The Italian Girl

  ‘David, I don’t want to trouble you now, but I must. Otto wanted to know – what you want done. Or have you already arranged something?’

  ‘No. Please let Otto arrange it. Forgive me for leaving it to you. You understand, I could not –’

  ‘Yes, yes. That’s all right. Have you any special wishes? A Jewish burial – ?’

  ‘Yes.’ He seemed a little startled. ‘Of course. If you will find the leader of the Jewish community he will arrange all, all.’ He looked already confused and far away. I saw that the tears were coming again and I looked down. I could not bear the mystery of his pain.

  I said, ‘Will you be all right? We wanted you to come home.’

  He put his suitcase down and put his two hands to his face as if to cool it. His fingers caressed the swollen disfigured cheeks.

  ‘Kind. But I must go. I shall be well.’

  ‘Don’t grieve,’ I said idiotically. I felt near to tears myself.

  He sighed very deeply. ‘I knew she was a doomed child. I knew I should have to leave her behind.’

  The solemnity of the words made me apprehend him as a child himself. ‘Where are you going David? Are you going back south to your people? Do not be alone.’

  ‘South?’ He looked confused for a moment. ‘No, no. I am going home. To the true north.’ He smiled a strained smile and rubbed his eyes.

  His words puzzled me. ‘Where – ?’

  ‘I am going back to Leningrad.’

  ‘Back –?’ I stared at him. ‘But I thought –’

  ‘You thought I was born in Golders Green and that my father was, I forget what, a fur merchant? No. Those were lies. We came from Leningrad like she said, just like she said.’

  ‘You mean everything, the whole story?’

  ‘The forest at night, and the searchlights, and my father’s hand – all true, every word true just like she said.’

  I stared at his hot streaked face. ‘But why – ?’

  ‘Why did I lie. Well, why should I tell the truth, such a truth, to anyone who asks? Why should I wear such a story always round my neck and be such a figure to the world? And oh, there were worse things, worse than she said. I did not want to be a tragic man, to be the suffering one. I wanted to be light, to be new, to be free – ’ He spoke impatiently, gesturing with his hands as if he were catching the dark fancies that flocked about him.

  It was impossible to doubt him now. And as it came to me that he had indeed not escaped his destiny of suffering, the significance of his earlier words came home to me ‘Leningrad? But, David, reflect –’

  ‘I want to see the Neva again,’ he said. ‘I want to touch those blocks of granite along the quays, to see the Admiralty spire in the sun –’

  ‘David, don’t be a perfect fool. You can’t go back there. You might be put in prison. Anything might happen to you.’

  He spread his hands in a way which made me see that he was Jewish indeed. ‘Who knows? I believe I would be well, I believe I would be let be. Why should they not let me be? And I am prepared to run the risk of things being otherwise. And even if it were otherwise? It is my own place and one must suffer in one’s own place.’

  ‘You are an idiotic little fool,’ I said. I wanted to impress him, to shake him out of this moment of fantasy. ‘You are in a completely insane state of mind, an extreme state of mind, at the moment. You want to die too. You simply must not make an irrevocable decision now. You must wait.’

  He shook his head. ‘Now is the time, exactly the time, to decide. Do you not realize that we know the truth about ourselves now? A truth that will fade.’

  It was what I had just said myself in answer to Otto’s question. It will fade. But I answered him. ‘Please don’t go.’

  ‘It is the only place where I am real. They speak the language of my heart.’

  ‘They may break your heart. Don’t be romantic about it.’

  ‘I am in the truth now. And this is a moment for following the truth into whatever folly.’

  ‘It will be a very long folly, David.’

  ‘Well, so. But I am useless here. You may not understand, but nothing means anything to me outside Russia. Your language is dry, dry in my mouth. Here I am a non-man, I should become here a clown, a nothing, some man’s toy, as I might have been your brother’s toy if he had wished it. I would rather die than be a meaningless man.’

