by Ali Smith
The boys’ backs disappear down the hill.
A prison. Daniel goes back to the House of the Fairy Tales, where they have a room to themselves, his father and him. It was called this already when they moved in because someone had cut the shapes of fairy-tale creatures with a razor into the blackout paint on the front window of the house.
A man with rabbit ears.
A legendary-looking tree.
A scarecrow.
A fish with the wings of a bird.
Three suitcases with mouths and eyes.
A mouse towering over a cat.
These figures all mean that daylight gets in. There’s a House of the Bathing Belles, with its windows all voluptuous, and a House of the Zoo Animals – the famous lion tamer lives there and an elephant keeper from a zoo. The zoo is trying to get a release for him as fast as possible because his elephants have stopped eating since he left.
The orthodox Jews complained to the street father about the Bathing Belles. Then someone cut biblical figures into their bay window and they stopped complaining and were really pleased about how the light filters in through the biblical.
One sunny morning Daniel comes out of the store and sees a commotion happening near the fence. One of the most elderly of the internees, a man with a long grey beard, has caught the beard in the barbs on the fence. Three internees on the internee side of the fence are tugging gently at the beard. Two guards on the other side of the fence are doing the same. Everyone is puzzling, on both sides, over how to free the beard.
One of the guards watching at a distance takes the bayonet off his gun and comes towards the commotion.
Two thin young Germans from one of the houses across the square are watching too. One of them’s the tuneful whistler, Daniel’s heard him round the place. The other, they’ll be family the way the whistler always has an eye on the other, is a shadow version of him, a ghost, and when that soldier raises the bayonet the ghost brother hollows himself into his own shoulders and somehow goes near invisible, very like vanishing himself by magic.
The soldier raises the blade, a blade as long as his arm. With precision he uses its tip to cut through the part of the beard caught on the fence. The old man steps back, rights himself, flourishes his arms. He smooths his beard, checks it for gaps. Everybody on both sides of the wire laughs and congratulates everybody else. Close shave!
The soldier tells the old man to watch the hair on your chinny chin chin.
The ghost brother is visibly shaking. Daniel can see even from here. The tuneful brother sees Daniel notice. He nods to Daniel. He takes the other by the arm and comes over.
Cyril, he says. Klein. This is Zelig, my littler brother. We are recently of Croydon, and before Croydon and before this Hutchinson Camp of Douglas, Isle of Man, we are lately of the city of Augsburg.
Zel lost his voice in Germany, in the camp called Dachau, Cyril tells Daniel later.
My brother has a fine tenor voice, he says, but he no longer sings. He can speak, but now he does not speak a lot. His voice is in hiding. He got taken away when they found books in his satchel they didn’t like. Story books. Der Krieg der Welten. Das kunstseidene Mädchen. But they are burned books and he is a Jew. Three crimes. The Nazis hate Jews, they hate the stories of the women who are independent, and they hate the stories of the bacterias that will kill invaders. He is political prisoner. He has fifteen years old. He is there for five seasons, fourteen months. What he has seen he cannot peel from the fronts of his eyes.
But miracle, we get him out.
Then we get us both out and get us here. I am chauffeur in Surrey, Cyril says. I am also partly doctor but of course ejected from university before completing my education.
Daniel already knows that they stand at the gate every day to watch the new arrivals. Cyril tells him they’re watching for their father. They don’t know where he is, or their mother, or anyone else in their family.
One evening in Daniel and his father’s room up in the eaves, Cyril tells Daniel cheerily the story of how he and Zelig were picked up by London Constabulary and taken to a vast London cave.
Olympia.
Where exhibitions are happening when it is no war, Cyril says. And many Nazi sailors came in the night off a boat. There was very much heil hitlering, very much singing about our blood spurting from knives. Then some days later they move us in trucks together with these same men to Butlin’s Holiday Camp. In Butlin’s Holiday Camp a pastor stood up on Sunday and asked God for Nazi victory.
Cyril laughs.
He laughs often. He puts an arm round his brother’s shoulders. The boy, Zel, hardly a man, smiles an absent smile whenever his brother laughs.
Your English, my friend Daniel, is hole at the top, Cyril says.
Top hole, Daniel says. That’s because I was born an Englishman, whelped as a German, and after the age of six became an Englishman again.
Helped as a German? Cyril says
Whelped, Daniel says.
He spells it and explains it.
Like a puppy, a young dog, he says.
He is embarrassed at his own showing off with language. But Cyril looks delighted.
Whelpéd, Cyril says. Whelpt.
I’m only a summer German, Daniel says. I grew up here. My father’s a German Englishman. He met my mother here, she was German, didn’t think of herself as Jew till they stamped it on her papers, she died three summers ago, the triumph of so many wills sapped her own will to live. She had me here, in Watford, in 1915. War was already on, father interned, mother and son sent home to Germany. I didn’t meet him till I was six years old. After the war I was schooled here. Except for the summers. We spent them in Germany.
It is summer now, Cyril says. So, you are a German right now, my friend.
Daniel smiles a broad smile.
I ask will you help me, Cyril says. My German English, to make it a German Englishman. Yes?
