She nodded.
‘And which way do you face?’
‘Which way do I face?’
‘Yes. When you’re straddling the water.’
He pressed his eyes shut for a moment. ‘South I think.’
‘Ah.’ She considered his reply for a while, and then she said: ‘Then your heart’s in Berlin.’
He rolled over to her.
‘No, it isn’t. I just turned round. Now I’m facing North and my heart is right here.’ And he took her hand and placed it on his chest.
*
After they made love, he curled up against her back and she fitted exactly into the curve he made with his body. She thought, I must remember the exact coordinates of this, the head, the hand, the chin, the gentle snoring, the temperature of his skin, his heat against my body and my heat against him. I must remember it precisely and not let it slip away.
6
Usually everyone at Highgate Meeting would have had to give their approval, but half the members were evacuated or doing land work. Paul’s father and another elder from Meeting dealt with the paperwork. On the Sunday before Grace’s departure, a dozen people gathered at Highgate Meeting House.
Grace tried to calm her breathing, to sink into worshipful contemplation, but every time she looked up, she saw Max and had to giggle. He was trying to put on a most solemn and Quakerly face and she wanted to nudge him and tell him that it was fine, that he did not have to pretend to be anything, they were hardly going to throw him out.
She suppressed her giggles and gave him a questioning glance. He responded with a nod. They both stood up. She took his hand.
‘Whither thou goest, I will go; and where thou lodgest, I will lodge; thy people shall be my people, and thy God my God,’ she said in her clear, honest voice. ‘Friends, I take this my Friend, Max Hoffnung, to be my husband, promising through divine assistance to be unto him a loving and faithful wife, so long as we both on earth shall live.’
She squeezed his hand and smiled at him.
‘Friends . . .’ He smiled. ‘I take this my Friend, Grace Woolman as my wife, promising to be unto her a loving and faithful husband, so long as we both on earth shall live.’
Everyone in the room signed the marriage certificate.
Later, over tea and cake, not even her mother mentioned Max’s omission of the divine assistance. It was a thoroughly happy day, though the best part of it, they agreed, was when they were on their own with the door locked behind them.
*
That night, she told him about her journey to Vienna.
‘Where? Where? And did you see . . .? And did you go to . . .? And did you see . . .?’
‘Max,’ she finally said, ‘I didn’t see anything. I didn’t see The Kiss. I didn’t see the Burgtheater. I didn’t eat the special chocolate cake. We’ll go after the war and you’ll have to show me everything. We’ll pretend it’s my first time.’
‘You didn’t even see The Kiss?’
She was chopping onions, he was peeling potatoes. They would have stew and boiled potatoes for their wedding dinner. Suddenly he rested his knife and said: ‘Did you have any direct meetings with them?’
It took her a moment or two to catch the reference.
‘I was more of a typist, really, so not really, no. Though I did sit by the door when one of the meetings took place, and I could hear them talk inside. A Dutch lady, Christian, not a Quaker though. Gertruida, she was called. Known as Truus. And an official. And you know what, it was the strangest conversation I heard in my life.’
‘Who was the official?’
‘The head of the emigration office.’
‘Eichmann?’
‘Yes. I only saw him when Truus came out and left the door open. He was just one of those ordinary men. In uniform, of course, but without it, he might have been the janitor at our meeting house. Well, I don’t know why I’d expected him to look different, but I had.’
‘And why was it a strange conversation?’
‘Because he asked her to show him her knees!’ She had been wanting to tell this to someone for such a long time; and what a relief it was to have finally found someone who listened. ‘See, I was just there in the corridor. So I sat down on a chair – I didn’t spy through the keyhole or anything – but you could hear them clearly enough. Dr Eichmann. That was it. They told us he was very keen on being addressed as Doktor. So Truus piled it on: Guten Tag, Dr Eichmann, pleased to meet you, Dr Eichmann, and all that. Right away he told her he didn’t talk to women and would she leave. She sat down and said she was sorry she hadn’t brought her husband. And so on. Then she explained that she wanted to take Jewish children to England, and he listened for a bit and then . . . Wait. First of all, he asked her to show him her hands. To take off her gloves and show him her hands. There was a bit of a pause and then I heard him say, now take off your shoes. Walk up and down in front of me, and lift your skirt so I can see your knees. There was another pause, and I could hear her rustle about in there. And eventually he said: Incredibly, a pure Aryan and yet so insane.’
Max had listened quietly. He picked up a potato and began to peel it.
