ruth watched the broad flat passing country, the fields ploughed and misty, the early November trees sketched against the sombre spaces between the tidy villages, the towns. It surprising her how frequently the red flags, with their white circle and broken lines, were draped at windows, on buildings, bright static flares. Yes, it had been too easy at home to
watch the changes in the streets, to hear the way people spoke differently and raised their voices or quietly said little, minding their own business. To repeat, as Vati’s brother Ephraim did, that things surely would pass. As if repetition made it more likely to be true.

  It was late afternoon when they arrived at the great station with its echoing spaces, the hiss and clamour of the trains, the slanting lights and the press of passengers leaving platforms, pushing towards them, the growl, as it came in on her, of a great city about its business. How timid, almost, how distant, Breslau seemed! Far more men in uniform too than she had expected to see—police, army, costumes that told her nothing but authority, watchfulness, there to protect. The gleam of leather, tilted cap-brims, boots, as if so much was smeared with oil, light skidding from them. She supposed it must be like this every day, every evening. Again, so sharply her sense of what a backwater they were in at home. How much you believed might be kept at bay once you closed the door in Schweidnitzerstrasse! It is all so like a performance that surrounds her, that one was caught up in. But the laughter too, her surprise at how many people laughed and called to each other, embraced as they met, held their hands high to departing trains. As she moved from the concourse she heard a band playing on the wide street, a procession of some kind, was it? But then as Sarah had written to inform her, in a note without an address or a name signed to it, there would be a friend to meet her, a friend who had seen her photograph, who would know the colour of her scarf to watch for, the coat too with its astrakhan lapels, its curved half-moon brooch.

  A woman now touching her sleeve, saying ‘Take my arm,’ as she stood by the glassed panels displaying timetables for the eastern lines. Saying her name is Carla. The woman so heavily made up, her mouth so vulgar and bright, it is difficult to guess her age. But the shock of more than that. A tart. One who so obviously stood out. Her perfume. The sense she gave of display. She smiles to a group of military men at the wide entrance to the station, they grin back, the first time Ruth has seen such a thing, how to smile with contempt. Arseholes, Carla said.