And now, today—finally—was the day for the election results. After three long weeks of waiting. Three weeks to tabulate the votes from servicemen overseas.
Milton was up at dawn. “The BBC is going to start announcing the results at eleven o’clock this morning,” he said, pacing around the kitchen. “On the hour, every hour, as they come in.” He checked his watch, although it was still very early: seven fifteen. “I was thinking of inviting the Bells over tonight to listen to the results together. Hopefully to celebrate.” He grinned. “What do you think?”
“That would be nice.” She enjoyed getting to know his friends; Simon and Tess were warm and welcoming. “But I don’t know if we’ll be celebrating,” she said. “All the papers are predicting a Tory win.”
At lunchtime, Milton appeared at the Food Office and announced to anyone who was interested that Labour had captured East Islington with a swing of 22 percent. They’d also captured St. Pancras and North Kensington. By early evening, the Labour gains came in torrents: Battersea, Barrow, Birkenhead, Mitcham, Mossley, Motherwell. Thirteen Conservative Cabinet ministers had lost their seats.
“This is incredible. It’s a landslide,” Milton said, back in the flat that evening, his voice choked with emotion. “This warrants something really special.” He retrieved a dust-encrusted bottle from the back of the kitchen cabinet. “My grandfather’s port from 1927. It survived the V2s.”
While he was hunting for the corkscrew, there was a knock at the door. “I’ll get it.” Simon jumped to his feet.
He returned with a telegram. Milton opened it and looked at Lena with a huge grin. “It’s from Mother.” He laughed. “It’s addressed to both of us.”
It read: You cannot fool all of the people all of the time.
CHAPTER 48
LONDON, AUGUST 1945
The pubs and workingmen’s clubs overflowed with jubilation. For the first time ever, there was a socialist government with a workable majority. Milton celebrated with glee. The flat was full of friends every night; two more bottles of Grandfather’s port were called into service. The dreams rose sky-high: a national health service, a welfare state, nationalization of the banks, the mines, and the railways . . .
But, Lena thought, the problems remain enormous. The housing crisis alone is overwhelming.
A letter arrived from Lotti. She was reunited with Peter, and Charles was now able to pull himself into a standing position. Lotti’s mother remained confined to Terezín because of the typhus quarantine, but she was reported to be in good health and Lotti hoped to see her soon. Emil had not yet been able to find his brother, Josef, who’d served with the Czech army on the Eastern front; sadly, he’d learned that his parents had been sent to Terezín in late ’42 and had not survived.
The Adler family had all perished in Lodž; someone named Harry Feigl, whom Lena couldn’t remember, had returned from Auschwitz but since died. Lena’s Aunt Elsa and Uncle Victor were confirmed transported to Treblinka in 1943, where they must have perished. Even Great-Aunt Herta, who would have been almost ninety, for heaven’s sake—did they have not an ounce of mercy?— had been deported to Terezín, where she had survived only a week. The Spitzer twins were missing, presumed dead.
Lena couldn’t finish the letter. She didn’t want to hear it. She couldn’t let herself dwell on the fate of those who had stayed. She couldn’t bear to think about what had happened to Máma and Sasha. She had to banish those thoughts, push them away into a deep cellar, behind a thick steel door.
She would never go back to Prague. She didn’t want to think about Prague; she didn’t want to talk about it. She turned her back and shoved as hard as she could against that door, digging in her heels, forcing it shut, until she heard it click.
EPILOGUE
ENGLAND, 2004
Oh, to be in England now that April’s there. Well, here she is—with the weather obliging, for once. Sara stands at the French windows on a luminous emerald morning, surveying the lawn, with its border of well-trimmed shrubs. The gardener must be continuing his weekly visits, clipping the wisteria and snipping the hydrangea, keeping up appearances at all cost. As if nothing has changed.
“We could take a drive after lunch,” she says to her mother, who sits in the winged armchair next to the fireplace.
She expects the suggestion to be welcomed with a smile, a visible relaxation of tension, perhaps. An outing in the car is the one thing Mum usually enjoys. Instead, she’s fixated on the newspaper Sara spread in front of her.
