Then We Take Berlin

by Lawton, John

  “I could watch sunset all day,” she said. “I haff seen sunsets over the Atlas Mountains in North Africa, I haff seen sunsets over the myriad lakes of Finland, and through the giant redwoods of California.”

  “I never much bothered, meself. Sunset over the East India Dock Road doesn’t have the same ring to it. Besides you can’t watch them all day. There’s only one a day.”

  “On this planet. Who knows about other planets? Perhaps there really is a planet somewhere out there on which one can watch the sun set forty-four times.”

  “Forty-four? How do you reckon that?”

  “Oh . . . one would haff to keep moving the chair of course.”

  He giggled, snorted champagne, felt the rush of bubbles down his nose.

  “And for all that, for all those places . . . a sunset still reminds me of home. And there is no earthly reason why it should.”

  “Do you miss Russia?”

  “Of course.”

  “Do you wish you could go back?”

  “Now you’re just being stupid.”

  “I don’t miss Stepney.”

  “Well . . . not yet anyway . . . but you will. Meanwhile . . . what is the place of birth but a jumping-off point?”

  “A what?”

  “You are a boy . . . a better-educated boy than when we met, of that I shall flatter myself . . . but a boy. You will miss nothing for a long time to come . . . but one day you will be so far from Stepney . . . physically, morally perhaps, that you will look back at it and wonder how you ever got from there to wherever you are in . . . I pluck a date from the air . . . 1963 . . . an impossible figure . . . only H.G. or Verne could ever conceive of such a time . . . men on the moon . . . a war of the worlds . . . and you will look back . . . believe me you will . . . the physical distance will mean nothing, the moral distance may, but the emotional distance and the passing of time will rip through you like hawk and handsaw.”

  She downed half a glass of Veuve Clicquot. A silence he would not fill. No glib remark about the East India Dock Road would do.

  “But,” she resumed, “if you weren’t looking at the sunset or gazing at the stars, what were you doing, Wilderness, looking at the gutter?”

  She had forcefully changed tack on him, swung the subject away from herself, away from the tears that had formed in the corners of her eyes but would not roll.

  “Not especially,” he said, looking down into the bubbles of his champagne, then lifting his eyes past her and staring westward. “Standing in it some of the time, for sure. But mostly I looked at the streets, the people in the streets, and when I wasn’t looking at the streets I had me nose in a book. I was . . . I was . . . a . . .”

  He looked at her now. The tears had vanished. They might never have been there at all.

  “A word child?”

  “Yeah. That’ll do. That’s exactly what I was. A word child. It’s what I am. A child of language . . . a word child.”

  “Of course you are. That is why Burne-Jones chose you.”

  “Is it? Chose me for what?”

  Rada had a way of not answering any question she didn’t want to answer. The dark eyes might smile at him, but the lips would move only to change the subject.

  “He tells me you have signed on for another two years.”

  “Yeah, well. He won’t hold me to that. He’ll have had enough of me after two years’ National Service.”

  But she was shaking her head.

  “Oh no, oh no no no.”

  She made him wait as she downed another half-glass of Veuve Clicquot.

  “He has you. He means to keep you.”

  “Bugger.”

  “You might have realised that the moment he sent you to me.”

  A little after eleven she bundled him towards the door, shoved another couple of folders under his arm—“FDR—The Tennessee Valley Authority,” “The Death of Leon Trotsky.” The short excursion to watch the sunset had made him duck through the rarely opened French window, and he had cobwebs in his hair. She stood on tiptoe, brushed them away and as her fingers ran across his cheek she, who had seemed always to avoid touching, had kissed him on the cheek. The only time she ever did so.

  “Rada, what did he choose me for?”

  “Спокойной ночи (Good night) Wilderness. It is time for candlewick and cold cream.”

