by Jem Lester
I was shaken awake by the guard. ‘Boy, you can’t live on this train. Get up now and get off – and be careful – there are still Germans near the oilfields to the north.’
I rubbed my eyes and felt for the gun and money in the lining of my jacket – both safe. ‘Is this Balaton?’
‘You are by the lake. Balatonfured. Where are you heading by yourself?’
‘Tihany, I’m going to meet my brother.’
‘Come, climb down.’
It seemed by luck that I was on the right side of the lake. Balaton is huge and it could easily have been an eight-hour trek around the shore, but the guard said if I walked quickly and took care I should reach Aszotto in an hour – where I could eat – and Tihany another two hours later.
‘Why Tihany, boy? There’s nothing there but some old lake houses and the sanatorium where they keep the lunatics.’
‘He’s in our lake house waiting for me.’ I could tell he didn’t believe me, but he told me to go carefully and remounted the train. I watched it build steam and disappear and began walking in the direction of Aszotto. I was starving, having not eaten for several hours, and the early autumn chill cooled me as I began at a trot.
But Aszotto was a ghost town, smouldering in places, windows were smashed and cartridge cases littered the floor. I searched three abandoned houses for food and found little but the remains of a hastily abandoned meal of pork and potatoes – too mouldy to eat. I drew some water from a well and drank and left as quickly as I could. Bad things had happened there, I knew, so I took the Luger out of my pocket and held it by my side as I left Aszotto behind and continued down the road to Tihany, talking in my head to Jonatan, planning adventures and games and trips to faraway places.
It was so silent that I heard the car approaching a full five minutes before it arrived and was safely behind a pine tree as it drew level and passed me. It was not a car, but a German truck, green and canvas-covered with Swastikas on the doors and the shadows of soldiers visible from its open back. It was heading where I was heading and where I was heading was to rescue Jonatan. Once it was out of sight I ran and ran until I thought my heart would burst.
It took me another thirty minutes before the roofs came into view, the roofs of Tihany, and ten minutes later I was crouching behind a tool shed, outside the walls of the Tihany Jewelly Sanatorium, Luger in hand, watching as about a dozen black-clad SS laughed and chatted in the fading light, passed cigarettes among themselves and urinated against the wheels of the truck.
There were five bursts – not the bang of my father’s handgun I now clutched in my hand, but something far bigger, something that sounded of death. I felt my heart split in two.
A few minutes later, two SS came out of the sanatorium and climbed into the driver and passenger seat. The others threw their cigarettes to the gravel and stubbed them out with fury before jumping into the back of the truck. It then swung round and sped off back toward Aszotto.
By now only the faintest glow outlined the horizon and the silence had returned – all but the pumping of my heart. I left my hiding place and ran, crouching, into the darkness of the sanatorium. My footsteps echoed off the marble floor. I could just make out a wide central staircase with a corridor either side – I went left, holding the gun in front of me.
There were five rooms off to the left of the corridor, offices, and as my eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, I saw that they were like my father’s with medical cabinets and charts and strange instruments. The first four rooms were vacant, but from the fifth came a light – dim and orange – and a whiff of tobacco smoke. I crept in slowly. It was the dying ember of a cigarette hanging limply from the lips of a man, his white doctor’s coat polka-dotted with red. Next to him, lined up like a little girl’s collection of dolls, lay four women in nurse’s uniforms – similarly polka-dotted – and to my young mind, playing dead.
‘Jonatan!’ I sprinted from the room, frantically calculating the burst of gunfire I had heard less than ten minutes before. Five bursts, five dead.
‘Jonatan!’ I searched the offices off the right corridor – all empty – then I took the stairs two at a time, all caution gone.
‘Jonatan!’ At the top, a large double door with the lock shot through stood open. Inside, beds sat either side like a hospital ward and on each lay a person, perfectly still, on their backs with their hands by their sides.
‘Jonatan!’ I found him in the last bed on the right-hand side of the row, tucked beneath a crisp white sheet, his eyes closed, his guileless smile fixed on me. ‘Oh Jonatan, Jonatan. It’s all right now, they’ve gone. I’ve come to rescue you, to take you home.’
I touched his cheek, but its chill stung my finger, I kissed him and shook him and cried on him but my tears froze to crystals. I climbed on to the bed with him and held him and spoke of our future into his deafened ear and then I slept.
I was young, but I had seen enough to know that he had been rescued by those with the polka-dots before I arrived and that they had died for their kindness. He was whole and he was smiling and whatever they gave him sent him off to be with Mamma and Papa in peace and with happy thoughts. They had saved him from a Nazi bullet.
He was bigger than me, of course, he was three years older, but the next morning, using the mattress as a sled, I dragged him from the ward, down the stairs and to the shade of a pine tree outside the walls of the sanatorium and – with a spade from the tool shed I had hidden behind the previous day – I dug a grave and buried my brother and marked it with a brick and earth headstone, bashed from the wall with a sledgehammer.
