‘It’s different, don’t you see? In your case, your instinct tells you they’re looking for you, but your reason knows they’re not – that they don’t want to bomb you in particular at all, that you’re not really their aim. But in my case, don’t you understand, I am their aim! I’m a Jewish girl working at a munitions factory, and I’m exactly their aim, and if they don’t hit me, it’s only because they can’t yet aim their bombs precisely enough.’
Paul knew that by the morning her panic would have passed. She would find an excuse for her absence and go back to making bullets, and when the next bombs fell she would flinch but force herself to stay at her work bench. Yet this did not make the slightest difference to her instinctive panic in this place at this moment. He understood so well that she wanted to be the stoically cheerful factory worker, but that a darker fear was with her all the time and would not cease until the war was over.
He took her in his arms and stroked her hair until she calmed down. Just then the walls of the room began to shake from a nearby explosion, and she pressed herself against him. He felt her warm skin and then her lips on his neck, his scarred ear, his face and finally his lips.
2
In the morning he went to his parents’ home and pulled his old sketches of her from under his bed. He looked at them and at a couple of prison drawings he had kept for himself. The daylight would be changing her mood already; she would be walking up to her room now, and with every step the night would fade further into the past, would perhaps be recast as one of those blitz follies, as a way of snatching a fistful of life when death was very close. At Bentham College he had sometimes gazed at the sketches until he fell asleep and she stepped out of the picture, naked and alive. The idea of worshipping a piece of paper seemed pathetic to him now.
He walked down the street and thought: this cloud is for you, and that one over there, too. Those yellow flowers by the roadside are for you. The sky today, surprisingly blue between the clouds, that sky is for you. The siren is for you, and the all clear. This streetlamp is for you, even though they don’t light it these days. The dark grass on the Heath is for you, and the red pigment in this tub of paint for you, and the silence in Silent Meeting is for you: it’s all for you, my love; I made it just for you.
He tucked a note into the cardboard tube with all the drawings before he posted it.
These drawings are for you.
All my drawings are for you.
You, you, you: I can think of nothing else.
x
Letters from the Isle of Man
1
Max sat on a wooden bench in the sun next to his new friend, a German wine merchant called Walter. Their internment camp on the Isle of Man had once been an ordinary town square surrounded by terraced houses. Only a barbed wire fence separated their bench from a shopping street.
How convenient this was going to be for the Nazis, Max thought. Once they invaded Britain, they would not even have to search the houses and forests for Jews from the Continent. Britain had done it all for them. Here they all sat, neatly trapped behind barbed wire.
Walter liked watching the shopping street because there was a wine shop similar to the one he had owned by the Rhine.
‘Look at all those poor people,’ he said now, and pointed at Manx housewives carrying baskets full of groceries. ‘Imprisoned behind the barbed wire.’
They laughed and Max made a mental note to add the joke to his next letter.
He wrote two letters a week, one dutiful, the other more passionate. This might be a good joke for the dutiful letter: ‘Dear Morningstars, here is a funny anecdote that will illustrate life in the camp for you . . .’
He was careful to keep the tone jolly and optimistic.
Max left the wine merchant by the fence. First the dutiful letter. Very protestant, that. Erst die Arbeit, dann das Vergnügen, his father said somewhere between his right ear and his temple. Work first, then pleasure. Yet his father had never once helped them decorate the Christmas tree.
There was a bench by the square, private enough to write, public enough to half-listen to the rabbi from Berlin who was giving a lecture to a group of men sitting on the grass.
‘Dear Morningstars . . .’
It would be fairly easy: there was news. They counted thirty professors and a dozen rabbis among them, and this had given them the idea for a camp university. A Manx version of Plato’s Academy.
‘Dear Morningstars.’
Good start. Max rolled the fountain pen between his fingers. How many more letters were stored in that pen? He liked the idea of his future swimming in the ink, ready to flow out and be shaped into words. It made him think of all that had flowed out of it already. The teasing little line he had rephrased so many times before putting it in the card. ‘In case you still want to practise (though it is not necessary). (It never was.)’
