Hannah & Emil (29 page)

Later, in the afternoon, when the place had settled into its usual rhythms of meetings, the comings and goings of union delegates, the laughter of secretaries in the kitchenette, I came into the meeting room to look for my notebook, which I had misplaced in the morning's excitement. There he was, sitting on a wooden chair in his old position under the window, his form now rendered in the light of afternoon, his clothes and skin the pale soft texture of a certain kind of Dutch painting, his body as still as though he had in fact been painted. He was leaning towards the room, elbows on his knees, looking at the space between his feet. Next to him stood Rupert, writing in a little notebook. The seated man spoke intermittently. Rupert nodded gravely, though I knew him to be the playful, mocking type, from whom every word has at least two meanings, even when dealing with only one language at a time. Then he jotted something down, waited silently for the man to speak once more. I resolved to ask him before the end of the day who this was, and what sort of details he was taking down about him. I tidied some papers quietly at the other end of the room, watching. They were not, it seemed, aware of my presence.

Once Rupert paused, looked sideways at the man, pencil suspended above his notebook, leaned in, said something, as though making absolutely certain of a detail. The man shrugged, passed one hand over the other, lifted his head and stared for a moment into the room, directly at me. A shiver went through me, as I thought I had been caught spying, but I did not look away. I was too curious for that. Before, I had only caught him in profile, in the morning shadows, or just now, the curly black thicket of the top of his head as he stared at the floor. Here was his face, held to the light. It was beautiful, and there was something else: a little shock, travelling instantly through my entire body. A recognition, a sense that we were somehow of the same kind.

In those few moments, his face presented to the room, I could not have said whether he saw me as he stared across the room for longer than anyone would call polite. Then it seemed he did, quite definitely, for an instant. His gaze caught upon mine. Something firmed in his focus, and his expression became weary, rather than simply lost. He let his chin dip back towards the floor, and answered whatever it was Rupert had asked him. Then he coughed for a while, and Rupert once more laid a hand upon his shoulder.

As I think of Rupert, cadaverous and intent, though warm-hearted as I knew him to be, and I see him again leaning on the sill, hunched over his work of drawing forth this man's story, my memory narrows in on that notebook in his hands, that held on its pages the pieces of Emil that I did not know, that he barely spoke of to me. Rupert, I fear, must have been killed in the camps, though even now my body rejects such knowledge. In a shoebox, in an attic, is his little black book with its cream pages covered with close handwriting from the days when we were all young. If I found that book, it would tell the words that came from Emil's mouth fresh from exile. It is buried in the obscure archive of some family that never knew him, when by rights it should be mine.

I stood at the door, bag hooked over gloved wrist, hair combed, ready to step out into the spring afternoon and find some supper before the union rally at seven o'clock. The others had already gone, but I liked to tidy up before I left. This was the closest thing I had to a home, and I was house-proud: I always gave one last look over my shoulder at the straightened desks cleared of coffee cups and ashtrays, chairs tucked neatly around the long horseshoe of the conference table, covers on the typewriters of the translators and secretaries, grey metal filing drawers closed, heavy white blinds drawn down against the golden sun towards the end of the day. My hand on the doorknob, I heard the low intermittent rumble of male voices from the kitchenette, away off the hall leading to the private offices. As my heels clicked across the wooden floor the voices ceased. Reaching the little kitchen I saw it was them, Rupert and the man who I'd come to think of over the course of the day as the Lost Worker.

Rupert, with his scalded-milk skin and pink-rimmed eyes from long hours of work and drink and debate, smiled his wry smile and began to speak in German, while the man leaned against the sideboard, hands gripping the countertop behind him, elbows pointed back to the wall, chin low. I had assumed the man was Flemish, as it was Rupert who had been assigned to him, but greater than these surprises was the condition of the man's boots, to which his own gaze led me. They were caked with dried mud on the uppers, encrusted laces flaking on the black and white tiles, a pink flash of foot visible at the open seam at the side—no socks. I glanced at my own shoes. I had recently done my best to polish over the dull stretched leather and had recently used a small part of my precious wages to have them re-heeled.

A few things happened within the space of a moment. Rupert reached the end of his introduction, to which I had barely listened, though I did hear for the first time in my life this man's name: Emil Becker. As though startled by the sound of it, the man looked up to see that I was comparing our shoes and appeared to do the same. A smile passed over his lips so briefly it might never have happened. It had vanished by the time he reached a hand towards me. ‘You are translator,' he said in English, his voice cracking, as I took his hand. I wondered that he had taken the trouble to find out my position and nationality at the same time as I experienced the warm, dry touch of his fingers, the attention directed upon me from within the fine wreckage of his exhausted face.

‘Herr Becker,' I said, my first words to him, ‘we must find you some shoes, and then supper.'

You are older than I, I decided as I stole glances at him smoking and eating in a dim café. Beneath the table were his feet, close enough to mine to tap against them with each shifting of position, and encased now in a brand-new pair of shoes. The sales clerk had offered to dispose of the ruined boots, holding them away from him, making tweezers of finger and thumb, trying to suppress his horror. Emil had assented.

