The Darkness of Wallis Simpson

by Rose Tremain

  When Hector woke, it was dark. He was lying in a bed in a small room, painted brown and lit by an oil lamp. The flicker and fumes from the oil lamp eddied round on the brown ceiling. He could remember nothing.

  Something cold touched his face. A dampness lay on his forehead. There was the smell of rose water.

  Then a voice, very near, said in broken German: ‘Are you waking, sir?’

  Hector didn’t recall making any reply, but the same voice decided to say next: ‘I am a train driver.’

  Then, the lamplit room and the train driver and the smell of rose water were removed from Hector’s consciousness and he was submerged again in sleep, while the man (who was a driver of freight trains between Poznan and Warsaw) got up quietly and went to talk to his wife, Katarzyna, telling her reassuringly that the German soldier had woken up and that his fever was passing.

  ‘Good,’ said Katarzyna, ‘so I hope he can leave tomorrow.’

  ‘Well,’ said the train driver, ‘we shall see.’

  ‘I don’t want to “see”,’ said Katarzyna, who was old and afraid, and had a long memory. ‘I want him out of the house tomorrow. I don’t know why I had to marry a man with such a stupidly kind heart.’

  ‘He was lying in the road, Katarzyna.’

  ‘I don’t care where he was lying.’

  He is lying in Ute’s bed. He knows he shouldn’t be here, not yet. He’d forbidden himself to come here, but here he is all the same. Outside the apartment building, in the first light of morning, Ute’s swan, Karl, is screeching in his cage. Ute is lying on top of Hector, kissing his eyes. He isn’t inside her, but he can feel his erection begin against her flat stomach, and with his encircling arms he presses her closer to him, moving her body so that her breasts will rub against his chest. He whispers to her that he wants her, that he will want her for ever, that he can’t help himself, that his passion for her will have no end, and she says to him sweetly, giggling, licking his ear: ‘Hecti, it will end when you die . . .’

  The dark room returned. A nightlight on a saucer had replaced the oil lamp and Hector could just make out the shape of a small window, shuttered with louvres, beyond which it was possible to imagine an icy, moonlit sky. Hector turned his head, looking for the train driver sitting beside him, but no one was there.

  He lay very still. There was a wet patch in the bed and Hector supposed that he had pissed in it in his sleep, but wasn’t particularly disconcerted, because this was a thing that had gone on happening to him long after boyhood and two doctors had told him that there was nothing to be done about it.

  Then, hearing a train’s mournful whistle, Hector remembered that he was in Poland. He remembered the striped fields and the procession of Catholic mourners. He sat up and looked around the room for his knapsack and rifle and, not finding them, was overcome with anguish. Weeping was for the weak, for people like Elvira, not for him. But in the Polish night, Hector wept and he didn’t seem able to stop, however hard he tried.

  After a while, he heard someone get up in the room next door and an old woman came and stood by him, wrapped in a shawl, with her hair in a grey plait. She stared at him for a few moments, then shook his shoulder quite roughly. ‘German soldier,’ she said, ‘stop crying, please.’

  Hector S. lay in the little room for another day and a night. Katarzyna swore at her husband and asked him: ‘Have you forgotten the war? Have you forgotten the destination of those freight trains?’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’ve forgotten nothing.’

  ‘Then why are we sheltering a German soldier in our house?’

  All the train driver said was: ‘I am a man. And so is he.’

  While he changed Hector’s sheets and fed him some of the beetroot soup that always simmered on the stove, Katarzyna went through Hector’s knapsack and removed the lemon that she found there. She pressed it to her nose and inhaled its refreshing scent, which reminded her of days long gone, when she was a girl in a green meadow. Then she made herself a beautiful jug of lemon tea. She refused to share the tea with her fool of a kind-hearted husband, but only announced to him as she drank: ‘This is the first gift I’ve ever had from a German. And the last.’

  Two days later, Hector and his bicycle and his knapsack were helped into a truck and driven to Poznan station. Katarzyna scrubbed the room the German had vacated with a disinfectant so strong it made her teeth sting.

