Bill made her take off her shoes and pull back her hair and tie it in a bun at the back of her head. He told her to button her jacket. They retreated backwards on all fours through the orange grove to the lip of the valley. The valley was grassy and steep and Natasha was able to grip the moist grass on the sunless slope between her toes and prevent herself that way from slipping. Bill stayed above her, a shield between Natasha and whoever they were stalking. They climbed down until they got to the edge of the stream. The ground flattened there from erosion when the stream was swollen and broader than they saw it now. The stream was stippled and roped with current and it coursed loudly between its steep valley walls. It was one of Bill’s desolate places. It was wilder and more remote than she could have imagined country being, only three or four miles from the road. She shivered with the chill and proximity of urgent water. There were dark pebbles mossy on the bed of the stream. Feathers fluttered around small bones at a spot on the bank a few feet away. The beak had gone. But the feet had not yet rotted. It was a very solitary place, she thought, in which to die. Even for a bird. She did not want to linger here. But Natasha felt much better now they were moving. And anger was starting to take the place of her fear.
It took an hour to find the place from which he had been watching them. They had to skirt around the high hills overlooking their picnic spot and ascend their rear slopes. They climbed in stealth and shade up the steep brown earth until Bill stopped and checked their progress with a raised hand. He looked around, for somewhere for her to hide, for cover for her, as he had been looking, she knew, all the way up this final part of their ascent. But there wasn’t anywhere. He licked his lips and swallowed and gestured for her to lie flat on the ground. He pulled his gun free of its holster. He looked alert and worried and was breathing hard, though she could not hear his breathing. Sweat splashed from his forehead and he winked at her again and went. She thought he was very brave. She turned on her back because if anything came for her, she wanted to see it come. High above, in a sky the late October blue of infinite space, the shape of a bird with a giant wingspan wheeled and glided. An eagle? A condor? Probably a condor, she thought, in its graceful, vigilant search for carrion.
‘He’s gone.’
She turned her head. Bill was silhouetted in the last of the sun. The sun was descending, now, on the other side of the hill. It was on their side of the hill, on the side that sloped all the way down to their picnic spot in the orange grove.
There was nothing remaining of him when Bill showed her the spot. There were no cigarette ends near the loose cairn of stones Bill said he’d hidden watchfully behind. There were no gum wrappers. There were not even the crumbs to suggest a sandwich. There were no snapped twigs to give him away and he had not bruised the grass with his weight because there was no grass to bruise. Jesus, there wasn’t a footprint. Was he a ghost? Natasha turned to Bill and shrugged. She was baffled.
‘Cartridge cases,’ Bill said. ‘I picked up five or six of them. Luckily for us he’s a terrible shot.’
The joke didn’t make her feel any better. It must have shown on her face.
‘Get down and smell the ground, hon. Close your eyes. Take your time.’
She got down and smelled the cooling stones of the cairn and the earth around them. Her sense of smell had always seemed to her a gift, sometimes appallingly acute. After a while she stood and brushed the dirt off her hands.
‘Lanolin,’ she said. ‘He has greasy hair. He must have rested his head against the stones.’
Bill nodded. ‘Anything else?’
‘Aftershave. The guy wears Old Spice.’
She could see Bill trying to force himself into levity, but he couldn’t, not on this occasion. He was sombre with the implications of what had taken place.
‘What have you done, Uncle Bill?’
He shook his head.
‘What on earth have you done?’
He shook his head. He looked at the sky. It was almost dusk and very quiet and the air was chilling with a creeping, autumnal cold.
‘Have you made influential enemies?’
‘Not as many as I’ve made influential friends.’
‘How did you spot him?’
‘A mistake. Just one. One flash of sunlight on glass.’
She thought about this. ‘He was watching us through binoculars?’
Bill hesitated before he replied. ‘I don’t think so, Natasha. He was scoping us.’
‘Doing what?’
‘I think he was watching us through the telescopic sight of a rifle.’