  ‘Don’t be a lunatic. You may feel this. But think about freedom. You said you wanted to be free, to be light, to be new. Freedom is that one necessary thing. And there, whatever else you have, you will not have that.’ I looked at my watch. I had ten minutes in which to raise the whole theory of the matter, ten minutes in which to persuade him.

  He gave a kind of smile, pushing his full mouth against the misery of his face. ‘There is no arguing with the bottom of one’s heart. Not everyone can have that thing, freedom, and not be ruined by it. It is only one way of life – ’

  ‘Idiot! Reflect, reflect! What will you do in Leningrad? Imagine, imagine! What about your painting? You spoke to me of that – ’

  ‘I burnt those paintings. I am glad you did not see them. I have no talent. And there are things more important.’

  ‘That could be so. But for you –? The question is not what life is best but what life can you best live. You must consider your own needs, and not just for your own sake either.’ How to explain that to him in ten minutes?

  ‘I have no such needs. Only the ones I spoke of. To be back there. The poet says, “Russia shines in my heart”. I did not want to leave. One cannot escape from the suffering of the world.’

  ‘One need not court it. You remember what you said to me about there being two kinds of Jew – ’

  ‘I never really believed it, not for myself. I knew that I would be caught in the end, through her –’

  ‘Have you any family out there?’

  ‘A sister.’

  ‘Ah, another sister. What does she do?’

  He smiled the painful dragging smile again. ‘She is a successful person, an engineer.’

  ‘I see. Perhaps she has escaped her Jewish destiny.’

  ‘Perhaps I am her Jewish destiny.’

  ‘You are leaping into the fire.’

  ‘It is in our family to do so.’

  The grimness of the wit shocked me with a terrible sense of his earnestness. I saw him there full of the despair of the very young, the beautiful absoluteness which can drive on towards a lifelong shipwreck. ‘Do not go, David. Please think for a while anyway. Wait a month or two without deciding. Let me see you again and talk with you. Come and stay at my house and rest and think these things over. Please let me look after you.’

  He gave me a full stare from wide-open blood-shot eyes. ‘And what do you think would be the consequence of that? No, no. It is better to do the wrong thing for the right reasons than the right thing for the wrong reasons. Ah, you don’t understand – ’

  I did however understand very well. I could have wrung my hands over the tangled mess of human destiny: those half-grasped intimations of right and wrong that drive us out along twilit roads where there is no return.

  I said to him harshly, ‘You can’t afford the fare.’

  He smiled, this time more freely, and I was reminded of Otto’s look when the mask seemed to fall from him. ‘Yes. I have these.’

  He groped in his pocket and brought out his closed hand. He turned it and opened the palm. There were four diamond rings.

  With a shock of mingled horror and pain I recognized them. ‘So that part of the story was true too.’

  ‘I told you it was all true. My father was a provident man. And she – she would not mind –’

  ‘Your father might. He got those rings to help you to get out, not to return.’

  He shrugged his shoulders. ‘He got them for our future.’

  The train came in. David picked up his bag. With a last frenzy of will I took out my pocket book and wrote my address on a page. I thrust the folded paper
into his breast pocket. ‘That’s where I live. Think again. Let me know.’

  He turned to open a carriage door.

  ‘David, have you any messages – for them?

  He paused. ‘No. The best I can hope is that I shall soon seem as unreal to them as they will seem to me.’

  ‘That is not the best, as you know.’

  ‘One cannot always achieve the best, as you know.’

  The folded piece of paper fluttered to the ground between us.

  The whistle was blowing. He put his foot on the train. With deliberation he took my shoulder and kissed me on both cheeks. ‘Goodbye, Lord Edmund.’

  19. Boxwood

  ‘I dreamt last night,’ said Otto, ‘that there was an enormous bird in the house. I think it was a kite –’

  ‘A vulture,’ I said wearily.

  ‘What? Well, anyway it was following me through the rooms trailing its wings after it like a sort of train, and I could hear a sort of heavy dragging rustling sound just behind me all the time. I got to the telephone to call for help, but the dial was made of butterscotch, so I didn’t dial, and then this bird –’

  ‘Otto, we must decide about Lydia’s tombstone.’