And that time he had crossed out her Sunday parade! The fury in her eyes! One eye had shot locusts at him, the other pestilence. That night he had rolled in his bed and laughed, and every time he finally calmed down he had thought of those furious eyes and burst out laughing again, until Mr Morningstar came in and asked if he was having nightmares.
The first words that had ever flowed out of the pen were ‘Lieber Max . . .’ in his father’s handsome, slanted letters. ‘Dear Max, I wish you much happiness for your thirteenth birthday.’
No, he thought, those were not actually the pen’s first words. Its brown leather holder was shiny with the grease of many hands. His grandfather had owned it, then his father, then Max. Birth certificates must have been signed with that pen, a doctoral thesis, a will or two, love letters and a marriage contract before Max was even born.
‘Dear Morningstars.’
He decided to take a little writing break. Rabbi Goldwater was talking about the concept of gam zu letovah, the idea that something good could be found in everything that happened. Max listened somewhat reluctantly. He had not seen much evidence of that.
Take America, the rabbi said. Remember how America was once our collective dustbin? The brother who gambled away the estate, the nephew who wanted to marry the village whore: had they not found themselves, one, two, three, aboard a ship sailing out of Bremen with the family waving relieved handkerchiefs from the dock?
This drew embarrassed laughter from the crowd, muffled by the shame of recognition. Max thought of his uncle Wilhelm, his father’s brother, a compulsive roulette player who now made corsets in Brooklyn.
Gamblers, drunkards, good-for-nothings, the rabbi said. Yet are those gamblers, those drunkards, those good-for-nothings not the same people who are now busy writing affidavits for all of us to come and join them in America? Gam zu letovah!
No. Wilhelm had not written an affidavit. Neither for Max nor for his mother. So much for gam zu letovah.
And you, Max thought, looking at the rabbi behind his nodding audience, when you were scrubbing a pavement in Berlin with your toothbrush, surrounded by louts in uniform and your own laughing neighbours, is that really what you thought then: gam zu letovah?
Perhaps the rabbi did not quite believe his own words. Perhaps what the rabbi really thought was, it’s been a while since I last spoke to God; I have this feeling he’s forgotten about us.
‘Dear Morningstars, apart from the university we now have a camp parliament, too. An upper house and a prime minister, elected in universal suffrage. In practice it is only male suffrage, because there are only men here!’ Max wrote. ‘But that is just an aside.’
He added the joke about the barbed wire.
What else . . . oh, the elections! He had beaten the wine merchant, a professor of Greek mythology, two accountants and a psychoanalyst to become his house’s representative to parliament.
‘Between you and me, the professor would have won, but he and the analyst tumbled into a very unsavoury row over the true nature of Oedipus’ relations with his family. I will spare you the unsavoury details
, but by the end of it we all preferred to hear no more from either of them.’
Twenty lines: almost done. Something about herrings and the weather.
‘Well, now I must “dash” off to the next leg of my Quest for Knowledge. Greek myths today! We vetoed Oedipus, the professor is going to do Odysseus instead.’
Thirty lines, and over.
He let out a deep sigh of relief and folded the letter.
On to a more pleasurable task.
Max took a bundle of letters from his bag and reread them carefully, one by one. He smiled. Maybe she, too, would enjoy the wine merchant’s joke. But no – he liked to keep the two weekly letters separate. He would write to her about all the subjects he could not discuss with anyone else. About gam zu letovah and the Protestants, about how the air smelled of salt or grass, depending on which way the wind blew, about the dreams in which he glided through the barbed wire and swam in the sky, surrounded by herrings.
Thirty lines of duty, thirty lines of—
‘Love,’ he thought. ‘That’s a rather big word, isn’t it, old friend? But why not? Why shouldn’t our nice Mr Hoffnung fall in love?’
