Visibility

by Boris Starling

  “Is not my birth name. I was born Hannah Moses.”

  “Why did you change?”

  “Why does anyone change their name? To seem less foreign.” She rolled the r slightly at the back of her tongue. “To change their luck, if the old name brings bad chance. Jews always change their names.”

  “They do?”

  “Always. Asher becomes Archer; David Davies; Jacob Jackson; Levi Lewis…”

  Herbert had stopped listening, because he was still thinking of what she had said a couple of sentences before, about the destiny of misfortune.

  With a leap of muscular induction, he knew—at least, he could make a good guess—when she had come to Britain, and why. If he was right, he knew what she must have been through in her life.

  “I was at Belsen,” he said.

  The British soldiers arrived in Belsen on 15th April 1945, a date Herbert could no more forget than his own birthday. If they had ever doubted the justness of the cause against Nazism, then with one look at Belsen, they doubted no more.

  They had expected to hear shouting from a mile off: “The Allies are coming! The Allies are coming!”—but when they drove through the gates, it was in complete silence. And at funeral pace, too. They had to keep stopping, because the inmates were too weak to get out of the way of their tanks.

  There had been no food or water for the five days before their entry. Outside the huts was an almost unbroken carpet of shit, filth, and corpses. Some of the bodies had been dismembered and the flesh ripped from their bones; yet there were no animals which could have done this.

  Everywhere was typhus and starvation, the dead and the dying indistinguishable. People collapsed as they walked; upright one moment, then dead before they hit the ground. Or they crawled to the sunshine to die there.

  The British doctors marked red crosses on the foreheads of those they thought had a chance of making it. They were never in danger of running out of ink.

  Everything Herbert had known about suffering was turned on its head. He and his fellow soldiers had spent months existing on army rations and whatever food they had found during the German retreat. They were filthy with sweat and diarrhea and the general stink of war. But compared to the inmates of Belsen, they looked as though they had been holed up at the Ritz.

  Their khaki uniforms, mixed and matched from inadequate equipment stores, could have been regal robes when set next to the rags of the deportees. Even with their various ailments, the British soldiers were the picture of ruddy-cheeked, well-fed health among the tenuous, skeletal silhouettes who tried to touch and finger them, as if the eddies of their passing were the waters of life itself.

  When the soldiers ran to answer a command, or climbed a ladder, they would sometimes stop dead not knowing where to look, for in the inmates’ wide-eyed gazes they saw an unpalatable knowledge: that such movements, so natural and easy for the soldiers, would have killed the inmates as surely as a bullet in the temple.

  How did Herbert know this? Because they did kill some of them, that was how.

  The soldiers gave away their rations—dried milk powder, oatmeal, sugar, salt, and tinned meat—and within hours hundreds of those who had eaten were dead, the food too rich for systems starved partway to death.

  How in the name of God could oatmeal and tinned meat be too rich?

  The initial admission, that he had been at Belsen, had come out of Herbert’s mouth without thinking, and as he told his story, his guts lurched with the possibility that he had spoken out of turn, that at best he was wrong, or if he had been right then the reminder would be unwelcome, and she would ask him, perhaps politely, perhaps with anger ablaze, to leave, to trudge back through the fog to a flat even emptier and colder than before. For before there had been neither Hannah, nor the chatter of her friends—which was no less comforting for its incomprehensibility—nor the textures of her food.

  Reactions flitted across Hannah’s face like clouds in front of the moon. Her mouth dropped slightly; surprise more than dismay, Herbert hoped. He saw the slight quiver of her cheeks as she battled the silt of dormant memories suddenly stirred.

  Finally, as she resolved the manner in which she would handle this, she narrowed her eyes and turned to him.

  “Then you understand,” she said.

  I come from Pécs, a small town several hour from Budapest in the car. My mother was a teacher, my father worked for Ford. American cars were popular in Hungary before the war.