  §42

  One day, later in that same summer of 1946, a letter arrived at his digs by the second post of the day. It was from his father, contained no return address, and was easily the longest communication of any kind that he had ever received from the man—and the first in four years. Wilderness knew where the regiment had been. He’d been able to follow the course of the war and the regiment’s part in it in the newspapers. His father had fought under General Montgomery and helped defeat Rommel, had landed in Sicily, fought up the spine of Italy, through the South Tyrol and into Austria, where he had met up with the Russians or the Americans or both. And only the absence of any letter from the War Office informing him of his father’s death gave him reason to think the old man had survived all this. But he had, and here was the final proof scrawled in pencil on lined paper.

  Son, I’m due for me demob. Back in Blighty. If you can get away meet me at noon on Saturday. You remember that last holiday me and your Mum took you on before the war? It was 1937 or maybe 1938, we went to stay with your Great-Uncle Ted in Felixstowe, and one day we caught a ferry over the river and walked out along this shingle beach all the way to that martello tower they got out there. I reckon it was called Bawtsey or Battsey or something like. Anyway meet me there. Dad.

  It was Bawdsey beach, and it had been 1936.

  Come Saturday, Wilderness caught an early train from Cambridge to Ipswich. In Ipswich he changed for a train to Woodbridge and in Woodbridge he stole a bicycle.

  The ride was six or seven miles, and he arrived at the beach pretty well on the dot of noon. Riding a bicycle on shingle is impossible, so he propped it against a groyne and set off on foot for the tower and what he perceived to be a human speck at the water’s edge.

  Closer, the speck was clearly his father. Closer still, it was his father stark naked, staring out to sea, his khaki uniform a neat, orderly, barrack-room stack at his feet, even down to the crowning effect of the tin hat and the black boots splayed at forty-five degrees. Closer still and Wilderness could see that all his father was wearing were his army dog tags—two small pressed discs, each about the size of a florin, on a green string around his neck.

  “Well,” Harry said. “Here’s a how de do.”

  It was the sort of thing he would have said to his son ten or twelve years ago—a nonsense phrase for a small boy who strived for literal meanings to puzzle over.

  Wilderness looked at his father. He could not recall that he had ever seen him naked, and certainly the man had no sense that he was. The coast of the North Sea is never warm, and for all the beauty of its beaches it is a hardy soul that strips off there on any day. Harry’s skin rose up in an alpine terrain of goose pimples, and the muscles in his chest twitched involuntarily. His genitals had contracted to an olive perched atop a walnut. But it was the scars that drew the eye. A brown, bronzed body, taut with muscle, and punctuated by scars.

  Across his left arm and left thigh ran raised, paler welts where bullets had skimmed his flesh. Wilderness could imagine him being bandaged up in a field hospital and stood down for a week. On his right thigh was a moon crater where shrapnel had been dug out. Where had that happened? How long had he been hospitalised with a wound as nasty as that? What was a man his age—still under forty by Wilderness’s reckoning, but an “uncle” in infantry terms—doing in the front line?

  “Yes,” he replied. “A bit of a how de do.”

  “I’m glad you could make it son. We haven’t a lot of time.”

  “Haven’t we?”

  Harry nodded, a tilt of the head seaward.

  “Doesn’t do to hang about. I mean to say, once your mind’s ma
de up it’s made up, innit?”

  “I suppose not.”

  “And there’s not a lot to be said.”

  He paused. It seemed to Wilderness that he was waiting on him, and looking at him without quite seeing him.

  “But if I don’t say ’em now . . . well. I know it’s been tough for you.”

  Indeed it had. Abner’s conviction that Harry had been “a nutter since Dunkirk” was a portion of the truth. Harry had always been a nutter who expressed his emotions with his fists. Dunkirk had simply made him a worse nutter. Shell shock, that old phrase from the last war, did not begin to explain Harry Holderness.

  “And,” he went on. “What’s the bleedin’ point of sayin’ sorry. What’s done is done. So I thought, I should just say goodbye, wish you all the best and hope you make a better job of this life thing than I could.”

