by John Lawton
He was nervous, not in the “oh crikey” diffident manner that hid anything real that men of his class wanted hidden, but shot through with something Szabo perceived as akin to shock.
“I have news.”
He looked down at the small piece of paper in his right hand. Looked up again. Szabo could almost swear there were tears forming in the corners of his eyes.
“I have really quite awful news. The Dorset Castle, which sailed from Liverpool for Australia yesterday, with, as I’m sure you all know, many detainees . . .”
For God’s sake man, just spit it out.
“With . . . er, many detainees on board . . . er . . . was torpedoed in the North Atlantic and went down . . . with, er . . . considerable loss of life . . .”
Whatever he had to say next was swamped in the uproar that followed, so he filled his lungs, voice breaking along with his heart and yelled, “As many as half are thought to have drowned.”
Through the hubbub, through the torrent of grief, Szabo heard his “I am sorry, I am so sorry.” And he knew the truth of the platitudes uttered by men like Rowly Jenkins and Rupert Feather. He was indeed one of the lucky ones.
That night, lucky once more in that he had a bottom bunk, Szabo listened as two men on top conversed across the foot-wide aisle that separated their bunks.
“Linsky. For sure Linsky was one.”
“He was. And both the Meyer brothers.”
“Spiegelmann, and that little fellow we met in the barracks in Suffolk.”
“Zuckermann. His name was Zuckermann.”
“Ja. Nathan Zuckermann.”
“Und . . . Gottlieb.”
“Big Gottlieb or little Gottlieb?”
“The little one, Amos Gottlieb.”
“Was not big Gottlieb his brother?”
“I think not. And . . . Berkovich, Halevi, Feinstein . . .”
“No. Not Feinstein. I saw him as we boarded today.”
“Posner, Grossmann . . .”
It was the Jewish Book of the Dead. As they recited more and more names it became to Szabo like an abstract, vocal music, an opera in a language one had never learnt. A lullaby. And the Singers and the Shlombergs, the Gombergs and the Goldmanns, the Rubins and the Rosenblooms lulled him into sleep.
§22
Ontario resembled Finland. Szabo had never been to Finland but he had been fascinated by maps since he was a boy. Finland was a land of lakes. Ontario was a land of lakes. He just hadn’t known it.
They had disembarked in Quebec, been robbed of anything worth stealing by the guards, and stuck on a train to Nipigon on the shores of Lake Superior, halfway to Winnipeg.
Szabo heard one detainee ask where they were and heard the guard reply, “India.” And the look on the detainee’s face showed not a hint of incredulity.
They moaned the loss of their possessions. Szabo had lost nothing. Anything of value had been stripped from him within forty-eight hours of his arrest back in November. He’d learnt to do without a wristwatch, and on the Isle of Man had learnt to tell the time just by looking at the sky. Robbed of his fountain pen he had made do with pencils. No one had ever thought fit to steal pencils from him.
Once on board the train each man received a cardboard box.
The man sat opposite Szabo—one of those who had endlessly recited the list of the dead, and whose name, he had learnt, was Fettermann, shook his box. It rattled.
“Perhaps the Canadians have seen fit to return my grandfather’s pocket watch, and the silver bands with which I used to hold up my shirtsleeves.”
But it was food—food in generous amounts. Cheese, fruit, onions, sardines, bread—a tin mug and a knife-fork-and-spoon combination that clipped together over a central rivet to form an object that Man Ray or Marcel Duchamp might have labeled and exhibited as “trouvé.”
“What,” said Fettermann, “is this? A foon? Or a snife?”
“Enough,” said his friend, “for each to slit his throat. Welcome to the New World.”
“Ah, a final train ride to death, but at least the cutlery shall match.”
Later, nightfall. Bunk beds lowered on chains, clean sheets, hot water from a stove. It was, he knew, better by far than the conditions back in Liverpool.
Fettermann looked at him, smiling as he rinsed his face, knowing, too, that he was better off, sighing with the pleasure of it all.
“Welcome to the New World,” Szabo said.