‘You see,’ Grace continued, ‘I haven’t told anyone about that conversation, and I still don’t know what to make of it. And I don’t mean the fact that he was making these bizarre requests – I assume it was what he would call a bit of fun, or perhaps he really did believe in racial studies – but the fact that she went along with it, because she thought that would be the best way to reach a deal. And she did, she received permission to take out some five hundred children and that was only the start. But it doesn’t make a very satisfying story, does it? I think that’s what unsettles me about it. There’s something very unsatisfying and irritating about it, not just sad and bizarre but unsatisfying, and for ages I couldn’t figure out why. But I think I know now. You see, we went to Vienna to negotiate with these people, and we did negotiate with them, and even made a modest success of it, if you can call it that, given the circumstances. But when I heard him say, now take off your shoes, something in me bristled, and – and I was silently, you know, really furiously thinking to myself, sending her a silent message, sort of saying, Don’t do it! Don’t take off your shoes! Tell him to go to hell! But that wouldn’t have been the prudent thing to do, would it? That wouldn’t have been of any use to those children. That’s what makes me so terribly annoyed with our people sometimes, that we’re so practical and sensible, and we never slap anyone or tell anyone to go to hell. We just send them Christmas cards saying, wouldn’t it be wonderful to release all prisoners from the camps? And if someone asks us to take off our shoes, well, we take off our shoes. Every time I hear someone say, gosh, I’d never shake that man’s hand, I think, well, we shake everyone’s hands. And it does mean we can do good, in a very quiet, ordinary way, but it also means, frankly, that we go through life shaking an awful lot of dirty hands.’
‘And I’ve peeled the entire potato.’
‘Ha, well done.’
‘No, I mean, look.’ He held up a tiny naked potato, the size of a radish, then pointed at a whole pile of shavings. ‘I was listening so hard I almost peeled it away.’
‘Thank you. So what do you think?’
‘It’s interesting. Clean hands, dirty hands. But to be honest, I wasn’t even really thinking about Eichmann. Or about the Quakers. I was thinking about my father.’
A Trembling Bathtub
1
You, you, you. I can think of nothing else.
No one had ever written such a thing to Esther Morningstar, née Adler. No one had ever said such a thing. The closest was: ‘I have never met anyone quite like you, young lady.’ The moist stem of an old brown pipe tapping the back of her cold hand.
And: ‘Esther . . .’ Spoken with the desperate urgency of a sinking man.
Surely there must have been something a trifle more stirring. She thought back to her first
encounter with her own husband, their early days of marriage. Nothing. ‘Essie, old girl’ was the best she could find in those draughty memories.
She turned the cardboard tube upside down and tapped it until the drawings edged out. Two flimsy pieces of paper fell out of the roll and sailed to the floor. She picked them up with two fingers, recognizing the waxy texture from so many institutional bathrooms. She laid out all the drawings on the kitchen table and stared at the six nude drawings of her daughter.
In Antwerp or in Hatton Garden, Mother would have burned the drawings and thrown the ashes in her face. That sort of reaction had no place in progressive Hampstead. She would roll up the paintings, leave the cardboard tube by the door and pretend nothing had happened.
That’s a very sensible idea, Esther, her mother’s voice said. Turn a blind eye to it, and when the inevitable happens, well, you’ll know how to fix it. Mind you, husbands like yours aren’t easy to find any more. Modern young men have wised up to our ways.
Surely it can’t be my fault, she thought. Had she not given Miriam all she needed to live her life with dignity and a sense of purpose? Had she not married an awkward, clumsy man who collected old horse harnesses, because her sisters told her he was kind and a little gullible, and those were the exact qualities she needed? Had she not hidden her disappointment that Miriam should show no aptitude for natural sciences, and indeed still struggled to understand calculus at the age of twenty? Had she not sent her daughter to Samhuinn, a crank school where she was allowed to substitute experimental dance for maths? Had she not risked her own good name to secure Miriam a place at the Bentham College social sciences department, and had she not stoically accepted Miriam’s choice to drop social sciences for Modern Print-Making: An Introduction to Linocuts?
She picked up the scrap of toilet paper with the most obscene sketch of them all, opened the slatted door of the stove, tossed it in and banged the door shut.
It vanished into the flames with a barely audible rustle.
Esther stood very still and listened to the whispering fire. What an utterly foolish thing to do. Now Miriam would know she had discovered the drawings. With hectic guilt she rolled up the larger ones, only to find that there was soot on her fingers and she had smudged the paper. She tried to rub off the soot with her sleeve but that only made matters worse.
Well, all sorts of things got lost and dirtied in the post. She glanced at the clock. There was a colleague’s paper on the kitchen worktop that she ought to be reading now. But she was stuck in the moment, stuck between the typed stack and the charcoal sketches, unable to decide which one should be dealt with first, which one was important. And she had never felt more of a failure than at this moment, when she knew that the sensible thing would be to ignore the drawings, when she knew that only a hysterical superstitious mind would interpret them as a symbol and a judgement and a curse.
She picked up the second piece of toilet paper, opened the slatted door but did not let go of the paper quickly enough. The corner caught fire and curled up, blackening and erasing the drawing and scorching her fingertips. It was the smell of accidents in the attic, of badly handled lead and temperamental gas flames. She was in the attic in Hatton Garden again and she was also in her kitchen in Hampstead, and that was perfectly possible because the path that connected the two was no longer a narrow straight line but a strange cursed road that twisted and doubled back beneath her feet as she walked.
*
As a girl, she had expected progress to be continuous and linear. There could be no other way. The past she saw as a collection of data that, if entered into a grid, would clot around a rising line. Her hungry, nameless ancestors she pictured crouching about in dark cottages and eating potatoes. They huddled on the cold fringes of Europe, somewhere close to the point where the y axis met the x axis. A knock on the patched-up door, a flicker of a fearful pair of eyes, a dying candle stump waxed to the table.