Greatly cheered by this thought, he whistled a tune, smoothed out the letter-writing form and picked up his fountain pen.
2
In November 1940, he climbed on a chair with six nails between his lips and began to decorate the windows with twigs and Christmas tree garlands cut from brown paper.
The camp university had lost its fizz. A mood of gloom and depression set in, of lives put on hold. The concentration of talent and learning that had entertained them at first now reinforced the bitter sense that despite their goodwill, despite all their efforts and their eagerness to serve society and be of use, they were men whom no one needed nor wanted.
Max grew to find the omnipresence of the rabbis oppressive. The bearded men in black gabardine who clustered together in the kosher houses seemed fierce and medieval to him, their rabbis like seers or sorcerers. Yet the reform rabbis, clean-shaven and smugly modern, made him equally uneasy, and it took him a while to realize why. With or without beards, they were continual reminders of a faith that was alien to him, that he had hardly been aware of until he was officially declared to belong to it. Initially he had enjoyed learning more about it, had particularly admired its emphasis on everything happening in this life rather than the afterlife. Yet as the weeks passed and then the months, and as the reform rabbis took to casting little asides and references his way as if he was one of them, he began to resist being drawn in. His mother had converted to Protestantism and raised him in that faith. Their year began with poached blue carp and lead-pouring: his father even let them use his Bunsen burner to melt the lead before they poured it into cold water and read their future in the shapes. It ended with Christmas carols, mulled wine and children in shepherd costumes stumbling over ‘yonder star’. To begin the year now with fasting and atonement, to feel affinity with some tribe who got lost in the wilderness a very long time ago would be to accuse her indirectly of having withheld something important from him, of having failed to transmit to him some vital knowledge. She had refused to be one of the Chosen, and perhaps with good reason, for as far as he could see, being Chosen didn’t exactly carry many benefits. Chosen, yes, he thought and picked a nail from between his lips. Chosen to be the first on the cattle train.
Rabbi Goldwater came in, cradling a mug of tea, and Max said through the nails without turning around: ‘I know what you’re going to say about my pretty twigs. Assimilation never got us anywhere. But I like it.’
‘I was actually going to say that it looks rather jolly. As Hillel said, I walk, I fall, I get up; meanwhile, I keep dancing.’
‘Well, here’s what I say to Hillel.’ Max took the last nail from his mouth and drove it into the wall with a hammer. ‘I get up, I walk, I dance: meanwhile, I keep falling.’
3
His boat sailed back to the mainland over the winter sea. The breeze stung his face. He sucked in the fresh, sharp air, air speckled with seawater that cleansed the mind of all that had been. Then he let his fist dangle over the railing. He had planned a grand gesture. He had planned to hurl the thing into the wind with a mighty cry, a survivor’s cry, half triumph, half pain: the sort of cry Noah might have let out in the deluge. But when he stood at the railing he simply relaxed his fingers and let his father’s pen and the shiny leather holder drop into the sea.
A new life washed in on the high tide. His glasses were blind with spray from the sea but he did not care.
They had escaped the school of the dead. Inge, Grace wrote, was enjoying life on the farm and had taken up horse-riding. Grace herself was training to be a nurse with the Friends’ Ambulance Unit. And he, he would join the Pioneer Corps.
He took off his glasses and let the spray cool his eyelids. It seemed to him that Samhuinn had lain under a spell. Now they were free and, God, what adventures awaited them.
He arrived on the mainland in the evening, caught a train and spent the night at a cheap hotel near Russell Square. In the morning, he shaved in front of a dull chipped mirror and turned his face to make sure he hadn’t missed a spot. He nicked his cheek, licked a piece of newspaper, slapped it over the cut.
At breakfast he considered ringing the Morningstars to tell them about his release. He ought to thank them for their work on his behalf, their letters to MPs, their insistence that despite his German origin, he was highly unlikely to lead the Nazis into Britain.
Then again, if he rang them later he might give them not just one piece of good news, but two.
