by Alice Nelson
Rwanda. Kigali. There was such a casualness to the names in the nun’s mouth. Not stones between them, only words, released from all their malevolent meaning. ‘South or north?’ the nun tried again, but Constance said nothing. She stood there beside Marina, her coat still on despite the warmth of the room. She was holding the blue notebook that Marina had bought for her the day before. Constance had chosen the colour herself, standing solemnly in the stationery aisle at one of the dollar stores near the projects, her tongue between her lips like a serious child. It was a small moment of hope, Marina thought, the choosing of a notebook. The unexpected agreement to come to these classes felt like an acquiescence to something outside her small world of strictly necessary things. Had Constance been to school? Marina could not imagine the other life the girl must have had, that disappeared world of villages and goats and banana groves. In the warmer weather Marina watched her walk down the street in her brightly patterned wrap and wondered if it was something from her old life. But, no, nothing could have been salvaged. It must have been allocated to her in a refugee camp, or bought cheaply from one of the African shops here in Harlem. What could Constance own that would hold any meaning, any memory?
The nun led them down a corridor to the crèche. A room full of children, mostly Mexican, one African girl with elaborately braided hair. The spin and clatter of them was overwhelming: an older boy launching himself off the top of a plastic climbing fort, a baby crying in a stroller in the corner, a young woman reading a book to a cluster of little girls on a rug. The nun bent down beside Gabriel, her grey head close to his. ‘Would you like to come and play with the other children?’ Marina heard her say to him.
Constance stood in the doorway, staring into the room. She reached out for Gabriel, wrapped her fingers around his upper arm. There was a look of panic on her face as she turned to Marina. This is a first, Marina thought. Later, she would try to remember other moments like this, times when something in Constance unbuckled and there was some glimmer of feeling for her child.
Gabriel began to cry. Constance looked stricken, touching her throat with her fingers as if she was trying to summon the words she needed. She would not leave her child with strangers, Marina realised. She would not turn away and leave him to be cared for by people she did not know. Gabriel broke away from Constance and pressed his head into Marina’s legs, his arms around her thighs. When she picked him up he wrapped his arms so tightly around her neck that she could hardly breathe.
‘I’ll keep him with me,’ she said to Constance. ‘I’ll take him home and you can come and get him when the class is finished. You don’t have to leave him here.’
She wondered if Constance would allow Gabriel to stay with her this time. She had never witnessed this protective surge, this instinct in her for her child’s safety. When she was walking home with Gabriel, she realised that, apart from the day that Constance had left him with her at the museum, this was perhaps the first time that the girl had ever been apart from her son. A year in a refugee camp, a year in the city, the child tied to her back, trailing her as she walked to shops, to hospitals, to the subway station, never more than a few feet away from her in that tiny apartment. Who could she ever have left him with?
At times that fall, the image of Jacob’s face would rise up unbidden, often accompanied by a qualm of guilt and regret; a feeling that she had failed him in some important way. After Marina had helped Jacob load the car on the morning he had left for Harvard earlier in the month, he held her for a long moment, his hands resting on her hips, his lips on the top of her head. He wanted her to come to Boston with him. It would have been possible, now that she was not teaching. There was the colleague’s elegant apartment in Cambridge, near the university. The small study she could use there, with a view over the charming square. The walks they would take together by the river, the cafés, the museums, the quiet decorum of the city itself. Jacob had described the shape of the journey eagerly, hopefully, as if he were trying to sell something to her.
‘Say yes. It will be an adventure. A vacation.’
He was standing in the doorway of her study when he put the proposal to her. She closed her book. He looked so hopeful. So youthful, somehow. Part of her wanted to say yes. To gather up her work and go with him. To take long walks around Cambridge and cook dinner for him each night. But she suspected that his desire for her to come to Boston was not entirely pure. He would like her to be away from New York. Away from Constance and Gabriel. He wanted her out of their orbit so that the ties between them might loosen. So that she might come to her senses. Several times these past weeks she had caught him gazing at her with a kind of perplexed concern, as if she had suddenly become errant and unknown to him. Did he wonder whether the whole sturdy scaffold they had built so carefully might turn out to have been shoddily constructed after all? He gazed at Ben in the same way these days and she suspected that his sorrows and fears for both of them had come together in a cloud of concern that threatened to overwhelm him. Sometimes we have to learn new truths about people, she had said to Jacob the week before. That their priorities and dreams are not always the ones that we had imagined for them. She had been referring to Ben, but staring at her husband as he stood before her, she wondered if perhaps she had been speaking about herself, too.
‘Darling, I’d love to come,’ she said, ‘but I have so many interviews lined up for the book these next few weeks. And I want to keep an eye on Ben.’
Marina knew that Jacob could not argue with this. That he would be grateful for her watchful care, her presence in the house with his son.
‘You’ll come back down for Rosh Hashanah in a couple of weeks, and maybe I can come up for a few days. We could go to Nantucket for a weekend,’ she said. She felt, even as she said it, that she was offering him some kind of consolation prize.
