The One I Was (30 page)

        
‘All children proceed to platform 2 now. Parents, you must remain behind. Do not accompany your children any further.’

        
Again the low wail rose. Rudi could almost smell the salt of the tears. A guard walked towards him.

        
‘Hurry, boy.’

        
Rudi opened his mouth to explain that he wasn’t actually going on the transport, that it was all a mistake, but the guard pointed towards the platform.

        
‘Can’t you hear me?’ His eyes were narrowed in anger.

        
‘I’m not going on the transport, I –’

        
‘Don’t try it on with me.’ His hand was raised now. ‘I can see the papers you’re holding. Get moving.’

        
Rudi shuffled towards the head of the queue, still searching for the right words to explain. The guard kept his stony gaze on him. An inspector in railway uniform peered at him. Rudi knew who the man was from the time a few years ago when Vati had held a lowlier position at the railways and sometimes took his son to watch the
trains pull in and out of the station. Surely the inspector would recognize Rudi, raise the alarm, forbid him from going to the platform?

        
Rudi waited for him to hold up a hand and detain him, but something else was working on him now, a contrary impulse making him want to do what he was told and join the other children as though he was just like them: Jewish, unwanted in this country. Rudi mightn’t be Jewish, but he wasn’t wanted at home, so what was the difference? The inspector said nothing, his eyes passing over Rudi’s features without expression.

        
‘Papers?’ Rudi showed them to the man, who checked the photograph against his face. The two didn’t match, not really. Benny and Rudi both had light brown hair and dark-blue eyes, but Benny’s face was far thinner than Rudi’s now, and his nose was longer. Benny’s hair had a wave to it; Rudi’s hung straight. Surely the inspector would notice it wasn’t Rudi in the photograph. But it was as though by becoming Jewish Rudi had become invisible.

        
‘This all you have?’ The inspector stared at the football and satchel.

        
He nodded.

        
‘On you go.’ The inspector nodded him through.

        
Rudi hesitated. Surely he wouldn’t get away with this? Now was the time to speak up, pass this off as a prank. The inspector might even think it was amusing. He could plead with him not to tell Vati.

        
‘Herr Lange, you’d never guess what that lad of yours was up to last week.
Nein
,
nein
, no problem at all, had us all in stitches, Herr Lange. You wouldn’t believe the sour looks he got from the Jews. No sense of humour. As if a proper German boy would seriously want to skulk off to England with
them
.’

        
‘Can’t you understand German?’ the inspector shouted. ‘What are you, a stupid Polish Yid?’ And this time the guard who’d shouted at him before pushed him towards the platform.

        
‘Think the train’s going to hang around for the likes of you?’ Rudi took a step forward and then another one and now he was walking towards the platform. He looked back, expecting someone to call out, to pull him back. But nobody seemed to mind that Rudi Lange was about to get on the train to England. He walked to the steps leading to the platform.

        
He spotted a group of boys he recognized from school a few years ago. They might well know Benny, and would not regard his presence here today as a bit of fun. They’d think he was mocking them in some way. He pulled up the collar of his jacket, dropping his face down, trying to make himself invisible. A policeman pounced on the group.

        
‘Open that case.’ He pointed at one of the group. Rudi slipped past as the others helped their friend undo the suitcase.

        
A party of smaller children was walking very slowly towards the steps. ‘How will they manage alone?’ a young woman said to another. ‘They’re hardly more than babies.’

        
‘Still a youth worker short? That’s bad luck.’

        
‘Suppose the police get rough with them at the border?’

        
‘I’ll go with them.’ Rudi almost looked over his shoulder to see who’d spoken, then realized that the voice had been his own.

        
The young women turned.

        
‘You?’

        
He supposed eleven-year-old boys didn’t often volunteer to assist tots.

        
‘I don’t mind. I’m alone anyway.’

        
‘What’s your name?’ The older girl was pretty, with curling blond hair and freckles. She didn’t even look particularly Jewish.