He’d said he was particular about whom he hunted with, making a compliment out of a necessity. He hadn’t dared leave her alone in the orange grove. And she did not feel like a predator. She felt like prey.
‘You’ll stay the night at our house?’
‘Of course,’ he said. ‘I need you to take care of me.’
Natasha limped around the crystal museum at Innsbruck. She studied the exhibits. She scrutinized their dark, deeply etched regularity. And she could find not a single thing to admire there or to wonder at. It was all geometry and craft. The first quality she had never mastered and so it irritated her. The second seemed a labour too precise for modern times. What was the point of intricate decoration in a glass punch bowl or its fluted, impossible spoon, when the world was threatened by the atom bomb? This was, she knew, selective thinking. But she pleaded the mitigation that she was only seventeen years old in absolving herself of any blame in thinking it. She figured she would have plenty of opportunity as an adult for drawing conclusions that were humble and compromised and fair.
Bored and on a whim, she took a bus to Landeck. She went there walking on her bad ankle with the aid of a malacca cane with a silver handle. It was a fabulously valuable stick, apparently, if you believed the concierge at the hotel the school was staying at. They had lent it to her. It was light and rigid and black. It was the second stick she’d used. Sammy Davis had tossed a stick into the audience once at a private preview of one of his new routines and Natasha had caught it.
Luck be a lady, Sammy had said.
But he always said that. And the routine had been lousy. And the Sammy stick had gathered dust in the attic pretty much ever since. And of course, Sammy had altered his routine.
By most people’s standards, Natasha knew that her life would appear to be pretty exotic and glamorous. From the outside, it certainly was. From the inside it was too, a lot of the time. She knew lots of rich kids at school who led lives more opulent than hers, indulged by wealthy parents careless about what they could buy. But she didn’t know anyone who had heard Frank Sinatra dedicate a song to them on their seventeenth birthday. I mean, just how cool had that been? On those occasions when she felt in her life the absence she felt now, she almost always consoled herself with such thoughts. And in this way she could generally yank herself out of moods she tended to dismiss as at best self-absorbed and at worst self-pitying. But it was harder today, limping through snowy streets, abstracted from the day to day of the familiar, the recognizable and the routine. It was harder because she was in a foreign place where an avalanche had very recently come awfully close to claiming her life. The pain throbbing in her ankle was a persistent reminder of just how narrow her escape had been. The narrowness of the escape made her think of her own fragile mortality. It made her dwell on who she was. And so it obliged her to think, as she thought more and more these days, of how little the circumstances of her birth had left her knowing about herself. It forced her to think about the absence in her life her father had left.
It would have been a small funeral. The song at the Sands and the stick in the attic would not have swelled the numbers at her graveside. It would have been her bereft mother and Bill, raw-eyed and stoical. Maybe Professor O’Brien representing the school. One or two classmates whose wardrobes ran to sufficiently stylish black to meet the formalities of grief played out in public. Someone from Hyannis Port, of course, where they were big on pr
otocol and felt the sacramental obligations of their Catholic faith. No father, though. She didn’t have a father. Natasha had never had a father.
Mostly, this was a fact that went unremarked upon. She had lived the earlier and less mature part of her life pretty much unaware of it herself. Hollywood had more than the average share of broken marriages, of paternal absentees. And then there were the dead ones. Alice Dorne, for example, had a stepfather. Her real dad had died in the war, on the beach at Normandy, when his daughter had still been a cooing innocent in her Philadelphia crib. There was an album of photos, though, a cache of treasured mementoes. Alice at least had a glass frame full of medals and her mother’s cherished memories to fall back on. To anchor her identity, Natasha thought, now, limping on her stick through snow. To help her understand where she came from and who she was.
