A Small Person Far Away (7 page)

Erwin looked back at her fondly. “Na,” he said, “at least they’re better than they used to be.”

When Anna got back to her hotel room she felt almost guilty at having enjoyed the evening so much. But what else could I have done? she thought. Lying under the German quilt in the darkness, she could hear a cat wailing in the garden. Somewhere in the distance a train went chuntering across some points.

She suddenly remembered that when she was small, too, she had listened to distant trains in bed. Probably it’s the same line, she thought. Sometimes when she had found herself awake while everyone else was asleep, she had been comforted by the sound of a goods train rumbling interminably through the night. After Hitler, of course, goods trains had carried quite different cargoes to quite different destinations. She wondered if other German children had still been comforted by their sound in the night, not knowing what was inside them. She wondered what had happened to the trains afterwards, and if they were still in use.

The cat wailed and the chugging of another train drifted over on the wind. Perhaps tomorrow Mama will be better, she thought, and fell asleep.

When she woke up in the morning, it was pouring. She could hear the rain drumming on the window and dripping from the gutters even before she opened her eyes on the grey light of the room. In the garden, most of the leaves had been washed off the trees, and she hoped that the cat had found some shelter.

As she made her way downstairs, across worn carpets and past ancient, fading wallpapers, she noticed for the first time that what she was staying in was not a real hotel, but a private house, half-heartedly converted. There did not seem to be many other guests, for the breakfast room was empty except for an elderly man who got up and left as she arrived. She sat down at the only other table which had been laid, and at once a small bow-legged woman whom she dimly remembered from the previous day hurried in with a tray.

“Had a good sleep?” she asked in broad Berlinese. “You’re looking better today. When I saw you yesterday I thought to myself, that one’s had all she can take.”

“I’m fine now, thank you,” said Anna. As usual, she emphasized her English accent and spoke more haltingly than necessary. She had no wish to be thought even remotely German.

“I’ll bring you your breakfast.”

The woman was middle-aged, with pale hair so lacking in colour that it might have been either fair or grey, and sharp, pale eyes. As she scuttled in and out on her little legs, she talked without stopping.

“The gentleman phoned to say that he’d be calling for you at nine. It’s dreadfully wet out. String rain, we call it in Berlin, because it looks like long pieces of string, d’you see? I really dread going out to do the shopping, but I have to, there’s no one else to do it.”

As she talked, she brought Anna a small metal can of tea, butter, jam and bread rolls.

“Thank you,” said Anna, and poured herself some tea.

“I don’t do suppers, but I can always fix you up a boiled egg or some herrings if you should want them. Or a bit of cauliflower.”

Anna nodded and smiled in a limited way, and the woman, defeated by her English reserve, retired.

She looked at her watch. It was only a little after eight-thirty, she had plenty of time. She wondered how Mama was. Presumably the same, otherwise Konrad would have asked to speak to her when he rang. She buttered one of the bread rolls and took a bite. It tasted much as she remembered from her childhood.

“There are more rolls if you’d like them,” said the woman, peering round the door.

“No thank you,” said Anna.

When she was small, there had never been more than one roll each for breakfast. “If you want more, you can eat bread,” Heimpi who looked after them always told them while she and Max wolfed it down before school. She had been so convinced of the infallibility of this rule that once, pondering upon the existence of God and also feeling rather hungry, she had challenged Him to a miracle.

“Let them give me a second roll,” she had told Him, “then I’ll know that You exist,” and to her awed amazement Heimpi had actually produced one.

It had been a poor bargain, she thought. For months afterwards she had been burdened by the knowledge that she alone in a family of agnostics had proof of God’s existence. Though she found it exciting at first (standing talking to Mama and Papa, her hands secretly folded in prayer behind her back, thinking, “Little do they know what I’m doing!”), eventually it had become such a strain that Mama had asked her if she were worried about anything. She remembered looking at Mama in the sunlight from the living-room window, trying to decide what to answer.

As always in those days, she was worried not only about God but about several other things as well, the most urgent being a book of raffle tickets she had recklessly acquired at school and had found impossible to sell. Should she tell Mama about the raffle tickets or about God? She had carefully examined Mama’s face – the directness of her blue eyes, the childish snub nose and the energetic, uncomplicated mouth, and she had made her decision. She had told her about the raffle tickets.

As she sat chewing her roll in the shabby breakfast room, she wished she had told her about God instead. If it had been Papa, of course she would have done.

“I’m going now,” said the woman. She had put on a long, shapeless coat which concealed her legs, and was carrying an umbrella. On her head was a hat with a battered veil.

“
Auf Wiedersehen
,” she said.

“
Auf Wiedersehen
,” said Anna.

For a moment she had a glimpse of Mama in a hat with a veil. The veil was blue, it just reached the end of Mama’s nose, and it was crumpled because Mama was crying. When on earth was that? she wondered, but she could not remember.

Konrad arrived punctually, shaking the water from his hat and coat.

“Your mother’s pneumonia is a little better,” he said. “Otherwise she’s much the same. But I managed to speak to the doctor when I rang, and he said they were trying a different treatment.”

“I see.” She did not know whether that was good or bad.

“Anyway, he’ll be at the hospital, so you can speak to him yourself. Oh, and Max rang up from Athens. He’s hoping to get on a flight to Paris this afternoon, in which case he’ll be here either tonight or tomorrow.”

“Oh good.” The thought of Max was cheering.

“He only knows about the pneumonia, of course.”

“Not about the overdose?”

“He didn’t ask me, so I didn’t tell him,” said Konrad stiffly.

