White Lies

by Rudolph Bader

  “So, you find it hard to understand these people, too?”

  “Of course, I do. It’s a real nightmare.”

  “Then I’m glad we’re not the only ones. Margaret and I find it extremely hard,” Nora complained.

  “Never mind, we’ll all get used to it. I tell you, in a few weeks we won’t even notice the difference.”

  Nora did not believe her mother. But she was right. After only a few days even, both sisters felt as if a switch had been turned in their ears and they could understand the Geordies - as the people called themselves - as well as any other English-speaking people. But they still liked to make fun of them when they were alone together. They tried to imitate the typical sing-song of expressions like “why-ay” and to get the long “aw”-sound right in simple words like “no” or “low”. With other people, their school-mates and their neighbours, however, they wouldn’t dare to imitate this charming dialect. They continued to move on the safe ground of their American English and only gradually replaced certain American expressions with British ones. The first of these replacements was “pavement” for “sidewalk”, and soon others followed.

  At school, only very few children made fun of their American accents, most of them admired what they called “the Hollywood accent” and thought the two American girls sounded rather posh, but in a pleasant way.

  After the first few weeks, both sisters began to like their school. Especially Nora was glad their parents had let them choose between the two school systems. They had both opted for the state school system, or - as the English called it - the maintained system. To have chosen the private school - called public school - would have gone against their American sense of equality and democracy. Their school, which was called a grammar school, was within walking-distance of their new house in a suburb called Gosforth.

  Dad had insisted on a school which offered Latin as a major subject. He had always been fond of that dead language, and he liked to quote phrases whenever an opportunity presented itself. The girls had already grown up with phrases like cum grano salis or mutatis mutandis from early childhood. And when, at the end of a minor quarrel about some disagreement, he gave in to one of his daughters he usually chuckled, “in dubio pro filia”, but as little girls they never found out what was supposed to be so funny about the expression.

  In their first Latin lesson at their new school they were surprised to hear yet another way of pronouncing this language. Dad didn’t pronounce it as the American teachers had done, and this English teacher now pronounced it differently again. It was all very puzzling. Margaret did not really mind. Nora wondered if it was only the Geordie way, but the teacher, a friendly elderly man with a bald head, called Mr Carr, assured her he had grown up down south, somewhere in Bedfordshire.

  Gallia omnia divisa est in partes tres. This was the first sentence in their new Latin book, De Bello Gallico, written by Gaius Julius Caesar. Nora was so proud. At last their lessons didn’t only consist of Grammar exercises and translations from English into Latin, at last they were actually reading their first book in that language. She brought it home, and when Dad came home in the evening she ran up to him and showed it to him.

  “How wonderful!” he exclaimed. “Now you are a big girl.”

  “Will you help me if I run into any problems understanding certain sentences?” she wanted to know.

  “I’ll be delighted. You know, I always loved the language. I believe that it has a positive influence on our minds and actions. It’s character-building. When I was going through the darkest moments of my life, back there in Germany, it was my memory of Latin poetry which virtually kept me alive.”

  Nora found this hard to believe. But she was glad to see her father happy. So, through the following months she often sought his advice when it came to the task of finding the meaning of words and expressions that mostly had to do with weaponry and warfare. It was amazing how many words Caesar must have known for swords, spears and other weapons. Sometimes she wondered why her father didn’t protest against such a text. He always took the pacifist view wherever possible, and he still forbade them to wear camouflage clothes. So how was it possible for him to like Caesar’s text? She asked Margaret’s opinion.

  “It’s because Caesar’s wars happened long ago,” Margaret explained. “It’s ancient history. It’s not like the recent World Wars, which are so close. For Dad, the Second World War isn’t just history, for him it’s reality, personal experience.”

  Such discussions about their father made Nora see him in a new light. The change of scenery, away from their homely Chicago to this quaint new British environment, and also their new life in this still unfamiliar house: these triggered a new sense of awareness in her. In this context, she began to look at her parents with new eyes, and she thought she saw her father - whilst he remained a parental authority - more clearly as just a middle-aged man. Some evenings, sitting over their supper and listening to the parents discussing the day’s events, Nora studied her father’s face. She saw his thick greying hair, his deep eyes with those wrinkles at their edges, his narrow face and his firm jaw. It was the face of a very determined man, a man who knew what he wanted. She felt proud of her father.

  After the summer holidays, Nora’s class welcomed three new fellow-pupils. One of them was Ned Robson, a shy boy with dark hair. Nora immediately liked him. Soon they walked home together after school. He lived just round the corner. Margaret was the first person to notice the new development in her sister’s life.

  “You like him a lot, don’t you?” she asked Nora one evening. They were lying on Nora’s bed, a situation which always gave their talks a very intimate atmosphere. Like this, they could discuss everything, there were no taboos.

  “How did you guess?” replied Nora, blushing.

  “It’s obvious. I can tell from your new behaviour. You have changed.”

  “No. It can’t be. I’m still my old self,” Nora protested.

  “But I can tell,” Margaret insisted. Then there was silence for a short while. The silence was fraught with meaning.