“At last he speaks!”
Almost three days later they arrived at Nipigon. A mining camp swathed in barbed wire . . . devoid of beds, blankets, furniture. Bleak in summer, unimaginable in winter.
“Welcome to the New World,” Fettermann rippled with irony.
But he was wrong. Only days later, truckloads of tables and chairs arrived. Beds, blankets, towels . . . and food by the box load. More food than Szabo had seen since the last time he ate at high table in his Cambridge college. Canada might not roast you a swan, but it would slay you the fatted calf.
Sitting down to a lunch of steak on white bread, oozing butter, with fried tomatoes, pickled gherkins, and mustard, Szabo felt certain Fetterman would repeat the by now habitual cliché.
Instead, he said, “One cannot help but wonder what the catch is.”
Suspicious by nature or distrustful by experience, it was weeks before they came to accept that there was no catch. The only catch was to be in Canada itself. To be imprisoned in Canada. To be imprisoned in Canada and to partake of its abundance from behind barbed wire.
Fetterman found a new catchphrase. Every box he opened was greeted with the words, “O, Canada.”
Bees buzzed in cigarette trees, over lemonade springs while hens laid soft-boiled eggs and a bluebird sang on the big rock-candy mountain.
O, Canada.
No lake of gin, no whisky flowing down the mountainside, but the inventive among them soon built a still and made a tolerable vodka from potatoes—while the enterprising among them reopened the mine’s metal-work shop and turned out iron crosses and swastikas to sell to their gullible captors, who, after all, assumed that they were all Nazis anyway.
O, Canada.
§23
There was a uniform that nobody wore. A silly, flat hat, a grey jacket with a red circle seared into the back like a target, blue trousers with vivid red stripes along the seams. There seemed to be a shortage of matching clown shoes in the larger sizes.
Come September, the shortening days and plummeting temperatures at last reassured them all that it was indeed Canada and not India, and Szabo took to wearing the jacket under his overcoat. At the beginning of October a young lieutenant—all long, skinny limbs and Adam’s apple, the North American variation on Jenkins and Feather—came around to tell him to don the full uniform as he was wanted on the outside.
“Why?”
“I don’t get told things like that. Somebody in town wants to see you, and it’s regulations that you wear the uniform when you leave camp. Makes it easier to spot you if you run.”
“Run? There’s three foot of snow out there.”
“Okay. Makes it easier to spot you when you slide ass over tit. Who cares? Just put the damn thing on and I’ll drive you downtown.”
Downtown was a six-mile drive to what the Canadians referred to as the nearest city and what Szabo would scarcely have graced with the term “village.”
In the lobby of the Statler, a three-storey, wooden Victorian hotel, every casement rattling in the wind, another young man was waiting. Well-dressed, well-groomed. A very different body type. No Jenkins, no Feather. A man bursting at the seams of his expensive suit with hard-earned muscle. A player of contact sports, all shoulders and knuckles, warming his hands over a potbellied stove the size of an elephant’s arse. The hands paused in midair like a boastful fisherman. Then one extended to shake his, fingers fat as bratwurst.
“Ron Katzenbach. What can I get you? A year inside, I bet you could kill for a drink.”
“Not quite,” said Szabo. �
�But after homemade vodka, a drop of real bourbon wouldn’t come amiss.”
The lieutenant perked up at this, and then perked down again as Katzenbach said, “Lieutenant, would you give us the room?”
The lieutenant looked around. They were the only people there.
“I get it,” he said, getting it far too slowly. “Spook stuff.”
“How elegantly you put it. Just give us half an hour.”
He summoned a waiter, ordered bourbon on the rocks for the two of them.
“I hear you play the flute?”
It was a question, Szabo thought. The polite passing of the time of day until the waiter had done and departed. And it wasn’t a question. Whoever this man was he’d read the file, and some more.
“They find you a flute to play?”
“They found me a ukulele,” Szabo said.
“So, what did you do?”
“I learnt to play the ukulele,” Szabo said flatly.