Watching him drive through the pouring rain, she noticed again how worn he looked. There were dark circles under his eyes, and not only his face but even his large body looked a little collapsed. Of course, he’s been coping with all this far longer than me, she thought. But as they approached the hospital, her stomach tightened as it had done the previous day at the prospect of seeing Mama, and she felt suddenly angry. If Konrad hadn’t had an affair with some wretched typist, she thought, none of this would have happened.

Unlike the previous day, the reception hall was full of bustle. Nurses hurried to and fro, the telephone kept ringing while a man in a raincoat stood dripping patiently at the desk, and immediately behind them an old lady in a wheelchair was being manoeuvred in from the rain under several black umbrellas. Of course, she thought, this was Monday. Yesterday most of the staff would have had the day off.

The nurse behind the desk announced their arrival on the telephone and a few minutes later a slight, balding man in a white coat came hurrying towards them. He introduced himself as Mama’s doctor with a heel-clicking little bow and plunged at once into an analysis of Mama’s condition.

“Well now,” he said, “the pneumonia no longer worries me too much. We’ve been pumping her full of antibiotics and she’s responded quite well. But that’s no use unless we can bring her out of the coma. We’ve made no progress there at all, so we’ve given her some powerful stimulants in the hope that these may help. You’ll find her very restless.”

“Restless?” said Anna. It sounded like an improvement.

He shook his head. “I’m afraid the restlessness does not mean that she’s better. It’s just a reaction to the drugs. But we’re hoping that it will lead to an improvement eventually.”

“I see,” she said. “What—” She was suddenly unsure how to put it in German – “What do you think is going to happen?”

He spread-eagled the fingers of both hands and showed them to her. “Fifty-fifty,” he said in English. “You understand? If she comes out of the coma – no problem. She’ll be well in a few days. If not…” He shrugged his shoulders. “We’re doing all we can,” he said.

At first, when she saw Mama, in spite of what the doctor had told her, she thought for a moment that she must be better. From the far side of the landing, with Mama’s bed partly obscured by a large piece of hospital equipment, she could see the bedclothes move as though Mama were tugging at them. But there was a nurse standing by the bed, doing something to Mama’s arm, and as she came closer she saw that it had been bandaged on to a kind of splint, presumably to stop Mama dislodging the tube which led to it from the bottle suspended above the bed.

Tethered only by her arm, Mama was lurching violently about in the bed, and every so often a strange, deep sound came from her chest, like air escaping from an accordion. She no longer had the tube in her mouth, but her eyes were tightly shut, and she looked distressed, like someone in a nightmare, trying to escape.

“Mama,” said Anna, gently touching her face, but Mama suddenly lurched towards her, so that her head almost struck Anna’s chin, and she drew back, alarmed. She glanced at Konrad for comfort, but he was just staring down at the bed with no expression at all.

“It’s the drugs,” said the nurse. “The stimulants acting on the barbiturates she’s taken. It causes violent irritation.”

Mama flung herself over to the other side, dislodging most of the bedclothes and exposing a stretch of pink nightdress. Anna covered her up again.

“Is there nothing you can give her?” she asked the nurse. “She looks so – she must be feeling terrible.”

“A sedative, you mean,” said the nurse. “But she’s had too many of those already. That’s why she’s here.”

Mama moved again and her breath came out in a kind of roar.

The nurse gave the bandaged arm a final pat where it was connected to the tube. “In any case,” she said quite kindly, “your mother is unconscious. She is not aware of anything that is happening.”

She nodded to Konrad and went.

Anna looked at Mama and tried to believe what the nurse had said, but Mama did not look unaware of what was happening. Apart from the fact that her eyes were closed, she looked, as she had so often looked in the past, as though she were railing at something. Death, or being kept alive. There was no way of telling which.

She hoped that perhaps Konrad would try to speak to her, but he just stood there leaning on his stick, with a closed face.

Suddenly Mama gave a tremendous lurch, her legs kicked the bedclothes right off and she fell back on to the bed with one of her strange moans. Her pink nightie which Anna remembered her buying during her last visit to London was rucked up round her waist, and she lay there, shamefully exposed on the rumpled sheets.

Anna jumped to tug down her nightdress with one hand, while trying to replace the bedclothes with the other. The nurse, reappearing from somewhere, helped her.

“Look at those legs,” she said, patting Mama’s thigh as though she owned it. “Marvellous skin for her age.”

Anna could not speak.

Once, in the Putney boarding house, Mama had rushed into their joint bedroom in great distress. It seemed she had been sitting in the lounge, her legs outstretched towards the meagre fire, trying to get warm, and a dreadful, crabby old man sitting opposite had suddenly pointed to somewhere in the region of his navel and said, “I can see right up to here.” Mama had been particularly upset because the old man was one of the few English residents, which seemed to make it much worse than if he had just been a refugee. “It was horrible,” she had cried and had collapsed on the bed to burst into tears. Anna had been filled with rage at the old man, but, while she comforted Mama with a kind of fierce affection, she had also wished quite desperately that Mama had just sat with her knees together like everyone else, so that none of it could have happened.

Now, as Mama threw herself about and they all stood looking down at her, she felt the same mixture of rage and tearing pity. She tried to tuck in a sheet, but it became dislodged again almost at once.

“I really think there is no point in your staying here at the moment,” said the nurse. “Come back this afternoon, when she’ll be calmer.”

Konrad touched her arm to guide her away from the bed. She pulled away from him, but she could see that what the nurse had said was true, and after a moment she followed him across the landing. Her last glimpse of Mama was of her face, eyes closed, the mouth emitting a wordless shout, as it rose into view behind some shrouded piece of equipment and then fell back again out of sight.

The reception hall was full of people in wet coats, and the smell of steaming cloth made her feel sick again. It was still pouring: you could see the water streaming down the windows. Konrad stopped near the door, where a little fat woman stood peering out, waiting for a break in the downpour.