When he had let go of her that morning, Jacob turned back suddenly. ‘You know, we could still try.’ At first Marina was not sure what he was talking about. ‘To have a baby,’ he said. ‘It’s not too late. We could go back to the clinic.’ It was early and the street around them seemed strangely quiet – all the customary noise and clatter winnowing down to just the two of them standing there on the front steps of their house. ‘I love you, Jacob,’ she said quietly, taking his hand in both of hers. He kissed her, then. A proper kiss, his mouth opening into hers, her tongue meeting his own.
After Jacob had driven away, Marina stood for a long time in his study. His desk looked as if he had just stepped out for a moment. A black-and-white photograph of a peregrine falcon soaring above a valley. A ceramic bowl full of sea-smoothed glass. A miniature painting of a palm tree that they had bought together from an artist at a temple in India; a picture where the brush-strokes were so fine that a magnifying glass was needed to see the cross-hatched beauty of the leaves. A collection of Montaigne’s essays left splayed open on top of a pile of academic papers. A framed picture of his father. A mug still half-full of coffee.
The clock above the desk ticked. It was a cuckoo clock, made by Jacob’s father. An exact replica of the one from his own childhood that had been lost to fire in Poland. Rose had given it to Jacob when they moved to this house. The clock fascinated Gabriel. Several times Marina had stood with him in her arms waiting for the hour to strike and the small wooden bird to appear from behind its door. Each time it was as if it were the first, the startled delight on the boy’s face undiminished. She smiled thinking of it. If Gabriel were their child, the cuckoo clock would become part of his own history. The story of the clock and its echoes of other lives would be bequeathed to him, as it had been to Ben. But would it be a kind of false inheritance, a plastering of other memories over his truer ones?
She did not want another baby, Marina realised. She only wanted Gabriel.
By Jacob’s abandoned coffee cup there was a pad of writing paper. On the blank page she could make out the faint imprint of letters, the ghostly impressions of his handwriting like a secret watermark. Who had he be
en writing to? How well do we ever know another person, she wondered? How much of our real selves ever manages to rise up to the surface of our lives? We live beside a person year after year, and yet we so often fail to understand the most fundamental aspects of their nature.
When they were children she and Dov had often rifled through their mother’s drawers when she was away from the apartment. They were searching for a pile of letters bound with a ribbon, a tin of photographs, a volume of poetry – anything that might provide them with some clues to Gizela’s past. They had been obsessive amateur historians, she and Dov, unshaken in their belief that if only they could line up all the facts of her history they would somehow understand their mother.
Most children want their parents to dwell only in the present, in the life that contains them, but for Marina and Dov the opposite was true. Gizela’s insistent inhabiting of a completely ahistorical present unnerved and alarmed them. Never once did she tell any story that veered into her past. This fastidious withholding must have needed terrifying discipline, Marina thought later.
She and Dov had only a handful of details, a truncated outline of her history. An old passport, official letters, a travel document: these were the only guides for their imaginative reconstructions of their mother’s life. Gizela was born in Prague in 1933. In the summer of 1939 she was sent, along with a group of other Jewish children, to England. She stayed with an English couple on a small farm in Suffolk for the duration of the war, and then for nearly a year longer until a relative could be found who was willing to take her. Eventually a great-aunt was located in Brooklyn, an elderly woman who had left for America many years before Gizela was born.
Marina often thought of the train journey that her mother had taken in 1939, when she was six years old, from Prague through the German Reich and the Netherlands to the Hook of Holland, where she was put on a ship to Harwich and then a train to Suffolk. How the loud roll out of the station and the thunder of the train through the Czech countryside must have terrified the little girl. The flashing fields and rooftops, the faint curls of smoke from trackside towns, the wailing of the other children around her. That two-day train ride away from everything known to her always struck Marina as being the poison at the heart of her mother, the terror that had so deeply unbalanced her. Though she knew that it was summertime when her mother left Prague, Marina always imagined it as a journey through a winter landscape, drifting cloud and a low sky, the Bohemian mountains swathed in grey and the cold creep of frost on the windows at night. She imagined a small girl sleeping upright in her leather-seated compartment, her hand still clutching her suitcase. Gizela had never spoken one word to them about that journey, or about her years in England, but Marina and Dov had traced it on maps, reconstructed every step of its arc, filling in the gaps with their own imaginings. It became a kind of earnest game for them, this invention of possible histories for their mother.
The further into Gizela’s past they ventured, the fewer details were available. There was an impenetrable silence around her early life in Prague; everything about that world had to be imagined. Of the English years they had a scant collection of verifiable details, a handful of dates and names from the documents they had found in the drawer beside her bed. They knew that she had been sent to Suffolk, and as children the very name of the place had taken on an almost mystical resonance. It was a secret code between the siblings. A stray fragment of detail that they clung to because they had so little else.
Several years earlier, after a conference in London, Marina had caught a train to the small village on the edge of the East Anglian broads where Gizela had lived during the war. It was the beginning of winter and the clothes Marina had brought were not warm enough. Her shoes were soon swollen with water after she had walked through the fields, and she had to buy a woollen scarf and hat from a small shop in the town. The streets of the village seemed to be almost entirely deserted. She could see lights behind the drawn curtains of the houses but there were no other signs of habitation. In the yard of one of the houses a dog was chained to the verandah. As she walked past, it hurled itself against the fence, making Marina jump back in fear.