  Hector S. was put into a freight car full of cauliflowers. ‘I am sorry,’ said the train driver, ‘to put you with vegetables, sir.’

  After this, there was just the dark of the freight car and the sound of all the miles and miles of the Polish heartland moving under the train. Hector lay down and covered himself with his overcoat, and was as still as a man can be on a bed of cauliflowers. His head and body ached, and it seemed to him that this ache was right in the substance of his skull and in the marrow of his bones.

  His future was going wrong. Every thought that came to him, instead of being clear and precise, was clouded and difficult. It was as though thoughts were harmful chemicals, setting off explosions in his brain. The train was taking him nearer to his destination, but he began to see, with embarrassment, that it was towards the old eternal Russia of his imagination that he was travelling and that although he’d prepared quite well for his journey, he hadn’t prepared at all for his arrival. When his D-Marks ran out, where and how was he to live? For a start, he spoke only a few words of the language. He knew the Russian word for ‘now’, but not the Russian word for ‘tomorrow’. What kind of work could he find which allowed him to be totally silent?

  Then a new thought came. The colour of its chemical felt white. It was a thought about silence and the new world, the world of the West, creeping east. Westerners were thieves of silence. They stole the quiet in a place and in the mind of a man, and replaced it with longing, just as they stole the mystery from a city by lighting it orange. Darkness and quiet were leaving the world. It was only a matter of time before the dawn wouldn’t be the dawn any more, but some other computer-adjusted piece of time, with colours other than its own.

  Hector felt pleased with this thought, not because it was an optimistic one, but because it seemed rational and not blighted by confusion, and so he said to himself that perhaps he was going all this way in search of the perfect silence. He’d imagined a wilderness, a birch grove, a lake, or at least, he’d imagined cycling or walking through this kind of landscape on his way to his future in Russia. But the truth was that the future had no location. He’d never got further with his own story than the lake. Now, he understood that he might never get further – ever. In all probability, the lake was his destination.

  Hector sat up and tried to eat a pickled cucumber. He had no appetite for what remained of the tinned meat. He lay down again, liking the train now, soothed a bit by the train, as if the train were Elvira and Hector a child falling asleep on her lap, wrapped in her apron.

  He didn’t want to show his face in Warsaw. He knew he would be stared at and he couldn’t abide the thought of meeting the stare of Polish women and girls.

  He dreamed the place smelled of spun sugar, that there was dry rot in the old houses, that church bells kept ringing and ringing the hours, that pigeons continuously ruffled the air. He would fall ill again in such a place.

  So he resorted to bribery. He offered DM10 to the train driver and asked him to put him in another freight going east to the border with Belarus or beyond.

  The train driver took the money and looked at it and shook his head. ‘Now from here in a freight train going east, you will die of cold, sir.’

  ‘I’m used to the cold,’ said Hector.

  ‘Not this one. This is more cold.’

  ‘Please,’ said Hector.

  So the money was paid and a second driver was found who agreed to take him in a night train carrying medical supplies to Minsk. Katarzyna’s husband then performed his last act of generosity: he gave Hector the blanket he kept in his cab. ‘In the cold night
,’ he said, ‘cover your body, German man.’

  Hector missed the cauliflowers. In this second freight car, piled with boxes, every surface was hard and in whatever way he lay down, Hector’s bones hurt. He tried folding the blanket in three and lying on top of it. This was more comfortable and Hector was beginning to drift towards sleep when he opened his eyes and saw in the darkness the freezing cloud of his own breath lying over him like a ghost. In time, he would have breathed all the air in the box car and the ghost would be very large and attempt to make more room for itself by entering the cavities of his body and taking away his life.

  The blanket smelled of oil and it was old and worn, but there was still a little warmth in it. Hector stood up and wrapped himself round and round in it and lay down again on the boxes of pharmaceuticals. He imagined he was lying on glass syringes, as clear as ice.