Daniel says he’ll do this thing with pleasure.
Cyril pulls his hand out of his pocket and puts something, small, made of flattened metal, in Daniel’s hand. It’s a little enamel lapel badge, the pin on the back is gone, but the front still has most of its enamel, peach colour and blue, in the shape of a girl’s head and shoulders. The girl has a swimming cap on and is holding something gold-coloured to her head. It says in black and white at the bottom of it:
BUTLIN’S CLACTON 1939.
I found it near the. What is the word, for the letters in the box?
Letterbox, Daniel says.
Ah!
Cyril laughs. Zelig smiles wanly.
Der Briefkasten, Cyril says. Letter. Box. Letterbox. I was looking to the letterbox because the mouth of the letterbox had been closed by a metal bar that has been fixed over the letterbox. Now I know this word.
Ha, Daniel says. You are an excellent pupil. But you were looking at the letterbox.
Genau! Cyril says. And I look at the ground, because I felt beneath my foot this swimming girl.
The girl on the badge has a cresting wave done in blue enamel over the place her breasts would be, white enamel foam on its top.
I give to you, my friend Daniel, because here we are all of us in one boat, Cyril says.
In the same boat, Daniel says.
The same boat, Cyril says. The same boat.
Thank you. But I couldn’t possibly accept, Daniel says.
Why is she holding this thing here, to her ear? Cyril says. Is she, what is the word for not to hear?
Deaf, Daniel says. No, no. I don’t think it’s a hearing trumpet. I think that’s meant to be a glass of champagne, I think she is toasting us. Like she’s saying: Cheers! Look. Bubbles in champagne. The little dots here in the enamel.
Glasur. Schmelz, Cyril says.
Zelig, who has been sitting staring at the table, a suitcase on a chair, says some
thing so quiet that Daniel can’t catch it.
Zel remembers to me that der Schmelz is also a word to say a voice or a music sounds very pleasant, Cyril says.
Zel reminds you, Daniel says. Thank you Zel.
Zel nods.
It is yours. Please do not be too Englishman. It is after all summer. Please accept, Cyril says.
Thank you, Daniel says. I do accept your gift. It is kind of you.
Look at Zel, he is thinking I give to you my girl, Cyril says. There is no gift better. We are now life’s long friend. I give you a way to escape this island on the back of this swimming girl.
Daniel smiles. He puts the badge down on the lid of the suitcase.
Next moment, gone.
Where’s it gone?
He looks for it but there’s nothing on the suitcase. There’s no suitcase here. Someone has put a tray on his lap.
Sandwich. How kind.
Elevenses, his neighbour’s daughter says.
Ah, he says. Here again.
I am, she says. It’s Friday.
She misunderstands him, thinks he’s talking about her. No matter.
How are you, Mr Gluck? she says. How was your week?
She means, ask me how my week was, Mr Gluck.
He smiles. She is a kind and lovely and clever girl, though no longer quite the firebrand she was when she was a child. Sometimes Daniel is sad about this, for her. She is in a kind of work that is eating her soul. She is lonely. That’s for certain. It is like watching her being eroded.
Much of a muchness and the muchness is good, he says.
I got back from Siena on Wednesday, she says.
Ah, he says.
I took twenty students there for the day to see the Lorenzetti pictures in the town hall. The Good and the Bad Governance.
I have never seen them, he says.
The Tyrant, she says, has lower jaw teeth sticking out of his mouth like a wild boar’s teeth. And Peace, Fortitude, Prudence. Generosity, Temperance, Justice, all the figures at the centre of Good Governance, are women. Fortitude in her suit of armour is surrounded by armoured knights.
What else? he says.
The Good Governance wall, she says, has this perfect balance and harmony to it, which is also somehow deeply present in the fact that it’s in amazing condition. Whereas the bad governance wall has deteriorated quite badly.
Tell me one of the pictures, he says.
A good or a bad? she says.
Let’s always choose good governance, he says.
She thumbs her phone.
From memory, he says.
She smiles.
She puts the phone down. She closes her eyes.
Bright architecture under a night sky, she says. Houses, sweet communal living. People selling things, people working, writing, making things. People getting married. People on horseback, people holding each other by the hand. A human train or chain, maybe a dance by the children of Venus, maybe just happy people holding on to each other. A peaceful city. Summer has come. They’re sprightly, the figures. A bit of damage, but not much. Well restored. Holding its own, still bright down the centuries.
They both open their eyes.
What’s in the paper today, then? she says.
Thugs and showmen in power, he says. Nothing new. A clever virus. That’s news. The stocks and shares will shake. There’ll be people who do very well out of that. One more time we’ll find out what’s worth more, people or money.
He thinks of his mother’s face. All her family money went in the hyper. She died old, in her fifties.
I for one don’t want to die young, he says.
His neighbour’s daughter laughs.
What my mother’d say if she were here is, it’s a bit late for that, Mr a Hundred and Four, she says.
Whatever age you are, he says. You still die young.
His neighbour’s daughter beams a smile at him.
His neighbour’s daughter loves him.
My father lived through the Spanish flu, he says. I only once heard him talk about it. He said you had to remember not to take it personally. Then you stopped being scared. Never mind that. What you reading?