  In 1944, springtime, the Germans arrive, and suddenly comes order after order: wear a Star of David, yellow; obey curfew; prohibit to travel; searching the homes; people in prison; seize stores and businesses.

  And then they take us to Auschwitz.

  It is May. I remember barbed wire between pylons, green tar-paper covering the barracks. Striped clothes for prisoners. Everything before is now gone.

  When I think of Pécs, it is like life on another planet.

  Auschwitz was … No need to tell you, you can guess. I was there until beginning 1945. The Red Army is almost at the gates when the guards evacuate us. We march through the snow; frostbite and exhaustion. People lose fingers, toes, arms, legs. Dancers don’t dance anymore, pianists don’t play.

  You stop, they shoot you. We drag those who don’t walk.

  I am fifteen. I should be in school, kissing boys behind classrooms and quarreling with my mama. Instead, I march through snow without seeing. Twenty thousand of us left Auschwitz; less than ten thousand reached Wandsbeck, the labor camp in Hamburg. Only two thousand arrive in Belsen.

  Belsen was the terminal, in every way. Never before is reflected so purely man’s darkness, his sadism and brutality. I try to describe with words what I remember from it, but there is no language on earth to express such horror, even to imagine it.

  It is so horrible because no longer the Germans are in charge. The guards have nothing to do—Death does everything for them. Death keeps us so hungry and so crowded that we cannot move, not even when our lives depend on it. Death stands guard on the walls, Death keeps all the food and water for itself. Death makes sure we have no work, no order. Death leaves us on a giant heap of rubbish.

  I arrived in Belsen on 7th March, so I spend five week there. The rest of my life, whether I die tomorrow or in next century, will never be as long as those five week. Difference is this: in Auschwitz, we do things, we work, we have reasons. In Belsen, we exist. No more.

  One day, I ask a guard: “Warum?” “Why?”

  And he reply: “Hier ist kein warum.” “Here, there is no why.”

  After first few days, I never think of death. Death all around, so why think of it? Like to thinking why grass is green or sky blue. Neither I think of the Germans very much. Yes, I like to defy. Just to be alive is enough. My hatred against them increases my desire to live; it keeps me alive in actuality, perhaps.

  Truth is this: you think too much of what happens, you go crazy. After few day, I decide to think of my hair only. I think of when I can wash it, or way to comb it with my finger, or way to tie it on my head, off my face. I think of how to stop guards cutting all my hair, and how to stay away from lice. Lice everywhere in camp.

  I think of my hair, nothing else. It fills my mind and closes me from actuality. I have a focus, something for me to control.

  And that is how I survive Belsen. In that way, and also because I cannot see anymore. For first time—for the only time—I give thanks to be blind.

  And then we are free. Allied soldiers give us uniforms to wear and food from their kitchen, putting us at the head of the queue. On the trains, we ride without paying if we show the conductor our camp tattoo. We stay in monasteries, where my friends say the sheets are the most white in their lives. I cross Europe, and eventually, at the end of summer, I take a boat and come to England.

  * * *

  The others were still there, of course, hived off into small groups—Herbert supposed that was typical of dinner parties, that the conversations would splinter once the food wa
s eaten and therefore no longer the communal focus; he had been to so few dinner parties in recent years, it was hard for him to claim much authority on the matter—but every fiber of his attention was on Hannah.

  He wondered how many other people Hannah had talked to about this. Not that many, he supposed. The luminosity in her expression suggested that this had been some form of catharsis, no matter how small and temporary.

  “Now you know,” she said.

  Actually, he thought, he knew very little. “No more than you know about me.”

  “I know you are lonely.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. Very, very lonely.”

  It was a statement, not a question; stark in its bluntness, yet delivered with neither judgment nor care that it would cause offense. Above all, it was true. Why else would he have gone, on his birthday, to dinner with someone he had barely met, knowing even at the start of the day that he would have no better offers by nightfall?