  The night would be so long. Poland, thought Hector, is a place where the nights have subdued the days and stolen half their territory. The bit of space left to the light is so pitiful, you just have time to cycle a few kilometres, buy some hard bread, pass a church where women kneel at open-air confessionals, hear a village band wearing hats with emperor’s plumes play an ancient march, and then the dusk comes down, and it’s futile to look forward to morning, because morning is so far away. It wasn’t so mad, so completely foolish to imagine that here, on certain days, you could go into a post office, say, to buy a stamp, and that when you came out again with the stamp in your wallet, the day had given up hope and the words ‘post office’ had faded into the wall.

  These thoughts made Hector remember the line of post boxes in the lobby of the apartment building in Prenzlauer Berg and how he’d imagined letters from Russia arriving there, letters which described an epic journey, an honourable arrival, a life built in a place where the structures of the old familiar world were still standing.

  Now, in his freight car, wrapped in the train driver’s blanket, as heavy snow started to fall, Hector began to compose in his mind a letter to Ute, to the sister he’d desired since the day, at the age of five, when she’d licked his penis in the bath. It might be, he thought, the only letter he would have time to think up, and so he wanted it to describe a place that would seduce Ute, a place in which she would recognise that she could be happy, a place he had made safe for her in advance.

  Dear Ute,

  I have arrived at the loneliest, most beautiful place in the world. Let me describe it to you. It is a great forest that has been growing silently for more time than anything else on this part of the earth. Bears inhabit it. And reindeer and wolves. Snow lies over it for seven months of the year. Sometimes, I fall into conversation with a solitary hunter and we discuss weapons and the individual characteristics of flight of certain difficult targets and how, in one’s aim, one may compensate for these and so kill after all and not starve. Bears are protected and may not be shot.

  And this brings me to swans. At the feet of the forest is the lake. The north side of it is frozen, but a little water still laps the snow on this southern side and here I have discovered a fine family of your favourite birds. They whoop like cranes in the early morning. They’re plump and sleek from the quantity of fish they find in the lake. They are as tame as Karl and will come if I call them and feed from my hand. When you join me here, this is the first thing we will do: go down to the lake and visit the swans.

  I expect you’re wondering where we’re going to live and how we’re to find shelter.‘Hecti,’ I hear you say,‘are you asking me to make love to you in the snow?’ No, Ute. No, I’m not. Unless you want to do that.

  I have found, at the lakeside, an old grey dacha, built of wood, with a stone chimney and a steep shingled roof. I walked into it like that girl in the fairy story and sat down in the largest of chairs. I found a smoked ham hanging inside the chimney. I found a larder full of apples. I found folded sheets for the bed.

  It’s as if this dacha was designed with me in mind, with everything necessary for my survival: an axe to chop wood, a fire to cook on, even a feather-bed quilt for the nights, which are as cold as nights on the moon. So now, I’m able to say to you, don’t waste any more time, sell whatever you have to sell – Elvira’s hairbrushes, father’s cache of cigarettes – and take the next train out of Berlin going east. . .

  It was at this point in his imaginary letter that Hector was jolted forwards and almost fell off the ledge of boxes on which he was lying. The train had stopped.

  Hector listened. He hadn’t seen the thick snow falling, but by the temperature in the car and by the absence of any sound, he was able to judge that it was the deep middle of the night. The train would still be a long way from Minsk, a long way even from the border, so he supposed that it must have stopped at a signal and that in a few minutes it would get going again.

  Somehow, the immobilisation of the train made the cold inside the freight car more intense and the ghost of breath that filled the space around and above Hector became agitated and began a strange kind of wailing.

  The train moved. But it was going backwards, Hector could tell by the way his body rolled. And then it stopped again. Hector raised his head off his knapsack, to hear better, to see better, but he could hear and see nothing except the ghost in the air.

  What Hector couldn’t know was that the train had been rerouted into a siding because the line further east was temporarily closed by snow. What he couldn’t know either was that the driver of the second freight had forgotten all about him and, once the train was safe in its siding, got down from his cab and walked away across the white fields towards a village, in search of a warm fire and a bed for the rest of the night. So Hector lay there, waiting for the train to resume its journey, while the soft snow piled up on the roof of the box car.