        
‘Benny. Benjamin Goldman.’ He said it softly in case anyone overheard.

        
‘Well, Benjamin Goldman, you have earned yourself a very big thank-you from us.’ Her smile was broad. ‘Think you’ll manage them on the train?’

        
He nodded, bathing in the warmth of her eyes. None of those tough Jewish boys would be seen anywhere near a carriage full of babies, so he’d be safe on the train. And when they were on the ship, he’d keep to the cabin. He shoved the papers into the satchel and grabbed the hand of one of the little girls.

        
‘Let’s go.’ She trotted along beside him, the rest of her kids following. The group of Jewish boys walked past him without a backward look.

        
The policemen were still pouncing on children whose suitcases looked expensive or too large. Rudi was almost grateful he only had the satchel and football. He was nobody of note. His father’s name could cause every man in this railway station to stand to attention, but Rudi was receiving only quick, contemptuous glances as he opened the carriage door.

        
Just another unwanted kid on his way out of the Reich, lucky not to have a boot up his backside to hurry him on. Invisible.

        
And invisibility was a state Rudi intended to preserve for as long as possible.

35

I lifted my head from the laptop. It took me some minutes to return to the old man in the bed. I was still with the young boy, swept up onto the transport by an irresistible current, arriving in a country he’d never expected to come to, alone, with a terrible secret. Rudi Lange, not Benjamin Goldman or Benny Gault. An imposter. In his own eyes, a man who’d lived under a stolen identity for the last half-century and more.

‘You never went back to tell them what had happened? To find your father?’ I asked. ‘And Olga?’

His hand went to the oxygen mask.

‘Don’t take that off. Shall I read the next file?’

He blinked at me.

I found the file titled ‘Rudi Lange 2’ and opened it.

*

When I finally told my wife, Lisa, who I really was, she had questions. As you’d expect. The first was why I hadn’t told anyone this years earlier. It was hard for me to describe the fear I felt that I would be sent home to Germany, or to some kind of internment camp, once the war started. Richard and Ernst had been interned on the Isle of Man and it had taken Lord Dorner weeks to have them released. But they had been ‘real’ Jewish boys. Would the Dorners have interceded for a non-Jewish
German, an enemy alien? I now know they would not have been unkind to me: they were tolerant, generous people. But as a boy I read stories of ships sunk in the Atlantic, their cargo of enemy aliens drowning. Even if I survived such a voyage, the thought of years spent as a prisoner in Canada or Australia terrified me. But it was the potential disgust of the Dorners, of the kindly Dr Dawes, of the other boys at Fairfleet, that terrified me even more. As I grew up I began to see my sin in a more tolerant light, but my teenage self judged himself harshly. I’d really become Benny, not Rudi, as soon as I stepped off the boat at Harwich, and Benny was who I intended to be for the rest of my life.

        
Lisa’s second question concerned my ‘real’ German family. She wanted to know what had happened to my father, Georg Lange. This is what I told her.

        
In 1951 I contacted David, who worked with Jewish Displaced Persons. I asked David if he could find out anything about Georg Lange and his housekeeper, Olga, telling him that Georg Lange had been a loyal Aryan friend of my family. David found a German researcher who searched the town records for me.

        
The researcher discovered that both my father and Olga had been killed in a freak air raid in 1944. An Allied bomber had emptied its bomb hold by mistake.

        
I’d always feared Georg Lange would track me down to England and insist on my returning to Germany. I now experienced mixed and shameful emotions, mourning the father I remembered from my early childhood: affectionate and funny. And I had loved Olga. Now they were both dead. But I felt a relief that nobody could expose me now. Benny’s father, Herr Goldman, was also dead. Dr Dawes had eventually managed to obtain confirmation of his murder at a Polish camp in 1943. Frau Goldman had died in hospital the same day as the real Benny had died in the cramped apartment with just me as company.