  Herbert supposed that he should have been cautious, as they were moving into areas he had barely explored himself, let alone shared with anybody else; but Hannah’s unerring accuracy reassured rather than concerned him, and if they had only known each other a few hours, then so what?

  He had known his own mother all his life, and yet still he felt a sense of estrangement from her.

  So Herbert told Hannah, and told her everything.

  Yes, he was lonely; an intense isolation which nothing seemed to quench. Every day, he looked around and saw the ways in which others seemed to be happy with the most superficial relationships.

  They passed the time of day, but never talked about what really mattered. They made noises and thought they were communicating; pulled faces and thought they understood.

  He was looking for something more, something which was at the very least empathetic, perhaps veering toward telepathic, to the point where his emotions began to merge with another person’s.

  He found it very difficult when someone did not instinctively know what he was feeling, because then he had to explain himself to them, which he hated doing.

  Conversely, of course, finding someone like Hannah who did seem to read his mind, was in itself unnerving.

  At times when Herbert was speaking, some of the Hungarians would approach them, check that they had all the food and drink they needed, and then drift away again.

  Herbert saw one man squeeze Hannah’s shoulder as he walked past the back of her chair; another bent to whisper something which made her smile.

  Herbert wondered whether these men were, or had ever been, Hannah’s lovers, and had to bite back a swift swell of jealousy.

  If they were, then it was nothing to do with him; though equally Hannah seemed too untrammeled to be any one person’s sole property.

  So he kept talking, ushered forward by the ease of her manner, by the lack of eye contact, and perhaps by his assumption that, as a foreigner and a Jew, her cultural norms were slightly different from his.

  He was an only child, with all that the unwanted status involved; a certain melancholy, tendencies toward introversion. When, as a child, he stayed apart from his schoolmates, they accused him of being aloof; but when he tried to make friends, he tried too hard, came on too strong, and they turned against him just the same.

  Most people seemed to understand instinctively the balance between communality and self-sufficiency. Not Herbert. He felt like a novice pilot, constantly overcorrecting as he tried to steer a steady course.

  He had a teddy bear with one eye, to whom he would talk for hours. In place of real friends, he had imaginary ones, loyal and inspiring.

  He even had an invented him, one who was braver, cleverer, more lovable, more daring—more of all the things in which he was less. Herbert wanted to follow and imitate this hero, who took the paths he had eschewed and told him about them, just as Herbert told him what he had done, sharing the good and the bad as equally as the thrilling and the banal.

  The invented him lived Herbert’s life the way he would have chosen, if only Herbert had possessed the gumption; for one became the person one chose to be, didn’t one? He was a second chance, a confidant, a mirror image, a mentor, a guardian angel, a counselor, a guide.

  He was everything. And of course he never existed.

  Then Herbert had won a scholarship to Cambridge, where he felt like a fraud from start to finish, neither one thing nor the other; too posh for the children at home, too common for the Etonians and Harrovians.

  There was a coal miner there, Jimmy Lees. He told Burgess, “You’ll get a First, because your energies aren’t exhausted by life, because of the class prejudice of the examiners, and because you got here easily and aren’t frightened by it all. I don’t have the brilliance of ignorance. I’ll do ten times as much work as you, and get a good Second.”

  And that’s exactly how it happened, for Herbert as much as for Jimmy.

  One could interest oneself in truth or brilliance; one could write essays or epigrams. Herbert chose the former.

  No. He did the former, because he could not do the latter. He had no choice.

  Then came the war, and then came Belsen. There were plenty of soldiers there with him, the happy-go-lucky ones, who managed to put away the horror and get on with their lives. Perhaps Herbert had less far to go than they; because, for him, Belsen took a world already negative and skewed it into darkness, a murk he had to face alone.

  There was no one he could talk to. Those who hadn’t been there wouldn’t understand; those who had been there simply wanted to forget about it.

