Griefwork (12 page)

One
Wednesday
night
some
eight
years
later
Leon
was
wander
ing,
brass
syringe
in
hand,
well
beyond
his
guests’
outer
perimeter.
Here
and
there
he
rubbed
the
steamy
glass
and
pressed
his
nose
to
it
to
see
if
the
snow
had
begun
again.
Like
a
shy
child
at
a
party
who
instinctively
moves
towards
the
darker
regions
of
the
house,
he
watched
from
afar
his
night
visitors
clustered
by
candlelight
beyond
the
palms.
A
low
hum
of
chatter
came
back
to
him,
together
with
the
occasional
clink
of
glasses.
When
he
passed
the
Balsam
of
Tolú,
now
a
sturdy
young
tree
sixteen
feet
tall,
it
addressed
him
clearly:

‘I’m glad for your sake, now you’ve got your way, and it was a nice idea in any case. It’s high time the visitors here learned to use their noses. It’s a pity some of them don’t wander down this end, break a rule and pluck one of my leaves. I’d happily spare the odd leaf in order to be more widely appreciated, though I fear I already know what they’d say. “Ooh yes, it’s like –” they’d crush and sniff a bit more “but very faint. It’s like – you know, sort of medicinal. You have a go,” and the other would say the dread words: “Friar’s Balsam, that’s it,” and they’d move off, reminiscing about childhood inhalations. Depressing that I could be confused with anything as crude as Friar’s Balsam which, though indeed it contains my resin, is mixed with all sorts of other things such as bitter aloes and extracts from various
Styracaceae.
Just as well they’d only be smelling my leaves. If ever they were to cut my bark they’d find that my sap hardened into a golden brown exudate, crystalline and redolent of an aromatic form of vanilla with a rich dark bitterness underneath. It would no doubt remind them of clot-mouthed black bottles in gruesome surgeries, of all sorts of punitive gargles and liniments. In point of fact my gum has many happy uses, including as a fixative in perfumery, but you wouldn’t expect them to know that. I, on the other hand, am sure I detect a definite trace of myself in the princess’s scent, “Cuir”, as Lancôme thoughtfully re-named “Révolte” in 1939. But as I stand here watching and sniffing and listening to those visitors who do pass me I have to conclude that modern people are progressively abandoning all but one of their senses, abject before vision’s crushing hegemony. They damage their hearing with raucous jazz, clog their palates with tobacco, wear gloves
so they needn’t touch anything and finally cut off their noses to spite the stone masks they’ve turned themselves into and from which they peer fretfully with greedy, insatiable eyes. But that’s their affair.

‘I’m touched you should have chosen to raise me. I’ve always taken it as an act of homage, a recognition of your own childhood indebtedness which overcame any silly idea of unhappy associations. (People and their unhappy memories! They shun them with such fastidious horror one can only conclude that’s where they chiefly reside, and would do far better to throw open a few windows than keep up this wearisome pretence of having moved house.) Perhaps on reflection it was less a matter of homage to me than of loyalty to your former self? Although the idea of a former self also strikes me as inaccurate. We are who we were always going to have been. What was my own former self? A seed gathered in Colombia? (I’m told Santiago de Tolú’s rather a pretty place on the coast not far from Panama.) A plumule? A radicle? As I was, so I am now but bigger. As I am now, so will I be, but unfortunately not much more so since as a fully grown adult I ought to reach a height of a hundred feet with a trunk four feet thick and I can’t see that happening here. But the point is we none of us change, we only somewhat transform ourselves. I didn’t personally help towards your survival as a child, of course, so I never saw you in those far-off days. Yet I’m sure you can’t have changed so fundamentally. I imagine all one need do is look around at this House and see your old obsessions respectably disguised as a vocation. I presume this goes for a good few people.

‘“I ought to reach a hundred feet,” I catch myself saying. Is this, then, one of my own obsessions? But no, I don’t think so. Really, I’m perfectly content and not a bit anxious about the future. How could I be – you ask – seeing that balsams have a reputation for self-satisfaction to the point of smugness?
Something to do with having been esteemed (over-esteemed?) for so long and associated with all those myrrhs and spikenards and frankincenses and other costly gums of mythic resonance. All I know is, I can supply something for the human nose and palate to get to work on. Now this probably
is
a mild obsession of mine. It’s heartening for us to see our gardener beguiling his visitors’ olfactory, if not sapid, sense before it atrophies entirely. You’re even making their eyes work harder by insisting on candlelight. I wonder if you don’t have a satirical streak in you as you confront these townees with the vestigial whispers of their ancestral past? As they once were, so may they discover themselves still to be! Already some of them are wearing pelts, I notice.’