“Oh dear,” Mum says her voice rising. “Oh no.” She points a blue-veined finger at the Guardian headline. “What am I supposed to do about this?”
“What do you mean?”
Sara can’t hide her dismay. Just three months ago, on her last visit, the newspaper was still a reliable distraction.
“What am I supposed to do about this?” Mum asks again, a rising panic in her voice. Fifty dead and hundreds injured—mostly women and children—in the bombing of Fallujah, nineteen dead in Najaf—Iraq is a bloodbath.
“This is terrible, terrible.” Mum shakes her head. “When will they ever stop?” She’s wailing now, stabbing at the paper. “Nothing but fighting, fighting, fighting.”
Sara has never seen her mother so upset. Mum has always been the one to maintain control, keep all feelings in check. She was disheartened last year during the buildup to the Iraq war. But not like this. Her father was upbeat, true to form, thrilled to see millions of young people filling the streets the world over, in massive antiwar demonstrations.
“Just look at that,” he said, pointing at the television. “Who says they’re just a bunch of juvenile delinquents? Gives you hope for the future.”
“It’s not going to do any good,” Mum scoffed. “Bush and Blair will go ahead anyway.”
Dad was dead before she could gloat that she’d been right— felled by a sudden heart attack the month before the invasion.
Sara removes the newspaper. She opts for a change of scenery now. A drive along leafy, green lanes. We could even try lunch in a pub, she thinks.
After ten minutes of fussing and coaxing, Mum is installed in the car. Sara starts the engine. “Shall we go to Upper Wolmingham? To the Fox and Hounds?”
“Ja, ja. That would be nice.”
Sara doesn’t usually notice her mother’s accent, but she hears it now in that ja—her version of yeah. Growing up, she was always surprised when other kids asked, “Where’s your mum from?”
Where’s she from?
She’s from here. She’s from the kitchen, from the living room, from the bedroom at the other end of the long, creaky hallway. She’s coming in from the garden with runner beans or peas. She’s running the bath for Sara’s little brother. She’s baking a cake for the village fête. She blends into English country life like a chameleon.
But she was from somewhere else. And she has no family. It’s just never discussed.
“We need to get gas,” Sara says.
She knows she should say petrol. But she has been here only two days and the word sticks in her throat, sounds foreign to her now. In a few more days, it will roll out easily and she will talk about the boot and the bonnet and taking out the rubbish, not the trash.
Trash: rubbish. Gas: petrol. Tom-ay-to: tom-ah-to.
But she can’t call the whole thing off. She straddles both sides of the pond: an aging mother on one continent, teenage daughter on the other.
She pulls into the gas station, silently converting liters into gallons and pounds into dollars: $7 or $8 per gallon, thereabouts. She will remember that next time someone complains about the price back home. The Ford Focus has a tiny tank, but it still sets her back £60—almost $100. Too late, she realizes she didn’t need to fill up. Force of habit from the land of milk and honey and $2-per-gallon gas. She’s the only one who drives this car now; half a tank would have been plenty.
The buttons on the machine are confusing. You have to pay inside, Sara remembers now. But before
she figures that out, she seems to have selected the car-wash option for £3 on top. Well, what the hell. The car is filthy, anyway. Splattered in Sussex mud.
“Roll up your window.”
Mum stares at her, uncomprehending.
Sara points her chin ahead. “We’re going through the car wash.” She reaches across and turns the crank, awkward at this angle. No power windows.
Guiding the car into the tracks and shifting into neutral, she blinks to fight off fatigue. She’s still jet-lagged, didn’t sleep well last night.
The sharp burst of spray jolts her awake. The car jerks forward into the arms of the giant brushes. Soap envelops the windows and obscures the view as they’re rocked gently forward. It’s like being in a cave in a dark rain forest, sheltering from a storm.
Mum lets out a whoop of delight. “This is fun.”
Sara sees her mother staring at the spectacle with childlike wonder, her eyes bright. She starts to laugh, and Sara laughs, too; they both laugh loudly, until tears are rolling down Sara’s cheeks. She wants to hold on to this moment, cherish the sheer joy of it, store it up as a bulwark in the face of what’s to come.