Natasha did not and would never have that. She had never discussed her paternity with her mother. And she could not really imagine herself doing so, now. What she did know about her mother’s history, she had dragged out of a reluctant and tight-lipped Bill. Her mother had been confined in a labour camp. She had escaped it pregnant. You could draw what conclusions you liked about the circumstances in which the pregnancy occurred. But the tenderness and heroism so fulsomely present in the Dorne bequest were not going to be its distinguishing characteristics, were they? Natasha suspected she had been conceived amid fear and a desperate pragmatism she didn’t want her mother forcibly reminded of. It was why she didn’t ask. It was why she would never ask.
It was why she would never know.
She rested on her stick and smiled to herself. She had not exactly craved a father. She had Bill, after all. She thought of the stereotypical dad of the movies and magazine advertisements with his plaid sportscoat and his pipe at the wheel of one of those shooting brakes with enough timber glued to its body to build a fair-sized dog kennel. Like a suburban version of Gregory Peck, those idealized fathers were. Not so outrageously good-looking as Greg Peck was, but the same type, sharing the same solid decency and those American virtues of sobriety, steady employment and the safe assurance that adultery was what French people did. No, she did not miss the father of cosy stereotype. She didn’t miss his strictures, his standards, the tedious banalities of his fireside lectures whenever she strayed from the path of righteous conformity. She had Bill, who was capable of cosiness but so far from stereotypical the thought of it turned her smile into a grin. She would have liked to know who she was, that was all. She would like to have known a little about her father. At seventeen, she had come close to dying without ever having had herself properly explained. She breathed deeply and saw her breath bloom on the cold. She looked around.
Landeck was a pretty town at the base of steep hills covered in conifers with snow in clumps burdening their branches. The town was Tyrolean and picturesque and smelled of woodsmoke and pine needles. Wind from the mountains stirred the trees and chilled the cobbled streets in cold gusts. The pavements were slippery with ice and Natasha walked carefully on her malacca stick in her new winter coat. She found an inn and sat at a table next to a window and ordered Glühwein. And she felt exotic and remote and mysterious there. It wasn’t just that she was drinking an alcoholic drink in a foreign town. She realized that she reminded herself of someone. Who was it? It was almost like the feeling of déjà vu. Snow had started to fall in slow petals on the street outside. Two men in Loden coats and hats walked by. Breath steamed out of their mouths in the cold when they spoke. She sipped Glühwein and catalogued in her mind the books she had recently read and the movies that had lately impressed her. Was it a particular actress? The part would have been something with glamour and possibly espionage. It was almost certainly continental, with sadness and dark portends of betrayal. It was on the tip of her tongue. Oh, what was it? She almost had it. And then, maddeningly, it was gone.
‘Oh my God,’ Natasha said out loud. Because it was her mother. It wasn’t an actress at all. It wasn’t a film or a novel. Gifted briefly in a foreign land with the role of the enigmatic stranger, she reminded herself of her mother. And she could not help wondering in that town, at that table, at what secrets endured in her mother’s tired heart and troubled soul.
Six
He had carried her over the mountains because she had never been outside Poland and had no technique for climbing in the snow. He had orchestrated their escape. What partial success it enjoyed was due to his skill. His courage had been important. He was very brave. Perhaps most vital had been the ruthless single-mindedness of his commitment to their flight. He wanted so ardently to save the life of his child. By the end, Julia believed her survival had been just as important to him. He had said it was. He had told her he loved her. He had not been a man to waste the last words spoken as his life departed him on lies and platitudes.
The opportunity for escape was given them by Wilhelm Crupp, the Werhmacht bureaucrat and war profiteer who ran the camp from Poznan. Crupp decided that the camp should become self-sufficient in timber. Hamer knew the wood a few miles away that they would clear first in the drive to self-sufficiency. He went there sometimes. It was said that he liked solitary places.
He saved her life in the camp and then took her, out of loneliness. He was a widower and a soldier and she had never met a lonelier man. The brutality of the camp and its corruption were the mundane realities of day-to-day life to inmates and guards alike. But not to him. Not to Martin Hamer. He was a soldier and had confined his reflections on the conflict to the winning of battles and campaigns. It was in the camp, as his own battle wound healed, that he began to understand something of what the leader of his nation planned to do with the world in victory. It was there he became aware that the Poles had no future in their country other than as a population of slaves.
