by Ali Smith
he starts to laugh
– what she does is, she takes hold of the bottom of, you know, what churchmen wear,
A, a – cassock? his neighbour’s daughter says.
Yes, exactly that, the cassock, and she tips, there’s a giant churchman, his cross is a swastika, she takes hold of him by the hem of his cassock and just, easy as that, she tips him over. Then she stands, with one foot off the ground, like a circus dancer or an acrobat, hand on her hip, and she balances on his vast stomach, and her balloon is high in the sky.
I wish I’d been able to tell Mr Uhlman I saw that, and to thank him.
And did you say you went to the cinema in your dream? his neighbour’s daughter says.
Oh, it wasn’t a dream. We went in real life, he says. They took us. Two guards. Four hundred of us. A day in November. The Picture House. It had a mock tudor front. Very pretty. The Great Dictator. Chaplin the barber loved a fine-looking girl. Same name as my sister, the girl. It was really something, taking on Hitler like that. And back to the camp to a concert that evening. Schubert, I believe.
It sounds very unlike a prison, she says.
A prison is a prison, he says. Whatever you fill the time with.
He finishes the soup.
Thank you, he says. You are so kind.
You are so welcome, she says.
She helps him through to the bed for the lie down he has in the afternoons.
And Mr Gluck, she says. Can I just ask. Did you say you have. You had. A sister?
I did, he says.
He doesn’t say anything else.
I’ll wake you a little before the people are due to arrive, she says.
People, he says.
The people who are coming to visit you today, she says. The man. You knew his mother. Remember?
Daniel shakes his head.
Oh yes, he says.
She goes to pull the curtains shut over the French windows.
Let’s leave them open, he says. It’s good light out there today.
She opens them again.
Thank you, he says.
He closes his eyes.
He is seventeen. His sister is twelve, a mere child. It’s in the front room in the Berlin flat, he is there for his summer, they are leaning next to each other out of the big open window with their elbows on the sill, both watching the afternoon traffic below.
They are arguing. They always do.
He says Max Linder is the better comedian.
She is all for Chaplin.
Yes, but Linder’s the one that’ll last, he is saying. No question. Sophisticated, inventive. A social comedian, a man with social intelligence. Chaplin’s a mere clown, a shadow-boxer to Linder. Thinks he can steal someone else’s tricks and be as good as the original. And he can’t, because he isn’t. Linder’s the source. Linder’s the real thing.
Hannah shakes her head like she’s sorry for Daniel.
Social comedian, she says.
She laughs like he’s said something naive.
Chaplin is evergreen, she says in English. Max Linder is one of those pretty things that last only a year. Wait and see, summer brother.
She has lately taken to calling him this, like he isn’t really her brother. Like he’s only a brother one season a year.
He put on his most superior air.
We’ll wait and see, he says.
Whether we do or we don’t, she says. The tramp will outlive the dandy, I reckon, and do it by thousands of years.
—
On a morning in late summer, still fine and warm in the daytime, cold at night, well, late September, Daniel sits in the sun behind the House of the Fairy Tales and unfolds the sheets of paper.
There are three.
He takes two of them and holds them on his knee against the breeze while he rolls the third up again and tucks it back into his inside pocket.
The young guard with the bright red hair (Daniel calls him the Irishman, he calls Daniel the Englishman) has lent him a good sized piece of a pencil.
He has the kitchen fruitknife, for sharpening.
My dear little Hanns
he writes, very small, small as he can and still make it out, at the top of the first page. Hanns is what he calls Hannah when she is most determined to do what she likes regardless of whether the world will let her
how is it where you are my wander-vogue?
she will like that, wander-vogue for wandervogel
or will she just think him immature?
his handwriting is execrable
My handwriting is execrable, my apologies, I am out of practice, I don’t do much with my hands now that involves many words
cross out everything from I don’t to words
I am working to improve this though as I will tell you and you will see in the course of this letter. Which comes with a smile and a laugh to say a hello to you, how are you? are you getting some fight practice in? I am thinking of you. Father is
in reasonable spirits
weak
a terrible roommate and it is a very small room
in reasonable spirits, sometimes he is even hopeful
yes
If he knew I were writing to you he would send his love. One good outcome of coming here is that they took his killing fluid away from him in Brighton so the butterflies of the Isle of Man are free to come and go on both sides of the wire like ‘the souls of summer hours’ that the Poet Laureate says they are. There, I have remembered that piece of poetry to tell you, are you impressed?