In the early days of the occupation Leon had commissioned a notice which said ‘Beware of Tropical Snakes’ in five languages. He screwed this to the Palm House door where it remained throughout the war. He never discovered if this simple ruse had saved his private capitol from ransack and destruction, but in one way or another the Botanical Gardens were largely spared the invaders’ attentions which, like the blast of bombs, took unpredictable and freakish forms. A grey scout car had nosed in through the gates one morning and stopped, blocking them. Soldiers had deployed with rifles at the ready, expecting ambush. When nothing happened beside the temporary capture of a couple of terrified orchid-fanciers the troops had relaxed and wandered around, poking into potting sheds and summer houses. Leon, standing protectively at the door of the Palm House, overheard them say ‘Just a lot of boring old plants. This is no fun. I know – let’s go to the Zoo.’ The scout car had backed out in a cloud of blue smoke and roared away. The Society’s director, Dr Anselmus, had shortly afterwards shown a high-ranking German officer around the Gardens but this gentleman, while keenly interested in plants, saw Leon’s notice and declined to enter the Palm House despite his escort’s assurance that the snakes were ‘not much in evidence these days’.

It was the luckless Zoo a mile away which had attracted all the attention. It had even been bombed. American or British pilots discovered that a line drawn between two prominent features, the penguin pool and the bear pits, pointed directly at the Ministry of Telecommunications in the centre of town. This building was well defended by anti-aircraft emplacements and though some way off, the younger and more nervous aircrews, lined up on their target and finding themselves flying directly into a lethal barrage, sometimes jettisoned their bombs early and peeled hurriedly away to safety. During one of these raids a bomb fell within thirty yards of the lion house, causing severe damage. An elderly lion, bewildered by pain and noise and bleeding from a concussed eardrum, loped its way slightly crabwise out of the Zoo grounds and along boulevards of shattered lindens. It caught sight of and attacked its own reflection in a music shop, scattering bright golden saxophones and severing an artery. A detachment of soldiers found it exsanguinated, gallons of dark lion blood running across the pavement and into the gutter. For good measure they riddled its lifeless body with 9mm rounds before whacking out its teeth and cutting off its paws for souvenirs. Then they hitched it behind their scout car and dragged it away, polishing tram lines and the metal studs of pedestrian crossings with its dusty pelt. Back in barracks its remains were roasted for the officers’ mess. The roaring, redfaced excitement that night, the uniformed men swaying outside trying to urinate on the Milky Way, suggested the catharsis of tribespeople after a long and dangerous hunt.

Strangely, it was not until the last few months of the war that the city folk, wearied and gaunt after nearly five years’ occupation and food rationing, had begun to think of the Zoo as an untapped larder. It was touching how long their inhibitions had lasted, how sacrifice had been piled on hardship yet precious food was still diverted to keep the animals alive. That
final winter, however, when the occupying forces could see their doom and began to be less interested in maintaining civil order than in saving their own skins, bands of famished people finally ransacked the Zoo. They found very little. Exotic menus had long since passed through the ovens of the officers’ mess and indeed the officers themselves: cassowary Kiev, giraffe steaks, panda pie, llama sausage. Three elephants, two hippos and a white rhino had provided hundreds of troops with tough but nourishing meals, while to the highest-ranking officers had gone one
bonne
bouche
after another: koala tongue pâté, lion tamarin in raisin and kümmel sauce, buttered marmoset. By the time the populace arrived there was not much left alive in the tanks and cages. Most of the reptiles had long since died of cold, though such was their hunger a few people would undoubtedly have overcome taboo and phobia for a plate of constrictor stew or fried monitor. The last two sealions were eaten, together with a brace of Tasmanian devils and a scrawny dingo. The Zoo was now a desolate and overgrown wilderness full of cages containing nothing more than an end of chain, a drinking bowl of green water, a drift of dead leaves. Before long some of the refugees roaming in directionless tides across Europe had taken up residence in the cages, lit fires of brushwood and had a roof over their heads.