The husband and wife Gizela had lived with were long dead, but she hoped she might find someone who had known them. Or someone who remembered Gizela. Marina had always wondered why the English couple had not kept Gizela with them after the end of the war. She was thirteen years old when she was sent to America; she had lived half of her life there in Suffolk. The distant aunt in Brooklyn was a stranger, Gizela’s existence had been unknown to her. Surely it would have been possible for Gizela to stay in Suffolk? Perhaps the English couple felt that their duty was done and were relieved to deliver her into someone else’s care. The child might have been a source of anxiety; an unwelcome burden, the trouble compounded by her foreignness.
A woman in the village had known the couple, had run errands and done some housework for them in the years before their deaths. She agreed to talk to Marina, and they sat in the formal parlour of her small house with cups of tea before them. The armchairs were draped in plastic slipcovers and an enormous black-and-white dog lay at the woman’s feet. The house felt damp and rank, full of the stale smell of animals. A scurrying could be heard in the roof above them. Dusk fell very quickly in the town, Marina noticed, the windows darkening though it was not yet three o’clock. She kept her coat on while they talked.
They were an odd pair, the woman had told Marina, with their own ways. They had kept to themselves. They were not from these parts so their histories were unknown. They had no children of their own and there were no other relatives. Apart from the minister, she herself had been the only person to attend their funerals. Yes, she had heard that they had taken in a Jewish child during the war, but the woman found it very hard to imagine this. It was not a household that she thought could ever have accommodated a child. She did not elaborate on this, except to say that the couple had been very religious and perhaps that had led them to take the child in the first place. Some notion of Christian piety. She drew Marina a map showing where their house was, on the very outskirts of the town. Of course it was much changed now with the new owners, she said, foreigners who had moved there from France.
The house stood much further away from the village than Marina had anticipated, past a dense stand of trees and a small lake. She walked along the side of the road, a dull trail of pink clouds in the sky above her, the scattered shapes of sheep in the fields beyond the lake. The trees beside the road creaked like the masts of sailboats at night. A cold, watery wind blew in. The shadows of the trees seemed very dark and precise. Marina thought of the deep woods in the fairy tales of her childhood. Was this the place Gizela had thought of when she had read to Dov and her? She must have walked this road each day to the small village school, though her name did not appear on any of the enrolment records.
The woman who answered the door looked flustered and exhausted, a baby on her hip. The crying of another child could be heard in the hallway beyond her. She was reluctant to admit Marina to the house. The children were unwell, she was trying to get them down for a sleep, she said. And the house was completely different – it would not be recognisable as the place it had been fifty years before. It was in a terrible state when they had bought it a few years earlier. Nothing had been modernised, not for many decades. The toilet was in a wooden outhouse at the bottom of the garden. Another English family had owned the house before them – they must have been the ones to buy it from the elderly couple. She had heard in the village that the old woman had died here in the house and that her body had not been found for several days. She had not wanted to live in a house where someone had died, the woman told Marina, but her husband said she was being ridiculous. The price had been very good and that part of the house was gone now anyway, torn down when they did the renovations.
Eventually she said that Marina might as well come in if she really wanted to, it was no good to stand there in the cold. The owners before t
hem had tried to conceal all the problems with the house, the young woman said as she led Marina down the hallway to a large barn-like room that opened on to a garden strewn with children’s toys. They had put cheap linoleum over the rotting floorboards, and layered wallpaper over mould and cracks. Can you imagine, the woman said, there was even wallpaper on the ceilings. In France we call it cache-misère. Did Marina know the expression? It meant, quite literally, ‘a cover for misery’.
The woman showed Marina the original floorboards, which she and her husband had restored. At some time in the life of the house, meat had been hung to cure from the ceilings, and the old boards were covered with animal fat. The walls underneath the cheap new wallpaper had been blackened with smoke from a hundred years of fires. It was terrible, all the things they had discovered behind the cache-misère. Unimaginable, said the Frenchwoman, that people could live like that.
Marina wanted to see the bedroom that her mother might have slept in but it was not possible. All the rooms that had been bedrooms had been torn down to make way for the large room at the back of the house. The wooden outhouse was still there, the woman told her, as if this might be some kind of consolation. They used it as a garden shed, though she did not like to let the children near it because it was full of mice and spiders. She and Marina stood by the windows at the back of the house, looking out at the tiny shed. Marina tried to imagine Gizela as a small girl, crossing the garden in the darkness, but it was impossible. She could see her mother only as she was during their life together. Tall and quiet in her blue coat, her hands tucked around her elbows, her gaze fixed somewhere in the distance.
As Marina walked back along the road towards the town it started to rain. The lake and the sky seemed to merge into one silvery expanse. When she turned to look at the house all its windows were lit up. It looked like a besieged ship in the middle of the dark fields.