A moment ago you opened your eyes. Dark gray eyes, completely alert, that caught and gripped me for a moment in their gaze. Then you closed them again and drifted away. Maybe you sense that I am coming to the end, that the story that has been hurtling toward you from the start is about to turn the bend in the road and collide with you at last. Yes, I wanted to weep and gnash my teeth, Your Honor, to beg your forgiveness, but what came out was a story. I wanted to be judged on what I did with my life, but now I will be judged by how I described it. But perhaps that is right, after all. If you could speak, perhaps you would say that is how it always is. Only before God do we stand without stories. But I am not a believer, Your Honor.
The nurse will come soon to administer another dose of morphine, touching your cheek with the gentle ease of one who has made a life of caring for others. She said they will wake you tomorrow, and now tomorrow has almost come. She washed the blood from my hands. She took a brush out of her purse and ran it through my hair, just as my mother used to do. I reached up and stilled her hand. I’m the one who—I began to say, but stopped there.
You stood pinned in the headlights, so still that I thought, in the fraction of a second left for me to think, that you were waiting for me. Then the screech of brakes, the body blow. The car skidded and was still. My head hit the wheel. What have I done? The road was empty. How long until I heard the abysmal moan of pain, and understood that you were alive? Until I found you crumpled in the grass and took your head in my hands? Until the wail of the siren, the red splash of lights, gray dawn through the window in which I saw, for the first time, your face? What have I done, what have I done?
They swarmed around you. They hung you back up on life, like a coat that has fallen from its hook.
Talk to him, she said, fixing the electrode that had come loose from your chest. It’s good for him to hear you. Good? She said, It’s good for you to talk. About what? Just talk. For how long? I asked, though I knew I would sit by your side for as long as they let me, until your true wife or lover arrived. His father is on the way, she said, and drew the curtains around us. For a thousand and one nights, I thought. More.
SWIMMING HOLES
LOTTE REMEMBERED ME until the very last. It was I who often felt I could no longer remember the person she had once been. Her sentences began easily enough, but quickly faltered and became submerged in oblivion. Nor did she understand me. At times she gave the impression of understanding, but even if some combination of words I struck on had ignited a glimmer of sense in her mind, by the next moment she’d lost it. She died quickly, without pain. On the 25th of November we celebrated her birthday. I bought a cake from the bakery she liked in Golders Green, and the two of us blew out the candles together. For the first time in weeks I saw a flush of happiness in her cheeks. The following night she came down with a very high fever and had trouble breathing. Her health wasn’t good, and she was frail by then; in the last years of her life she had aged a great deal. I called our doctor, who came to see her at the house. Her condition worsened, and some hours later we brought her to the hospital. The pneumonia came over her rapidly and overwhelmed her. In her last hours she begged to be let to die. The doctors did everything they could to save her, but when there was nothing more to do they left us in peace. I climbed onto the narrow bed with her and stroked her hair. I thanked her for the life she’d shared with me. I told her that no one could have been happier together than we had been. I told her again the story of the first time I saw her. Soon after that she lost consciousness and slipped away.
About forty people came to Highgate Cemetery on the afternoon I buried her. Long ago, we had decided to be buried together there, where we had walked so many times among the overgrown lanes, reading the names on the toppled gravestones. That morning I was flustered and nervous. Only as the rabbi began to say Kaddish did I realize that some part of me believed her son might attend. Why else had I published the small announcement in the newspaper? Lotte would certainly have disapproved. To her, private life was exactly that. Through eyes blurred by tears, I scanned the trees for a figure in the landscape. Hatless. Coatless, perhaps. Quickly drawn, as the masters sometimes drew a portrait of themselves hidden in a dark corner of the canvas or concealed in a crowd.
