He remembered rain like this, lit up, then disappearing down into a void, and Gerda standing by a space where a wall should be. A draught lifts her hair. She has been raging but now she’s quiet, and he puts out his hand to ask if she is all right. But instead of turning when he touches her, Gerda’s arms fly up. She tips forward into empty air, her body rolls over, and she’s gone.
Time draws back, reluctant to go on. It cannot be: there’s an empty space where Gerda was. What has happened is impossible.
He crashes down the broken staircase, hearing Gerda in the dark amongst the wreckage of the plane. When he finds her, she clutches at him while he tries to wipe away the blood and filth from her face. He lifts her up and a ragged shriek comes from her mouth, so he sits in the water holding her while she cries softly for her mother, Mutti, Mutti.
After a time she lets go of his shirt but she is too heavy to hold and she slips down. Black ripples bump against her cheek. A rat tiptoes along a nearby joist and Stefan scrambles away, sending an oily wave over Gerda. The water folds her into itself and she disappears.
This happened. Stefan knows now. The memory was snarled up in the clutter of his brain but now it’s broken free: wings did not unfold from Gerda’s back and there was no wounded deer calling for its mother. It was Gerda and she died at the house in Müllerstrasse.
The sound of footsteps on the pavements ceased. The city turned dark at Stefan’s back and Moon amongst her constellations laid silver on the roofs and spires. The nettles grew a fur of frost and the shadow of a fox, Fox himself invisible, paused to taste a human scent somewhere high up, still and barely breathing.
Stefan leaned his cheek against the air and the quiet held him softly to itself. There was no need to search for Gerda.
The stars took note and drew their graceful diagram for the coming day. The moon accomplished her arc and the stars withdrew. The sky turned violet. Birds began to sing.
37
The disappointment was greater for Francesca, Michael knows now. When they married, she had trusted in the infinite possibilities of love and it was painful for her to discover she was wrong, and also wrong about herself. She found she didn’t love him after all. Michael wanted to tell her it didn’t matter, but that would hurt her more.
For two years they lived uneasily together. Their need for sleep and food and sex did not coincide, and, their natures being equally selfish and equally peaceable, life became a succession of apologies and counter-apologies which it still makes Michael weary to remember.
He started sleeping at the studio and her fantasy of their life together, ‘not at all respectable’, as Frankie put it, remained intact. Michael could go walking at dawn and she could sleep past noon without either feeling guilty. Their incompatibility was proof to her that the marriage was unconventional and therefore a success.
‘You’re not like anyone in the whole world, Michael,’ Francesca once said to him. ‘You’re someone I can’t even imagine.’
The war and Francesca’s pregnancy forced a helpless contentment on them both. What they wanted for themselves was suddenly irrelevant. When Michael came home on leave and Francesca returned from the hospital, they lived together for a month and almost fell in love.
Michael would walk back and forth across the bedroom with his new-born son in his arms and Frankie would sit by the fire in a bright silk kimono, hugging her knees and smoking. Those were the best times, when they were simply content in one another’s company as they used to be.
He loved Frankie’s dark eyes and the silver in her hair, and when she was naked he wanted to paint the fineness of her bones under the cool white skin. He rarely wanted to touch her.
They talked about how life would be different and marvellous when the war was over and they could be a family together. Their dreams bore no relation to who they were.
He was sent to Tobruk and Francesca struggled alone in London, writing brave letters that touched him and sometimes made him laugh. Life was difficult and dangerous, but fleeing to the country was impossible for her. ‘I’d go mad, Michael. I know your English villages, all mud and scones. The quiet would swallow me whole.’ After a year, she took the baby home to her sister in Wyoming.
When the war was over, he went back to London, took what he needed from the house in Bloomsbury and moved into the studio.
He wondered at this half-marriage he and Frankie had. Their letters never acknowledged that it was finished, and Frankie sometimes talked about returning to London when life was easier again. She did not ask him to join her in America and he understood it would be wrong for her if he did; she needed to keep the illusion of him perfect.