Behind the Botanical Gardens’ high walls, within the steamy glass palisades of his private land, Leon’s beleaguerment had increased with each new threat. There are ways of retreating from the world which nevertheless involve an awareness of its doings. The gardener remained in touch with how things were beyond his precinct; its survival depended on knowing the nature of possible menace. Going out only to collect his rations, he was taciturn but listened well. In this he resembled an extension of his own House, the sheen of war-grime on whose glass looked steely from outside but admitted more light than
one would have thought. Once he was back inside his taciturnity vanished. The trickle of visitors had now dried up altogether and days went by without his seeing anyone other than the blurred shapes of the few old gardeners moving slowly about outside. His own conversations grew steadily. The assiduous study, the self-tuition went on and spilled out in long harangues with plants whose sophistication and articulateness now equalled his own. They were fit company, and the enabling pact he shared with them in private made it a pleasure to limit himself in the outside world to few and dark words. When occasion demanded, though, he could come up with a schoolmasterly outburst right there on the street. When in 1943 two identically-hatted men in civilian clothes stopped him in Palace Square and asked to see his papers, the folded rag which Leon had produced after much searching through pockets filled with tarred twine, dried seed pods, corks, washers and copper glazing pins had not at first satisfied the inspectors. They had, indeed, collared a frightened passer-by in order to show Leon what an identity card ought to look like.

‘It got damp,’ said the gardener truculently when the other card had been handed back with sinister courtesy and the man scuttled off, sick with relief.

‘It looks as if you’d buried it. Maybe the same thing ought to happen to its owner. Look at it – you can’t even read it. “Place of work …” Something about a garden, is it?’

‘The Botanical Gardens. I am the Curator of the Palm House.’ Leon said this with a certain quiet dignity, slightly stressing the definite articles. He knew one didn’t trifle with these little rodents from the Gestapo but neither was he going to grovel.

‘Tell us some botany, then.’

‘Vascular bundles, gentlemen? The drawbacks to Paris Green as a pesticide? Or maybe –’ and he launched into a lecture on
August Borsig, a German industrialist of the last century who diverted steam from his own ironworks at Moabit in Berlin to heat glasshouses in which he reared one of the world’s great private palm collections, including the so-called ‘thief palm’ named
borsigianum
in his honour. Long before it was over the men had handed back the mould-stained document and walked off. Turning oneself into a classic bore had distinct advantages, Leon considered, and carried on his daily rehearsals.

It was not all book learning which echoed among the roof’s dripping traceries as the silver midges of warplanes twirled and smoked in the skies above. In night hours fitfully lit by hectic bursts of light and shaken by concussions, as he walked his aisles in danger of death by falling glass, his plants spoke eloquently to him of loss and anguish. Sometimes he thought he heard a girl’s voice. ‘I may be going away,’ it said and he would turn involuntarily in the blackout, straining to glimpse the beloved face, a few strands of hair crossing a cheek. But it was only a plant. ‘I thought you couldn’t speak,’ he told it bitterly, yet even then was sure his nose caught in its vicinity an aching wisp of the fragrance – marine sunlight on young skin – of his lifetime’s one act of utter homage, of the feet he had once kissed.

Just as a desire to preserve the illusion of normality had for so long kept people feeding a shrinking population of zoo animals, so by a mixture of inertia and oversight fuel was still delivered to the Palm House until the last winter of the war. True, it had degenerated from top quality coke through brown coal and peat to nearly anything burnable including dried beet pulp which should have gone for animal feed, railway sleepers damaged by Allied air attacks and tarred oak blocks blown by bombs out of tramway beds; but still it arrived. With the onset of winter, though, supplies stopped. Both the winter and the war were predicted to end at much the same time, but that was still months away. It was a matter of surviving until then. With
Dr Anselmus’s permission Leon took to raiding the gardens. What with the able-bodied younger gardeners having vanished into war, most regular maintenance work like the pruning and lopping of trees had not been done and there was five years’ worth of dead and surplus timber to be thinned out of the mature planes, elms and beeches.