he can see her handwriting in his head, clever, flowing, sharp, leaning like she does when she’s on a bicycle right over the handlebars as if leaning will make it go faster
here I am, sick for home, not just standing amid the bewildered alien corn, no I am the bewildered alien corn, and very corny too, yes, thank-you
she will like the poetry what-have-you, she will appreciate it
forlorn! as John Keats would say and tolling away to myself like a poetic bell I’m on the lookout for a more melodious plot but where we are and what I’ve got will have to
no. Cross out the forlorn and the tolling. Cross it all out from here I am to will have to
Here in this Island of Men on the Isle of Man your brother is pleased to be able to report to you he has friends, I have in fact made a real pal, a jolly chap, we pal around together and it is a comfort to have a friend in this strange Zwangsgemeinschaft of a mineshaft
she will like that, good,
though he won’t tell her
(or anyone)
about how Cyril knows exactly how to take him and hold him till he comes, which he now does for Daniel and Daniel for him most days of the week. He can see her now in his head. If she saw, she’d know. She would not disapprove. He knows that she would laugh and laugh, empty herself laughing, at the rumour that the camp authorities are now lacing the porridge with bromide to help them all control their urges, the main result of which is that most people don’t eat the porridge any more, the secondary result of which is all the more material for Kurt
here Hanns it feels far away, but we are all in anticipation all the time
cross that all out
here Hanns though it feels far away I find myself among such artists and clever folk that I am sure you would approve, and say, you’re a lucky boy, Dani, in fact I’d go so far as to say if you were here yourself you’d be in your element. If the element wasn’t a prison
put a line through that last sentence
remember when she wrote to him after their mother died and said that the people left behind after someone has died are liable to become inhabitants of Grief Island and must be sure to carry an inflatable life jacket with them to help them swim away if the weather roughens and they haven’t got access to a boat.
>
She is so clever. She has always said, always been able to say the unsayables. He is a poor substitute, especially for a letter writer.
But he will pass on no fear, he crosses out
we are now much less fearful of an invasion than we were
as soon as he writes it
he will not mention the lurch in the stomach, the fairground swing of hope / despair, he won’t say anything about the boredom, she’d just scorn him for being it, he will not even write the beautiful line he was so proud of thinking up
we have been here behind the wire all through the bright open door of the summer
even though it seems to him a beautiful sequence of words. He will not mention how easy it would have been for him or their father to find themselves on a ship to Canada or Australia just by the accident of being in one room or another when the selections were made, and he will not write about the boat that was torpedoed, or how red the sky went over Liverpool burning, even all that distance away. He will not say how time is not recognizable as time any more, how he can’t bring himself to eat sometimes, how sometimes he finds he is walking about like Uncle Ernst did when Ernst was drunk.
Ernst. Dead now or alive?
We tell nobody your name or where we imagine you might be. There are ears everywhere and they are not always listening for a Keatsian melodious plot
is a paragraph he will not write in her letter
instead
I have been reading for you in case you are right now too busy or otherwise preoccupied or not getting the chance to read for yourself, most unlikely I know, but there we are, and it is like we are companionable when I do, and because our camp Commandant is such a fine fellow he has said there can be some books in the camp, so there are some old volumes doing the rounds, they fall more apart the more more and more people read them
he’ll have to sort that, there are too many mores
but I have read in a pretty good copy David Copperfield by Charles Dickens. I would tell you my favourite quotations from it but now some other fellow has it and is no doubt enjoying it. I must say when the mother holds the baby brother up high in the air to show him to David when David is being driven away to school, at that point in the story I thought of you. I am grown sentimental in my older age but there you have it. I have also read Kafka. The story of the brother and sister who go past the gate of the manor house and maybe knock on the gate or maybe don’t. It is more true, that tiny story, than many a thing I have read and it has gone deep
leave Dickens but cross out everything Kafka, replace with
and a little Christmas story by Dickens too where a man asks a ghost to take his memory away so he will stop feeling sad about painful things he remembers. So the ghost does, it removes all the memories that cause the man pain. But the pain itself doesn’t go away, though the knowledge of why there IS pain has vanished. Then the man becomes bitter and angry and bewildered as to why he feels pain. And then, like a contagion, this bitterness and anger and the loss of memory of difficult things infect everyone the man comes in contact with, and soon everybody in the town is angry and bitter with no idea why.
Right now I am also reading most of a volume (I am waiting for someone to finish the broken-off part of it and pass it on to me) of Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy. ‘On a thyme-scented, bird-hatching morning in May.’
