A Traitor to Memory

by Elizabeth George

  Living here in England so much closer to where it all happened, I don't remember it myself. But it was, as Dad told me, quite a story then because Katja and her boyfriend didn't attempt their crossing from somewhere in the countryside, where it would have been at least marginally safer to go from east into west, but instead they sailed from East Berlin itself. The boy didn't make it all the way. The border guards got him. But Katja did make it. She earned her fifteen minutes that way and became a standard-bearer for freedom. Television news, front-page headlines, magazine stories, radio interviews. She ended up being invited to England.

  I listened carefully as Dad told me all this, and I watched him closely. I looked for signs and for inner meanings, and I tried to make inferences, leaps, and deductions. Because even now in the situation in which I find myself—sitting here in the music room in Chalcot Square with the Guarneri fifteen feet away, taken from its case at least and surely that's progress God tell me that's progress, Dr. Rose, although I can't bring myself to lift the violin to the height of my shoulder—there are questions I'm afraid to ask my father.

  What sorts of questions? you want to know.

  Questions like these, questions that rise to my mind without effort: Who took that picture of Sonia and Katja? Why did my mother leave only that single picture behind? Did she even know about it? Did she actually take the other pictures or did he destroy them? And why, above all, did my father never speak of them before now: never speak to me of Sonia, of Katja, of my mother?

  Obviously, he hadn't forgotten they existed. After all, once I brought Sonia up, he produced her picture and from its condition I'd swear before God that it was something he's held and contemplated hundreds of times. So why the silence?

  People sometimes avoid, you tell me. They dodge subjects too painful for them to face.

  Like Sonia herself? Her death? My mother? Her leaving? The pictures?

  Katja Wolff perhaps?

  But why would Katja Wolff be a painful subject to Dad? Except for the most obvious reason.

  Which is?

  You want me to say it, don't you, Dr. Rose? You want me to write it. You want me to stare at it sitting on this page, and thus to weigh its truth or its falsehood. But where the hell is that going to get me? She's holding my sister, she's cradling her just beneath her breast, her eyes look kind and her face is serene. One of her shoulders is bare because she's wearing a dress or a top with straps too loose and it's brightly coloured, bizarrely coloured, that dress or top, so much yellow and orange and green and blue. And that bare shoulder is smooth and round and yes all right it's an invitation and I'd have to be blind not to see it so if a man is taking that picture of Katja and if that man is my father—but it could be Raphael it could be James the Lodger it could be Granddad or the gardener or the postman or any man because she is splendid beautiful seductive and even I a cocked-up mess of a paltry excuse of a healthy laughable male can see who she is and what she is and how she's offering what she's offering—then that man has an alliance with her and I've a fairly good idea what sort it is.

  So write about her, you instruct me. Write about Katja. Fill a page with her name alone if that's what it takes and see where filling that page takes you, Gideon. Ask your father if there are other pictures he can show you: family pictures, casual pictures, snapshots of holidays, fêtes, parties, gatherings, dinners, anything at all. Look at them closely. See who's in them. Read their expressions.

  Look for Katja? I ask.

  Look for what's there.

  21 September

  Dad says I was nearly six when Sonia was born. I was just short of eight when she died. I phoned and asked him those two questions outright. Aren't you pleased, Dr. Rose? The horns were there and I actually grabbed them.

  When I asked him how Sonia died, Dad said, “She drowned, son.” The answer seemed to cost him much, and his voice seemed to come from a place that was distant. I felt a tightness inside me, having asked him anything at all, but that did not stop me going on. I asked him her age when she died: two years. And the strain in his voice told me that she had been quite old enough not only to have established a permanent place in his heart but also to have made an indelible mark on his spirit.

  The sound of that strain and the comprehension that accompanied it explained so much to me about my father: his focus on me throughout my childhood, his determination that I should have and see and be and experience the very best, his single-minded protection of me when I began my public career, his wariness of anyone who came too close and might do me harm. Having lost one child—no, my God, having lost two because Virginia his oldest had died young as well—he was not about to lose another.