Mostly right now I’m reading the news on my phone, she says. But also this.
She holds up a paperback book.
Novel, she says. It’s okay. Sub Woolfian, well. Thinks it is, anyway. It’s about Rilke and Katherine Mansfield. Did you know they lived near each other in Switzerland but never met? Have you read Rilke ever?
Ah, he says. Rilke.
He has things he wants to think about Rilke. But he can’t think of him right now because Cyril is here again kneeling by his side next to this nice chair in his neighbour’s conservatory.
He nods to the ghost of pale Zelig, always there with Cyril. Zelig nods back.
Of course neither of them’s here in the conservatory at all. Zel died in 1947, didn’t stay long, how could he, he’d already been made so old so fast. Cyril, gone in 1970, was it?
Yet here he is now, bright and alive and next to Daniel as they look out ahead, eyes on the silver sheet of the sea beyond the wire.
His brother had the worse time of it, is all Cyril will say. His brother’s memory, Cyril says, is what gets left after a fire has gutted you and everything in you has melted and changed its shape.
Cyril they just tormented, hardly at all, a bit of goading. He was lucky. They brought him in to headquarters, punched him in the head and the stomach, told him he was a homosexual and would be hanged, told him he’d seduced too many Aryan girls to be allowed to live, death sentence for undesirables like him so he’d be hanged that afternoon in the yard, told him to sit down then pulled the chair away from under him just as he went to, so he fell to the floor, room of laughing brownshirts. Did it again. Again. Again.
In the end something else happened somewhere else in the building to distract them and they forgot about him. He took the chance and slipped out. He saw as he went how they were lined up on either side of the corridor with their rifle butts ready for whoever was next to walk their line.
Even just that, being punched, insulted, was terrifying. Even just sitting down on a chair that was never there beneath you, and knowing you’d better make to sit down on it though you knew there’d be no chair, because if you didn’t they’d kill you then and there, was so terrifying, Cyril said, that he nearly lost his mind. But I keep getting up. Every time I hit the floor I get up again. I say inside my head, you can do it, you can be like Chaplin. Up. On the feet. That’s it. Now. Brush your jacket down.
He is finding it hard to hear what his neighbour’s daughter is saying, or to listen.
BUTLIN’S CLACTON 1939.
He looks down at his slippered feet on the carpet in case it’s fallen.
But of course it’s not going to be here.
It’s somewhere else in time, isn’t it?
Where?
Where and when did he let it slip?
It was such a fine thing for anyone to give anyone.
He is deeply annoyed with himself.
He is a very careless man sometimes.
He can’t articulate enough how much he dislikes himself for forgetting things he can’t remember.
For instance. A girl he loved. One night he woke in the dark in a panic. It wasn’t Rive Gauche she wore! He’s been telling himself it was Rive Gauche for years. But he’s been telling himself wrongly, the wrong name. It was something else!
He lay in the dark ashamed.
He didn’t, he doesn’t, know how to atone. He has to put it right.
But how do you put a memory right?
I’m so, so sorry.
It was another French one she wore. Jolie. Jolie something.
Jolie, it says on one side of the bottle on her sideboard in
her room. The other word is on the other side of the bottle. He tries to see round its corner in his head.
No.
Can’t.
She worked at the Soup Kitchen for cash. Then she sold some paintings. Then she acted, Royal Court, BBC. Then she died.
Soup Kitchen. It wasn’t a soup kitchen, it was a restaurant that served soup. It got more and more fashionable the further away from poverty London got. Artists worked there. The girl artists all got jobs there.
His neighbour’s daughter is saying something more forcefully now.
I’m so sorry, he says. Tell me again.
She’s asking him about the Isle of Man.
Oh.
How do you know about that? he says.
She tells him he was talking about it earlier and Paulina heard.
Oh.
Yes, he says. Well. I was hardly in, in for comparatively no time. And it was awful.
It was exceptional. And it was still awful. But we weren’t in for long. My father, he’d been interned for near six years, the whole first war. Wakefield. Lofthouse. Lofthouse was a good camp, high class, fee-paying, my mother paid for it. But still he came out mad, very weak, bleak. Ruined his health. Sick man the rest of his life.
Daniel closes his eyes.
He opens them in the dark of the House of the Fairy Tales. His father has the mattress and the bed. For this he’s given one of his blankets to Daniel. Daniel is on the floor, one blanket over him, two between him and the floor. His father’s voice, in the dark:
Wakefield was a holiday place too. For the workers on the local trams. They like to intern people in the holiday places. Anyway a girl, one day, she was maybe sixteen, a pretty girl, she must’ve been out walking beyond the gorse, and she saw me reaching for meadowsweet. I thought if I could get my hands on it I could put it in water and a drop of sugar, if I could find some, the butterflies love meadowsweet. But I couldn’t reach it, and she saw that, she saw me try, so she came over through the bushes and picked it and very simply gave me it through the wire. I heard she got three months in the Wakefield Prison for that. They very particularly told me. Loitering in government grounds. Consorting with the enemy. My fault. I think of that girl often. I hope it didn’t do harm to her. It was such a gift to me.