But there was one thing I couldn’t bury with him, couldn’t bear to part with – Father’s paperweight. His crystal paperweight that split the light and shone a rainbow over Jonatan’s innocent face – for that was all I had left of my family. ‘Jonatan’s Jewel’, my father called it. It had made its way there with Jonatan, a gift of parting. And I was now parted from everything I had known and loved. I was somebody else, so I should change my name and what else could it be? From the hospital in whose grounds I buried him, to the paperweight I now clutched in my hand: both told me this was now my beginning and from then my name was Jewell.
I stayed one more night, collected up as much food as I could carry and set off back toward Balatonfured and the train – making sure to stick to the trees.
The platform was deserted. Scraps of newspapers blew in the breeze. I stood scanning the horizon and it occurred to me that the only people I had encountered since arriving the day before were either dead or Nazi soldiers. I walked over to the station master’s office. The door hung off its hinges, the desk inside covered with coffee-stained papers and the telegraph box torn from the wall. The railway map remained, however, so I carefully unpinned it from its cork board and folded it so that it would fit in my jacket pocket.
It felt as if everyone was dead. Not just my parents – as I discovered later – and Jonatan, but the whole world. Maybe I was the last alive. At first, the thought exhilarated me. So childish, I know, but all I could think of were the empty stores, full of goods and food and all for free, all for me. I would live in the biggest house in Budapest and crown myself king, drive a different motor car every day and never, ever go to school again. But there is only so much silence one small boy can take, only so many solo games he can play before boredom sets in and then loneliness and finally fear. If I became ill, who would treat me? And if I became so ill that I lay dying, who would comfort me the way the nurse who sent Jonatan to sleep no doubt comforted him?
So what should I do? Return to Budapest, follow the track I had rolled down the day before, or walk the other way – west, I guessed, although I was not sure. I had to make a decision. I could have waited for ever for a train and one may never have arrived, but I knew that the tracks led to stations and stations belonged to towns and in towns there may be people. So I jumped down on to the dusty tracks, my shoulders a
lready aching with the weight of the provisions I had removed from the sanatorium, and turned away from Budapest, my home and, as it turned out, a home I would never return to.
People always imagine that railway lines are straight, but they are not, they follow contours, they swish through valleys, burrow through hills and bridge rivers and they go on and on. I passed three deserted towns before the sun beat down on my uncovered head and there, about an hour outside the last, stood an unmanned junction box and the track split in two like an undone zip. I sat in the box to find some shade, drank some water and carefully unfolded the map.
North-west, or south-west? Either way meant Austria. I flipped a pengo coin – on such simple acts lives are won or lost – and headed north-west where I knew that I would eventually reach the Danube again and where the map showed more lines through more towns, although how long it would take me on foot, I did not know.
I walked those tracks for three days taking shelter where I could find it, but even in my sleep I was riding those rails. I began to talk to myself, just to check that I still had the power to talk. Solitude does that to a person. I also had conversations with Mamma and Papa and Jonatan, with the family whose carriage I had shared on the way from Budapest to Balaton, with Comrade Stalin – pleading with him to hurry – and even with Adolf Hitler, in language I had heard used in some of the seamier neighbourhoods of Budapest but had never had the courage to use, even among my closest friends – or even with Jonatan, who could not have repeated it anyway.
And then, on the fourth day, as I sat on the rails nursing my aching feet, I felt the slightest vibration creep from my backside and up my spine. The sensation grew stronger until I was almost bouncing like on a fairground ride.
It was a train. A train! But I was nowhere near a station, in truth I had no idea how far I was from the nearest town. For two days I had counted my steps, trying to measure the distance I had travelled. Should I run back? Should I run forward? Would it stop for me anyway? Trains move faster than nine-year-old boys, this I knew as a fact, so I jumped from the line and ran to the highest ground I could see – a small hillock, overgrown and verdant – and stared into the distance, squinting against the sun, trying to separate steam from wispy cloud until I gained a sharpened view of the locomotive’s face. It grew larger and larger, so quickly that I thought it must have been travelling at a hundred miles an hour. I began to wave, first with one arm, then with both, my rucksack flung to the floor, and, yes! It was a Hungarian train, the insignia was clear to me and my waving was joined by jumping. I grabbed my bag and sprinted back toward the track, praying it had slowed enough for me to jump on and see a face, hear a voice, grab a hand.
I was right, it had slowed, but only to negotiate the growing incline, and the locomotive, so smiling and familiar as it approached through the sun-soaked rays, turned demon as it reached me, each open door of the steam-breathing monster a cobra’s eye, with lids of black iron and gunmetal eyelashes spitting bullets at me as it passed.
I hit the floor, instinctively, flattening myself against the grit and weeds beside the rails until the firing stopped and the cattle wagons whumped and whumped and whumped past me; wooden and numbered and Swastikaed. The train did not slow; the only ride available it appeared would have been to Hell and I didn’t want to go, not then, at least.
I lay on my stomach looking up as the last wagon drew up to me and – as it did – one plank lifted at its rear, and as the train hit the brow of the hill, this final carriage gave birth, from a gap no larger than a school exercise book. A bundle squeezed out, fell to the track and rolled like a balloon – so light it was – until it settled at my feet.