  Belsen showed him that life delivers little but bad news: disaster, disease, disorder, distress, disgrace, divorce, and of course death, inescapable and inevitable, because even if nothing else went wrong, one was still going to die.

  What Herbert already had inside him, Belsen had exacerbated, and then Maclean and de Vere Green took it still further, till he could hardly tell where cause began and effect finished, or vice versa.

  In Belsen, Hannah, you said you had existed, no more.

  That’s what Herbert feared above all: being absent from his work, from other people, even from himself. In such circumstances, nothing would matter, neither humor nor love, sadness nor anger, let alone pain. And surely there could be nothing worse than feeling so desolate that even the tears would not come.

  “Well,” Hannah said, “no one say that life is a bowl of cherries.”

  No, Herbert agreed; they did not.

  “You play piano?” she asked.

  “A little.”

  “You ever hear ‘Life’s a Bowl of Cherries’ in five-quarter time?”

  “It’s in four-quarter time, isn’t it?”

  Hannah put on a flawless Cockney accent. “Life’s/a bowl/of fuckin’/cherries,” she sang, and in spite of himself Herbert burst out laughing.

  There was an upsurge of chatter at Hannah’s singing, which he understood to be calls for her to play the piano. She demurred, at first through concern for Herbert, and then with mocking halfheartedness after he assured her he was fine, and that he had monopolized her enough for one evening.

  When she stood, everyone cheered, and cleared a path to a piano in the corner which he had not even noticed. Usually it took him a couple of seconds at most to fix the layout and furniture of a room in his head. Must be slipping, Herbert thought.

  He had never heard the tunes Hannah was playing—they must have been Hungarian folk songs, judging by the enthusiasm with which the others started singing—but it hardly mattered. Her playing was exquisite. She could have been a concert pianist, if she had put her mind to it.

  Diver, cook, musician; Herbert wondered if there was anything she could not do.

  He looked at his wristwatch for the first time since arriving in Frith Street, and was amazed to find that it had gone midnight.

  Now that the spell between Hannah and him had been broken, Herbert felt somewhat flayed. He had never exposed so much of himself.

  Once
more at the edge of a group, once more on the outside looking in, he slipped quietly through the door and out into the fog.

  The stillness was so complete as to be incredible. A disaster could have taken place, leaving Herbert the last man on earth, and he would not have known the difference.

  Every city, especially one as big as London, has its own hum, its own cadence, even in the small hours, because cities never truly sleep.

  But that night, there was absolutely nothing. No people, no traffic, no distant shouts, no industrial whirring. The fog concealed anything which Herbert would otherwise have seen, and silenced everything he would otherwise have heard.

  When he held out his hand in front of him, he lost sight of his own fingers, and wondered if his own body was disappearing. Even the streetlights had been reduced to the faintest of glows.

  One step into the hanging mist, and perhaps the fog would swallow him whole, spitting him out only in another dimension of space and time.

  It did not, of course; but it might as well have done. Seconds later, Herbert was lost. From Hannah’s flat to his was no distance—less than a mile, even going the long way via Shaftesbury Avenue and Piccadilly—but from the very first turning he took, he had absolutely no idea where he was, or even which way he was going.

  Every place looked the same, for he could see nothing: no landmarks, no street signs. When he paused at a street corner to get his bearings, he could no longer remember from which direction he had come.

  It was akin to being buried in an avalanche, when one was so disorientated that one had no idea which way was up. At least in such situations one could use gravity to find out; clear a space round one’s mouth and let saliva flow. But he had no such resources here.

  He kept walking, knowing that he was as likely to be making things worse as better, but having no idea what else to do. And he had to keep warm, too; to stop was to freeze, and to freeze was to die. He could have been right outside his front door without knowing it, or he could have been halfway to Bethnal Green. He would have stopped a passerby or flagged down a car to ask where he was, but he saw neither. At times he fancied he recognized a patch of pavement or the particular orientation of a corner, but in the very next stride everything seemed alien again.