The young man swallowed a mouthful and sagged in his chair, blowing out his cheeks. He shook his head, again and again, in denial of the pressure of her attention. —He was with me on the Island.—
He bit again into his chicken leg and chewed.
She held her cup in both hands and gulped tea.
—Oh god. Wha’d’we do. What’s his line of work, can’t we find something for him.—
—Worked in a dry cleaner’s, a box factory, I don’t know … he hasn’t got skills.—
She threw up her hands, then rattled a pen against her cup. —Why do I have to open my big mouth! Why do I have to open my big mouth!—
Chapter 4
Passing.
Passing down the street. Driven by countless times so that the destination it once meant has been obliterated, layer upon layer, by errands taking that route. At first, for months, halted at a traffic light, staring up at the closed windows of the flat as if into the eyes of someone who gives no sign. Then there was someone else’s washing on a laundry stand on the baleony. A dartboard hung on the wall below where the bathroom fanlight looked out. That was when the letters stopped; or only now did the image seem as signalling that other dispossession; the end of sueh experiences in reality comes much more slowly, the drama of parting, repeated in variation—the end of touching, the end of talking on the telephone, the lengthening gap between letters—it’s over-rehearsed and so the final performance is not recognized.
An old actress in many positively last appearances.
Here we are.
To stop outside the entrance, to hear the name spoken by a stranger to the site, is simply the quiet ripple of a smile: Delville Wood. This is it. Walking along the corridors, same concrete slippery-polished ochre red, a mixture of fascination and a sort of dread. After all, the mail-boxes in the foyer are numbered through six floors, the new kind of tenant could have been leading along another corridor to another number. Even on this floor it surely must be another number. But no, more and more impossible, a coincidence against odds of six floors of flats, One-Twenty-One. The door opening on locked feelings; the coming to life as fascination and dread is the old sexual anticipation of walking along the red-polished corridor to enter One-Twenty-One. Amazing: the sensations are pleasurable, as if the one who had been there at the desk before the window will get up to press himself against her or in the sleepy surprise of an early-morning visit lift back his bedclothes for her to slide in, shivery-naked beside him—as if he were going to be there, was there, in the return of the desire he had created in this living-room where the great eye of the television set sees nothing, in this bedroom where a new, poor young tenant makes his bed. The motherly friend is helpfully surveying the needs of the new kind of tenant. She is briskly preparing the dirty stove to warm up her provision of snacks. The evidence that she knows her way about this kitchen as if she lived there is attributed to the general familiarity of women with the domestic domain: I haven’t got the hang of the stove yet, the new kind of tenant says, apologetically male.
What you have done once you will do again. Sometimes Vera had reminded herself, sneered at herself, jeered in reproach; but this did not stop her. She felt resentment at self-confrontation with this evidence of what, when she was a child, her mother termed ‘behaviour’—which implied only transgression. Bennet was her lover, he was the one with whom she had slept while her young husband was fighting a war, expecting to come home to her. Bennet therefore would be for ever in the category of lover, the one chosen above the sexual bond and moral ties of marriage, even when he became husband. That was how it was for how long? Again, the reality comes at an unnoticed pace, in the brief human time-span of one life the equivalent of the smoothing of the thumb on a holy effigy by centuries’ homage of those who kiss the hand. Bennet became Ben. The skill of his love-making became satisfaction to be counted on. She could not believe she was being strongly attracted to another man; Ben, Bennet was the other man. Yet in a way it was he who made another man possible, wanted, because he it was who had shown her, up in the mountains with those friends of a group photograph, what love-making could be, how many revelations of excitement and wild sensation it could mean beyond what she had thought was its limit, with the husband who was out of the way at war. If Ben had taught her that the possibilities of eroticism were beyond experience with one man, then this meant that the total experience of love-making did not end with him. The understanding of this, in her body, must have been there for years—logically, ever since she first was made love to by him? But it remained unaccepted or dormant until, somewhere in her forties, oh when her hair was still abundantly glossy, not a single broken vein showing a red spiderweb on her legs, a man came to the Foundation to film an interview on its work for a documentary he was making about forms of resistance in the country. He left his card to join those of other visitors to the Foundation who imagined they might be contacted again, though what for, politeness forbade asking. Otto Abarbanel. The surname was one she had never heard of; he worked for an Austrian television network and spoke with a slight—to her—German accent. He was solemn going about his filming and formal in manner, like Germans she had met. He telephoned her several times and came back to the office, apologizing for disturbing her, wanting to verify this information or that, and when she realized these were pretexts she was at first amused to find she did not find him a nuisance. Then, that afternoon, without any transition from formality, he grasped her fist where it was resting slackly on her desk, covered it tightly in his own. She placed her other hand over this grip. And so suddenly, there was a covenant of desire.