  After an hour had passed, he tried to move himself towards the edge of the car, so that he could bang on the doors with his feet, but he found that his body was unwilling to move. It asked him to let it rest. He attempted, then, to call out. He knew that a human voice inside a freight train would probably make the kind of sound that disturbed one’s peace and altered nothing in the world, but he tried to call nevertheless. ‘Train driver!’ he said. ‘Help me!’ It was a whisper, not a shout. Hector believed that he was shouting, but he was only murmuring. And anyway, the driver of the second freight was a mile away. He was sitting by a fire with a schoolteacher and his wife, drinking vodka and eating poppyseed cakes.

  After his efforts at calling, Hector’s throat felt sore and he was afflicted suddenly by a desperate, unbearable thirst. He had no memory of where his water bottle was or when he had last seen it, but what he did remember was the solitary lemon he had put into his knapsack on the morning of his departure. And his longing, now, to suck the juice from this lemon became so great that he succeeded in extracting one hand from the blanket and with this one hand reached behind his head to try to undo the fastenings of his knapsack.

  He could picture with absolute precision the colour, shape and texture of the lemon, as clearly as he could picture the icy Russian lake and the grey dacha beside it, in which he and his beloved sister would live. And his yearning for the freshness of the juice of the lemon was so deep, so absolute, that into his search for the precious fruit he put every last ounce of his strength.

  The snow stopped falling an hour before sunrise and the sky cleared and the dawn was bright.

  Woken by the winter sunlight, the driver of the freight to Minsk remembered at this instant the German soldier he’d agreed to hide in one of his box cars in return for DM5.

  He dressed hurriedly, tugging on his overcoat and his hat, and let himself out of the schoolteacher’s house.

  The snow was thick on the fields. The man wasn’t young. Trying to make his way through this deep snow was exhausting for him and it took him the best part of half an hour to reach the train.

  He opened the door of Hector’s box car and stared in. The light on the snow had blinded him and, for a moment, he could see nothing. �
��Hello!’ he called. ‘Hello! It is morning.’

  Hector was lying face up, one arm behind his head that rested on his knapsack. The German’s face had the pallor of bone, but there was a smile on it, as if, in his last moments, Hector had glimpsed something strangely beautiful.

  The train driver walked a few paces from the car and fumbled to light a cigarette.

  He stood in the snow, thinking.

  It didn’t take him long to decide what he was going to do. He was going to leave Hector exactly where he was. He wasn’t even going to touch him or cover his face. Even if the day remained fine, the cold in the box car would preserve his body and, with a bit of luck, the train would get to Minsk before nightfall.

  At the depot, the freight would be unloaded by rail workers from Belarus, and so it would be they who would find the stowaway. In this way, provided he remembered to get rid of the German currency, the driver would have shifted the burden of responsibility. The dead German, wearing some kind of military uniform, would become a Russian problem.

  Death of an Advocate

  Inspired by the painting ‘Holyday’ by Tissot, c. 1877

  By permission of the Tate Gallery, London

  The thing which first annoyed Albert about that afternoon was everybody pretending they weren’t cold.

  He considered this ridiculous: his wife, Berthe; his sister-in-law, Marianne; his parents-in-law, Claude and Joséphine, sprawled there on the tartan picnic rug in the weak October sunshine, drinking their tea, smiling, listening to the birds, as though this were a hot day in July.

  ‘You know it’s freezing,’ Albert announced.

  Nobody paid him any attention. They just carried on sitting still. For that was what this picnic seemed to be about: eating cake and sipping tea and then falling silent and staring at Nature – or what passed for Nature in this part of the municipal park. Everybody hunched and separate and in a reverie of his own. Albert noticed with irritation that the women even pretended the chestnut leaves weren’t falling on the picnic cloth. They let them lie there, as though they didn’t see them, or as though the brown leaves might have been slivers of fruitcake left half-eaten through inattention.