  We were in the workshop. Otto was sitting on the workbench, in a space he had cleared among the tools, eating his lunch. He had just crammed a fat piece of raw carrot into his mouth. As a handful of parsley followed it closely, shreds of munched carrot fell out onto Otto’s bare chest and lodged in the curly mat of hair. I was sitting on a block of black Irish limestone. A black pollen covered the floor round about it. Otto had been working.

  He rubbed his big unshaven chin with a sandpapery sound. ‘Yes. I’ve been thinking. Let’s just put “Beloved Wife of” and “Beloved Mother of”. The usual stuff. Don’t you think? After all she was our mother and she was our father’s wife. I don’t see why she shouldn’t put up with it now.’

  ‘I agree. I’ve been thinking that too. And, Otto – ’

  ‘Mmm?’

  ‘You do really agree about accepting Maggie’s suggestion? You won’t throw a fit about it later on?’

  ‘That I keep the house and we split the rest three ways? No, I’ve no objection at all. It seems rational, doesn’t it? The insurance have come up trumps about the fire damage, thank heavens. Lydia’s fire extinguishers did a good job. It’s only Isabel’s room that’s a write-off.’

  I stared at my brother with a mild surprise. I had expected some gestures, some fuss: but Otto seemed to take Maggie’s generosity for granted.

  ‘There’s plenty, you know,’ he said, as my wonderment left a suggestive silence.

  ‘Yes, yes, plenty. Well, Otto – ’

  ‘Yes, I know. You’re just going. Ah, well. Maggie’s going too, you know. She’s off. I don’t suppose we’ll see her again. It does seem the end of an epoch, doesn’t it?’

  ‘How will you manage, Otto, without – without anyone?’

  ‘So you know Isabel’s going too? I was right not to stop her, wasn’t I? I would never have suggested it. But we were punishing each other. I feel in a curious way it’s all for the best, this part of it. I’ll manage so long as I can get to the greengrocer’s. And I’ve just learnt how to bake potatoes. All you do –’

  ‘I know, Otto, I’ve baked many potatoes. You’ll manage.’

  ‘And Isabel will manage too. She’s wonderful you know.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘You don’t think I ought to have fought it, tried to persuade her to stay?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I felt – somehow so tired – it was like dropping something very heavy, letting go, letting her go without hatred, setting her free. It seemed essential now, absolutely proper, and I feel so much better about her. You know how when one acts rightly at last it’s suddenly very easy?’

  ‘I don’t actually.’

  ‘Maybe it’s just something to do with being in despair. You remember how I said I wanted to be stripped, denuded? Well, it’s come. I’ve become a vegetable. Now there’s no hope or fear of anything I just live in the present. I don’t even want to drink. Do you think I’ll go on like this, do you think I’ve really changed?’

  ‘I don’t know, Otto.’

  He did in fact look different. The big flabby face seemed collapsed, fallen apart, as if the strings of anguish had been cut. A vacant, curiously serene, light shone from behind. I had not expected this: I had expected a whole drama of violent grief and guilt. I had expected some sort of breakdown, But since he had returned home Otto had been completely quiet. He was working regularly and hardly drinking at all. He did not avoid speaking of Elsa; he seemed better able to think about her than I was. It was not that he made little of her death or failed to see his own share in that destruction. It was that this contemplation had brought him, as he said, to a kind of extremity of which despair was perhaps not the right name. He was beyond the consolations of guilt. He was beyond even the sober machinery of penitence. He was broken and made simple by a knowledge of mortality. Whether he would remain so I could not be certain. But in a way that would have surprised him very much I almost envied him.

  ‘Go and see Isabel before you go, Ed. She’s very fond of you. You might be able to help her. She’s at the hotel.’

  ‘I know. I’m just going there. Then I’ll come back and pack.’

  ‘Funny for you to go home, won’t it be? Us all altered and you just the same. But then you were always miles ahead of us, above us. Sometimes I thought you had a sort of religious vocation, Ed. If we’d been brought up differently – ’

  ‘No. It’s you who have the religious vocation. I’m just taking a long time to reach the human level. You’re the one that watches.’

