Bombs on Aunt Dainty

by Judith Kerr

  “You hardly knew your great-uncle,” said Papa. “I’m sure Aunt Dainty would understand.”

  “No, I’ll go,” said Anna.

  It was not just that she felt sorry for Aunt Dainty, it was also the hope that – what? Something might happen to make her understand, she thought, to fight down the terrible vision of emptiness whenever she thought of the world without Papa.

  “I’ll come straight back,” she promised, and saw him installed by his gas fire before she left.

  She had put on her warmest clothes but even so, as she came out of the tube at Golders Green, the wind blew right through them. It was as though the weather, knowing that the war was coming to an end, was determined to do its worst while it could.

  She had miscalculated the time it would take her to get there, and when she reached the cemetery the service had already begun. She could see it from the gate – a few shabby people standing forlornly in the cold. Aunt Dainty was wearing a large knitted black shawl and looked pale but composed. She saw Anna and nodded, and then Anna stood next to a woman with a feathery hat, wondering what to do.

  Uncle Victor’s coffin was already in the open grave – was he really in there? she wondered with a kind of horror – and a man with a book in his hand was making a speech over him, but the wind carried the words away and she could not understand them. She watched the mourners’ frozen faces and tried not to stamp her frozen feet and thought of nothing. There was a buzzing sound in her ears, her hands were cold and she wondered whether it was disrespectful to keep them in her pockets, and then she realised that the buzzing sound had increased and that it was not only in her ears. The woman in the hat had heard it too, and her eyes met Anna’s in embarrassment and alarm.

  As the sound grew louder it became impossible not to look up and even the man making the speech glanced away from his book, to see the buzz-bomb puttering across the sky. It seemed to be coming directly towards them and Anna, calculating that there was no shelter she could possibly reach in time, decided to stay where she was. The other mourners must have come to the same conclusion, for nobody moved. Only the inaudible stream of words from the preacher gathered momentum. His mouth movements became faster, his arms gestured above the grave, there seemed to be some kind of quick blessing and at last he stopped.

  As he did so, the puttering sound stopped also and the bomb tore down from the sky. For a split second Anna considered sheltering in the grave with the coffin but decided against it, everybody ducked or flung themselves on the ground, and then the bomb exploded – after all, some distance away.

  There was a silence as the mourners picked themselves up and stared at each other, and then Aunt Dainty shook her fist at the sky.

  “Even at his funeral!” she shouted. “Even at his funeral they couldn’t leave him in peace!”

  The reception afterwards in Aunt Dainty’s basement almost had an air of celebration. It was warm by the paraffin stoves, and Aunt Dainty served hot chocolate sweetened with real sugar which Otto had sent from America.

  “He’s in the States now,” she said proudly. “His work is so important that even President Roosevelt knows about it.”

  There were several handmade rugs on the floor – rugmaking was Aunt Dainty’s latest enthusiasm – and two women who turned out to be fellow evening-class students were inspecting them with interest. The rest of the mourners seemed to be either lodgers or neighbours and they sat on Aunt Dainty’s homemade cushions, sipping chocolate and admiring the furnishings. Aunt Dainty bustled about with cups and seemed quite excited to have so many people to talk to at once. She introduced Anna to one of her lodgers, a little old man with bright eyes who threw up his hands when he heard who she was.

  “But I know your father!” he cried. “I knew him in Berlin! Once we spent the most wonderful evening together.”

  “Really?” said Anna.

  Next to her Aunt Dainty was telling someone about Otto.

  “Even Einstein,” she was saying. “Otto discusses things with him all the time.”

  “An unforgettable evening,” said the old man. “I met him at a friend’s – the poet Meyer in the Trompetenstrasse – do you remember?”

  Anna shook her head. “I was quite small,” she said.

  The old man nodded regretfully.

  “Your father had read a book I had written – he was quite complimentary about it. I remember it was a beautiful summer evening, and your father – he was supposed to go to a performance at the theatre and then to a party, something quite important, but suddenly, do you know what he said?”