Katzenbach laughed loudly at this, his hands ferreting around in his pockets as though he had lost something, to produce a small black notebook such as a court reporter might use.
“You like Canada?”
Were they still chatting or had the turning of pages in the notebook brought them to the rub?
“One barbed-wire fence is much the same as another. I’ve seen next to nothing of Canada.”
“Me, neither.”
Szabo could not tell an American accent from a Canadian. But then again, who can?
Katzenbach went on, “In fact, this is my first time. Instead of seeing the sights I get to see a one-horse town in . . . where are we . . . Alberta?”
“You’re not even close. We’re still in Ontario. You can travel for days and still be in Ontario. Now, tell me. What does Uncle Sam want with me?”
The notebook lay flat in front of Katzenbach. They were definitely not chatting anymore.
“In 1937, you applied for a United States visa?”
“Did I? Thirty-six, thirty-seven. I really can’t remember.”
“It was January 1937.”
“I’m sure you’re right.”
“You wanted to emigrate?”
“I had emigrated. I left Hungary in the summer of ’29. In January ’37, I was in London.”
“You didn’t like England?”
“I liked England very much. I simply needed a job and at that time I was having difficulty finding one. I filled out the forms. Handed them in at your embassy, and before I heard anything, King’s College, Cambridge, offered me a fellowship. I didn’t pursue the application. I don’t recall that I ever heard from your people. The forms no doubt ended up in a wastepaper basket in Grosvenor Square.”
Another pretence of patting down his own pockets and Katzenbach unfolded three pages of typed paper with handwritten entries and set them out on the table between them.
It was like seeing history turn full circle, the bread cast upon the waters. Almost moving.
“May I?”
“Sure.”
The ink of his signature had turned brown with age and four years seemed to him like another lifetime.
He looked at his address—the boarding house in Primrose Hill where he had lived for the best part of a year—at the cramped handwriting as he had run out of space to summarize his career and credentials.
Katzenbach said, “I bet we did reply. Be damn rude not to. But if we didn’t, let me apologize now and say, formally, that we are inclined to grant your request.”
Szabo was grateful. He doubted it showed in his face. He was also slightly baffled, and rather thought that did. Sooner or later they’d want him—Kornfeld had been right about that—it was just that he’d resigned himself to it being later.
“I didn’t pack my ukulele,” he said.
Katzenbach smiled at this.
“It won’t be today. It can’t be today. You’ll go back to the camp. I’ll get some temporary accommodation set up, and then . . .”
A big hand with its fat fingers in the air, the sentence wafted away.
“And then you’ll send for me?”
“No. Then I’ll come and get you.”
“To go where? Washington? New York?”
“Not so fast. It’ll be Toronto. Then in the new year maybe we cross the border. It all depends.”
“On what?”
“Oh, Dr. Szabo, you know I can’t answer that.”
§24
The young lieutenant chatted amiably all the way back, to monosyllabic answers from Szabo.
Over dinner—more inch-thick steak and a small hill of buttered spuds—Fettermann asked, “What was all that about? Do you suddenly have brothel privileges in town?”
Szabo could not resist the moment; one first, one last throwaway indiscretion.
“I shall be leaving you soon.”
“For why?”
“Uncle Sam is building an atomic bomb.”
Fetterman chewed on his beef. For all that he was skin and bone, he was an accomplished trencherman and never let his words get in the way of his grub.
“Before I was arrested (munch munch), before we met, I was a (munch munch) jeweller. For all I understood (munch munch), you just told me the moon is made of Wiener schnitzel. (Munch munch munch). Atomic, shmatomic. I should know?”
But that was the pleasure. The only people he could ever tell were those to whom it would be meaningless.
“Gideon, if it turns out that the moon is made of Wiener schnitzel, I shall be sure to bring you back a slice.”
“Good. Beef is all very well. But you can have too much of a good thing.”
Fetterman began to sing to the tune of an old Strauss waltz, “He’s going to the moon, the moon, the moon. He’s going to the moon.”