Three or four months after Lotte died I began to travel again, as I had been unable to do while she had been unwell. Mostly in England or Wales, and always by train. I liked to go where I could walk from village to village, staying in a different place each evening. Making my way like that, with only a small rucksack, I felt a sense of freedom I hadn’t known for many years. Freedom and peace. The first trip I took was to the Lake District. A month later I went to Devon. From the village of Tavistock, I set out across Dartmoor, losing my way until at last I saw the chimneys of the prison rise up in the distance. About two months after that I took a train to Salisbury to visit Stonehenge. I stood with the other tourists under the monstrous gray sky, imagining the Neolithic men and women whose lives so frequently came to an end with blunt-force trauma to the cranium. There was some litter on the ground, shiny metallic wrappers and so on. I went around picking these things up, and when I stood up again the stones were even larger and more frightening than before. I also began to paint, a hobby I’d had when I was young, but had abandoned when I realized that I lacked talent. But talent, worshipped for all that it promises when one is young, seemed at last utterly irrelevant: nothing could be promised to me now, nor did I wish for it to be. I bought a small collapsible easel and took it with me on my trips, unfolding it whenever a particular view struck me. Sometimes someone would stop to watch and we would find our way into a conversation, and it occurred to me that there was no need to tell such people the truth about myself. I would say I was a country doctor from outside Hull, or an airman who’d flown a Spitfire in the Battle of Britain, and as I said it I could actually see the pattern of fields below, opening out in all directions like a code. There was nothing sinister in it, nothing I wished to hide, only a certain pleasure in leaving myself and becoming someone else momentarily, and then a different sort of pleasure, watching the stranger’s back recede into the distance, of slipping back into myself again. I felt something similar on nights when I would wake up in some bed-and-breakfast and forget for an instant where I was. Until my eyes adjusted enough to make out the lines of the furniture, or some detail of the previous day came back to me, I hung suspended in the unknown, the unknown which, still loosely tethered to consciousness, slips so easily into the unknowable. A fraction of a second only, a fraction of pure, monstrous existence free of all landmarks, of the most exhilarating terror, stamped out almost immediately by a grasp of reality which I came to think of at such times as blinding, a hat pulled over one’s eyes, since though I knew that without it life would be almost uninhabitable, I resented it nevertheless for all it spared me.
On one such night, waking before I was able to remember where I was, an alarm rang out. Or rather it was the alarm that woke me, though there must have been a delay between the break from my sleep and an awareness of the earsplitting noise. I jumped out of bed and my arm swept the bedside lamp onto the floor. I heard the bulb shatter, and remembered that I was staying in the Brecon Beacons National Park in Wales. There was a smell of acrid smoke as I fumbled for the light switch and pulled on my clothes. The stench of burning in the hallway was overpowering, and I heard shouts coming from the bowels of the building. Somehow I found the stairs. On the way down I met others in various stages of dress. There was a woman holding a barefoot child, a child who was utterly still and silent, like the eye of a storm. Outside, there was a small group assembled on the green in front of the building, some with rapt faces turned upward and illuminated by the fire, others doubled over coughing. Only once I’d made it to their circle did I turn back to look. Flames were already consuming the roof and leaping out of the windows of the top floor. The building must have been more than a hundred years old, a mock Tudor with great wooden ceiling beams made from the masts
of old merchant ships, according to the hotel’s brochure. It went up like dry timber. The impassive child watched it quietly, resting her head on her mother’s shoulder. The night porter appeared with a list of guests and began a roll call. The child’s mother answered to the name of Auerbach. I wondered if she was German, perhaps even Jewish. She was alone, there was no husband or father, and for a moment, as the fire raged and the firefighters pulled up in their trucks and my belongings, the easel and my paints and what clothes I’d brought, went up in smoke, I imagined placing a hand on the woman’s shoulder and guiding her and the child away from the burning building. I pictured the grateful look on her face as she turned to me, and the placid, accepting expression of the child, both of them aware that my pockets were full of crumbs and from then on, from forest to forest, I would guide them, protect them, and care for them as my own. But this heroic fantasy was interrupted by a murmur of excitement that shot through the group: One guest was missing. The porter went down through the roll again, calling each name in a loud voice, and this time everyone became hushed, touched by the seriousness of the task at hand and the luck of their salvage. When the porter arrived at the name Rush no one answered. Ms. Emma Rush, he called again, but it was met with silence.