So he was alone and glad to be so, but freedom, he had come to realize, was as difficult as living with Francesca. There was always money in his bank account, earned from paintings or deposited from time to time by Frankie. He could have lovers if he wanted, and do anything at any hour of any day. He was nearly forty, and time sprawled like a flood with no landmarks and no tide to take him anywhere.
London was subdued after Germany surrendered. People seemed baffled by the victory and the mood was sullen. Grief and hardship had exhausted people and the aftermath sometimes seemed as terrible as war.
One weekday afternoon, Michael went into a news theatre to shelter from the rain. He sat in the flickering dark and watched a newsreel of stone-eyed creatures with bone claws hooked on wire fences. Without flesh the people did not seem naked although they were. But, for all their suffering, he felt them pitying his ignorance. He was a creature who did not know its own kind.
These were the concentration camps in Germany and Poland. What could not exist except in nightmares did exist.
Cartoons came on and then the reel of news again. Michael watched twice more because his mind could not comprehend what his eyes were seeing: the human body nullified.
That final summer of the war, a city was destroyed in a single burning breath, and then another. Horror was perfected. Lucifer had woken and now it seemed he worked for good as well as evil. The human mind could accomplish feats of devastation beyond its own imagining.
The dead were a multitude too vast to mourn, so the living turned back to the small things they were masters of. A kind of life resumed.
He sometimes went to Dean Street of an evening, to an artists’ club above a trattoria where Muriel presided – a chalk-faced woman Frankie would have hated. Muriel would clamp her black-red lips around her cigarette and tell him, ‘Your work is sentimental, Michael. Beauty is old hat. You think your gods are grateful?’ She stroked his greying hair and laughed. ‘Poor darling. A fine old angel when there’s no call for angels any more.’
Occasionally, he walked to Hampstead Heath to visit an ageing sculptor and his wife, who was a painter. They still believed art could repair a damaged soul although their faith was wearing thin.
Most days Michael worked until noon, had lunch in a café and slept for a while, then worked into the night and slept again. He would go out before dawn to walk and see the light take on a colour.
This morning there is a frost. The days are warm but the dawns are still cold. Michael is swaddled in a heavy sweater, scarf and gloves, and the cashmere overcoat Francesca bought him one Christmas. He is amused that he’s dressed like an old man, but his arthritic hands and damaged leg will suffer if he does not keep warm.
When he leaves the studio, a woman is still asleep in his bed and she will have gone by the time he returns because this is always the understanding.
Fitzroy Street is empty. The cold seems to fall from the buildings, which sparkle with rime in the grainy neutral light. There is a gap in the terrace where a bomb fell. Vast oak struts support the houses on either side, and a cat sits neatly on a first-floor mantelpiece looking down into the weeds.
He is aware of people sleeping behind the upstairs curtains and he tries to walk quietly. Occasionally a basement light is on where a maid or a housekeeper is already up, but not so many people have servants th
ese days and most of the houses have been turned into flats.
He has never met his neighbours or the people living above or underneath the studio, and he wonders if they know he exists because he never hears them. The studio is hidden in its labyrinth of staircases and passages. As Frankie once said to him, no one would ever find him.
He walks until the dawn turns violet and then stops for breakfast at a café in Covent Garden, where business started hours ago. He buys some dark blue delphiniums which remind him of Elisabeth although he has forgotten why.
Coming back along Bloomsbury, through Bedford Square, he is not far from the house where he and Francesca used to live, but he has no need or inclination to go there, then along Bayley Street towards the Tottenham Court Road.
He reaches the corner, turns right and what he sees stops him dead in the middle of the pavement. A sudden wonder grips him and too many sensations come at once.
There is a boy walking towards him with a rifle on his shoulder and at the open neck of his shirt is Madame Baumanière’s silver locket. The boy’s blue eyes are bloodshot and his hair is a dozen shades of gold. He has almost walked past. His lips are mauve and he stares ahead. On the stock of the rifle he carries, there is a design of flowers and curling ribbons.
