Hannah & Emil (52 page)

‘Can we go on holiday?' Ben said. ‘I'd like to practise my French.'

‘I'd like to practise my French too,' I said.

‘Why not?' Emil said. He put the cheque in his pocket and went outside, leaving us sitting around the hare in its tray of rosemary and claret, the boys peering macabrely into its eye sockets and mugging at each other across the table. I saw through the tall bay windows that Emil was smoking a cigarette on his own at the raspberry brambles, not caring who saw or scolded him, looking out over the English fields, thinking, I imagine, of his father, for whose life he was being compensated. But I cannot know such things, and should not like to say.

It was so agreeable to be near the sea when we were in France and it had such a beneficial effect on Emil's chest that we decided when we returned that we would pack up over the next winter and retire from the hostel to a flat in Brighton. Emil would miss the young people, but his chest was simply not up to the work anymore, and I was looking forward to a little peace.

First, we had to clear out the house and all the sheds. After thirteen years of bringing up the boys we had to pack up Geoffrey's museum displays of botany and animal life and Ben's various attempts at motorised transport. Then there were all my papers. I assumed I would be left to deal with these when I was ready. My journals, translation documents and dictionaries were in my little study in the house. Outside, though, I had a shed that smelled faintly of bone meal, which I had chosen because it had a window and a long bench at desk height where a previous inhabitant had done their potting. I put my spare typewriter out there and when I had a day to myself with the boys at school, guests out and Emil off on some errand, I worked on my project. I did not necessarily admit to myself that it was secret, and yet I told no one of its existence, saying, if asked, that I liked to do my correspondence out there, away from the noise of the house. I was, as Solomon had mysteriously intuited, writing a memoir, but it was a joint memoir, of both of our lives, a frustrating but compulsive undertaking, which forced me to ask Emil carefully framed questions about his childhood and youth. For the most part he did not answer them, preferring to narrow his eyes at me and make a little harrumphing sound. I could not have said what my plans for this work were. I am certain that I did not know. I only knew that it was work I felt compelled to do, now that I had a place in which to do it.

One morning in autumn I woke to the smell of a bonfire, a not-unusual smell for the time of year—it was a smell that went with the fogs of October and November—but who would start a fire at this hour? Before I had even opened my eyes I had managed to conjure an entire scenario in which one of the boys had left a lantern going near some wood shavings the night before, and I rose expecting to discover a conflagration, the sheds providing kindling for the denser fuel of the main house. It was early, the sky still almost dark, and the house appeared to be intact as I slid my feet onto the cool boards and went over to the window to see. Our quarters were contained in a small wing of the house on the ground floor, and our room looked straight out to the gardens and sheds. In the dawn fog there glowed a bonfire, against it the shape of Emil loading material onto it from a pile of fuel that I could not see, blocked from sight as it was by my shed. I watched him for a moment and saw that he was hefting a rectangular shape like a small box onto the fire, where it separated into sheets and floated upwards. It was paper. ‘
Emil!
' I was outside in a moment, running across the freezing wet grass in bare feet and thin nightdress, bellowing his name before I could find the composure to articulate further. When I got to him he was emptying a cardboard box of the last of its load, casting the container on after it.

‘Those are my
manuscripts
! What is wrong with you?'

He spoke in German. ‘Not yours.' He turned to face me. His eyes were like coals.

‘These are the drafts of my book. How
could
you?' I glanced behind him. I saw that he had finished the job he had set out to do. ‘How could you be so
vicious
? I was almost there. I just about had the thing done!'

‘My life is my own.'

‘Speak in English, damn you!'

He was poking the black cinders into the flames with a shovel, just to be sure. They curled up into the foggy blue sky, irretrievable. He threw the spade onto the ground and marched back to the house, as though it was me who had been shovelling his two years of work onto a bonfire. ‘Of all people!' I shouted. ‘You, who had your books burned by Nazis!' I saw the shapes of the boys' curly heads at the window, the light on in the kitchen. Let him explain himself to them.

Later, when I was a fraction calmer, he came to me where I sat on a chair outside in the cold light. I was packing Geoffrey's eggs in tissue, exhaling fog. I had planned to throw them out, but I had decided now to make a point about the care of another's treasures. ‘I wish you had told me you were doing this thing,' he said, standing behind me.

‘You would have approved?'

‘I could have stopped you before you wasted the time.'

I stood up. No doubt my eyes were red. I had been grieving for hours without cease. ‘It was my life too. You threw it all in. You had absolutely no right.'

‘I am sorry for all your work. But if you told me, I would not let you begin.'

‘It would never have been published. It was just something I wanted to do.'

‘Publish or don't publish. It's the same.'

‘I just wanted it not to be lost. Don't you feel that? That it is too much to lose?'

‘I am sorry, Hannah,' he said again. ‘I could not bear to see it.'

He took ill soon after that, again and again. His chest kept him in bed, and when he was better I spent every spare penny on packing him off to Switzerland to take cures. I tried not to be away as much as I was before, and there was no time to restore those lost pages, or do anything much but worry and work and watch him minutely, as though by casting my gaze across his face and hair and clothes and hands I could head off any threat. If only I could maintain the proper vigilance, I could protect him, and myself, from the future.