  “What?” said Anna.

  “He said, ‘Let’s take the steamer to the Pfaueninsel.’ You must know the Pfaueninsel,” said the old man anxiously. “An island in a lake near Berlin, with peacocks?”

  Anna dimly remembered a school outing. Had that been the Pfaueninsel?

  Aunt Dainty was saying, “And they’ve given him a house, and a car …”

  The old man was waiting for her answer, so she nodded. He seemed relieved.

  “Also a very good restaurant,” he said with satisfaction. “So we went there, just your father and I and two others, and we ate, and we drank a very good wine, and we talked, and your father, he was so very amusing and witty. And when we came out we saw the peacocks asleep all together in the branches of a tall tree – your father had not known that they did this, he was very surprised. And then we took the steamer back to Berlin in the moonlight. Wonderful,” said the old man. “Wonderful!”

  Anna smiled. All she remembered of Berlin was the house and the garden and her school.

  “It must have been lovely,” she said.

  The rug enthusiasts had seen their fill and prepared, reluctantly, to leave.

  “Such a lovely party,” said one, momentarily forgetting the occasion, and the other corrected her, “In the circumstances.”

  One of the neighbours said she must get back to her little boy and Anna, too, excused herself. As she put on her coat she thought that there had been, after all, no point in coming. She had felt nothing, learned nothing, received neither comfort nor enlightenment. Aunt Dainty saw her to the door.

  “Give my love to your parents,” she said.

  It was the first time Anna had been alone with her and she suddenly realised that she had not offered her any condolences.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said awkwardly, “about Uncle Victor.”

  Aunt Dainty took her hand.

  “Not to be sorry,” she said in her warm, thick voice. “For me you can be sorry, because I loved him. But for him—” She shook her head above the large shoulders as though to ward something off. “For him, better it should have happened years ago.”

  Then she kissed her and Anna went out into the icy street.

  Aunt Dainty was right, she thought as she hunched her shoulders against the wind. It would have been better for Uncle Victor if he had died before. There had been no point in those last years in England. She trudged along the frozen pavement and it struck her that this thought was even more depressing than the fact of his death. To have to go on living when you no longer wanted to, when it no longer made sense …

  Like me, she thought, momentarily overwhelmed by self-pity, and was shocked by her own lack of courage. Rubbish, she thought, not like me at all. But like Papa? In her mind she saw him in his poky room with his typewriter that kept going wrong and his writings that no one wanted to publish, in a country whose language he did not speak. How did it feel to be Papa?

  A few specks of snow were beginning to fall, dotting the walls, the bushes and the pavement with white.

  Did Papa’s life still make sense to him? When he remembered Berlin, did this shabby, frustrated existence among strangers still have any point? Or would he have preferred it if it had never happened? Would death, perhaps, come as a relief? She tried to find some comfort in the thought, but only felt worse. There’s nothing, she thought, as the snow blew and whirled about her. Nothing …

  She had t
o wait a long time for a train and by the time she got home she felt chilled to the bone. She went straight up to see Papa, but there was no reply to her knock and she found that he had nodded off in his chair. The gas fire was sputtering – it needed another shilling in the meter – and some of Papa’s papers had fallen off the table. The room was cold and gloomy.

  She stared at it dispassionately in the fading light. Why should anyone want to live here? Especially someone like Papa who had travelled and been acclaimed and whose life, until Hitler disrupted it, had been a series of choices between different kinds of fulfilment?

  She must have moved inadvertently, for Papa woke up.

  “Anna!” he said, and then, “How was it?”

  “Awful,” said Anna. “A buzz-bomb nearly fell on us and Aunt Dainty shouted at it.”

  “You look frozen,” said Papa. He took a shilling from a tin box marked “shillings” and after a moment the gas flared yellow and the part of the room closest to it became a little warmer. “Would you like something to eat?”

  She shook her head.

  “Then come and get thawed.”

  He gave her a folded rug to sit on – there was only one chair – and she crouched at his feet by the fire. In spite of the shilling, it did not seem to give out much heat.