The toast lay untouched on his plate. A sip of tea would have to do. All he wanted, really, was to grab his knapsack and be on his way. He took a quick gulp of tea and spluttered. In his distraction he had grabbed an old flower vase, empty but for an inch of stale water.
He laughed. The only other guests, two elderly men at separate tables, looked up from their newspapers and frowned. He laughed back at their frowns.
I will remember this for ever, he wanted to shout at them. I will for ever remember that on this morning, I was so nervous, so nervous that I drank from a flower vase.
Instead he nodded at them and picked up his knapsack. He left behind the untouched toast, the cooling tea, and the vase with its inch of stale water.
4
He saw her as soon as he entered the garden in Tavistock Square. She was sitting on a bench and reading a book. The sunlight fell on her hair. And he stood there – simply stood – for five minutes, ten, just watched her turn the pages. He remembered how he had walked past her office five times, ten times, just to see her sit at her desk. How he had dropped a basket full of pine cones just to force her to stay there in the corridor with him for five, ten more minutes; as long as it took to collect them. How he had arrived at work early every morning during that cold winter to light the stove in her office because he wanted her to be warm.
And he suddenly thought that this was perhaps all his heart could hold, that this was the portion doled out to him. He thought that perhaps he ought not to be greedy, that he ought not to risk upsetting the fragile scaffolding that was his love for her, that he ought not ask for more than the apportioned share. Her sitting on this bench; her pouring pine cones into his cupped hands; her holding on tight to his arm on their last day at Samhuinn: those were small frail memories that a single wrong word, a single disappointed look could erase.
He turned round. And as he walked out of the garden he heard her frantic footsteps behind him, running, kicking up gravel, and heard her shout: ‘Max! Max! Where do you think you’re going? Max!’
5
They had a week together before she had to leave with the Friends’ Ambulance Unit.
Once Grace said: ‘I wish . . .’ and Max placed a finger over her mouth.
‘We are here now,’ he said and traced her lips with his fingertip. ‘There’s nothing else.’
She closed her eyes and tried to register the prec
ise sensation of his fingertip against her lip. He was right, there was nothing else. She must squeeze the juice out of every moment and store it away for when they were apart: like a bare-footed vintner treading grapes.
‘Open your eyes.’ His fingertips moved to her temples. ‘The way your pupils suddenly contract when you open your eyes. The black and the grey. It’s magnificent. I need to remember that.’
And she loved the way he said ‘I need’. It was exactly what she felt: that she needed these memories, needed them as nourishment and sustenance.
Once she had thought of him as a shadow, as little more than a pair of sunken eyes behind horn-rimmed glasses. Now she was trying to build him afresh, to piece him together out of a thousand little elements, a thousand little tics and gestures, so that when they were apart she would be able to recreate his image faithfully. She thought, the way he stands by the bed in the morning, naked and talkative, and then he tugs at his penis in that thoughtful way, as if to prompt himself: I must never forget that. The way he reaches over his head with his right hand to scratch the top of his left ear. She wanted to notice everything about him that others failed to catch. During their first night together they couldn’t sleep because they kept propping themselves up to look at each other. She asked him, with slight nervousness, whether he could imagine staying in England after the war.
‘I think so,’ he said, and smiled at her. ‘I do feel at home here. In a way.’
‘In what way?’
‘Good question.’ He thought for a moment. ‘Sometimes I dream that I’m a giant with footprints as big as Hyde Park. I’m straddling the water with one foot squashing Hyde Park and the other on the Tiergarten. One foot is in London, and the other in Berlin. One hand dangles over Westminster; the other, over the Reichstag. With one ear I can hear spoons in teacups. And with the other, people arguing over a barrel of pickled gherkins.’ He tugged at his earlobes. ‘One eye on London, the other on Berlin. Exactly half of me is here, and the other half is over there. So really, I’m at home in two places.’
Of Love and Other Wars Page 18