BRIGHTON, 1963

One morning in November of 1963, the telephone rang while I was at my desk. I was mid-sentence in a tricky technical translation full of agricultural-economic vocabulary and I tried to ignore it. I remember looking out the window to the flats opposite for a moment, trying to retain my sense of the sentence. It won't hurt you to get that, Emil, I thought. The boys were away at university by then. The telephone continued to ring in the hallway. The sentence was gone. I remembered now that he had gone for a walk. It was part of the routine since we had moved here. His doctor had him taking a daily constitutional, rain or shine, and he was not back yet. I looked at the clock in the hall behind me. It was half past ten. He'd been out rather a long time; I tend not to notice such things when I am working. I went out into the dark passage. I remember looking at my hand as it reached out to the receiver. ‘Becker,' I said. ‘Mrs Becker?' a woman asked. ‘We have your husband.' It sounded like something the police would say, but it was a nurse. Her name was Archer. Funny what you remember. They had him in emergency. He had collapsed at the seafront, unable to breathe. A motorist had heaved him into his car and deposited him at the hospital. I had not been with him. A stranger took his weight and felt him labour for breath. But I was fortunate; at least I was not abroad. I put down the receiver, lifted it again, called for a taxi.

I went into Emil's bedroom. His breathing was too noisy at night for us to sleep in the same room. It was a bare space with a neatly made single bed, wardrobe in the corner, enough room only to walk along between the window and the bed and make it up. A box room we used to call those little leftover spaces between the other rooms. I stood at his window for a moment. You caught a glimpse of the sea from this side of the building, down the hill, between the houses. It was why he chose this room rather than moving into the boys' bigger room at the front. The water was navy blue today under a moody sky. I pulled his case out from under the bed. It was my old battered one, that he had adopted as his own and taken to Australia. I had a smarter, more suitably sized one in my own room but last time he had gone into hospital and I had taken in my case for him he had scolded me. He wanted this one.

I packed his pyjamas, a few changes of clothes, his underwear, toothbrush, shaving kit. As I moved around the flat I had the feeling that I was being entrusted with a task too large for me. I had difficulty making decisions, in spite of the modesty of his belongings. Will he want the blue pyjamas or the burgundy? I worried about the bottle of aftershave. Might the glass bottle break and ruin his clothes? And which scent would not be too much for hospital? In the end I was saved by the tooting of the taxi on the street. I bundled the last few things into the case and struggled with the clasp. My fingers have been losing dexterity for these past years; I seem to have inherited my father's arthritis, a curse for one who relies on a typewriter as much as I do. As I grappled the too-large case down the narrow stairs and felt the chilly draft from under the front door, I realised I had forgotten my overcoat. But it would have to wait now.

When I saw him, lying in the bed in a row of five or six elderly men, I knew that he was worse than he had been before. The condition of the others was in no way reassuring—they are finished, I remember thinking—and the little glances the nurses shot my way each time Emil coughed gave the whole scene and period that same atmosphere as at the end with Father. It's
your turn
, the nurses' looks said. I asked Emil whether I should get the boys. Geoffrey was in his last year at university by then and had exams looming. ‘Stop trying to get rid of me,' he grumbled. ‘I'll be home next week.'

In the beginning, I steeled myself to be civil, lightweight, even among the smells of decaying bodies overlaid with bleach and institution food ripened by the stifling central heating. There were long silences while he read the newspaper, or asked me to read to him. I worried over this. Sometimes I could only get hold of the
Express
on the ward, and he frequently hauled himself upright and shouted when he felt a Tory was on his soapbox. In the end I resolved this situation by pretending I could not find any newspapers and bringing him in some Conrad. He asked me to bring him other things, usually cigarettes, and for the first day or so I held out. Eventually, as his skin took on a strange pallor and he ceased to speak above a murmur, I relented.

Late one afternoon, dusk falling earlier and earlier as the winter closed in, I walked down to the tobacconist on the High Street. I had never been there before. A beautifully painted red and green sign above the door, reading Schwartz's Tobacco, gleamed dully in the light from the streetlamp. It gave me a strange feeling for a moment, like missing a stair, and having to catch your balance quickly. I stepped inside, the bell ringing, and the feeling continued. It was larger than Father's shop, but the mixture of smells, the jars of sweets, the crowded shelves, assaulted me as though I had been whisked up in a time machine and set down in an approximate version of my early childhood. The tobacconist, a stooped man with only a little black hair left around his ears and the back of his slightly egg-like head, climbed down from a ladder behind the counter and turned to me. He peered at me for a moment. ‘Mrs Becker, isn't it?' He had a German accent. ‘I have seen you walk past with your husband. He has not visited for a while.'

I did not ask why my husband should visit a tobacconist when he had officially been a non-smoker for the past three years. ‘He is not well, I'm afraid.'

‘He is not quite so youthful as you, Mrs Becker, I think. We old men have seen something of life.' He was already reaching up behind him, laying out on the counter a tin of tobacco with a green lid, some Rizla rolling papers. He began to slide his treasures into a small brown paper bag, and then flipped it over so the corners were sealed. Even that movement seemed stolen from Father.