Hannah & Emil (2 page)

Home, her memories, all that made her, burst into this light new life. Hannah had died a few years before Flora left England. They had all been relieved, in the end. Dementia had eaten away her body and her mind. She asked strange things you could not think how to answer. Now, with this square of leather beneath her fingers, Flora recalled the earlier times: her visits to Hannah in Hampstead, going together to the British Museum, riding backwards on the little fold-down seat in a hackney cab. Playing with the babushka dolls or reading fairy tales while Hannah sat at her desk by the bay window amid her dictionaries. ‘Do you know, Flora,' she might say, ‘translation is a sort of writing. You are making something quite new.' Hannah still travelled then, but it was a newer, smarter suitcase that stood in the hall, always ready; this old thing with a loose clasp had been relegated to the spare room to serve as a bedside table.

She pulled back the string, tore off the paper. The suitcase filled the little room with a musty leather smell, and she opened the window, let in the hot, wet night, ozone and tarmac drifting up from the alley. The catch was tied shut with yet more string. She cut through it and opened the lid carefully, a breath escaping, a puff of aged paper, ink and unsmoked tobacco. This new sensitivity to smell was overwhelming.

Inside the case was a mess of loose, crumpled papers, photographs, a sliding stack of little black notebooks, a plastic bag with a man's old tweed jacket inside, patches at the elbows. On top of the heap was an envelope with her name on it. Inside was a note from her father.
Hannah left you this case, it's only just arrived from her solicitor. Been
sitting in customs for months, apparently. Not sure what to make of it
but some of it might be interesting.

Under the plastic bag was a carved wooden box. Flora opened the lid to find a green enamel plate with flowers painted on it in a child's hand; on top of it, rolling around, a lovely little globe. Beneath these, a couple of medals, an old key, a compass and a tape, and at the bottom of the box a German children's book: Grimm. She picked up the globe for a moment, turned it in her hands. It was the size of an orange but barely the weight of a sheet of cardboard. At its base were marked the initials SL—not the initials of any of Flora's relatives.

Gazing at the jumble of odds and ends in the case, Flora had a vision of her grandmother in her Hampstead flat, rifling through the case in the dead of night, curly hair mad and white, looking for objects, photographs, casting aside papers, gripped by the need to find something lost in her memory, to lay her hands on something, some icon that would return it to her.

Flora pulled loose a photograph. Two dark-haired boys with naughty grins hugged Hannah's legs on the deck of a ship: Dad and Uncle Ben, going to England for the first time. They had been born in Australia during the war and they both lived here now. Two more photos. Hannah in one of them, so young: dark, curly-haired, standing beside Flora's German grandfather Emil. They were in one of those lanes of Flora's English childhood, a tunnel of trees, a lit path. If the picture were in colour it would be a corridor of glowing green. On Emil's shoulders sat a thin blond boy, shirtless, a piece of cloth tied about his neck like a cape. One of Emil's hands held the boy's, and also a cigarette. In the other photo, Hannah had been replaced by a tall, very fair woman who looked like the boy. No one but the boy was smiling.

Flora began to gather the papers together, smoothing out the crumpled sheets on the bed beside her. She lifted one and saw that it looked strange. If she held the page just far enough away not to be able to make out the words, there was something odd about the pattern of print on the page. Not on every page, perhaps on one in three or four, there was a space that did not belong. When she looked closer, she saw that these were spaces in the sentences, the size of a word. And when she read the sentences, she saw that Hannah had recorded her memories. Flora heard her voice the instant she began to read, and yet every few pages there were these gaps in otherwise perfectly structured sentences. As she looked through more and more of these sheets, and found that they could be clustered, ordered, she realised with a start that the spaces were gaps in Hannah's memory of language, marking the beginning of her words failing her. Did she see these for herself? Did she write faster against the spreading of the gaps?

But as Flora started to read the pages she stopped noticing them, inserting suitable words as she read, without effort. She found fragments of Hannah's childhood in the West End with her brothers, of her travels in Paris and Berlin, the boat to Australia. The moments of a life, retrieved from the dark. Flora put a cushion between her back and the cold wall and began to make piles. After a while she went to the kitchen for a bowl of cereal and brought it back to the spare room, her mind still working over the ordering of the pages. When the type began to blur she picked up a notebook from the pile and examined it. These too could be ordered. They were diaries, she realised—the source material for many of the typed pages.

Late into the night, the rain lashing the window as though someone stood in the side alley emptying endless buckets against it, Flora tidied the pages into two piles. One she had sorted into order: the early part of Hannah's manuscript. The other was still a puzzle to be worked through. She laid both piles in the lid of the open case next to her, unable to take in any more tonight. She lay back on the narrow bed and closed her eyes. Her mind, sliding down towards sleep, was reaching towards something. The things in the wooden box, she thought. The medals, the compass . . . But the thought she was grasping towards evaporated and a memory came in its place. When Hannah was very old, she sat with Flora at the round table in the corner of the sitting room. They were surrounded by the piles of papers that Hannah continued to generate somehow but never now cleared away. Hannah was reading to her from a Russian dictionary.
I knew all this once
, she told Flora.
Where has it gone?
It had seemed as Hannah spoke that she was lost in the layers of time, that all her dead were in the room with them, and that it was to them that she was speaking.

For a moment as Flora lay, close to sleep, she was with Hannah again at the table. She saw her face: teeth missing, lips gathering elastically over her gums. She had stopped dying her curly hair red and it was wild and white, like Einstein's. She leaned over her dictionary. Her finger, arthritically curled, nail bitten, pointed at the Cyrillic script as she read out the words. As soon as her lips formed around them, all those soft, low sounds, made for her old, soft mouth, Hannah was transformed into an ancient Russian woman.