  ‘What one that watches?’

  ‘Never mind. I must be off.’

  Otto laid aside the onion he had been eating. He wiped his mouth on the long silky black hair which covered the back of his hand. He dusted shreds of carrot off his chest on to his worn and rather smelly corduroy trousers. Gorilla-like he rose and I rose too for the parting.

  My eye was caught by some change of colour on my left among the tall stones. Flora was standing there so still that she looked for an instant like a pre-Raphaelite girl, all patience, all regard. But then I saw that it was a new Flora. She too had changed. She was neat, tense, modern, a greyhound. As she came forward I flinched before her.

  She put her suitcase down while I shuffled my feet in the black limestone dust. She gave me a brief hard glance and then turned severely to Otto. He shrank back a little, looking at her with gaping drooping mouth, eagerly yet piteously. ‘Flora – ’

  ‘I’m going to stay here now,’ she said in a high voice. ‘I’m going to look after you.’ She looked, she sounded, like Lydia. Otto wriggled like a deflating balloon and got back on to his table. He smiled a grateful lunatic smile. I moved away.

  ‘You are leaving, Uncle Edmund?’

  ‘Yes, it looks like it. I think I’m being seen off!’ I smiled at them both. I was very glad she had come back.

  Otto turned his beam upon me. He smiled at me tenderly, exhaustedly, as someone might smile in the presence of death. I had never seen quite this smile before. Flora gave me the severe prim look of the very young. I blessed them both with a salute. ‘Good-bye, then.’

  ‘Good-bye, Ed. By the way, what happened to those boxwood blocks of father’s that you found? I think I might use them after all.’

  ‘They’re upstairs, I’ll just leave them in my room. I’m glad you want them. They’ve all healed, you know, they’re quite sound and whole again. Good-bye, Flora. I hope you’ve forgiven me.’

  ‘Good-bye.’ She frowned, taking off her coat slowly. ‘Is your eye better?’

  ‘Yes, much better. It looks funny still, but it feels all right.’ I reached out a hand and she took it. We did not exactly shake hands. It was more like a chaste embrace.

  ‘Good-bye, Ed. Thanks for all. Gosh, I’m a wreck.’

  ‘Human lives mend
too, mysteriously.’

  ‘Mine’s the kind that’s better cracked. Ciao, Ed.’

  ‘Ciao, Otto.’

  I left them together and wiped the butter and onion off my hand with a handkerchief.

  20. Isabel in a long Perspective

  ‘You know, I think it was Otto that David really loved.’

  ‘Maybe,’ I said.

  ‘He certainly loved being afraid of Otto – and that’s a sort of love, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes. There are many sorts of love, Isabel.’

  She was gradually denuding the scene. The shabby, nakedly brown hotel room emerged from under mountains of feathery downy garments which Isabel folded quickly into fantastically small square packages and stowed into suitcases. It was like a metamorphosis of birds.

  ‘I think he wanted Otto to beat him.’

  ‘So he didn’t tell you where he was going?’ I asked.

  ‘No. His letter just said he was going abroad. I dare say it’s America. Oh, I don’t expect to see him again, Edmund, I really don’t.’ She sighed.

  I sighed. I had decided not to tell Isabel about my last talk with David. It was better to keep silent and to let the deep logic of the situation remain entirely hid. Simplicity was better than puzzlement. I sat down upon the bed from which the sheets had already been removed. Our voices were beginning to echo in the empty room. How we had all been stripped, Otto, Isabel, David – and myself.

  ‘America. Yes. Isabel, are you going to be all right? I mean, if you need money, of course Otto – ’

  ‘Oh, I have some money of my own, don’t worry. You aren’t shocked at me, are you, Edmund?’

  ‘Shocked? Dear Isabel, of course not! I’m just worried –’

  ‘Yes, I know. But I thought you might be shocked, you’re such a very austere and upright sort of person yourself. I know you’ve hated seeing me and Otto muddling along. You don’t think this makes it even worse?’