by Nigel Packer
‘What about the lions?’ he asked.
‘In a minute, darling.’
‘But we came to see the lions.’
Otto, who was gazing intently at the watery light on the underside of a ramp, failed to notice Daniel or his mounting frustration, even when his son began pulling at his sleeve and pleading with him to move on.
‘Daddy, let’s go. I want to see the lions. I want to see the lions in their garden.’
At this point, Otto did something he later regretted. He pulled away his sleeve – not angrily, but absently, without even glancing down at Daniel. It was as if he were a thorn on which the sleeve of Otto’s shirt had become caught. Straightaway, Daniel’s tears began to well.
Cynthia, who had been watching closely, sensed the effect that Otto’s unthinking gesture might have. She tried to preempt any reaction by distracting Daniel.
‘Don’t you want to see the penguins, darling? Look, there’s a really fat one, coming down the ramp. See him go now into the water. Splosh!’
But it was already too late. Daniel’s snivels mounted to a wail. Before Otto had noticed that anything was amiss, Daniel had turned on his heel and was fleeing at speed along the path.
‘Daniel, wait…’ Cynthia called out, setting off in rapid pursuit.
But she couldn’t avert the accident she saw approaching.
Daniel was struck hard on the shoulder by the bicycle that flashed across his path and sent spinning backwards onto the gravel, where he lay on his back, sprawling and stunned.
By the time Cynthia and Otto reached him, he had regained a sitting position and was crying loudly. His elbows were grazed and there was a nasty cut on his knee where it had been hit by a pedal. The young man who had struck him was trying to untangle himself from the aluminium frame. The bicycle lay upended on the grass, its front wheel revolving slowly.
Having established that no one was badly hurt, and with apologies issued all round, Cynthia took Daniel to the first-aid post while Otto went to seek out his son’s favourite ice cream at a nearby kiosk. Returning with a giant cone, he apologised and suggested that they go and see the lions. Daniel, a wad of dressing round his knee, looked up at Otto and firmly shook his head. There was nothing they could do to persuade him to change his mind. The eagerly awaited afternoon at the zoo was soon abandoned.
Driving back home to Hampstead, Cynthia cuddled the still-fragile Daniel as he lay on the back seat of the car, his head resting limply on her lap. Otto, silently gripping at the steering wheel, cursed his own stupidity and self-absorption. He had ruined Daniel’s day, and there was nothing he could do to remedy the situation. Why was it that he seemed to get these things so wrong so often?
* * *
‘Daniel’s an architect too, isn’t he?’ asked Chloe.
Otto recovered from his reverie.
‘Yes, he is. A talented one. He’s won himself a number of awards.’
‘You must be very proud of him.’
‘I am, of course, although our relationship, these days, is rather broken.’
‘Really?’
‘There was more or less a complete rupture between us, several years ago. We’ve not spoken directly since.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ she said.
He glanced away again at the view.
‘It was some silly argument about a railway station he was designing. He was over in Geneva on business and asked me to take a look at the plans over lunch. I made some critical comments that upset him. I should have let it drop, of course, had the wherewithal to sense how annoyed he was becoming. But I didn’t. I kept going, nagging away at him, and finally something seemed to snap.’
He thought again of Daniel, gathering up the plans in his arms, his features contorted with unexpressed hurt. Then the stride to the door; its slamming shut behind him.
Otto looked again at Chloe.
‘There was more to it than that, of course. It was a catalyst for the emergence of other, pre-existing tensions. The problems between us lay much further back in time.’
He halted, momentarily, surprised by his own candidness.
‘If you’d like to talk about it…’ Chloe said to him cautiously.
‘It’s a complicated matter. I won’t bore you with the details. But I must do something about getting back in touch one day. Families are so important, you see.’
Chloe wanted to know more about this troubled relationship with Daniel; about the long and eventful life that Otto had led. Yet the sight of his ancient face, the unfathomable depths of his eyes, brought home to her just how great was the gulf that separated his generation from her own. Dare she tread the eggshell bridge that seemed to divide them? No, it was impossible. The chasm in human experience could not be breached. And so she talked to him about other things instead.
