“You’ve described it very well,” said Mama. “But there is one thing you don’t know. You don’t know how it feels to be fifty-six years old.”
“But I can imagine.”
“No,” said Mama. “You can’t. It’s quite true, I could do all the things you say. But I don’t want to. I’ve made enough new starts. I’ve made enough decisions. I don’t want to make any more. I don’t even,” said Mama, her mouth quivering, “want to go to that bloody convalescent home with the ping-pong table.”
“But that’s because you’re not well.”
“No,” said Mama. “It’s because I’m fifty-six, and I’ve had enough.”
The snow was still drifting past the window.
“One of the doctors was talking to me yesterday,” said Mama. “You know, they have all this awful psychology now, even in Germany. He thinks that when someone tries to kill themselves, it’s a cry for help – that’s what he called it. Well, all I know is that when I had swallowed those pills, I felt completely happy. I was lying on my bed – they take a while to work, you know – and it was getting dark outside, and I was looking at the sky and thinking, there’s nothing I need to do. It no longer matters. I’ll never, ever, have to make another decision. I’ve never in my life felt so peaceful.”
“Yes, but now – now that everything’s changed and you’re going on holiday and –” Anna had a little difficulty in getting this out – “if everything is all right with Konrad, won’t you be quite glad?”
“I don’t know,” said Mama. “I don’t know.” She frowned, trying to think exactly what she meant. “If I had died, you see, at least I should have known where I was.”
It did not occur to her that she had said anything odd, and she looked surprised when Anna laughed. Then she understood and laughed too. “Why do you always think I’m so funny?” she said delightedly, like a child who has inadvertently made the grown-ups laugh. “I’m really very serious.”
Her snub nose stuck out absurdly under her tired blue eyes and she sat there in her flowery dressing gown, needing to be looked after.
Later the nurse brought them tea with some little cakes. (“Plätzchen,” said Mama. “Do you remember how Heimpi used to make them?”) Konrad rang up to say that he had booked the hotel and also to remind Anna that he would pick her up early next morning.
After this, Mama went happily back to bed and, even though it was now quite dark outside, they left the curtains drawn back, so that they could watch the snow. It was too wet to stick, but of course, said Anna, it would be different in the Alps. Mama asked about her new job and, when Anna explained about it, said, “Papa always said that you ought to write.” She only spoiled it a little by adding, “But this job is just for television, isn’t it?”
Towards seven, the sister came back and said that Mama had had a very tiring day, and Anna shouldn’t stay too long. After this, it became more difficult to talk.
“Well—” said Anna at last.
Mama looked up at her from the bed. “It’s been so nice today,” she said. “Just like the old days.”
“It has,” said Anna. “I’ve enjoyed it too.”
“I wish you could stay longer.”
Instant panic.
“I can’t,” said Anna, much too quickly. “I’ve got to get back to my job. And Richard.”
“Oh, I know, I know,” said Mama. “I only meant—”
“Of course,” said Anna. “I wish I could stay, too.”
She finally left her with the nurse who had brought in her supper.
“I’ll write every day,” she said as she embraced her.
Mama nodded.
“And look after yourself. And have a lovely time in the Alps. And if you suddenly feel like it, come to London. Just ring us up and come.”
Mama nodded again. “Goodbye, my darling,” she said, very moved.
Anna looked back at her from the door. She was leaning back in the bed as she had so often done in the Putney boarding house, her grey hair spread on the pillow, her blue eyes brave and appallingly vulnerable, her nose ridiculous.
“Goodbye, Mama,” she said.
She was almost out of the room when Mama called after her, “And give my love again to Max.”
She came out of the hospital for the last time and suddenly didn’t know what to do next. The snow was trying to stick. It glistened patchily on the invisible grass and, more thinly, in the drive, making a pale shine in the darkness. A taxi drew up, white flakes whirling in the beam of its headlamps, and deposited a woman in a fur coat.
“Wollen Sie irgendwo hin?” asked the driver.
It was not yet eight o’clock, and she could not face going back to the hotel, “Ja, bitte,” she said, and gave him the Goldblatts’ address.
She found Hildy in a state of euphoria. Erwin was much better and the doctor, who had only recently left, had assured her that he was suffering not from hepatitis but the current form of mild gastric ’flu.
“So we are celebrating with cognac,” she said, handing Anna a glass. “We are drinking to the hepatitis which did not catch him.”
“And also to the brave Hungarians who have defied the Russians,” Erwin called through the half-open door. She could see him sitting up in bed, a glass of cognac in his hand, the billowing quilt covered with newspapers which rustled every time he moved.
“Look at this,” he cried. “Have you seen it?”
“Ach, poor Anna, from one invalid to the next,” said Hildy, but he was holding out the illustrated paper so eagerly that she went in to see. It showed a fat, frightened man emerging from a house with his hands above his head. “Hungarian civilians arrest a member of the hated Secret Police,” said the caption. In another picture, a secret policeman had been shot and his notebook which, the caption explained, contained the names of his victims, had been left open on his chest. There were pictures of dazed political prisoners released from jail, of children clambering over captured Russian tanks, of the Hungarian flag, the Russian hammer and sickle torn from its centre, floating over the giant pair of boots which was all that was left of Stalin’s statue.