  So I finally understand why he's stayed so close, been so involved, finessed so much of my life and career. Early on I said aloud what I wanted—the violin, my music—and he did what it took to see to it that his remaining child was given just that, as if by providing me the means to my dream he would somehow assure my longevity. So he had two jobs; he sent Mother out to work as well; he employed Raphael; he arranged that I should be educated at home.

  Except all this was before Sonia, wasn't it? It couldn't have been the result of Sonia's death. Because if, as he said, she was born when I was six years old, Raphael Robson and Sarah-Jane Beckett would already have been in place in the house. And James the Lodger would have been there as well. And into this already established group Katja Wolff would have come as Sonia's nanny. So that's what must have happened, isn't it: An established group was forced to accept an interloper in their midst. An intruder, if you will. A foreigner as well. And not just any, but a German foreigner. Briefly famous, yes. But German all the same: our wartime enemy and Granddad forever a prisoner of that war.

  So Sarah-Jane Beckett and James the Lodger are whispering about her in that corner in the kitchen, not about my mother, not about Raphael, and not about those flowers. They are whispering about her because Sarah-Jane is like that, was like that from the first, a whisperer. Her whispering grows out of jealousy because Katja is lithe and pretty and seductive and Sarah-Jane Beckett—with her short red hair like a pudding bowl sprouting from her scalp and her body not much different to mine—sees how the men in the household look at Katja, especially James the Lodger, who helps Katja with her English and laughs when she says with a shiver, “Mein Gott, my corpse is not yet used to such rain in this country” instead of my body, which is what she means. She's asked if she would like a cup of tea, and she says, “Oh yes. Most voluntarily and with many gratitudes,” and they laugh the men laugh but it's laughter that's charmed. My father, Raphael, James the Lodger, even Granddad.

  And I remember that. Dr. Rose, I remember.

  22 September

  So where has she been all these years, Katja Wolff? Buried with Sonia? Buried because of Sonia perhaps?

  Because of Sonia? You pounce upon the word, don't you? Why because, Gideon?

  Because of her death. If Katja was Sonia's nanny and Sonia died when she was two years old, Katja would have left us then, wouldn't she? I would have had no need for a nanny with Raphael and Sarah-Jane attending to me. So Katja would have left us after two years—perhaps even less—and that would be why I'd forgotten her. I was, after all, only eight at the time, and she wasn't my nanny but Sonia's, so I would have had little to do with her. I was consumed with my music, and when the violin wasn't devouring my time, my school lessons were. I'd already had my first public performances, and the fallout from them was an offer to study at Juilliard for a year. Imagine that. Juilliard. What age could I have been: seven? eight?

  “A virtuoso in the making,” I was called.

  But I didn't want making. I wanted made.

  23 September

  I don't go to Juilliard as things turn out, despite the honour and what it can mean to my development as an international musician. Because of the history of the place, scores of people three times my age would have done anything to have the same opportunity, to experience the endless possibiliti
es that could come from having this extraordinary transcendent invaluable experience…. But there is no money, and even if there were, I am far too young to go that distance by myself, let alone to live there. And since my family cannot move there en masse, the opportunity passes me by.

  En masse. Yes. I somehow know that en masse is the only way Juilliard will happen to me, money or not. So I say, Please please let me go, Dad, I must go, I want to go to New York because even then I know what it means in my present and can mean to my future. Dad says, Gideon, you know we can't go. You can't be there alone, and we can't go as a group. Naturally, I demand to know why. Why why why can't I have what I want when until this moment I have always had it. He says—and yes, I remember this well—Gideon, the world will come to you. I promise you that, I swear it, son.

  But it's clear that we can't go to New York.