I wanted to know how old he was. He seemed not quite of this century, just a little too old-fashioned for the gaudiness of the 1920s to have made an impression. There was something in his look, beneath the window, and in the kitchenette in his tragic shoes, that put a damper on my usual boldness. Still, I found questions to put that might be regarded only as friendly, unintrusive. He was careful with his answers, perhaps because he insisted on speaking in English. I discovered that he was from the Ruhr, that before the crash he had been an electrical engineer on the Shannon hydro-electric project and then testing the equipment on ocean liners. I watched his hands as he ate, drank, smoke. Practical square hands with strong fingers, nails that needed trimming. ‘And how do you like Brussels?' I asked him, as though he were a sojourner and not a ragged refugee. Around him the walls of the café were lined with framed photographs of actresses and singers all affecting that smouldering look of the nightclub stars of Berlin. He looked about him as though to say: Is that where I find myself?

I had run down a bricked-off lane. What I really wanted to ask him was: What on earth happened to your shoes? Instead, I picked over my omelette, and wondered what could with decorum be extracted from Rupert tomorrow.

From the other side of the table there was a repeated, rapid movement. I cast my eyes at his plate for a moment. His fork was going like the shovel of a navvy at a ditch that was filling with mud even as he dug. He had just about cleared his plate, while my own was still more or less full. He laid down his fork and pulled a packet of cigarettes from his shirt pocket. I pretended not to notice that he had eaten his meal like a starving wretch and continued with my own.

There was money in my pocket. Rupert had pressed a note into my palm as we left the office and there was plenty left from the shoes. Emil had chosen the cheapest, though I had told him that he should choose according to comfort. The clerk had also provided socks. I busied myself with some gloves by the window then. In any case, I had money for our meal, so I paid, and we left our table ready to make our way to the demonstration.

As I weaved my way through the other diners I sensed him behind me, and did my best not to hurry—or as Mother might have put it, charge like a baby elephant—or stumble, or to appear ruffled in any way. He was quite close; once I felt his cool breath on my neck where the skin was bare beneath my clipped bob.

In the streets around the Grand Place workers were gathering. The narrow cobbled lanes were filling with men and women and banners floated overhead, the red silk billowing in the spring breeze. Emil scowled a little into the faces of those around us. It was quite crowded in the lane and as we edged towards the square his elbow brushed frequently against my arm.

The mild chaos, the cheery jostling as the crowd squeezed towards the square, seemed nothing more than a slightly boisterous market night in comparison to my time in Berlin. The barely contained fever of that city lurched in me every time I heard a cheer or the sound of a motor revving. These medieval lanes, filled with the smell of melting chocolate and ladies' perfume, occupied a world in which there was no such person as Adolf Hitler, or the dark-uniformed SS in their sleek motorcars, or burly SA forever hanging about the streets, searching out some commotion.

We shuffled into the back of the square. It was my French-speaking mining delegate at the podium, as I had known it would be. He was speaking about the dreadful conditions in which the men worked, to which I now felt I could enthusiastically attest. I peered sideways to see what Herr Becker made of this. Perhaps the never-ending horror of the miners' working conditions seemed beside the point to this German, whom I was beginning to believe had experienced equivalent horrors. Yet he stood patiently, keeping close. The Flemish speaker took the stage and the crowd crumbled at its edges. Air moved among us again. Now his attention seemed to harden. I saw that he understood this language, whereas the speech in French had merely washed over him. Eventually I felt his hand grip my upper arm lightly, his breath pass across my ear: ‘Come, he repeats himself.' I did not know Flemish, and was happy enough to move on, though I feared this might be the end of our evening.

We edged free of the mass at the back of the square. Out here, beyond the press of demonstrators, a breeze passed over my bare arms. There had been no time to go home and fetch a cardigan before dinner. I could not help but smile. It was one of those moments in which you are fully aware of where you are, and where you have come from, and for a second or two take full possession of the delicious improbability of your life.

‘Excuse me,' he said, a finger on my forearm. ‘I have no currency, Miss Jacob. But I will take you to a café, please. Perhaps we can drink one brandy for an hour.'

‘We'll make it last,' I said with a laugh. Even my laugh, I remember, was circumspect, as though I should not frighten him with extreme emotions. ‘It would be my pleasure.'

‘One day, I will repay you.'

We found a round metal table whose legs creaked against the sloping cobblestones every time one set down a drink too firmly, which he did every few seconds, between sips, for all his talk of one brandy in an hour. He was nearing the end of his third, while I was still on my first, letting its fire warm me as my arms grew cool in the dusk and the cheerful demonstrators disappeared from the steep lane. We talked of the novels of Conrad, whom he had read at sea. He did not once lapse into German, though I offered to speak it several times, and so when he attempted to explain what he liked about Conrad he had to say it simply, in his limited vocabulary. ‘He is always the foreigner.'

‘Stranger?' I ventured.

‘Yes, that's right, stranger also. Foreigner.'

As I came to the end of my brandy, swishing the last viscous drop in my glass, I found the nerve once more to regard his handsome face without looking away. His features had relaxed. I saw that I had distracted him from his troubles and dreaded the moment that he would notice it was dark, that I was shivering, and that inside the café the tables were stacked and the gloomy, ancient proprietor was sweeping the floor with long melancholy strokes of his broom, leaning on it occasionally to peer out the doors to the street, where we were the only remaining customers.