The wood for supplementing his dwindling fuel stocks was there, but Leon was scarcely in a fit state to bring it in. The exertion of sawing and dragging combined with the colder weather went straight to his lungs. After hardly any time he was forced back inside the Palm House’s sanctuary, weak and wheezing, while minatory shades of purple and cinnabar flashed across the retinas of his closed eyes. Nevertheless he and a small band of mainly elderly men did move steadily from tree to tree, heaving ladders and labouring with saws, while the piles of firewood at the foot of the trees grew.

One evening as dusk was falling he was bringing in a final barrowload when there came the familiar sounds of a disturbance in the street on the other side of the high wall. In the war’s early months there had been spontaneous protests against the occupation, against conscription, against the curfew, against rationing. These had usually been put down with such overwhelming displays of
force
majeure
that often there were not many fatalities. The centre of the demonstration was suddenly surrounded with tanks and troop carriers, a few ringleaders were pulled out of the crowd and either driven away to SS Headquarters and never seen again or tied to a tree in the park and summarily shot. The rest of the demonstrators were allowed to melt away and within ten minutes there was little to show for it except some brass cartridge cases and a body or two. Even the rounding-up of the Jews had been conducted with hardly any fuss or resistance. They had been driven away in army trucks to a goods yard out in the eastern
suburbs and had vanished. Not a single trainload had left from the platforms of Main Station. After this initial period things had quietened down and gone back to being as nearly normal as was possible in an occupied city in wartime. Recently, however, with some sense of an ending in sight, little fermentations of the anarchy brewing beneath had begun bubbling up with increasing frequency. As the hardships grew and repression had less effect terrible revenges were taken, scores settled and reprisals exacted.

On this particular evening Leon was just the other side of the wall when he heard the sounds of an old-fashioned hue and cry coming down the boulevard. Running feet and harsh shouts passed and stopped in a knot fifty yards beyond. Out of this stalled baying there rose a despairing, piercing cry. Nearly a word, it soared up into the cold twilight like a rocket and shed tingling sparks of anguish over the entire sky. For some reason it made him snatch up his pruning hook and run for the wicket gate. By the time he had reached the street the cry had become pulsing screams. Ten or so dark shapes were grouped at the foot of the wall, some of them squatting and busy with their hands, others watching.

What was it that possessed him to intervene, suddenly to break every unwritten rule learned over the previous five years to stay out of trouble, never to interfere? He didn’t even think what to shout, simply advanced with his pruning hook rigidly at his side, bellowing:

‘How dare you? How dare you? This is the
Botanical
Gardens
! You’ve no right to do your filth here! Get back to your holes, you vermin!’

Such was his tone of voice, a quality in his advancing presence, that the lynchers suspended their work and turned to face this newcomer with belligerent incredulity. They saw a gaunt man wearing ragged overalls, muddy, scratched-faced
and with dead leaves in his yellow hair who shouted ‘Back! Back! Back!’ and wheezed audibly between shouts.

‘Stay out of this, Dad,’ said one who appeared no younger than Leon and might even have been older. It was still light enough to see his features, which were all muzzle. The gardener was reminded of a crazed greyhound. (A year later almost to the day, on a visit to the pensions department in the Town Hall, he came face to face with this same man, now two stone heavier and wearing a bureaucrat’s cheap suit, and recognised him instantly. Then, the man appeared not to notice him and the snout he was bending over a secretary’s head as he walked had fattened into that of a bear, but Leon had known him at once, might almost have predicted the ribbon of an honour threaded through the buttonhole of his lapel.) ‘Stay out of this,’ his wartime persona was yapping. ‘You keep out. Nothing to do with you. Just some thieving little turd of a gypsy we’re dealing with. I thought the Germans had cleaned out all these scum years ago.’ A high moan escaped the wall of legs.

‘Not here you don’t.’ The gardener was still advancing. ‘Not
ever
here! You keep your dirty battles in your own quarter!’ He was beside himself, bellowing directly into the muzzle, which opened, weakly underslung.

‘What’s it to you?’ came through the side of the teeth. ‘In any case we’ve finished.’ And the moment passed when the ten or twelve panting men and youths might casually have diverted some of their overflowing ferocity and killed this irritating spoilsport. For a moment they stood, silently roaring plumes of grey breath. A hand came out dark with blood, offering backwards a knife. The vulpine leader took and folded it without wiping it, saying ‘Why waste energy? This gyppo won’t steal again in a hurry, not now we’ve nicked his jewels.’