  For some reason I know this even as I ask again and again and again, even as I bargain, beg, behave as badly as I've ever done, as I kick the music stand, fling myself into my grandmother's treasured demilune table and crack two of its legs … even then I know there will be no Juilliard no matter what I do. Alone, with my family, with one of my parents, accompanied only by Raphael, or with Sarah-Jane dogging my heels as my shadow or protector, I will not be going to that Mecca of music.

  Know, you point out to me. Know before you ask, know as you ask, know despite everything you do to change … what, Gideon? What are you trying to change?

  Reality, obviously. And yes, Dr. Rose, I know that's an answer that takes us nowhere. What's the reality that I already understand as a seven-or eight-year-old?

  It appears to be this: We are not a rich family. Oh yes, we live in an area that not only indicates but also requires money, but the family's owned that house for generations and the only reason the family still owns it is due to the lodgers, to Dad's two jobs, to Mother's going to work, and to Granddad's pittance from the Government. But money is not something we ever discuss. Talk of money is like speaking of bodily functions at the dinner table. Yet I know I won't go to Juilliard and I feel a tightening inside me as I know this. It starts in my arms. It moves to my stomach. It rises upwards into my throat till I shout oh I shout and I remember what I shout, “It's because she's here!” And that's when I kick and pound and fling. That's when, Dr. Rose.

  She's here?

  She. Of course. It must be Katja.

  26 September

  Dad was here again. He came for two hours and was replaced by Raphael. They wanted to make it look as if they weren't taking shifts at a death watch, so I had at least five minutes alone between the time Dad left and Raphael arrived. But what they don't know is that I saw them from the window. Raphael came walking into Chalcot Square from the direction of Chalcot Road, and Dad intercepted him in the middle of the garden. They stood on either side of one of the benches and they talked. At least, Dad talked. Raphael listened. He nodded and did what he always does: ran his fingers left to right on his scalp to arrange the fretwork that's left of his hair. Dad was passionate. I could tell that much from the way he gestured, one hand up at the level of his chest and closed into a fist like a punch withheld. The rest I didn't need to interpret because I knew what he was passionate about.

  He'd come in peace. No mention of anything regarding my music. “Had to get away from her for a while,” he sighed. “I've come to believe that women the world over in the last months of pregnancy are all the same.”

  “Jill's moved in, then?” I asked him.

  “Why tempt fate?”

  Which was his way of saying that they're sticking to their original plan: Have the baby first, combine their households second, and marry when the dust settles on the first two events. It's the fashion these days to go at relationships in that way, and Jill is an adherent to fashion. But I sometimes wonder how Dad feels about an arrangement so foreign to his other marriages. He's a traditionalist at heart, I believe, with nothing so important as his family and with only one way in mind to make a family. Once he learned Jill was pregnant, I can't see him doing anything but dropping hastily to one knee in order to claim her. Indeed, that's what he did with his first wife, although he doesn't know that I learned that from Granddad. He met her while he was on leave from the Army—his intended career, by the way—he got her pregnant, and he married her. That he's not gone the same route with Jill tells me it's Jill's agenda being followed.

  “She sleeps when she can now,” he told me. “It's always like that in the last six weeks or so. They're so blasted uncomfortable and if the baby's decided to be awake from midnight till five A.M….” He brushed his hand through the air dismissively. “Then you've got what you've been waiting for for years: a nightly chance to read War and Peace.”

  “Are you staying with her now?”

  “I'm doing time on the sofa.”

  “Not good for your back, Dad.”

  “Don't remind me.”

  “Have you settled on the name?”

  “I still want Cara.”

  “She still wants—” and the import dawned upon me so suddenly that I scarcely said it but I forced myself to go on. “She's holding fast for Catherine?”

  He and I locked eyes, and she was there between us, as if she were corporeal, immediate, and eternally that captivating girl in the picture. I said, even though my palms were damp and my gut was beginning to feel the first spark of a fire to come, “But that would remind you of Katja, wouldn't it? If you called the baby Catherine?”