Michael touches the boy’s sleeve, which causes him to flinch away so violently a man passing on a bicycle turns to stare. The anguish in the boy’s eyes is terrible and Michael almost flinches too. He says, ‘So you’ve found me.’ What other reason would bring this ghost except to find him? ‘I live just round the corner. I’ll make us some coffee.’ The words sound oddly banal.
The boy doesn’t seem to understand but when Michael starts walking, he follows. He has the loping gait of a youth but the height and stature of a man. He might be sixteen, seventeen, not much more.
In the studio, it is still dark although the muslin at the windows is lit up by the early light. It is not quite seven o’clock. The firelight casts a pinkish glow across the floorboards and the boy stands in his heavy country coat staring at the embers.
When Michael comes out of the little kitchen with a pot of coffee the boy is lying on his back by the hearth. He looks as if he’s fallen down. The rifle is across his chest and he is asleep. His face looks younger coloured by the fire, his skin is very fine though down is beginning to show above his lip, and his nose and mouth have outgrown their childish neatness. The jaw is clumsy and the cheekbones are too prominent. The planes of his face might settle in the right proportions as he gets older or they might not.
His eyelids are like waxy petals and Michael finds it strange to be so moved by a child he doesn’t know – because, for all his size, the boy seems not much older than a child. There is an untidy scar on his throat from a wound that was probably infected once – it occurs to Michael that perhaps the boy hasn’t spoken because he can’t – and lying near the scar is the silver locket, which has been repaired and polished since it was given to Elisabeth’s daughter in a muddy Kentish lane six years ago. It was tarnished then, and dented from having been in Michael’s pocket during the Munich beating.
The rifle looks the same. After nearly twenty years he still knows every curl of the inlaid ribbons and he can recall the feeling when he lifted it from the iron rest above the fireplace at the house in Mazamet.
Jean Baumanière’s rifle and Emmanuelle Baumanière’s silver locket have been reunited. Michael would ponder what it means if he thought there was some purpose or design in the conjunction, or if there was a message to be deciphered in these objects from the past. Fate can be spiteful or generous, that’s all. Chance can look symmetrical, but it means nothing.
What Michael believes is that a kind of random magic has occurred and something will be altered by this boy. A succession of small convergences and ruptures, decisions and accidents, has brought him here with the rifle and the silver locket.
The boy doesn’t stir while the morning begins to come into the room with the sound of motorcars and footsteps and, occasionally, horses’ hoofs. Michael puts the delphiniums in water, then starts to paint, and he feels an odd companionship with the sleeping figure by the fire. Usually he can’t work with anyone but a model in the room. He makes more coffee, wondering if he should take off the boy’s boots and put a pillow under his head, but he is gripping the rifle even in his sleep and Michael leaves him alone.
By ten o’clock, the sun shines straight in, making prisms bounce from the bevelled mirrors. The muslin across the windows diffuses the glare but the ricocheting light is tiring at this time of the day. When Michael moves, dozens of subtly distorted reflections do the same. At one time he thought of covering the mirrors, but he has become accustomed to the multiplication of light and movement and he hardly notices it now.
It is almost eleven o’clock. The work absorbs him but for the first time in years he notices the smell of the paint, the linseed oil and fumy turpentine, and he wonders if the boy’s dreaming mind notices it too. The thought makes Michael look across and the boy’s eyes are open. He hasn’t moved but he gazes at the ceiling, then he turns his head when he feels Michael watching. His expression is peaceful and curious, as if he doesn’t know where he is but he doesn’t mind. The sleep has done him good because whatever frightened him has receded.
‘There’s still coffee if you’d like some,’ Michael says. A mass of questions crowd in and one of them will start the unravelling of the story, but it’s too soon. ‘I don’t know your name,’ he says.
