A Small Person Far Away (22 page)

“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.

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.”

There was nothing more she could say.

The smell of crisps became suddenly overwhelming and nausea returned, but she fought it down.

“Good luck with the job,” said Konrad. “I look forward to seeing your name on the television screen. And give my love to Richard.”

“I will.”

“Perhaps I’ll see you both at Christmas. I’ll be in London then to visit my family.”

“That’ll be lovely.” The part of her not occupied with the crisps noted that it was ludicrous of him to mention his family at this point, but replied, even more ludicrously, “And Mama will be there then as well.”

They looked at each other and then, to her relief, her flight was called.

“Goodbye,” she cried and, on an impulse, embraced him. “Look after yourself. And thank you!”

“For what?” he called after her, and it was true, she did not know. For making Mama happy in the past? For promising, with no great certainty, to look after her in the future? Or just because she herself was at last going home?

She turned and waved to him from Passport Control and he waved back. Then she watched him thread his way through the crowd in the lounge – a tall, fat elderly man with thinning hair and a stick. The great lover, she thought and it seemed very sad.

She was almost sick again as the plane took off – but here at least, she thought, they’ll just think it’s air sickness. She got as far as feeling for the paper bag provided, just in case, but as the plane rose up into the sky, away from the rubble and the re-building, from the dubious goods trains and the even more dubious people who claimed to have known nothing about them, away from the threatening Russians and the ex-Nazis whom they so much resembled, from the Grunewald and the German language and Mama and all her problems, it seemed as though her nausea had been left behind with all the rest.

She looked out at the blazing sky and felt a huge sense of relief. Well, I’ve made it, she thought, as though it had been some kind of escape. She was suddenly hungry, and when the stewardess brought her some breakfast, she devoured a double portion, to the last crumb. Afterwards she wrote a note to Mama, to be posted at London Airport. This way, she thought, Mama would get it tomorrow and it would be something, at least, to stave off depression. When she had stuck down the envelope, she leaned back in her seat and stared out at the sky.

“We have now left the Eastern Zone of Germany and are flying over the Western Zone,” said the stewardess through a little microphone. “In a few minutes you may see the city of Bremen on your left.”

The man beside her, a middle-aged American, stirred and smiled. “I guess it’s silly of me,” he said, “but I’m always glad when we get to this bit.”

She smiled back at him. “So am I.”

Already, as she looked back, her time in Berlin was beginning to shrink into the past. I didn’t do much good there, she thought, but with detachment, as though she were considering someone else. Small, fleeting images ran through her mind – Mama searching for a handkerchief under her pillow; the exact inflection of Konrad’s voice as he said, “The affair, of course, is finished.” Perhaps one day I’ll really write about it, she thought, and this time the idea did not seem so shocking. If I did it properly, she thought – the way it really was. If I could really describe Mama.

But as she picked through everything that had happened, there was a sense of something missing. Something forgotten, or perhaps neglected – something quite ordinary and yet important, that should have happened but hadn’t. If I could just remember that, she thought. But she was tired and it was lovely not to feel sick any more, and after a while she put it out of her mind.

What would Papa think about it all? she wondered. During his last years, when her German had faded and Papa’s English remained inadequate, they had made a joke of addressing each other very formally in French…
Qu’en pensez-vous, mon père
? she thought, and only realized from her neighbour’s astonished glance that she must have said it aloud.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I think I was dreaming.”

She closed her eyes to make it look more convincing, shutting out everything except the throbbing of the engines. Of course if you wrote about it, you’d have to put all that in, she thought. The different languages and the different countries. And the suitcases. Packed and re-packed so many times. Stored in the lofts and basements of the various shabby boarding houses, counted and re-counted on the train journeys from one temporary home to the next.

“
Wir fahren mit der Eisenbahn,
” said Mama. The iron railway. It even sounded like the noise the train made rattling across Germany. The compartment was dirty and Max had got his knees black from searching for his football under the seat. “Here comes the passport inspector,” said Mama and put her finger to her lips, so that Anna would remember not to give them away to the Russians. She could see them standing all along the frontier in an endless line.

“Anything to declare?” said Konrad, and she forgot and told him about the Professor’s pills, but Mama shouted, “I’m fifty-six years old,” and the train moved on, across the frontier, right through the middle of Paris and up Putney High Street.

“I’ve got the children through,” said Mama to Papa who was sitting by his typewriter in his shabby room. He smiled fondly, ironically, and without a trace of self-pity. “As long as we four are together,” he said, “nothing else matters.”

“Papa,” cried Anna, and found herself looking at the face of a stranger. It was quite close to her own, carefully made up and surrounded by permed, blonde hair. Below it was a crisp, blue blouse and a tailored tunic.

“We are about to land at London Airport,” said the stewardess. “Please fasten your seat belt.” She looked at Anna more closely. “Are you quite well?” she said. “You’re looking very pale.”

“Quite well, thank you.” She must have answered automatically, for she was still too much hung about by the dream to know what she was saying.

“Is someone meeting you at the airport?”

“Oh, yes.” But for one endless, panicky moment, she could not remember who it was. Papa? Max? Konrad? “It’s all right,” she said at last. “I’m being met by my husband.”

“Well, if there’s anything you need—” The stewardess smiled and moved on.