by Judith Kerr
She nodded.
A group of shops, unexpectedly bright, throwing rectangles of light on to the pavement. Apotheke, a chemist. A newsagent. A florist. Blumenladen said the illuminated sign above it, and as she read the word she had a sensation of being suddenly very near the ground, surrounded by great leaves and overpowering scents. Enormous brilliant flowers nodded and dipped above her on stems almost as thick as her wrist, and she was clutching a huge hand from which a huge arm stretched up into the jungle above her. Blumenladen, she thought softly to herself. Blumenladen. Then the shop vanished into the darkness and she was back in the car, a little dazed, with Konrad beside her.
“Nearly there,” he said in English, and after a moment she nodded again.
He turned down a side street, through a patch of trees, and stopped outside a white-painted building, one of a number placed fairly close together among scrappy lawns.
“Purpose-built American flats,” he said. “The Goldblatts have only just moved in here.”
They climbed a flight of stairs and as soon as Hildy Goldblatt opened the door Anna felt she was back in wartime England, for with her frizzy hair, her worried dark eyes and her voice which sounded as though someone had sat on it, she seemed like the epitome of all the refugees she had ever known.
“There she is,” cried Hildy, opening her arms wide. “Come all the way from London to see her sick Mama. And how is she today?”
Konrad replied quickly that Mama’s pneumonia was fractionally better – which was true, he had telephoned the hospital before leaving – and Hildy nodded.
“She will be well soon.”
Her husband, a slight man with grey hair, had appeared in the hall beside her. “Today pneumonia is nothing. Not like in the old days.”
“In the old days – na ja.” They raised their hands and their eyebrows and smiled at each other, remembering not only the intractability of pneumonia but all the other difficulties overcome in the past. “Things are different today,” they said.
As Hildy led the way to a lavishly laid table (“We eat now,” she said, “then it will be done.”) Anna wondered how they had preserved their refugee accents through all the years in England and of working with the Americans in Germany. It must be a special talent, she decided. She could almost have predicted the meal Hildy served, as well. In wartime London it would have been soup with knoedel, followed by apple tart. In Berlin, with the American PX to draw on, there was an additional course of steak and fried potatoes.
While Hildy heaped her plate (“So eat – you must be tired!”) the conversation slid from English into German and back again in a way which she found curiously soothing. Erwin Goldblatt worked with Konrad at JRSO, the Jewish Restitution Successor Organization, where they dealt with claims from the millions of Jews who had lost their families, their health and their possessions under the Nazis. “Of course you can’t really compensate them,” said Erwin. “Not with money.” And Konrad said, “One does what one can.” They talked of work, of the old days in London (“I can tell you, Finchley in 1940 was no summer holiday!”), of colleagues in Nuremberg where they had all first met.
“And your brother?” asked Hildy. “What is he doing? Something in Greece, your mother said.”
“He’s got a big case for a Greek ship owner,” said Anna. “He had to go there for a conference, and the ship owner lent him a house for a holiday with his family afterwards. The trouble is, it’s so far away even from Athens, on a tiny island. It’s bound to take him a long time to get here.”
Hildy looked surprised. “Max too is coming to see his mother? Is it then so serious?”
I shouldn’t have said that, thought Anna.
Konrad swept in calmly. “Pneumonia is no joke, even today, Hildy. I thought it best to let him know.”
“Of course, of course.” But she had guessed something. Her shrewd eyes met her husband’s briefly, then moved back to Konrad. “So much trouble,” she said vaguely.
“Ach, always trouble.” Erwin sighed and offered Anna some cake. “But this young man,” he said, brightening, “such a young barrister, and already ship owners are lending him their country houses. He is making quite a career.”
“You’ve heard her talk about him,” cried Hildy. “The wonder boy. He got a big scholarship in Cambridge.”
“And a law scholarship after that,” said Anna.
Hildy patted her hand. “There, you see,” she said, “it will be all right. As soon as the mother sees her son, no matter how ill she is, she will just get up from her bed and walk.”
Everyone laughed, and it was quite true, thought Anna, Mama would do anything for Max. At the same time another part of herself thought, then what in heaven’s name am I doing here? But she suppressed it quickly.
Hildy went into the kitchen and reappeared a moment later with a jug of coffee. “The girl looks tired,” she said, passing Anna her cup. “What can we do for her?”
Erwin said, “A glass of cognac,” but Hildy shook her head. “Cognac afterwards. First I know something better.”
She beckoned, and Anna followed her out of the room, feeling suddenly at the end of her tether. I don’t want any cognac, she thought, and I don’t want any more cake or coffee, I just want to be home. She found herself standing beside Hildy in the hall. There was nothing there except a telephone on a small table. Hildy pointed to it.
“So why don’t you ring up your husband?” she asked.
“Really?” said Anna. She felt tears pricking her eyes and thought, this is really ridiculous.
“Of course.”
“Well, if you’re sure.” She blinked to stop the tears from running down her face. “I don’t know what it is – I feel so—” She couldn’t think what it was she felt like.
Hildy patted the telephone.
“Ring him up,” she said and left Anna alone in the hall.
When she went back into the living room, they were all drinking cognac.