She looked at Flora. ‘You have his forehead,' she announced. ‘Whose?' Flora asked, frowning, sure that Hannah would say her father's, as everyone always did. ‘Oh yes. There, dear, when you scowl. Emil's. Do you know my friend Emil? You're very like him.'

Flora was twenty then. She knew that Hannah's mind was failing, and yet she felt a sudden shift inside her, looking into Hannah's face.

She does not know me. How can she not know me? She fought the urge to shout, ‘It's me, Flora—your granddaughter. It's
me
, Hannah.'

When Flora woke there was a cup of tea steaming on the bedside table. She could hear the shower, David singing badly. That boy in the photograph, the fair boy on Emil's shoulders. He didn't look only like the woman. She reached into the case, which David had lifted onto the floor while she slept, and found the photograph, still at the top of its pile. Yes. He had Emil's long nose, and something around the eyes.

She eased herself onto the floor into a patch of morning light next to the suitcase. She took out the wooden box and placed its contents on the carpet next to her, along with the jacket. She felt in the pockets of the jacket and found the source of the tobacco smell, lifted the packet to her face, opened the flap briefly so as not to let it all out at once, breathed it in. A half-packet of tobacco. The one Emil had never finished, had not had time to finish. She tucked the tobacco back inside the pocket and laid the jacket across her lap, put the green plate on top of it and on that the tape, the key, the medals, the compass. She rolled the little globe lightly on her palm. She was not the only one, then, to love small things. It was the most perfect, exquisite little object, its tininess reminding her of what a globe was: a gorgeously intricate miniature of the whole world of people and places and life. And it brought a new knowledge of herself, of her habits and loves having old precedents, that made her skin prickle.

The thought she had lost the night before returned, complete. The tobacco, half-finished, these few silent objects. Somehow, every moment of their lives might be here, in her hands, in her lap. Not just in Hannah's pages, but in these medals that rattled on the enamel plate, this globe with its fading colours.

She returned the globe to the plate and picked up the key, wondered that this object could find her, could follow her across the world. The traffic was growing heavier at the window, the light was changing, a man called out on the street, the day was coming to life. She replaced the key on the tin plate with a little click. She gathered the medals and the compass and the globe into her open hands and the light, rising at the window, fell on them. For a moment they seemed to give off a light of their own, and a heat.

Then the light passed on and the objects in her hand were old, worn things again, relics. Any life in them was a life she imagined.

Part I

Emil

DUISBURG, 1902

In the summer, it did not matter that Emil was shoeless. The soles of his feet were as tough and dirty as leather. His friend Thomas left his own shoes at home in a paper bag stuffed behind the toilet in the outhouse, and so there was no difference between them.

Down along the Rhine, at the edge of the fields, dozens of men were building a huge factory. Ships docked at the pier and swearing workers unloaded bundles of timber planks and steel beams and crates of bolts, tools and machinery, while a crane swung pallets of bricks from the ship onto the bank. The boys were close to the world of how things worked, of metal and machines, and Emil watched carefully. He and Thomas ran around the crane operator as he peered up at the rope on the winch and then at the teetering bricks, wiping his forehead with the back of his hand and then shifting the crank gently, wheeling in the load. They jumped and ran in circles, shouting encouragement, but all the time Emil followed the progress of the bricks, pieces of wire, moulds, pipes, planks of wood to see what would happen to them, to see what their purpose in the world might be.

One day they watched unbelieving as an entire load of bricks was upended into the river. It happened slowly enough to observe properly, to remember afterwards: the pallet dipped a little to the left and the crane operator overcorrected it. The bricks went in, sliding unstoppably, hundreds pouring into the water in a second. The boys hooted and slapped each other, pointed at the operator, a man named Dieter. The foreman came striding down the track from the office-cabin above the steep bank and stood in front of him. He cuffed Dieter around the ear and shouted. Dieter's body crunched forward and he held his head in his hands. Blood was filling one of them, leaking from between his fingers. The boys ran home.

The next day there was a different man working the crane, one with a head like a bulldog's. The boys stood on the towpath at a distance, taking in the impressive size of Dieter's replacement. Emil approached the man, who was loading machinery parts onto a cart to pull up to the factory. ‘Come back!' Thomas called from behind. But Emil's curiosity forced him on.

‘Excuse me, sir.' The man did not stop loading. Sweat darkened his vest. ‘When is Dieter coming back? Is he working inside the factory now?' The man stopped at last, snarled, a wordless grunt from his throat. Emil froze, and then felt Thomas pulling at his shirt. He woke to himself and they ran back along the path, gasping and laughing.

As the building grew, the ragged rows of bricks blocking out more and more sky, they found that there was always some corner of the building site left unattended. They lugged armfuls of sharp-edged bricks stacked up to their chins to a hidden spot behind a hummock and built a den with walls high enough for them to stand inside the structure unseen. They peered over the bricks, watching the builders beyond the little rise of land, small from here, balancing like circus performers as they hurried across steel beams and up and down great ladders, the hods of bricks at their shoulders like no weight at all.

Every day was warm; the grass a little drier, coarser underfoot. Emil woke each morning expecting summer to be finished, for the rain to spoil his days, but it was just blue, over and over again. The men's skin shone red as they worked, like his father's when he came home from a day going door to door at the factories, looking for work. Emil's memories of winter seemed distant: sliding along the iced-over river on Thomas's toboggan, Papa pulling them both along, falling over, laughing, falling again for their entertainment.