Later, she could have told herself that she went with him because she didn’t have the choice. But the truth was less clear, more contingent. She went with him because they were all afraid of him and if she was his in the camp, she believed no further harm would come to her. She went with him, willingly, because she had become so brutalized by the likes of Rolfe and Buckner that his kindness came as a comfort and a relief. That was the truth. But it still wasn’t the whole truth. It suggested hers had been a passive role in the matter. Where, truthfully, it had not.
She had seduced Martin Hamer. That was the truth of it. He would have initiated nothing without her invitation to intimacy. She had seen how he looked at her. She had seen it even in the fury that had compelled her to goad Rolfe as she pegged washing. The instinctive tug of attraction was almost feral in his eyes. He would have done nothing about it, though. His moral code seemed a sort of ironic perversion in the bestial confines of the camp. But he was not of the camp. He was a career soldier. He was an officer, one of a distinguished line from a distinguished family. He would not have put a hand on her without her bidding. Martin Hamer was kind and handsome and she wanted his protection and so she seduced him in the camp. He was of the tribe that had conquered her country and killed her brother in a Poznan barn and confined her in a place of hopelessness surrounded by watchtowers and wire. And he had given her his love and his child and her freedom. He had gifted her this life. With the help of the American who had once been his friend, the brother he had longed for and thought he’d found and then irretrievably lost, he had gifted her this life.
Julia Smollen laughed out loud. She was in the lobby at the Carlyle. Outside, Christmas shoppers in overcoats and hats stepped cautiously on snowy Manhattan Streets, burdened by bags that said Neiman Marcus and Macy’s on their sides. Madison Avenue was white and chilly and beautiful in the pale electric light of its windows and the snow falling in heavy drifts from a sky imperious with cloud. There were carol singers on street corners in stoic bands with Christmas lanterns. Here and there a portly, red-cheeked man dressed as Santa Claus would spellbind passing children with his size and shows of booming, hearty laughter. Cops patrolled in pairs in black rain slickers and greatco
ats with snow melting in clumps from their shoulders. They warmed their wet, leather gloves, drying them on their hands over the street braziers used by the peanut and pretzel sellers, cracking cop one-liners, alert and tough and festive with the crowd.
She had watched and enjoyed the tableau of Christmas in New York from behind the window of her yellow cab on the journey to the Carlyle from the airport. She was currently working on two scripts. Both projects were stalled by problems with location and casting. It was something of an impasse but it freed up her time for the work she wanted to do. Her daughter was in Austria, skiing. Julia had never skied but it was something the school said her daughter did boldly and well. She hoped Natasha was enjoying herself in the mountains. She had been very excited to go.
It was the singing of the Christmas carols that delivered her back to the camp. The Germans were a sentimental people and their Christmas celebrations elaborate and heartfelt. During the two Christmases she had endured as their guest she had heard them, often, sing ‘Silent Night’. It seemed to be a favourite among their festive hymns. Homesick and lachrymose, they would croon out the pious verses in their huts at night. They lived and worked in abject contravention of everything Christ had preached. But they loved to sing ‘Silent Night’. And hearing it sung by the innocents of some New York parish, rattling their collection tins on the streets for charity, had reminded her. She couldn’t stand the carol herself. Though it had been one of her own favourites to sing in the village church and to listen to at Christmas as a child.
Crupp put Hamer in charge of clearing the wood. There was logic in the decision. He had helped husband his father’s estate as a boy and he understood trees. Rolfe was no longer around to organize these things. Hamer gladly took charge. He hid her in a rolled tarpaulin in the back of one of the two trucks they were using for the job. She hid in darkness wrapped in tarpaulin next to the felling tools and waited for the rain to stop that Hamer said would hamper their saws, causing the teeth to catch and stick against the wet trunks of trees.
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