Will you come and see me, he had said, to make it possible to seem that some professional appointment were being discussed, there in the office where anyone might come in upon the atmosphere the gesture had created. —For coffee on Saturday afternoon.—
Vera and Ben were busy people who did not need to account to one another for every movement. He had invited for lunch an old schoolmate who had become a successful painter. She was tranquil, serving at table, unbelieving of what she was going to do, and in the same state of mind went to the bathroom after lunch and fitted into her body the rubber device that had prevented her from conceiving since the birth of Annie. She left Ben and his visitor with an apology—she had to put in some duty appearance at a political gathering. She had many obligations of this nature and her husband looked up from his preoccupation, giving the goodbye-go-well salute that was their customary private signal before other people.
And when she came home later in the afternoon it was as she could never have imagined it could be, what had happened in the three hours’ interim was something that concerned her alone, her sexuality, a private constant in her being, a characteristic like the colour of eyes, the shape of a nose, the nature of a personal spirit that never could belong to anyone other than the self. Bennet Stark stood in a doorway once, admired by some woman who did not know he existed in a relationship with the woman to whom she remarked on his male beauty; that unknown woman was demonstrating a truth Vera now euphorically believed she had only just discovered; sexuality, in his case displayed guilelessly by nature in the sensuous allure of his face, was a wholly owned attribute, could not be claimed by the naïve bid: He’s my husband. Now Vera saw herself in that doorway. She lay beside Ben that night with a sense of pride and freedom rather than betrayal.
During those two years there was no yoghurt and apple lunch eaten over papers at the office. She fled, whenever there was an interstice in activity there or at home, whenever her absence would not be noticed or when there would be some reason for it plausible to her colleagues, her husband, her adolescent daughter (Ivan was already living in England); fled to number One-Twenty-One. The duplicate key she was equipped with hung with her car and house keys on the ring with the bluebird medallion, a birthday gift bought for her with pocket money saved by the daughter. She let herself in. He was there or was to be anticipated. Sometimes he arrived with the kind of food he li
ked—herrings or smoked sausage or cold Kasseler ribs—and they ate together in that kitchen before or after making love. They bathed together before going back to other people, soaping each other—why was it no one, least of all women, would admit the tender pleasure of handling like this a man’s slippery soft tube, pressing it a little, playfully, to make it grow, palpating, rounding out the shape of the two eggs, often uneven in size, in the pouch that keeps warm and alive the seed of the young, akin to the physical attribute that belongs, in the animal species, to the female kangaroo with her pouch of unborn young, quaintly reversed in the human species to the other sex, the male; the pouch that is anciently wrinkled, as if about to atrophy, even in a young man.
Otto was fifteen or more years younger than Vera. Vague about his age perhaps because he wanted to forget the age of his lover. But when, in talk, she made references he was too young to remember, the attempt to catch up, the momentary blankness in his expression, was obvious. He had a high forehead tight, anxious, shiny-skinned, like that of a rosy apple, was not good-looking; in fact, Vera did not know what he really looked like, if the face is what one is; she knew the body, the cruciform male body with its line of light brown curly hair branching up from the navel into a crossbeam at the nipples, following the dominant shape from the narrow hips and widening with a splendid thorax to the shoulders. His face was the disguise that bearded men all wear; dark shaggy-blond growth curled round his mouth and gave its own shape to whatever his chin and jaw might be. Thick-rimmed glasses protected the expression in commonplace blue eyes as if they were seen through the distancing of binoculars. His mouth was the soft one, upper and lower lip the same fullness, she associated with dissatisfaction with self, and generally found unattractive in other people. In him, surrounded by that seaweed beard, it was to her one of those fleshy creature-flowers in rock pools, sensitive to the temptation of the slightest touch. Not only had she thought she never could be attracted to another man; she had been sure she would never be attracted to another blond man. So it was this foreigner who exorcised for her some residual resentment—and resentment remains always damaging—that must be surviving against the first blond, the wartime husband. She wanted to tell Otto this odd fact, a confession surely endearing if not flattering to him, but didn’t because she sensed that references to that war, at the end of which he was a child, made him uneasy—for herself, she had no embarrassment at being so much older than he; verifying critically in a mirror, she knew there was no mark of ageing to be found on her!
But she had said after the first few times she had visited One-Twenty-One, This won’t last long, you know.
He misunderstood what she was telling him: that he couldn’t count against Ben, although she was free to choose both of them. He thought she was referring to the limit of his working assignment in the country. —I’ve got a surprise for you—I’ve applied to be stationed here, the channel’s correspondent for the region.—
They were getting dressed. He did not know what to make of the way she dropped her hands at her sides. He came over and bound her arms with his, bending his head to bury it in her neck.
Alongside the success of managing clandestinity there was in her a wish to take her foreigner home, to introduce him to her life, so that he might know her elsewhere than behind a desk or in his bed. She rationalized: if he were invited to the house occasionally, as both she and Ben would naturally bring home a new acquaintance whom they liked, this would reduce the risk of someone drawing other conclusions should she and Otto happen to be seen together somewhere.
Otto was reluctant to come to Vera’s home, to enter her life in which he had no part. But he acknowledged she must be a better judge than he in the situation. There were other guests, some of them blacks he had met in the course of his filming of trade union officials and minor political figures, and there was the husband, an impressive man, very skilful in pleasing the guests in unison with his wife, the two of them managing the gathering. The wife: that’s what she was, in this house. He was introduced, also, to her daughter, who quickly disappeared from the parents’ gathering that no doubt bored her; beautiful, but exactly like the father. So there was nothing to trouble him as evidence, in a younger version of herself, that his lover had faded in the years she had lived ahead of him.