        
So they were all gone. My real parents, Benny’s parents, Olga and Benny himself.

        
I am now dying, with good and kind companions beside me. When I feel fear of what is to come I think of the real Benny, of how scared he must have been as he gasped for his last breath. I was so young, I didn’t know how to reassure a dying child. I can only hope I was of some comfort to him.

        
I was working on a local newspaper at the time I found out about my father, and rang in, claiming to have flu. For five days I drank myself stupid and stayed in my lodgings.

        
Then I returned to the newspaper office. I worked hard, very hard. I took on every assignment I was given and pursued it with a terrier’s intensity, whether it was a story about meat shortages or the opening of a new municipal swimming pool.

        
Occasionally English people I worked with would ask me if I had ever gone ‘home’, meaning Germany. They were probably taken aback by the vehemence with which I told them that Germany was not my home and had not been since January 1939. Eventually I became Benny Gault. I dropped the Goldman surname to sound more British. By then I had barely a hint of a German accent. I’d been ruthless with myself, listening to English people, copying their pronunciation. Nobody would have known me as the person I’d been in 1939. Alice Smith seemed at one stage to hint she knew something wasn’t right about me, but she wouldn’t have been able to prove anything.

        
I suspect I have only a few days left to write down what else I discovered about my father. I am weary now and will return to this task.

*

I finished reading. Benny was still awake, watching me.

Something was nudging at my memory. Something to do with the storage room. I’d opened a drawer down there and touched something, something old and brown and leather. A deflated football. The football which the real Benny had given Rudi. Of course: the three gold letters, ‘O D N’, had been all that remained from ‘
GOLDMAN
’, Benny’s surname. Benny had given his ball away to Rudi, therefore the ball could only have come to England with Rudi.

Benny’s mouth was etched with blue again. His eyes were shut now. Max, lying on the rug beside the bed, lifted his head and wagged his tail, as though offering reassurance to Benny.

36

Benny let himself drift. He could still hear Rose’s voice in the distance, telling him to rest, feel her hands pull the cover over him. She had gentle hands and a gentle voice, just like Harriet, just like her grandmother. Rose wanted to know, she wanted to know everything.

He wasn’t going to tell her the rest of it. He’d promised Harriet. Back then, his word had been the only thing he could give Harriet. Rose knew enough.

This disease was breaking him up, splitting him into all the versions of himself he’d ever been. Part of him was an old man in a bed he’d never leave again. Part of him was Rudi, aged eleven, finding himself pushed onto the train, smelling the mixture of anguish and relief at the railway station. And part of him was a young man. With a guilty secret. An interloper who’d fallen for his benefactor’s wife.

The three parts of Benny pulled him one way and another. Finally he let himself float towards the young man. People had called Benny handsome, but he’d never really seen it himself. He’d been tall, wide-shouldered, with a good head of hair. Was that was Harriet had seen in him? But surely a woman like her could have found handsome men anywhere? What was it about me? he longed to ask her.

Even if he’d put the question years ago when it had first started between them, she probably wouldn’t have answered with more than that mocking laugh of hers. He was back with her now, it was summer, early August. The day had been hot and he’d been studying hard.

*

The afternoon’s heat had softened to a warm softness. Benny hadn’t seen Harriet for a month. She was back at Fairfleet now; he’d overheard her talking to Smithy downstairs, discussing which dress Harriet was to wear when they dined out tonight.

Harriet said: ‘It’ll have to be the short-sleeved silk, Smithy. Anything else will suffocate me.’ She sounded very light-hearted, not the contemplative woman who’d told him about her friend crashing the plane.

It was quiet tonight. Dr Dawes was visiting his sister on the south coast this week, so Benny had eaten the rissoles Alice Smith served up for him in the kitchen, sitting alone at the scrubbed pine table.

‘You’ll have to make do with these, there’s barely enough meat on the ration to feed a mouse,’ she said. ‘So the cook tells me. When she deigns to turn up.’