“What they have done!” said Erwin. “What these wonderful people have done!” He raised the cognac to his lips. “I drink to them,” he cried, and emptied his glass, which Anna felt sure could not be good for him. But she too was moved, and glad for a moment to think of something other than Mama.
She smiled and emptied her glass also. It was surprising how much better she felt almost at once.
“Wonderful,” murmured Erwin and was refilling both of them from the bottle on his bedside table, when Hildy took over.
“So now it’s enough,” she said. “You’ll only give her your germs.”
She took the bottle and carried both it and Anna off to the kitchen, where she was in the middle of chopping vegetables for soup.
“And so,” she said, as she settled Anna on a stool. “What’s new?”
Anna was not sure where to start. “I’m going home tomorrow,” she said at last.
“Good,” said Hildy. “And how is your Mama?”
The fumes from the cognac mingled with the fumes from Hildy’s chopped onions, and she was suddenly tired of pretending.
“I don’t know,” she said, looking hard at Hildy. “All right, I suppose, if Konrad stays with her. If not… I don’t know what will happen if he doesn’t.”
Hildy looked back at her equally hard.
“So what are you going to do about it?” she said. “Stick them together with glue?”
“Of course not. But—” She wanted desperately to be reassured. “It seems awful to leave her,” she said at last. “But I can’t bear to stay. And I think I’ve really made it worse by being here. Because I told Konrad – I told him something about Mama. He says it didn’t matter, but I think it did.”
Hildy swept the onions into a saucepan and started on the carrots. “Konrad is old enough to know if it mattered or not,” she said. “And your mother is old eno
ugh to know if she wants to live or die.”
It seemed an absurd over-simplification, and Anna felt suddenly angry. “It’s not as easy as that,” she said. “It’s easy to talk, but it’s not the same as coping with it. I think that if your mother had tried to kill herself, you’d feel very different.”
There was a silence because Hildy had stopped chopping. “My mother was not at all like yours,” she said. “She was not so clever and not so pretty. She was a big woman with a big Jewish nose who liked to grow Zimmerlinden – you know, house plants. There was one that she’d grown right round the living-room window, she called it ‘die grüne Prinzessin’ – the green princess. And in 1934, when Erwin and I left Germany, she refused to come with us because, she said, whoever would look after it?”
“Oh, Hildy, I’m sorry,” said Anna, knowing what was coming, but Hildy remained matter of fact.
“We think she died in Theresienstadt,” she said. “We’re not quite sure – there were so many, you see. And perhaps you’re right, what I say is too simple. But it seems to me your mother is lucky, because at least she can choose for herself if she wants to live or die.”
She went back to chopping the carrots. Anna watched the glint of the knife as they collapsed into slices.
“You see, what are you going to do?” said Hildy. “Go to your mother each morning and say, ‘Please, Mama, live another day’? You think I haven’t thought about my mother, how I should have made her come with us? After all, she could have grown Zimmerlinden also in Finchley. But of course we did not know then how it would be. And you can’t make people do things – they want to decide for themselves.”
“I don’t know,” said Anna. “I just don’t know.”
“I’m a few years younger than your mother,” said Hildy. “But she and Konrad and I – we’re all the same generation. Since the Nazis came, we haven’t belonged in any place, only with refugees like ourselves. And we do what we can. I make soup and bake cakes. Your mother plays bridge and counts the miles of Konrad’s car. And Konrad – he likes to help people and to feel that they love him. It’s not wonderful, but it’s better than Finchley, and it’s a lot better than Theresienstadt.”
“I suppose so.”
“You don’t suppose – you know. Anyway, what can you do about us? Make the Nazis not have happened? You going to put us all back in 1932? And if your mother, with her temperament, says this life is not good enough for her, you going to make her go on living whether she wants to or not?”
“I don’t know,” said Anna again.
“She doesn’t know,” said Hildy to the carrots. “Look, can’t you understand, it’s not your business!” She swept the carrots into the pan with the rest and sat down at the table. “You want something to eat?”
“No,” said Anna. “I mean, thank you, I’m not hungry.”
Hildy shook her head. “Pale green, you look.” She picked up the cognac and filled up her glass. “Here, drink. And then home to bed.”
Anna tried to think how many glasses of cognac she had already had, but it was too difficult, so she drank this one as well.
“I would just like –” she said, “I would just like to know that she will be all right.”
“Nu, that you know. Konrad is a good man, and they have been together so long. He will certainly stay with her, at least for a while.”
“And then?”
“Then?” Hildy raised both hands in the age-old Jewish gesture. “Who can worry about then? Then, what do we know, everything will probably be quite different.”
It was snowing more than ever as the taxi drove her home to the hotel. She leaned back, dazed, and looked out at the flickering whiteness racing past the window. It shone when caught by the light, broke up, whirled, disappeared, touched the window from nowhere and quickly melted. You could see nothing beyond it. You might be anywhere, she thought.