And Szabo knew that old Fetterman would remember nothing of this.
§25
London: October 1940
Arthur Kornfeld and Viktor Rosen travelled up to London on the same train. Bureaucracy had messed them about. Granted their freedom, they had left the Isle of Man on the same boat as the two Stepney tailors—the belligerent Abel Jakobson, who preferred his anglicized Billy Jacks, and mild-mannered, big-eared Viennese refugee, Josef Hummel—but an identity check as they docked at Liverpool had split them up and Jacks and Hummel found themselves on an earlier train, Kornfeld and Rosen on a later.
“They might have waited,” Kornfeld said.
“Why so bitter about it? We have just spent more than three months incarcerated with them. I in the same room as Jacks. You can count yourself lucky you didn’t share with him. An opinion on everything. They probably no more want to chat to us on a four-hour train journey than I to them.”
“I had thought better of it Viktor. I had thought better of us all. I had come to think of us as family.”
He was not the only one.
Rod Troy met them at Euston. RAF blue and wings pinned to his chest. He’d been free since August.
“I just saw Joe and Billy, not more than an hour ago. I knew if I hung on I’d catch the two of you sooner or later. I can’t hang about. I’ve a couple of questions and then I must dash. Are you okay for rooms?”
“Of course,” Rosen replied. “I still have my apartment in Chelsea. It’s been mothballed while I was at His Majesty’s Pleasure. Arthur will spend a day with me before he goes down to Cambridge.”
“Fine. Make that two days. I’m in town on RAF business but I’ve a forty-eight-hour pass starting tomorrow. Due back at base on Saturday evening. I’ve Saturday lunch arranged. You two, me, Billy, Joe—a reunion.”
“But,” said Rosen, “we have scarcely parted.”
“You might have . . . I haven’t clapped eyes on you blokes for two months. I want to hear Arthur and Joe dispense wisdom, I want to hear you play the piano, I want to hear Billy grumble about something . . . and I want you all to meet my little brother.”
“Rod,” Kornfeld said, “I really must get back to Cambridge. I’m sorry. I would love to—”
&n
bsp; Rod clapped him on the shoulder.
“Another time, Arthur. There’ll be plenty of other times. We’ll make it into a regular reunion.”
After he’d gone, in a taxi heading south to Chelsea, neither spoke until they had reached the bottom of Gower Street. Then Rosen said, “I didn’t know he had a brother.”
“Then Viktor, dare I say, you did not listen to the man. Rod is one to take the burden of the world upon his shoulders, and none more burdensome than this brother that peppers his conversation.”
“Really? Can’t say I noticed. Black sheep of the family I suppose?”
“Au contraire. Would you believe the boy is a Scotland Yard detective? Sergeant Troy?”
§26
“The boy” was an apt description. Sergeant Troy was clearly stamped from the same mould as Rod, but in miniature. Rod was six foot two or more, Rosen doubted the brother made five foot six—but he was dark in the way Rod was dark, with thick black hair, obsidian eyes, and a touch of the Slav about him that marked him out as being not-quite-an-Englishman. He looked about eighteen. He looked far too pretty to be termed handsome yet. He looked like the star of all those awful British B feature films that had been one of their inflicted entertainments on the Isle of Man: James Mason. He looked as though Rod had just dragged him up from sleep. And he was peppered with tiny scabs as though he had just survived an encounter with . . . with what? The answer was embarrassingly obvious, the man had been in an air raid. A reminder that “the boy” was, indeed, a serving police officer. Best not to ask.
He introduced himself—“Viktor Rosen. I play ze joanna”—to squeals of laughter from Hummel and a roaring guffaw from Rod and Billy Jacks, all too easily amused by his grasp of patois.
Somewhere in the cross-talk that followed, he heard young Troy say, “I heard you play in Berlin in 1929. You were playing Schumann.”
And before Rosen could acknowledge this with the customary pleasantry, Rod had them all at the table—the refugees, his brother, his mother—and he talked no more to the younger Troy until the meal was over and host and guests affably pissed.