It was another hour before the fire was put out entirely and her body was discovered, brought out to the driveway covered in a black tarp. She’d jumped from the top floor and broken her neck. Only one other guest remembered her, and described her as middle-aged, always in possession of a pair of binoculars that she’d used, presumably, for bird-watching in the valleys, gorges, and woods of the Brecon Beacons. One ambulance left for the morgue and the other, carrying those suffering from smoke inhalation, to the hospital. The rest of us were divided up for various inns in nearby towns on the edge of the park. The Auerbach woman and her child were assigned to Brecon, and I to Abergavenny in the opposite direction. The last I saw of them was the child’s matted hair as she disappeared into the van. The following day there was a piece about the fire in the local paper, in which it said that the fire had been electrical, and the deceased a primary school teacher from Slough.
A few weeks after Lotte died, my old friend Richard Gottlieb had come round to see how I was getting on. He was a lawyer, and years before he had persuaded Lotte and me to draw up our wills—neither of us had ever been practical in that regard. He’d lost his own wife some years earlier, and since then he had met someone else, a widow eight years younger than he who took care of her appearance and hadn’t let herself go. A force of life, he said of her, stirring the milk into his tea, by which I knew he meant that it’s terrible to die alone, to grow old and fumble with one’s pills, to slip in the bath and crack one’s skull, that I should think about my future, to which I replied that I thought I might travel a bit when the weather got warmer. Either way, he let the subject, so briefly raised, drop. Before he left he laid a hand on my shoulder. Might you want to think about revising your will now, Arthur? he asked. Right, I said, of course, but at the time I had no intention of doing as much. Twenty years ago when we’d drawn up the wills, Lotte and I had each left everything to the other. In the case that both of us died in a single stroke, we’d divided things up among various charities, nieces, and nephews (mine, of course; Lotte had no family). The rights to Lotte’s books, which earned a pittance, we left to our dear friend Joseph Kern, an old student of mine who had promised to act as her executor.
But on the train ride back from Wales, my clothes still reeking of smoke and ash, the photo of the dead teacher from Slough gazing up at me from the paper folded in my lap, it was as if death’s iron door had swung open and through it, for an instant, I glimpsed Lotte. Deep within herself, as the poem goes, Filled with her vast death, which was so new, / she could not understand that it had happened. And seeing her like that, something broke in me, a little valve that could no longer hold back such pressure, and I began to weep. I thought about what Gottlieb had said. Perhaps it was time to revise after all.
That night, back at home, I made myself a supper of fried eggs and ate them listening to the news. Earlier in the day, General Pinochet had been arrested at London Bridge Hospital where he had been convalescing after back surgery. A number of Chilean exiles, victims of his torture, were interviewed; celebration could be heard in the background. The boy, Daniel Varsky, came back to me briefly, vividly, as he had stood that night at our door. I switched on the television to follow the story, and also, I suppose, to see if there would be any report of the fire, or the woman from Slough, but of course there wasn’t. Images of Pinochet in military uniform, saluting his army, waving from the balcony of La Moneda, were interspersed with blurry footage of an old man dressed in a canary yellow shirt semi-reclining in the back of a car driven by Scotland Yard.
There was an old feral tomcat who sometimes stalked our garden and knew to come to me for food. At night he screamed like a newborn. I left a bowl of milk out to let him know I was back again. But he didn’t come that night, and in the morning a dead fly was floating belly-up in the bowl. As soon as it turned nine, I took out our old address book filled with Lotte’s handwriting and found Gottlieb’s number. He answered, full of cheer. I told him about my trip to the Brecon Beacons, but not about the fire; I didn’t want to disturb the silence around it, I suppose, or betray it by turning it into a story. I asked if I could come by to speak to him in person, he expressed his enthusiasm, called to his wife, and after a muffled pause he invited me over that afternoon for tea.