We are fortunate in how many really talented and scholarly people speak here and give lectures, just the other day there was a talk on Goethe, there is a professor of Plato here, and an expert on Rilke and of course I thought of you when he was talking of the Rose Bowl,
but now you know how to forget about those things
because the rose bowl is here before you
and it cannot be forgotten, it is full
of being, the roses leaning forward,
holding out, never giving way, holding their own
so we too can go as far as we can, like the roses do
How do you like my translation? It is from memory, so might be very wrong. All the speakers here speak from memory. It is quite a feat. The other day I was really thinking of you when the debate we had was: Should The Artist Portray His Own Age. I tell you Hanns there was nearly a fistfight. And you would be so proud of me, because I spoke up and said, but what about the artist portraying her own age, and when I did I was nearly laughed out of the room, but at least it stopped the fistfight and let them all agree with each other and have something in common again. But I am thinking of your pictures a lot too. There are artists here. They are good but it is yours I have in my head. The one with the flowers that I thought had faces discernible, if you looked, in the shapes of their petals, means that now I can’t not see a face in all real flowers
am I saying it wrong? She was annoyed when I said the flowers she painted had faces. She is no longer sixteen, she is twenty now, maybe she thinks such things childish and behind her
and one of the other things I have been remembering to tell you is that I am carving you a wooden bird out of a piece of chair leg. I regret to pass on the information too that nowadays I have none of that nice lotion with me that you told me about and had been keeping my skin soft as you said it would, and even worse I no longer have the ointment the doc gave me for the place behind my ear where the wart came off, and so I am using any oil or grease that comes my way, but sparingly, because not often very nicely scented.
I know you will be interested that I went to see Dr Streliska, he is a handwriting expert and graphologist in the camp. Our father had been to see him and Dr S looked at a piece of his handwriting and said, ‘you are a man who loves to grow things.’ So our father felt most pleased.
‘He said nothing about you being a person who likes to suffocate butterflies, open their wings when they’re dead and stick a pin through their torsos, then?’ I said.
I wish above all I had had something written of yours to show Dr S. He would have said, ‘why this is a king of queens! A queen of kings!’ I don’t doubt.
I showed him a piece in my own hand and he said, ‘you are a man for many seasons.’ I am pleased though I have no idea what it means or how he can say such things by looking at scrawl. I was most disappointed that he didn’t say, you are a great singer and will be famous for your singing. Of course you remember exactly how good a singer I am. But I am persevering. I am writing a summer song with my friend Mr Klein, he is musically talented, we are planning to record our musical notations on the wire here by hanging our socks on the fence like the fence is our stave and the island’s view our page, and when I have finished it I will dedicate it to you. Its first line is: ‘on a thyme-scented, bird-hatching morning in May.’
Talking of music, I mean the real thing. Mr Rawicz is here. Mr Landauer is at another of the island’s camps. Our camp Commandant asked Mr R to give a concert. Well. Mr R tried out all the old pianos left in the camp and they were all terrible, one fell to pieces literally as he was playing it! (There are paintings now on the wood of its back and sides, the wires are conducting electricity in the technical school, who knows what’s become of the wheels, the ivory keys went to the dentist to be made into teeth.)
Our Commandant is Major Captain Hubert Daniel. He has given the artists studios, given the writers books and paper. He made sure all our mail arrived and arrives. That’s the good chap he is. He had two grand pianos shipped in from Liverpool and a special arrangement sorted between the camps so that Landauer could play at our camp though he is not an internee here.
Rawicz and Landauer! who perform for the King and Queen! They were arrested on their journey home from playing for the King and Queen and brought here to be interned. Now they have played for me too! We sat on the grass and listened to the Viennese Strausses.
The fine people of Douglas crowded in their hundreds up against the wire to listen together with us.
It was a marvellous evening.
So till we meet again.
Keep your Innerlichtkeit lit and shining in the window for me,
as mine is for you
my autumn sister
from
your ever
summer brother
Daniel reads it through.
He unfolds the last sheet of good paper.
Leaning on his knee, pinning the draft pages of the letter beneath him with his heel where he can see them, he makes a final fair copy in even tinier writing and with (almost) no crossings-out.
Then he sits back against the wall, looks towards the sea beyond the wire.
High above the island, high above the gulls, a bird that’s not a gull. A summer bird? this late in the season? If it is, it’s a very late traveller, possibly lost, quite alone.
Take this letter to my sister, whatever you are, bird up there.
Now he shuffles the three pages, the crossed-out and the fair copy, all together neatly.
He tears them in half.
He tears them in half again then in half again.
He takes the pieces to the kitchen in the House of the Fairy Tales, where he borrows the cook’s matches. He comes back through the bare hall and out the front door.
He makes a little heap of paper on the stone of the house’s front step. He sets light to the edge of one of the pieces of paper.
The others catch.
The heat the fire sends through them strengthens, then wanes.
When the fire’s over and the remains are cool enough, he cleans the burnt stuff up. He rubs the ash of them into his hands, then opens his empty hands and looks at them.
The lines on his hands stand out clear through the blackening.
He puts his hand behind his ear to feel the place where the wart was, three years ago,
no,
eighty years ago.
His ears have wakened.
That wart’s long gone.
But he can still feel the place the doctor took it off and left a line of stitches. He can still feel the line where something was that’s gone, where the gone thing healed.