  “Thanks,” Wilderness said.

  “So . . . I’ll be off now. It’s good to see yer, and you look a treat in that uniform. RAF, who would have thought it, eh? You’re a big lad, you just ain’t filled out yet. But you will.”

  Wilderness was not a copy of his father. As tall, he’d never be as broad. Nor did he have his father’s wispy red hair or his dazzling, bright blue, crazy eyes. The eyes that now looked into his.

  He was holding out his hand.

  “Shake, son?”

  Wilderness shook his hand. A more formal parting than he ever would have imagined, and watched as Harry walked out into the North Sea. It evoked the old classroom puzzle. How do you know the earth is round? Because of the way a ship vanishes over the horizon. Wilderness watched Harry until he vanished. And then he stood and stared a while longer in no anticipation of his reappearance—just to be sure that he had finally gone.

  Then he turned to the pile his father had left on the beach.

  The boots had no name in them and were two sizes too big. They could be left for some lucky beachcomber.

  In the pockets of the blouse he found a packet of Craven “A” cigarettes, with nine still in it, his father’s ration book, ID card, and more than fifty pounds in notes. He had, clearly, picked up his back pay and demob gratuity before setting off for Bawdsey—fourteen shillings for every month served was a pittance, but over five years and more it slowly mounted up. In the trouser pockets, twelve shillings and eightpence in change. The last item was a brown paper parcel. He tore it open and found a crushed trilby hat and a shapeless demob suit, pale grey with a thin blue stripe and in the inside pocket of the suit, the War Office documents issued by the demobilisation centre in Wembley formally discharging his father from the Army. Neither the blouse nor the jacket had a name in it. But on the front of the blouse was a row of ribbons, and it seemed to Wilderness that they could be read as a language, that there was a hidden syntax to the strip of reds and blues and greens, whereby an informed person could read the history of Harry Holderness’s war and hence, sooner or later, know that these colours had belonged to Harry Holderness. A man’s war in a colour palette. A neat and simple semaphore. The strip came away in his hand with a gentle tug, and he tucked it into his trouser pocket. The rest he left. Walked back to the bicycle with the brown paper parcel under his arm.

  Wilderness put the bike back where he had found it and boarded the next train for Liverpool Street, London. From there a short hop on the Metropolitan Line (Hammersmith and City branch) took him to Whitechapel Underground, a matter of yards from the house in Sidney Street in which Merle still lived. But he passed the end of Sidney Street, walked on past the Blind Beggar and the Gaumont cinema to a grimy shop-front on the other side of the Mile End road—“Abel Jakobson Tailor, formerly Minsky & Jakobson est. 1904.”

  With any luck the irascible Mr. Jakobson would be at home on a Saturday afternoon, or down the Catford dog track, and the premises manned by his diligent, civilised partner, Mr. Hummel—or as Wilderness had known him since he was a boy, Vienna Joe.

  “Ah, Johnnie Holderness, looking every inch the hero in his RAF uniform.”

  “Hello, Mr. Hummel. I was hoping you’d be here. I got a bit of a job for you. I mean, a paying job.”

  “No problem. I long ago gave up any notion of a Sabbath. Indeed, I have been wondering for a while now which of you street urchins would be the first to knock at our door in search of their first bespoke suit. I am glad it is you, Johnnie. It is a significant rite de passage.”

  “That’s not quite what I meant, Mr. Hummel.”

  Wilderness unwrapped the demob suit. Laid it out on the cutting table.

  “Could you tailor this to fit me?”

  Hummel turned the suit over in hands, rubbed the fabric between finger and thumb, turned down his mouth at the corners.

  “Is it worth the effort?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. I never owned a suit.”

  “That’s no reason to look like a shlump. How much money you got?”

  “Enough I reckon.”

  “Spoken like a cockney miser. Follow me.”