I spent the morning reading Ovid. I read differently now, more painstakingly, knowing I am probably revisiting the books I love for the last time. At a little after three I set off across the Heath to Well Walk where Gottlieb lived. The windows were decorated with his grandchildren’s paper cutouts. When he opened the door his cheeks were ruddy and the house exhaled a smell of allspice, like those sachets women put in their lingerie drawers. So good of you to come, Arthur, he said, patting me on the back, and led me to a sunny room off the kitchen where the table was already set for tea. Lucie came in to say hello, and we talked about a play she had seen at the Barbican the night before. Then she excused herself, saying she had a friend to visit, and left us alone. When the door closed behind her, Gottlieb took his glasses out of a small leather case and put them on, glasses that magnified his eyes many times their normal size, like the eyes of a tarsier monkey. The better to see me with, I couldn’t help but think, or to see through me.
What I’m about to tell you might surprise you, I began. It surprised me when I discovered it myself, some months before Lotte died. Since then I haven’t grown any more used to the idea that the woman I lived with for nearly fifty years was capable of hiding from me something of this scale, a secret that I have no doubt remained a vivid and haunting part of her inner life for all those years. It’s true, I said to Gottlieb, that Lotte rarely spoke about her parents murdered in the camps, or about the childhood she was exiled from in Nuremberg. That she displayed a capacity, even a talent, for silence perhaps should have alerted me to the possibility of other chapters of her life she might have chosen to withhold from me, to sink deeply into herself like a wrecked ship. But, you see, the subject of her parents’ fate and the loss of her former world were known to me. She had managed to communicate these nightmarish parts of her past at some point early on in our relationship in the form of a shadow play, without ever dwelling on them or giving them away too fully, and had managed at the same time to make clear to me that they were not subjects I should expect ever to be raised by her, nor should I attempt to raise them myself. That her sanity, her ability to carry on with life, both her own and the one we had forged together, depended on her ability and my solemn agreement to cordon off those nightmarish memories, to let them sleep like wolves in a lair, and to do nothing that might threaten their sleep. That she visited these wolves in her dreams, that she lay down with them and even wrote about them, however many times metamorphosed into other forms, I knew well enough. I was a complici
t if not equal partner in her silences. And as such, they were not what one might call secrets. I should also say that despite my acceptance of these terms and my desire to protect her, despite the tender understanding and sympathy I aspired always to show her, and my guilt for having lived a life sheltered from such torment and suffering, I was not always above suspicion. I admit that there were times I am not proud of when I sank to imagining that she had kept something hidden from me in order to willfully betray me. But my suspicions were small and petty, the suspicions of a man who fears that his powers (I trust I can speak frankly to you about these things, I said to Gottlieb, that you are no stranger to what I’m trying to say), his sexual powers which are expected to last decade after decade, have diminished in his wife’s esteem, that she, whom he still considers beautiful, who still evokes in him a feeling of lust, is no longer excited by his sagging and dilapidated state revealed beneath the covers, a man who, to further compound the matter, has taken the example of his own lust for total strangers, certain of his students, or the wives of his friends, as incontrovertible proof of the lust his wife must feel for men other than him. You see, when I doubted her it was her loyalty that I doubted, though I would like to say in my own defense that it was not often, and also that to respect one’s wife’s right to silence as I tried to do, to muffle your own need for reassurance, to suffocate your questions before they rise up and escape through your mouth, is not always easy. A man would have to be better than human not to wonder, at times, whether she hadn’t smuggled into those greater forms of silence, the ones to which you both long ago agreed, other, cheaper, forms—call them omissions or even lies—to mask what amounts to a betrayal.