Three months later, the heat wave breaks the day before Sara’s arrival, leaving in its wake a cold and gloomy July like many she remembers from her childhood. The women’s finals at Wimbledon are postponed yet again because of rain. She switches off the television and returns to the radio. She has discovered Classic FM on this trip: criticized by some as too lowbrow, featuring mainly the most popular movements of well-known symphonies and concertos. But really, what’s so wrong with that? Mum seems to like it. The music soothes her. Earlier this afternoon, in one of her lucid moments, she recognized Beethoven’s Sixth. So odd how she can retrieve the name of a symphony but not that of her granddaughter, and certainly not what time of day it is or who visited an hour ago.
Sara glances over at the bed. Mum is still sleeping. Her skin is stretched pale and taut over her cheekbones, her mouth strangely misshapen, gaping as if caught off-guard while it labors softly in the familiar task of taking the breath in and out, in and out, as it has for eighty-five years. Her hand lies exposed on top of the covers, its dry, wrinkled skin marked with irregular brown splotches and purple bruises from all the blood draws.
Sara is struggling to accept the deterioration since her last visit. She should have known from all the phone calls back and forth; in fact, the hospital bed in the living room and the wheelchair were her suggestions when she heard about the falls, the struggle to get up the stairs. But when she walked in the door yesterday, she was shocked.
“What time is it?” Suddenly, Mum’s awake.
“Four o’clock.”
“The middle of the night?”
“No, four o’clock in the afternoon.”
“Four o’clock in the afternoon?” Her eyes dart around the room as she heaves herself upright. “I have to get up. I can’t lie in bed all day.”
Sara gently eases Mum out of bed. She used to be an inch or two taller than Sara, but now she barely reaches her shoulders. She stands before her like a tiny, frail sparrow and looks up with a smile.
“Thank you so much, dear. I’m sorry to be such a nuisance.”
Sara settles her into the wheelchair. “Could you help me with more of the photographs?”
Yesterday, Sara unearthed a box from the back of the living room cupboard. She has never seen it before. Obviously an antique, it is beautifully crafted, from two different types of wood, one golden and the other a deep, rich red, rosewood, perhaps, and inlaid with an intricate pattern of brass around the edge. It’s stuffed full of photographs. Those on top are familiar, although she has not looked at them in years: dozens of square black-and-white snapshots of her and Phil sitting on the beach, building sandcastles, exploring rock pools, piling sand on their father while he dozed. And the group shots from the large gatherings at Sara’s grandmother’s house, also from those early childhood years, carefully inscribed on the reverse in her mother’s neat writing, with the date and subjects clearly designated left to right.
But yesterday, as Sara delved more deeply into the box, she uncovered other, much older photographs. She’s never seen these before. And they are not identified.
“Who’s this?” she asks. “Are these your parents?”
Sara knows almost nothing about Mum’s family, almost nothing about her past. There was a grandfather, Mum’s father—but he died when Sara was very young, and he wasn’t mentioned much. And Uncle Ernst, she never met; he lived in Czechoslovakia, out of reach behind the Iron Curtain, until he died of a stroke in his fifties. Sara has heard occasional vague references to other family members who died in the war, but somehow she has always known this is a taboo subject. Something terrible happened, something too terrible to name.
“Let me see—where are my glasses?” Mum angles the photograph into the light. “Yes, that’s right, that’s right,” she says, leaning forward to retrieve more from the box. One shows two women walking briskly in overcoats, carrying pastry boxes secured with string.
“Who’s this? Is that you?” Sara asks. “Is that your mother?”
Mum leans back, dropping the photograph onto her lap and closing her eyes. Has she fallen asleep again? Sara continues to sift through the pile. A young girl on a beach, squinting into the sun, the date on the back: August 1935. Suddenly, Mum is awake again, leaning forward, reaching into the box.
“Oh my goodness, look at this one!” she says, her eyes brightening. “There we all are!”
“Let me see.”
It’s a faded three-by-five showing a group of young adults, six of them altogether, seated in a small, untidy garden with two sides of a brick dwelling angled behind them. No one is looking at the camera, each person engaged in some activity, either seated on straight-backed wooden chairs or standing around a table at the rear. Some are reading, one man is at a typewriter, and one of the women—there are two women—appears to be sewing. A black cat basks in the sunshine.