  Nora remembered a sentence she had read in one of her father’s books: “She took refuge on the firm ground of fiction, through which indeed there curled the blue river of truth.” She wasn’t sure, but she believed it was from Henry James. It made her wonder indeed whether she should tell her sister the full truth about her feelings for Ned or whether she should take refuge on the firm ground of fiction. She chose the blue river of truth.

  “Yes, you’re right. I think I might fall in love,” she admitted.

  “You think you might? Ha ha, you’ve already fallen in up to your ears,” Margaret laughed. “It’s wonderful. I’m so happy for you.”

  “It’s not so easy,” Nora moaned. “It hurts so much.”

  “I know. It hurts at first, because you don’t know if he loves you back, and you don’t know what to do about it.”

  “Yes, that’s it, exactly. And it hurts so much when I can’t be with him, which is most of the time. Those few moments when we’re together are so precious, but they’re so short. It’s only when we walk home from school.”

  As it turned out over the following weeks, Nora felt more and more that her mother no longer understood her. She imagined her mother loving her father with the same painful intensity as she loved Ned, and the sheer idea nearly made her sick. She tried to imagine her parents in an intimate activity, as she had seen in films, but even though she was normally quite gifted when it came to a colourful imagination, she failed completely when she tried to imagine them in the act of love. True, Dad often called Mum “my darling”, sometimes “darling Emily”, and she usually kissed him on the cheek, but never on his mouth. When they embraced, it was usually a fleeting affair. There just didn’t seem to be any real passion lost between her parents.

  As for her own development in this department, she found hers
elf in the wonderfully exciting but equally daunting phase of exploration. She knew she loved Ned with all her heart, and her body felt strangely drawn to him, but she didn’t quite know where this was leading her. She wanted to do more, to experience more, to find out what lovers did, but at the same time she was afraid of the unknown. She had heard and read so much about possible disappointments, about the dangers of sexual activities among teenagers, and her mother had warned them of what men and boys wanted. She had never been particularly specific, but it was precisely the hazy nimbus surrounding the topic as it was treated by Mum which suggested unfathomable dangers and disappointments.

  Ned was a pale boy with long thin arms and gangly legs. He never walked fast, he rather slouched along. Nora found this endearing. His long thin face was quite feminine, with smooth white skin that had yet to experience the novelty of facial hair. Nora began to imagine what it might feel like to kiss those thin pink lips. His voice was very manly and stood in harsh contrast to his soft looks. Nora wondered why his voice had already broken while he still looked rather boyish and didn’t need a shave. A highly interesting boy, by all means!

  In late September, walking home from school, Ned and Nora found themselves turning suddenly into a back alley. They both wanted it, neither of them had to pull the other or even say anything. They just turned away from the pavement, round some dark green bushes and found themselves alone, just the two of them, in one of those ugly, unkempt back alleys, overgrown with weeds and deserted by human beings. The alley stretched along the back yards of a long row of houses. It was about two hundred yards long, and halfway along the alley a black and white cat was sitting, cleaning its paws with its pink tongue. The cat was the only living creature in this world besides Ned and Nora. The sun, which rendered this autumnal afternoon in a golden light, only reached the back yards, the alley itself was in the shade, and the contrast between the sunny parts and the grey shade seemed extreme.

  They slowed down and eventually stopped, facing each other. Ned put his hands on Nora’s shoulders and gently pulled her towards him. She looked up into his pale face, trying to detect what he was feeling at this moment. His face appeared strange at this close range. She could make out two small pimples on his chin, about one inch from his lower lip. His eyes looked insecure, searching for hers. His expression betrayed even more insecurity, presenting to her something between a sour half-smile and a fatalistic mood, as if he was about to say, “I’m sorry, what do you expect me to do?”

  Nora knew this was a very special and very important moment in her life. When she felt a new and utterly unknown force in her abdomen, as if someone was pushing her body against his, she felt her former shyness disappear. She wanted him to take her in his arms, and she desperately wanted to feel his lips on hers.

  When he enveloped her with his arms and their lips touched at last, Nora closed her eyes and let herself be carried away into an unmapped territory that made her believe she was entering a new form of existence, leaving her old and meaningless life behind her and embarking on a significant future. After these first impressions, she just dismissed all intellectual assessments and let herself sink into this sea of warm and velvety water. She was ready to follow him wherever he was going to lead her.

  After an eternity of earth-rocking kissing, which had begun with simple lip-contact and gradually grew into a fascinating exploration of their mouths with their active and extremely sensitive tongues, they both began to regain parts of their consciousness. They drew slightly apart and drew some deep breaths. Ned looked at her, their eyes were locked together, as their mouths had been for the last few centuries.

  “I love you,” he managed to whisper at last.

  “I love you, too,” she answered.

  That was all. Then they continued with their kisses until, after another century, she began to feel uncomfortable. Her back was a bit stiff from their long standing in the alley. This physical unease gradually pulled her out of her dream. She returned to the world and reluctantly faced the facts. She realized that time must have flown. She pulled away from Ned and patted her hair to smooth it down.