With the chat that accompanies clearing away in the wake of guests Ben mentioned he hadn’t had much chance to talk to the young German, what was his name again? A strange name; giving it, she asked in innocent-sounding interest what its origin might be? Ben was so well-read, had a memory for all kinds of esoteric knowledge that never came her way.
—Abarbanel? But that’s an old Sephardic name, must be a Jew, not a German.—
—I think he’s Austrian.— She was enquiring.
—Could have been born there, I suppose. Jews’ve been dispersed all over, so long. Who knows.—
Who knows.
And so it was her husband who roused her curiosity. An erotic curiosity. In the dreamy confidentiality after love-making, she spoke to her lover. —So you’re a Jew. Someone told me your name’s Jewish. Sephardic. That’s Spanish, isn’t it.—
— It has a Spanish origin but the Jews were expelled from Spain in the fifteenth century.—
—I wouldn’t have known you were a Jew.— Murmured laugh. —They’re supposed to be circumcised.—
—I didn’t have the usual sort of beginning and I was sent away quite young with other orphans and adopted, I grew up in Vienna with those people who took me. People of Sephardic origin, somewhere far back.—
—What about your own mother and father?—
He turned so that their profiles faced one another on the pillow. —Dead.—
She would ask no more: the Gestapo round-up, the closed cattle-train, the concentration camp, the gas chamber; a provenance she could be familiar with only from books and films, documentation.
Vera was a gentile atheist gratified by the idea that her lover was a Jew, orphaned by racism, without a name that was his own—this linked him with the open, daily purpose of her life, the files of displaced communities on her desk and, before her on the other side of it, day after day, the faces of those who had been made wanderers because they were decreed the wrong race. She found herself paused, before the windows of expensive shops selling men’s clothing; she bought French shirts and Italian ties, and because he was fond of a few Ghanaian gold weights he picked up on assignments in West Africa, searched the art and craft galleries to bring him additions to his collection. She was making up to him for the deprivation of childhood, deprivation like that of so many she knew in the veld settlements she investigated. She was giving him toys and sweets. Naked in bed with her, he was also an infant deported, naked in the world.
Vera continued to make love with her husband, even if she felt she had the delicacy not to initiate it. She thought of it as part of a strategy, both to have her lover and not to hurt him, Ben; for the credo she had adopted for the situation was the well-worn one that anything was permitted her, was her right, so long as no one was hurt. Otto had no woman she knew of; there might be one he would go back to in Europe. And the fact was that the love-making with Ben was strangely successful. Ben must have been moved by her; instead of hurt. It was rather like it had been long ago on the mountain holiday, and again after the birth of Annick; she could not help being convulsed by wave after wave of orgasm.
Bitch.
Bitch, greeted her face in the mirror.
And next day she went back to One-Twenty-One. There she felt it was her lover she was hurting. What lover would accept that a woman like her could enjoy making love with another man? With her husband?
She was not free at all, after all. There was a clause in their love affair—she had formulated the small print of it, through her work she was familiar with the importance of clauses that allow breach of contract. This won’t last long, you know. But the clause was forgotten, buried in bedclothes and that other fabric, of the intimacy of a certain complemen
tary pattern in their working lives. He witnessed: he was becoming filled with horror at what he recorded on film, the savagery of those who called their victims savages, the shooting of children, beatings, torture, and the savagery that this was beginning to bring forth in retaliation, the knifings and burnings in the revenge of the night. He was telling her of what he managed to film the previous day, before the police had threatened him with arrest unless he left the site of a school where they had thrown tear-gas into classrooms to drive out children who had stoned their vehicles. Dogs rounded up the terrified children, white policemen caught them at random and beat some as they were dragged to police vans, there were shots—the two children he saw fall screaming: he did not know whether they were dead or not, nor would anyone know, because at that point he and everyone there to record was ordered out of the area. Black kids, he said. As if expecting some explanation. —Black kids. A girl tried to hide behind me.—
—You haven’t lived here long enough to know. The Nazis didn’t end in the war where your parents died, they were reborn here.—
He stirred as if to ask a question and did not. He stared at the food before them. A plate of delicatessen smoked ham and potato salad she had provided to indulge his native tastes. —There’s something I haven’t told you. I don’t like to tell even myself. But it’s true. You know what a Hitler Baby is?— His German accent became unusually pronounced.
He knew she did.
—I’m one. My mother was mated like a cow to produce a good German child for Hitler. I don’t know who the Aryan stud was. She didn’t know. Was never told his name when he was put on her. Artificial insemination for a cow is better, hei’m, it’s a syringe, hei’m?—
If there is some form of love between people there surely must be something to say, always, whatever has happened. There was nothing. Vera listened to what was there but could not be seen, the transformation foretold in legend of a being into another, a woman into a tree, a god into an eagle; a creature of the unspeakable mythology of genetic engineering, the chimera of modern history.
None to Accompany Me Page 6