From there to Antwerp, which she pictured as one large garden under a blue sky with a washing line drawn through it. A clear white line travelling away from the potato-eaters, a line travelling out along the x axis that measured time, out along the y axis that measured . . .
What did the y axis measure, Esther? Look, even now you fail to label it accurately. How could you trust your model when you did not even know what the y axis measured?
Upwards, always upwards. Antwerp. There was that stifling workshop, but still, it was better than the cold Russian hut and the fearful ancestral eyes.
Ten years to the right on the x axis, and several unnamed units up on the y axis, and there was Hatton Garden, her own childhood home. The workshop was still stifling but their kitchen was clean and big. Ten people could fit around that table. Eight of them would fan out and continue the climb, always upwards, towards the sky, away from the roots and the dirt. She had willed it. Out of the darkness and into the light, eight bright new Adlers. She herself was the wonder girl, the promising scientist, the fifty-seven facet brilliant. But the others, she generously conceded, would do well enough too, as cutters, merchants and wives. Her seven brothers and sisters would sparkle with eight facets each.
A few more years to the right on the x axis, and then her careful model collapsed.
She could not understand it – why the line that traced their luck suddenly began to move in such a scraggly and unpredictable manner. It brought deep and sudden pain, but it brought success and good fortune too, and that was the most corrosive feeling. She tried to discern a clear pattern, at least a sequence of transgression and punishment, but there was none; the data was random and scattered.
Someone had given, someone had taken away, and left the pattern broken.
And yet she had pushed ahead, onwards along the time axis. She pushed ahead, she moved into the draughty house on Rose Walk and tried to will the line to rise again in progress. When her husband told her that prayer might help her calm down at bedtime and improve her somnambulism, she replied: I’d rather be a somnambulist than God’s slave.
Upwards!
And it had worked, hadn’t it? She had mastered the line. She had set it on a rising path again. She had calculated the trajectory of bombs and in the process had corrected her own trajectory.
But when she pushed the remaining three drawings and the note deep into the stove with a black poker and shut the slatted door, she wondered whether she had quite risen to the challenge of the bold new century, and whether she quite fit into the model she used to map out her years; and she told herself that perhaps the model, that long positive line of progress, had been faulty all along.
She inspected all the dots between her y axis and her x axis, one after the other, and she realised then that there had been only one time in her life when she had been truly content, and that had been many years ago, when all the mirrors in Hatton Garden still reflected two old faces and eight young ones.
You, you, you. I can think of nothing else.
2
Three days passed and then Miriam came into the kitchen one morning after her night shift and found the cardboard tube, which had been too large to push into the stove. She recognized Paul’s handwriting in the address field. She opened the stove door and poked around in the ashes. When she saw her mother that night, she asked her calmly why she had burned the drawings her artist friend had sent her.
‘It wasn’t the sort of thing I wanted in my home,’ her mother said without looking up from the paper she was annotating.
Miriam went upstairs, fetched the suitcase she had packed in the morning and made for the front door.
‘Are you going on a trip?’ Her mother’s voice was unnaturally shrill.
‘Burning a work of art isn’t the sort of thing I want to happen in my home,’ Miriam said. ‘So I’ve decided to find another.’
Her mother began to laugh in the same shrill register. ‘Don’t be silly. It was only a drawing, and not a particularly good one, frankly.’
‘How would you know?’
/>
‘I may not know much about drawings, but I do know a thing or two about life. And the first thought that struck me was, what sort of young man would sit around in London and doodle when the rest of us are struggling to stay alive?’
‘A conchie.’ Miriam thoroughly enjoyed the look on her mother’s face, so much that she added: ‘He doesn’t want to sign up, you see. He’d rather sit here and doodle.’
Her mother glanced at the suitcase and Miriam could see that she was taking in its size, estimating how many sets of clothes she had packed, whether the departure was a bluff and she would be back within a few days. All this infuriated her.
‘I see.’ Her mother smiled. ‘I suppose that’s a very wise decision of his. Your uncles had a friend who was a conchie, you know. A man called Leybesh. He made a very clever choice, survived the whole war without as much as a scratch. If only your uncles had been that clever.’
‘Daddy never served, either.’ Miriam, too, knew all about the precise spot that could cleave the entire crystal.
‘Because of his health.’
‘Is that so? He told me it was because of his age. Auntie Hannah told me it was because he didn’t want to go and knew the right people.’
‘Well, we’re not discussing your father’s war record now.’ Her mother folded her hands and looked just past her face, into the middle distance, as she always did. ‘I’ve experienced quite a few disappointments over the years, as you know. And it certainly hasn’t been much fun watching you flit around between all your half-finished tasks and making very little of your life. But I have to say that it would never have occurred to me, not even when I most doubted that you would ever accomplish anything of lasting value, that when push came to shove, when a time came when we’d all be tested, my own daughter would be spending her time posing nude for a deserter.’
Of Love and Other Wars Page 19