The bundle had a face, not much of a face, so prominent were its bones – but a face nevertheless. A boy’s face with relief shining like torch beams from his sunken eyes.
I pointed to my chest. ‘Georg,’ I said, while he took his hand and mimed the action of a drink.
An age later, after I had fed him water drip by drip and he had slept and then revived a little, I tried again. ‘Georg,’ and held up nine fingers. ‘Nine years, Magyar.’
With effort he held his skeletal child’s hand out to me and I took it. So thin it was, I swear I could feel my own thumb through its width.
‘Mauritz. Nederland.’ Two fives and a two. He was twelve, but reached just to my shoulder. His forearm bore the Jewish tattoo, so there was no need to ask.
‘Maurice, I want to take the bricks with me, before the writing weathers away. They’re tactile, Jonah can read them. I’ll put another stone in their place.’
I have thought about this moment constantly since Maurice’s revelation, written and rubbed out, rehearsed and re-rehearsed. Maurice promises to fill me in about their time together before arriving in England, but it is enough – for now – and I plan to type it up as soon as I get back, before the pages become unreadable.
This forced solitude, as unwanted and painful as it is, will stretch as far into the future as I allow it. So, I must try to acknowledge the situation as an opportunity to accept optimism without guilt – my life is valuable enough for me to care about it and, dare I think it, maybe Emma won’t be the last woman in my life.
I have so much time now. I don’t want to waste it on drunken days and daytime TV – years can pass that way. No. I will return to England and begin my journey and listen to my voice, trust what it has to say.
But for now, as I stand here, beneath a sun-dappled pine, beside my family’s lake, thinking of my father and finishing a postcard to my son, I am suddenly voiceless. Suddenly, perfectly shtum.
Why I Wrote Shtum
The day after I took my own autistic son to begin a new life at a wonderful residential school in the country, I began the MA in Novel Writing at City University. Having just emerged from a year-long battle with the powers that be to get him there, it seemed serendipitous. After all, it had been more than a decade since I’d truly had the time to concentrate on writing – such was the level of dedication he required.
To be frank, I was exhausted and emotionally raw and the last subject I wanted to write about was autism. However, after frustrating my tutor, Jonathan Myerson, with adamant refusals to do so, I went home for the weekend and pondered long and hard, and came up with a list of pros and cons.
When I returned to City the following week, my conclusions were the following:
1.It would have to be funny – because autistic children can be joyously hilarious. As an example, when my son was six or seven, he developed an aversion to my mum. If she entered a room he was in, he’d physically push her out and close the door after her!
2.Honest – I was truly fed up with being asked what my son’s ‘special talent’ was.
3.How would I feel if someone else wrote this story?
And then there was the ironic realisation – long held – that my son, with no language, was far better at communicating his wants and needs than I was.
After all the soul searching and prevaricating, it was number two that kept hammering at me. I wanted to be honest, even if revealing the brutality of the reality was counter-intuitive.
Before my son was born, I read The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and loved it. Over the years since his birth, I have witnessed the elevation of autism – especially Asperger’s – to something almost fashionable. I’d heard autism used as excuses for shoddy behaviour, as an insult, and seen it adopted as a badge of honour.
This was galling to me and, no doubt, to the countless other families dealing with the day-to-day misunderstandings and devastation it could bring. So I found myself in a challenging and (again counter-intuitively) responsible position – how could I write a novel that had a mute central character? How could I write a novel that was about autism yet, at the same time, dealt with so much more?
Shtum is the result.
I hope you enjoy it.
; Jem
Acknowledgements
My partner, Catherine Ercilla, who fell for me because of my writing, and – despite my uselessness in most other areas – is still here and is my best friend and reader.
Noah Lester, who will never read this book, but who may – if the mood takes him – throw it out of the window.
Eloise Lester, whose psychology degree will, I hope, save me a fortune in therapy in the coming years.
Karen Ferberman, to whom I owe thirty-four birthday presents, innumerable cigarette lighters, a hundred explanations and, crucially, a bearable youth.
Mitchell Ross, for forty-six years of laughter, ludicrous antics and many shared sorrows.
My amazing agent, Laura Williams, and all at PFD who backed Shtum after hearing a badly read 1,500 words above a pub in March 2013.
My brilliant Orion editor, Jemima Forrester, and publicist/force of nature, Sam Eades.
Jonathan Myerson, Lucy Caldwell and Clare Allan of City University.
My anti-insanity squad: Dr Claudia Bernat, Dorit Dror, Mel Davis and Wendy Davis.
Dame Stephanie Shirley, the founder of Priors Court School, Berkshire, and all the dedicated staff therein.
The bionic Tracey Fenton and all at TBC for their enthusiasm and support.
The late JC deputy editor and theatre critic, David Nathan, for accepting my post-lunch filing cabinet violence as completely appropriate behaviour.
AN ORION EBOOK
First published in Great Britain in 2016 by Orion Books.
This ebook first published in 2016 by Orion Books.
Copyright © Jem Lester 2016
The right of Jem Lester to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.