The boy’s lips part and he licks them.
‘Qui êtes-vous?’ Michael asks. ‘Wie ist Ihr Name?’
‘Stefan,’ says the boy huskily. His coat creaks as he shifts, puts the rifle on the floor and sits up, rubbing his scalp so his hair fans silkily through his fingers. The proportions of cheeks and jaw are better now he’s upright. He yawns and swallows hard.
‘Ich hole Sie Wasser.’ I’ll get you some water, Michael says but he can’t bring himself to move. The sound of German has momentarily invoked the past and he catches a glimpse of Artur Landau. The likeness vanishes and the boy is just himself again.
There is a pause when nothing happens. Michael stands by the easel and Stefan sits on the floor and blinks sleepily, then his expression changes as if a switch is thrown. His eyes redden and flood and the myriad of thoughts and reflexes that give a face complexity are wiped away because there is only one single thought: he has remembered something which was forgotten in his sleep.
Michael has seen it many times in war and in its aftermath – the sudden recollection of a fear that brings back the fear itself. Stefan begins to shiver. He doesn’t weep and hang his head or hunch into himself. Whatever it is must be too terrible to cry for. Michael can sense only its outline but for the first time he feels frightened too – not of the boy, who could almost be Artur Landau’s son, but of the horror that is present in the room.
‘Was ist los?’ Michael asks softly. There’s a plea in Stefan’s eyes. He wants the thing undone, or unremembered as it was in the seconds after waking. Michael knows this longing too because how many times has he tried to make a memory disappear. He never could. Unknowing is impossible.
If he had succeeded in erasing certain things, he would have chosen badly, he realizes now, because in these last few years he has been grateful to have the memories of Elisabeth, and glad to remember his father, even at the end. And if the beating in Munich had been forgotten, the kindness of the Jewish doctor and his wife would have been lost too. A life can’t be partitioned and perhaps there’s nothing it’s better to forget.
As always, when he thinks he’s found a truth he is proved wrong, because he sees that Stefan is recalling something intolerable and the horror of it will never change. The boy will not become a better man because of it, or a kinder one. Whatever this memory is, it will distort him and will always torture him.
Stefan shivers inside the coat. Nothing can be done. The air feels solid, as if the two of them are fixed in glass.
&nbs
p; Ordinariness is needed to break the spell – a cup of tea or food – so Michael moves. What happens next is hidden in the light.
Perhaps when multiple figures seem to move on every side, Stefan reaches for the rifle and scrambles to his feet. Michael backs away to show he is no threat and his reflections do the same. Stefan sees grey-haired men retreat, but blond young men swing their rifles wildly around. There is a shot.
A rectangle of air seems to crumple, then drop slowly like a waterfall sending a tide of shards out across the floor. The young men still have their rifles raised and whichever way Stefan turns they always aim at him. There’s another detonation, another mirror falls, another tide of glass.
There is silence. Michael straightens up and something has altered. After a while he says, ‘What a mess.’ The floor is strewn with bits of aquamarine and silvered glass and it is everywhere, even in the fireplace amongst the ash. ‘What a mess,’ he says again, although it looks rather beautiful.
The rifle is on the floor. He didn’t notice when the boy put it down. At the first shot, or perhaps it was the second, he felt a dull clenching and unclenching of his nerves as if he had touched a raw electric wire. It is difficult to gather his thoughts together but he notices blood pooling at his feet. It has filled his shoe and his trouser leg is soaked. There is so much blood running down it looks like skeins of paint but he’s not in pain and he wonders where it’s all coming from. His chest feels bruised somehow, nothing worse than that. He pats his chest and sees his hand – his little finger with the ring that used to belong to Nanna Lydia, his thumb with charcoal under the nail, and between them is a mess of flesh and bone. Three fingers have disappeared. Blood goes down inside his cuff and starts filling his sleeve, but the arm is too heavy to hold up for long so he lets it drop again.
The German Boy Page 37