  “I had a letter from Mama,” said Papa. “She’s quite recovered from her ‘flu and she says she’ll be home by the weekend.” He looked at her anxiously. “I hope you’re not catching it now.”

  “No,” said Anna, though it was strange how the cold in her bones persisted.

  She stared up at his face. What was he thinking? How could one ever tell how people really felt?

  “Papa,” she said, “do you ever regret—?”

  “What?” he asked.

  She gestured vaguely at the room. “These last years. Here and at the Hotel Continental. I mean – after the way you used to live in Berlin?”

  He looked at her attentively. “If you mean, would I rather have gone on living as before, well of course I would. There were so many more opportunities – so much to choose from. Also,” he added simply, “I would have preferred to be more help to Mama, and to you and Max.”

  But that was not what she wanted to know.

  “What I meant,” she said, “is—did you ever feel…I mean, you must sometimes have wondered—if there was really any point …?”

  “In these last years?”

  She nodded. Her head was throbbing and she had the strangest conviction that if Papa could reassure her she would get warm.

  “Well, of course there was.” Papa had got up from his chair and was looking at her in surprise.

  “But it must have been so awful!” said Anna. “With losing your language, and never having any money, and Mama always so wretched, and all your work…all your work …!” She found to her horror that she was crying. A fat lot of good I am to him, she thought, and Papa bent down and touched her face.

  “Your head is very hot,” he said. “I’m sure you’re not well.”

  “But I want to know!” she cried.

  He searched among his things and produced the thermometer from a box marked “thermometer”.

  “In a moment,” he said.

  When she had tucked it under her arm he sat down again in the chair.

  “The chief point about these last, admittedly wretched years,” he said, “is that it is infinitely better to be alive than dead. Another is that if I had not lived through them I would never have known what it felt like.”

  “What it felt like?”

  He nodded. “To be poor, even desperate, in a cold, foggy country where the natives, though friendly, gargle some kind of Anglo-Saxon dialect …”

  She laughed uncertainly.

  “I’m a writer,” he said. “A writer has to know. Haven’t you found that?”

  “I’m not a writer,” said Anna.

  “You may be one day. But even an aspiring painter—” He hesitated, only for a moment. “There is a piece of me,” he said carefully, “quite separate from the rest, like a little man sitting in my forehead. And whatever happens, he just watches. Even if it’s something terrible. He notices how I feel, what I say, whether I want to shout, whether my hands are trembling – and he says, how interesting! How interesting to know that this is what it feels like.”

  “Yes,” said Anna. She knew that she, too, had a little man like Papa’s, but her head was spinning and she imagined him, confusedly, turning round and round.

  “It’s a great safeguard against despair,” said Papa. He plucked the thermometer from under her arm and looked at it. “You’ve got ‘flu,” he said. “Go to bed.”

  She went along the freezing passage to her room and got between the cold sheets, but after a moment Papa appeared, awkwardly carrying a stone hot-water bottle.

  “Is this all right?” he said, and she hugged it gratefully.

  He lit the gas and drew the blackout curtains, and then he stood uncertainly at the foot of her bed.

  “Are you sure you wouldn’t like something to eat?” he said. “I’ve got some bread and fish paste.”

  “No!” she said.

  He insisted, slightly hurt, “You’ve got to keep your strength up,” and the thought of keeping her strength up with fish paste when the room was whirling round and her head was splitting seemed so funny that she laughed.

  “Oh, Papa!” she cried.

  “What?” he said, sitting on the edge of the bed.

  “I love you very much.”

  “And I you.” He took her hand and said, “The last years haven’t been all unhappy, you know. You and Max have given us great joy. And I’ve always had Mama.” There was a pause and then he said, “I have written about these years. A sort of diary. When you read it I hope you’ll think, as I do, that it’s the best thing I’ve done. And one day, perhaps, my works will be reprinted and this will be among them.”

  “In Germany?”

  He nodded. “Mama will see to it.”