  “I’ve got to be going. I don’t want Mum to find out about us.”

  They checked each other’s appearance. When they felt they were presentable enough they walked back to the street they had left when they were children, and they continued their way home feeling very grown-up.

  Back at home, Nora went straight up to her room. She threw herself on her bed and began to re-live in her mind what she had experienced in that back alley only a short while ago. With her eyes closed, she lay there, forgetting about homework, savouring her memory, until her mother called her downstairs. It was tea-time.

  In the morning, Nora made sure she found Ned on her way to school. Together, they walked hand in hand, happy to be together again. No words were needed. Everything was perfect.

  During lesson-time, Nora’s attention was drawn to the subjects at hand, but whenever the subject got too boring she drifted off and bathed in her memory of that kiss, that long kiss, that first real kiss in her life.

  When their history lesson began, she was pulled out of her dreams with a violent realization. The new topic was the Second World War. With a sudden stab in her heart she remembered that Dad had been in the war, in the very same war that they were going to discuss in their history lessons. As long as they had been treating topics like the Great War, the General Strike and the Great Depression, even the Abdication Crisis, things had been as distant for her like the Tudor kings or Napoleon and Waterloo. But now, this was the recent past, nearly the present world, considering that Dad had been part of it. He had suffered so much, Mum had explained, so that the daughters never asked any questions. Dad himself had always been as silent as the grave about his experiences; he only reminded them of the awful terror of a war and forbade them camouflage clothes. One day, he had remarked that he was glad they were girls, for if they’d been sons they might have developed an unhealthy interest in weapons, in guns and pistols, as boys often did, so he was relieved they were daughters. Apart from his aversion to weapons and his refusal to accept the existence of any military equipment in the world, they knew nothing of his ultimate reasons behind this attitude or his role during the War. Nora decided to find out more.

  She had to wait for the right moment to approach her father with such a sensitive subject. But she knew he was very fond of her, especially since she’d shown such a keen interest in Latin and ancient history. This might serve as a possible opening.

  “Didn’t Emperor Augustus and his successors aim for supremacy over the entire Mediterranean as well as most of Europe?” she asked her father, when she found herself sitting alone with him in the lounge on a wet Sunday afternoon.

  “Yes, and they managed to build one of the largest empires in history. Roman influence reached from Northern England - you’ve seen pictures of Hadrian’s Wall, haven’t you? - to the Sahara Desert and to what would be the Arab World today. I wish I could show you some of their monuments as they are still in existence today. We must make a start with Hadrian’s Wall, which is just down the road. In fact, do you remember when we went on that visit to one of our new friends’ week-end house near Hexham. That’s where Hadrian’s Wall is. Shall we go there next week-end? Would you like that?”

  “Of course, Dad. It would be fascinating. It’s only a pity we can’t see all the other monuments. At school, we learnt about Pompeii, about Baalbek and about Palmyra.”

  “Now, those are too far away for us. Let’s make a beginning with Hadrian’s Wall. Later we might see other sites in this country, such as Bath, for example.”

  “That would be wonderful. Thanks, Dad!”

  “And what did you learn from ancient history?”

  “That empires may be great for a time, but they never last. It’s probably because it’s always a small minority that profits from such empires. The majo
rity of the people always suffer. Mr Jackson told us that’s the case in all empires.”

  “Did he include the British Empire, I’d like to know?”

  “He didn’t say.”

  “I’m asking because the British are notoriously uncritical about their own history. They usually blame all the other nations with whom they’ve fought a war. For a long time, it was the French they hated, then the Germans. They never question their own role in all those wars, the only mode they know is their own hero-worship.”

  “But they saved us from the Nazis, as Mr Jackson explained.”

  “Indeed, in a way they did,” Dad smiled.

  “Then why shouldn’t they be proud of it?”

  “Because national pride is the source of dangerous nationalism, which is the breeding ground for new wars. Once people start to believe that they are better than other nations, things become racist and may eventually lead to another war. We should all be humble when it comes to judgments of other nations.”

  “Are you humble about your own past in Germany?” Nora dared to ask.

  Her father was silent for a while. Then he cleared his throat.

  “It’s all such a long time ago,” he said at last, and his shoulder began to twitch slightly.

  When she saw a tear running down his cheek, she was sorry. She was going to save him by changing the subject when he spoke again. This time, his voice was soft, and his entire attitude had lost its customary authority.

  “You see, my girl, I have made some awful mistakes in my life. But there’s no going back. You can’t change your own past, you just can’t.”

  “Did you suffer a lot?”

  “Yes. But not in a way you could imagine.”

  “Did you hate the Jews, like everybody else?”

  “Not everybody hated them.”

  “But Mr Jackson said while the population of Germany at the time was seventy million people, they found out after the War that only 455 individuals were recognized as Jew savers, I think they called them Judenretter, people who hid Jews in their attics or cellars or otherwise helped them survive, like the people hiding the family of Anne Frank in Amsterdam. Imagine, only 455 out of seventy million!”