“Look at her,” cried Erwin when he saw her, “she has another face already.”
Konrad patted her shoulder. “Everything all right?”
“Yes.” Just hearing Richard’s voice had made her feel different.
Out of respect for Hildy’s telephone bill, they had only spoken a few minutes. She had told him that she had seen Mama – but nothing about Konrad, it would have been impossible with him in the next room – and he had told her that he was trying to get on with the script and that he had cooked himself some spaghetti.
Halfway through she had suddenly asked, “Am I speaking with a German accent?” but he had laughed and said, “Of course not.” Afterwards she had felt reconnected to some essential part of herself – something that might, otherwise, have come dangerously loose.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s all been a bit disorientating.”
They gave her some cognac which she drank, and suddenly the evening became very cheerful. Erwin told various old refugee jokes which Anna had known since her childhood but which, for some reason, she now found hilarious. She saw that Konrad, too, was leaning back, laughing, in his chair.
“Ach, the troubles we’ve had, the troubles we’ve had.” Hildy had produced another cake, a chocolate one, and was pressing it on everyone. “And in the end, somehow, it’s all right, and you think, all that worrying – better I should have spent the time learning another language.”
Everyone laughed at the thought of Hildy attempting another language on top of her refugee English, and she pretended to threaten them with the chocolate cake.
“You can laugh,” she said, “but all the same it’s true what I say. Most things are all right in the end.” She glanced at Erwin. “Not everything, of course. But most things.”
Erwin looked back at her fondly. “Na,” he said, “at least they’re better than they used to be.”
When Anna got back to her hotel room she felt almost guilty at having enjoyed the evening so much. But what else could I have done? she thought. Lying under the Germa
n quilt in the darkness, she could hear a cat wailing in the garden. Somewhere in the distance a train went chuntering across some points.
She suddenly remembered that when she was small, too, she had listened to distant trains in bed. Probably it’s the same line, she thought. Sometimes when she had found herself awake while everyone else was asleep, she had been comforted by the sound of a goods train rumbling interminably through the night. After Hitler, of course, goods trains had carried quite different cargoes to quite different destinations. She wondered if other German children had still been comforted by their sound in the night, not knowing what was inside them. She wondered what had happened to the trains afterwards, and if they were still in use.
The cat wailed and the chugging of another train drifted over on the wind. Perhaps tomorrow Mama will be better, she thought, and fell asleep.
Monday
When she woke up in the morning, it was pouring. She could hear the rain drumming on the window and dripping from the gutters even before she opened her eyes on the grey light of the room. In the garden, most of the leaves had been washed off the trees, and she hoped that the cat had found some shelter.
As she made her way downstairs, across worn carpets and past ancient, fading wallpapers, she noticed for the first time that what she was staying in was not a real hotel, but a private house, half-heartedly converted. There did not seem to be many other guests, for the breakfast room was empty except for an elderly man who got up and left as she arrived. She sat down at the only other table which had been laid, and at once a small bow-legged woman whom she dimly remembered from the previous day hurried in with a tray.
“Had a good sleep?” she asked in broad Berlinese. “You’re looking better today. When I saw you yesterday I thought to myself, that one’s had all she can take.”
“I’m fine now, thank you,” said Anna. As usual, she emphasized her English accent and spoke more haltingly than necessary. She had no wish to be thought even remotely German.
“I’ll bring you your breakfast.”
The woman was middle-aged, with pale hair so lacking in colour that it might have been either fair or grey, and sharp, pale eyes. As she scuttled in and out on her little legs, she talked without stopping.
“The gentleman phoned to say that he’d be calling for you at nine. It’s dreadfully wet out. String rain, we call it in Berlin, because it looks like long pieces of string, d’you see? I really dread going out to do the shopping, but I have to, there’s no one else to do it.”
As she talked, she brought Anna a small metal can of tea, butter, jam and bread rolls.
“Thank you,” said Anna, and poured herself some tea.
“I don’t do suppers, but I can always fix you up a boiled egg or some herrings if you should want them. Or a bit of cauliflower.”
Anna nodded and smiled in a limited way, and the woman, defeated by her English reserve, retired.
She looked at her watch. It was only a little after eight-thirty, she had plenty of time. She wondered how Mama was. Presumably the same, otherwise Konrad would have asked to speak to her when he rang. She buttered one of the bread rolls and took a bite. It tasted much as she remembered from her childhood.
“There are more rolls if you’d like them,” said the woman, peering round the door.
“No thank you,” said Anna.
When she was small, there had never been more than one roll each for breakfast. “If you want more, you can eat bread,” Heimpi who looked after them always told them while she and Max wolfed it down before school. She had been so convinced of the infallibility of this rule that once, pondering upon the existence of God and also feeling rather hungry, she had challenged Him to a miracle.
“Let them give me a second roll,” she had told Him, “then I’ll know that You exist,” and to her awed amazement Heimpi had actually produced one.