“Who are these people?”
“This was in Upper Wolmingham. Must have been soon after I arrived.”
Sara looks into her mother’s eyes. They look clear and focused now, and her voice is calm. Sara feels her own pulse quicken with nervous excitement. The haze has lifted; there is so much she wants to ask. She’s afraid of saying the wrong thing, not knowing what might trigger the confusion again.
“Go on,” she says, as gently as she can.
“I don’t want to be cremated.”
This comes out of the blue the following morning, as Sara helps her mother brush her teeth. She’s in her wheelchair in the downstairs bathroom, in front of the sink.
“All right.” Sara tries to keep her tone neutral, but she’s surprised. Her father was cremated last year. So was Granny. Cremation has always been the progressive thing to do. “Why not?”
Mum returns to brushing her incisors in a broad, circular motion, round and round, as if stuck in a groove. Sara gently removes the toothbrush and offers her water for rinsing.
“Why don’t you want to be cremated?”
“Because Hitler cremated my mother and sister.”
Sara freezes. A memory comes rushing back to her from years ago, in San Francisco, after she had been there only a couple of years, maybe: the Jewish Film Festival. Funny how so many of her friends were Jewish. There was a film at the Roxie. Sara can’t remember the title—something like Generations Apart. Sara was with Noreen and . . . what was the name of that woman who worked at Rainbow Grocery? They arrived late and squeezed into the back row. Sara can’t recall much of the film itself, but it was about the sons and daughters of Holocaust survivors, and how they inherit their parents’ grief. What Sara remembers most is her reaction. She couldn’t stop crying. She sobbed and sobbed. Noreen put it down to Sara’s feeling vulnerable because she and Alex had just made it through yet another big-fight-almost-breakup scene. But Sara felt there was something more. Something she couldn’t pin
point. They emerged from the theater, the fog rolled in with a vengeance, and Sara couldn’t stop shaking the whole way home.
She looks at her mother now. Mum still holds the toothbrush, but she leans back, eyes closed. Sara remembers her mother’s silences, the years of looking away, holding in tears, clamping down on any expression of emotion. “Don’t cry,” she always said. “There’s nothing to cry about.”
“Tell me what happened,” Sara says now.
Mum sighs. “This is the thing: I don’t know. I never knew what happened to them.” She looks at Sara now and holds her gaze. “They have no grave, no date of death. That has always been the worst thing. Not knowing.”
Sara walks into town to do errands. Karly, her sister-in-law, has come to relieve her, and she’s glad for the break. She marvels at the patience of the caregiver, who does this full-time and is on a well-deserved vacation. The sky brightens as she walks up the hill; it’s milder today. She unzips her jacket and quickens her stride, savoring the exertion. She enjoys this walk, enjoys the town, in fact, somewhat to her surprise. She didn’t grow up here—her parents moved from The Hollow many years after she left home, after Granny died—and she expected to despise its all-white, small-town smugness. But now that she lives in California, she’s thrilled, in a guilty-pleasure sort of way, to be able to walk to Marks and Sparks and Sainsbury’s and buy chocolate biscuits and tea, and whatever else takes her fancy, to bring back home.
As she reaches the pedestrian precinct, she checks her watch: almost 4:00 P.M. It’s 8:00 A.M. in California; Megan will be up soon. She reaches into her pocket for her cell phones. Still nothing on her English phone; she left a message earlier for Mum’s doctor, wanting to talk to him about Mum’s fluctuating levels of confusion. She switches on her US phone, and immediately it buzzes to life. There’s a text message waiting. Sara pulls out her reading glasses.
OMG!!! It’s all in capital letters. I GOT THE PART!!!
Sara’s thrown into confusion and then plunged into guilt. How could she have forgotten? Yesterday Megan was going to hear whether she’d passed the audition. Sara should have called. But she was exhausted and went to bed early, switching off her phone. Now, she moves to the side, dodging a woman with a huge stroller, and thumbs her response: Fantastic!! So proud of you.
When It's Over Page 34