  Hummel led him over to a hanging rail. Took off the cover and pulled out a single-breasted suit in a plain, dark blue.

  “This I made for Captain Gibson of the Sherwood Foresters. In the May of ’44. It has hung here in its wrapper these last two years. The poor captain was killed in Normandy before he could collect. Naturally, I wrote to his widow. The suit after all was paid for. But I never received a reply. Captain Gibson was your size. I’d be a poor excuse for a tailor if I could not see that.”

  “What even without measuring me?”

  “I don’t need a tape measure, Johnnie. Just try the suit.”

  Wilderness admired himself in the mirror, his mind juggling clichés . . . a second skin . . . like a glove . . . and comparisons . . . like Cary Grant, like Fred Astaire. The late captain and he had been cast in the same mould.

  “How much?”

  “Nothing. As I said, the suit is paid for.”

  “But . . . but it’s a much better suit than the one I brought in.”

  “Such understatement, Johnnie. It is an infinitely better suit than your demob sack. If I ever talk Billy into opening up in the West End this suit would cost . . . forty-five guineas. That’s what Kilgour and French or Henry Poole would charge in Savile Row this very day.”

  “Fuck me.”

  “Genau.”

  “Mr. Hummel, if you are, as I think you are, offering to give me this suit, why did you ask how much money I had?”

  “Why? Because for two pounds ten shillings I will recut your RAF uniform so that it fits you as well as this suit. You will be the best dressed basher on the square.”

  “I don’t do square bashin’ Mr. H. I’m an egghead these days.”

  Wilderness left his uniform, strolled into Sidney Street wearing his Gibson suit, looking, as Merle told him, like a million dollars.

  Lunchtime Monday, he put on his tailored RAF uniform, felt like two million dollars, paid Hummel, and caught the next train back to Cambridge.

  He had not told Merle or Hummel about Harry. It would be more than a year before he would tell anyone.

  §43

  It was about three months later. Towards the end of October. He let himself into the flat in Cornwall Gardens and called out Rada’s name. It was his intention, his desire, to surprise her. Wearing his Gibson suit rather than his uniform for the first time. The suit the king had not bought.

  She did not answer. No “Chust a minute, dollink.” No “Put the kettle on, ragazzo.”

  She was sitting upright in her armchair, her chin resting on her chest, a book open on her knees, a folded page of unlined paper wedged into the spine. He read her last words, surprised to find they were addressed to him.

  Wilderness, chéri —“Quand tu regarderas le ciel, la nuit, puisque j’habiterai dans l’une d’elles, puisque je rirai dans l’une d’elles, alors ce sera pour toi comme si riaient toutes les étoiles.” . . . au revoir, Rada.

  He picked up the book to look at the title. What had she chosen to read in
the moment of her death? A fairy tale, of sorts: Le petit prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.

  He lifted her chin.

  She was not yet in rigor, and he smelt the scent of almonds on her lips. He did not know how he knew this meant that Rada had taken cyanide, and could only ascribe it to Hollywood films seen on matinees at the Troxy cinema—but he knew she was dead. He did not know where she might obtain cyanide—but he knew she was dead.

  He could see the grey roots to her hair. If he had noticed them before, he had blotted them from sight and from memory. Rada had not been old until now. Rada had been ageless until now. If she’d worn a wig . . . he would have noticed . . . Merle’s atrocious collection of wigs for her nights on the game had made him aware of wigs . . . but now he saw that dead Rada was old Rada. The years had not slipped away, they had accumulated, the twentieth century had fallen on her in a single coup. The Great War, the Russian revolutions, the death and disease that had followed in the wake, the starvation years of the twenties and thirties, the coming of the Nazis . . . death camps, gulags, total war . . . a continent of refugees . . . ragged, battered humanity on the move . . . everything that had wiped out her generation . . . for whom to grow old was a rarity. The survivors were few. Her false teeth had slipped in her jaw.