It had been a poor bargain, she thought. For months afterwards she had been burdened by the knowledge that she alone in a family of agnostics had proof of God’s existence. Though she found it exciting at first (standing talking to Mama and Papa, her hands secretly folded in prayer behind her back, thinking, “Little do they know what I’m doing!”), eventually it had become such a strain that Mama had asked her if she were worried about anything. She remembered looking at Mama in the sunlight from the living-room window, trying to decide what to answer.
As always in those days, she was worried not only about God but about several other things as well, the most urgent being a book of raffle tickets she had recklessly acquired at school and had found impossible to sell. Should she tell Mama about the raffle tickets or about God? She had carefully examined Mama’s face – the directness of her blue eyes, the childish snub nose and the energetic, uncomplicated mouth, and she had made her decision. She had told her about the raffle tickets.
As she sat chewing her roll in the shabby breakfast room, she wished she had told her about God instead. If it had been Papa, of course she would have done.
“I’m going now,” said the woman. She had put on a long, shapeless coat which concealed her legs, and was carrying an umbrella. On her head was a hat with a battered veil.
“Auf Wiedersehen,” she said.
“Auf Wiedersehen,” said Anna.
For a moment she had a glimpse of Mama in a hat with a veil. The veil was blue, it just reached the end of Mama’s nose, and it was crumpled because Mama was crying. When on earth was that? she wondered, but she could not remember.
Konrad arrived punctually, shaking the water from his hat and coat.
“Your mother’s pneumonia is a little better,” he said. “Otherwise she’s much the same. But I managed to speak to the doctor when I rang, and he said they were trying a different treatment.”
“I see.” She did not know whether that was good or bad.
“Anyway, he’ll be at the hospital, so you can speak to him yourself. Oh, and Max rang up from Athens. He’s hoping to get on a flight to Paris this afternoon, in which case he’ll be here either tonight or tomorrow.”
“Oh good.” The thought of Max was cheering.
“He only knows about the pneumonia, of course.”
“Not about the overdose?”
“He didn’t ask me, so I didn’t tell him,” said Konrad stiffly.
Watching him drive through the pouring rain, she noticed again how worn he looked. There were dark circles under his eyes, and not only his face but even his large body looked a little collapsed. Of course, he’s been coping with all this far longer than me, she thought. But as they approached the hospital, her stomach tightened as it had done the previous day at the prospect of seeing Mama, and she felt suddenly angry. If Konrad hadn’t had an affair with some wretched typist, she thought, none of this would have happened.
Unlike the previous day, the reception hall was full of bustle. Nurses hurried to and fro, the telephone kept ringing while a man in a raincoat stood dripping patiently at the desk, and immediately behind them an old lady in a wheelchair was being manoeuvred in from the rain under several black umbrellas. Of course, she thought, this was Monday. Yesterday most of the staff would have had the day off.
The nurse behind the desk announced their arrival on the telephone and a few minutes later a slight, balding man in a white coat came hurrying towards them. He introduced himself as Mama’s doctor with a heel-clicking little bow and plunged at once into an analysis of Mama’s condition.
“Well now,” he said, “the pneumonia no longer worries me too much. We’ve been pumping her full of antibiotics and she’s responded quite well. But that’s no use unless we can bring her out of the coma. We’ve made no progress there at all, so we’ve given her some powerful stimulants in the hope that these may help. You’ll find her very restless.”
“Restless?” said Anna. It sounded like an improvement.
He shook his head. “I’m afraid the restlessness does not mean that she’s better. It’s just a reaction to the drugs. But we’re hoping that it w
ill lead to an improvement eventually.”
“I see,” she said. “What—” She was suddenly unsure how to put it in German – “What do you think is going to happen?”
He spread-eagled the fingers of both hands and showed them to her. “Fifty-fifty,” he said in English. “You understand? If she comes out of the coma – no problem. She’ll be well in a few days. If not…” He shrugged his shoulders. “We’re doing all we can,” he said.
At first, when she saw Mama, in spite of what the doctor had told her, she thought for a moment that she must be better. From the far side of the landing, with Mama’s bed partly obscured by a large piece of hospital equipment, she could see the bedclothes move as though Mama were tugging at them. But there was a nurse standing by the bed, doing something to Mama’s arm, and as she came closer she saw that it had been bandaged on to a kind of splint, presumably to stop Mama dislodging the tube which led to it from the bottle suspended above the bed.
Tethered only by her arm, Mama was lurching violently about in the bed, and every so often a strange, deep sound came from her chest, like air escaping from an accordion. She no longer had the tube in her mouth, but her eyes were tightly shut, and she looked distressed, like someone in a nightmare, trying to escape.
“Mama,” said Anna, gently touching her face, but Mama suddenly lurched towards her, so that her head almost struck Anna’s chin, and she drew back, alarmed. She glanced at Konrad for comfort, but he was just staring down at the bed with no expression at all.
“It’s the drugs,” said the nurse. “The stimulants acting on the barbiturates she’s taken. It causes violent irritation.”
Mama flung herself over to the other side, dislodging most of the bedclothes and exposing a stretch of pink nightdress. Anna covered her up again.
“Is there nothing you can give her?” she asked the nurse. “She looks so – she must be feeling terrible.”
“A sedative, you mean,” said the nurse. “But she’s had too many of those already. That’s why she’s here.”