  His response was to get up and make coffee, and he took his time with the activity. He commented upon my choice of ready-ground beans and what they did to destroy freshness. He went from there to an expatiation of what the presence of yet another Starbucks—this one on Gloucester Road not far from Braemar Mansions—has done to the atmosphere of his neighbourhood.

  As he did all this, the pain in my gut began to move slowly down where it planned, as always, to wreak havoc with my bowels. I listened to him make the leap from Starbucks to the Americanisation of global culture, and I pressed my arm hard against the lowest part of my intestines, willing the pain to stop and the urgency to ease, because if that did not happen, Dad would have won.

  I let him exhaust the subject of America: international conglomerates dominating business, Hollywood megalomaniacs determining cinematic art forms, astronomical and singularly obscene salaries and share options becoming the measure of a capitalist's success. When he reached the peroration of his speech—evidenced by the fact that the great gulps he was taking from his coffee cup were becoming more frequent—I repeated my question, except this time I didn't ask it as a question. “Katja,” I said. “Catherine would remind you.”

  He poured what remained of his coffee down the drain. He strode into the music room. As he moved, he said, “God damn it. Show me, Gideon.” And then, “Ah. This is what's going for progress, is it?”

  He'd seen the Guarneri back in its case and although the case was open, he somehow knew that I hadn't yet attempted to play it. He took it from the case and the absence of the reverence with which he'd touched that violin in the past told me just how angry—or agitated, irritated, infuriated, frightened, worried, I do not know which—he actually was. He held the instrument out to me, fingers round its neck with that brilliant scroll emerging from his fist like hope coiled round an unspoken promise. He said, “Here. Take it. Show me where we are. Show me exactly where weeks of excavating through the dreck of the past has taken you, Gideon. A note will do. A scale. An arpeggio. Or, miraculously because something tells me it would be miraculous at this point, a movement from the concerto of your choice. Any concerto. Too tough? Then what about a little encore piece?”

  And the fire was in me but it was changed to a single coal. White hot, silver hot, incandescent, and it moved like acid down through my body.

  And yes, yes, I see what my father has done, Dr. Rose. You don't need to point it out. I see what he's done. But in that moment I could only say, “I can't. Don't make me. I can't
,” like a nine-year-old who's been asked to play a piece that he cannot master.

  Dad used that next, saying, “Perhaps that's beneath you. Too easy for you, Gideon. An insult to your talent. So let's start with The Archduke, shall we?”

  Let's start with The Archduke. The acid ate through me, and what was left when the pain had knotted my viscera and rendered me useless was blame. I am at fault. I placed myself into this position. Beth set the programme for the Wigmore Hall benefit, and she said, “What about The Archduke, Gideon?” in absolute innocence. And because it was Beth who made the suggestion, Beth who'd already experienced my other more personal brand of failure, I couldn't bring myself to say, “Forget it. That piece is a jinx.”

  Artists believe in jinxes. The word Macbeth spoken inside a theatre has its counterpart in every field of art. So if I'd called The Archduke what I needed to call it—my personal jinx—Beth would have understood, despite the way she and I ended. And Sherrill wouldn't have cared as much as a sprat what we played. He would have said, in that Do-I-actually-give-a-shit American fashion of his that he uses to hide a monstrous talent, “Just point me to the keyboard, boys and girls,” and that would have been that. So it was all down to me and I let it happen. I am to blame.

  Dad found me where I'd taken myself off to when I could not face the challenge he was issuing: in the shed in the garden, where I sketch the designs and make my kites. That's what I was doing then—sketching—and he joined me, the Guarneri replaced in its case and the case itself left inside the house.

  He said, “You are the music, Gideon. That's what I want you for. That's all that I want.”

  I said, “That's what we're trying to get to.”

  He said, “It's bollocks, going at it this way, scratching in notebooks and having a nod-off on a screw doctor's sofa every three days.”