Her head swam with the cognac she had drunk, and she pressed it against the glass to cool it.
Perhaps out there, she thought, is a different world. Perhaps out there, as Hildy said, it really had, none of it, ever happened. Out there Papa was still sitting in the third row of the stalls, Mama was smiling on the beach, and Max and the small person who had once been herself were running up some steps, shouting, “Ist Mami da?”
Out there the goods trains had never carried anything but goods. There had been no torchlight processions and no brown uniforms.
Perhaps out there Heimpi was still stitching new black eyes on her pink rabbit. Hildy’s mother was still tending her plants. And Rachel Birnbaum, aged six, was safe at home in her bed.
Friday
She woke early and was out of bed and at the window almost before she had opened her eyes, to see what the weather was like. It had worried her, at intervals during the night, that the plane might not be able to take off in heavy snow. But when she looked out into the garden, most of it had already melted. Only a few shrinking patches were left on the grass, pale in the early morning light. The sky looked clear enough – grey with some streaks of pink – and there seemed to be little wind.
So I’ll get away all right, she thought. She wrapped her arms about her against the cold and suddenly became aware of feeling rather strange. I can smell the glass, she thought. I can smell the glass of the window. At the very same time, her stomach gave a heave, everything rose up inside her, and she just managed a wild rush to the basin before she was sick.
It happened so suddenly that it was over almost before she knew it. For a moment she stood there shakily, letting the water run from the taps and rinsing her mouth in the tooth-glass. This is not tension, she thought. Oh God, she thought, I’ve caught Erwin’s gastric ‘flu. Then she thought, I don’t care – I’m still going home.
She was afraid that if she once went back to bed, she might stay there, so very slowly and methodically, she put on her clothes, opened her suitcase, threw in her things, and then sat down in a chair. The room was inclined to rise and sink around her, but she made a great effort and kept it steady.
Perhaps, after all, it was only the cognac, she thought. She kept her eyes focused on the curtains, mercifully still today, and concentrated on their intricate, geometrical pattern. Gradually, as she followed the interlocking woven lines on the dark background, the nausea receded. Down, across, down. Across, down, across. In a moment, she thought, I’ll be able to go and have some breakfast.
And then she suddenly realized what she was looking at. The pattern resolved itself into a mass of criss-crossing right-angles. It consisted of nothing but tiny, overlapping swastikas.
She was so surprised that she got up and walked across to them. There was no doubt about it. The swastikas were woven right through the fabric. Her nausea forgotten, she was filled instead with a mixture of amusement and disgust. I always thought that woman was a Nazi, she thought. She had found swastika patterns in Germany before, of course – engraved on the cutlery in a restaurant, carved deep into the backs of chairs or into the newspaper holders in a café. But she was repelled by the thought that she had unwittingly shared a room with this one, that she had been looking at it while thinking about Mama and Papa.
It’s just as well I’m leaving, she thought. She moved her eyes from the curtains to the window and, very carefully, turned round. Then she walked down to the breakfast room and drank two cups of black coffee, after which she felt better. But the table was grubby as usual, a German voice was shouting in the kitchen, and suddenly she could not wait to get out of the place.
She went to fetch her suitcase and put on her coat. The proprietress, to her relief, was nowhere about, so she did not need to say goodbye to her. She smiled at the adolescent girl who, she calculated, could not have been more than three or four at the end of the Thousand Year Reich and could not thus be held responsible. Then she carried her suitcase out into the street and, even though it was far too early, sat on it in the cold until Konrad arrived to collect her.
“You look terrible,” he said as they
stood together at the airport. “What’s the matter with you?”
“I think I had too much cognac last night. I felt awful when I first got up, but I’m all right now.”
It was not strictly true. She was still troubled by nausea, coupled with the curious intensification of her sense of smell. The leather seats of Konrad’s car had been almost too much for her, and she had ridden a large part of the way with her nose stuck out of the window.
“I’m quite well enough to travel,” she said, suddenly afraid that he might somehow stop her.
“I wouldn’t dream of daring to suggest otherwise,” he said. “Especially as I’ve cabled Richard to meet you.”
She smiled and nodded.
There was a pause. She could smell his coat, floor polish, a packet of crisps which someone was eating, and the wood of some seats nearby, but it was all right – she did not feel sick.
“Well,” he said. “This is very different from when you arrived. At least we’ve got your mother through.”
“Yes.” She hesitated. “I hope it won’t be too difficult for you now. With – with your secretary and everything.”
“I’ll manage,” he said. “Obviously, one can’t just – abandon people. But I’ll manage.”
“And I hope you have a good time in the Alps.”
“Yes,” he said. “I hope so too.”
“And when you come back –” She suddenly needed, desperately, to hear him say it – “you will look after Mama, won’t you?”
He sighed and smiled his tired, asymmetrical smile. “You should know me by now,” he said. “I always look after everybody.”