  He stroked her hot face.

  “So you see, as long as I can think and write I am grateful to the old rabbi up there for every day that he keeps me on this extraordinary planet.”

  She felt better, but there was still something wrong. It was hiding from her, but it was there – a kind of horror, she imagined it crouching at the foot of the bed. It was to do with Uncle Victor and it was terribly important.

  “Papa?” she said.

  “What?”

  She couldn’t think. Think and write – he had said think and write. But Uncle Victor hadn’t been able to think and write. He had just lain there – brain damage, Aunt Dainty had said, doesn’t remember, better he should have died years ago. But didn’t a stroke have the same effect – wouldn’t Papa …?

  “Papa!” cried Anna, clutching his hand, “but if you couldn’t think …?”

  His face was blurred as she tried to focus on it, but his voice was clear and calm.

  “Then of course I should not want to go on living. Mama and I have talked about it.”

  “But how?” she cried. “How—how could you …?”

  She made a great effort and his face suddenly reassembled, so that she could see his eyes and the extraordinary, confident smile with which he spoke.

  “Mama,” he said, “will think of something.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  The cold spell had ended by the time Mama came back from the country. Anna recovered from her ‘flu in thin sunshine and the world suddenly looked more hopeful. The Professor announced that Papa’s health had improved. His blood pressure was lower, and the effects of the stroke had almost disappeared.

  “I told you,” said Papa. “The old rabbi up there is on my side.”

  Gradually the war began to run down.

  There were still buzz-bombs, so you could still get killed, but they were fewer. The news on the radio was always good, and for the first time since 1939 small glimmers of light were allowed in the streets at night. One d
ay Max appeared to announce that his squadron was being disbanded.

  “No more flying,” he said quite regretfully, to Mama’s rage. “I suppose it really will all be over quite soon.”

  As the armies advanced, pictures appeared in the papers and on newsreels of devastated German cities. Hamburg, Essen, Cologne – they were not places Anna had ever seen, and they meant nothing to her. Only once, when she heard on the news that the Grunewald had been set on fire, something stirred inside her.

  The Grunewald was a wood near their old home. Long ago, when she and Max were small in the past which she never thought about, they had tobogganed there in the winter. Their sledges had made tracks in the snow and it had smelled of cold air and pine needles. In the summer they had played in the patchy light under the trees, their feet had sunk deep into the sand at the edge of the lake – and hadn’t there once been a picnic …? She couldn’t remember.

  But that was all before.

  The Grunewald that was burned was not the one she had played in. It was a place where Jewish children were not allowed, where Nazis clicked heels and saluted and probably hid behind trees, ready to club people down. They had guns and fierce dogs and swastikas and if anyone got in their way, they beat them up and set the dogs on them and sent them to concentration camps where they’d be starved and tortured and killed …

  But that’s nothing to do with me now, thought Anna. I belong here, in England.

  When Max said to her, later, “Did you hear about the fire in the Grunewald?” she nodded and said, deadpan, “It’s just as well we left.”

  As the spring grew warmer, she started to draw again. It began one day in her lunch hour. She was walking aimlessly through some little streets at the back of Vauxhall Bridge Road when she saw a child. He was the fourth she had seen since she had come out and she thought, the war really must be ending if the children are coming back! This one was about ten and was sitting on a heap of rubble, staring up at the sky with a pleased expression. I suppose he’s glad to be home, thought Anna.

  There was something about him – the way he was clasping his skinny knees, the way his over-large sweater hung loosely on his shoulders, the way he squinnied up at the light – that was very expressive. Suddenly she had a great desire to draw him. She did not have a sketchbook with her, but found an old letter in her handbag. Feverishly, she started to draw on the back. She was so anxious to get the boy down on paper before he moved or stood up and walked away that she didn’t have time to worry about how best to do it. She just thought, that goes like that and that goes like that, and there’s light on his face and on his knees and a dark patch of shade under his chin…and suddenly there was the drawing, she’d done it and it looked just right!