‘How are you finding the filming? Is everything okay? I hope you haven’t found it a waste of time.’
‘No, no … not at all,’ said Otto, worried about his evident lack of enthusiasm. ‘It’s been most interesting, seeing the old place again.’
But was the building really worth saving? That was what he wanted to ask her. He no longer knew the answer to this question himself.
Fifteen
Stretched out in near-darkness on his sofa sometime later, Otto felt too tired to get up and switch on any lights.
‘Exhausted,’ he muttered, in little more than a whisper.
Once more he wished he had given a better account of himself that day. Chloe’s questions had been rapid and his answers superficial. He hadn’t found the space to gather his thoughts. But then she and her colleagues seemed to operate in a different frame of time to him. Everybody did, nowadays. They all moved on fast forward; he in slow motion. No wonder he’d been left a little dazed. It was all so different to his life back home in Switzerland. There he would sit for days on end at the window of his study, watching the colours change in the autumn forest.
He was glad they would soon be meeting some of the residents – apparently it was next on the itinerary. He was feeling a little apprehensive, however. Supposing somebody swore at him?
‘How would you feel about using this lift each day?’ Chloe had asked him earlier.
With an extended yawn, Otto emptied out his mind, allowing his concerns to drift off into the shadows. Tomorrow would no doubt take care of itself.
Little by little, the dark night enclosed him, but he felt no urge to turn on any lights. The distant glow from the city below cast a halo onto the ceiling. He lay staring at it for quite some time, the harsh glare softening to a flickering of candles.
The cellar in which he found himself was long and narrow. It had a red-brick ceiling and walls, which sometimes dripped with damp, and a stone floor that at night seemed half alive with the rumours of mice. He knew this cellar, in intimate detail, and recalled its layout now. There were two exits: a door into the apartment of the elderly couple who sheltered them, and a hatch leading up into the courtyard directly above. Of these two exits, they had been told that they should never use the first. The second, however, they could use as often as was practicable.
The light of the candles offered some respite from the darkness, although the children later had problems with their eyesight, and their mother eventually lost hers altogether. Otto’s symptoms were less severe than his sisters’, although he always needed glasses for his drawing.
The family moved into the cellar in August 1942, just as the deportations began, having fled to Antwerp from Vienna four years earlier. But it was not far enough to escape the forces of persecution, which seemed, to Otto’s father, to be personally pursuing his family across Europe. The previous two years had seen increased levels of violence and intimidation against Antwerp’s Jewish community. When word spread that the round-ups were starting, the family had almost no time in which to search out a hiding place. Fortunately, they were offered one by friends.
The cellar was always uncomfortable and its low ceiling claustrophobic. It was high enoug
h to allow the four children and their mother to stand up straight, even to stretch upwards a little to exercise. But Otto’s father, who was tall, had to permanently stoop in order to move around. Conditions were at their most bearable during spring and autumn. In summer the cellar could become extremely stuffy, and in winter bitterly cold.
There were mattresses for each of them. Otto, who at nine years old was the youngest of the children, had the smallest space in a corner of the cellar. His three sisters slept in a line running along its narrow length to the wider space at the end where their parents slept. A small table and three chairs also stood in that corner.
Their new living arrangements seemed strange at first, but the children quickly adapted and in time their parents did, too. Their father, in particular, suffered from terrible bouts of claustrophobia during the early weeks, but he hid this from the others fairly well.
Before fleeing Vienna, and for a spell in Antwerp, Otto’s father had practised as a civil engineer. He was a stern man, taciturn, but given to moments of great tenderness towards his family. These would break like unexpected shafts of light through his rather oppressive persona. He had greying hair and a substantial moustache in the old-fashioned style. Otto’s mother, who was dark and petite, with thick and shining locks, had been a ballet dancer until suffering an injury some years before, after which she had become somewhat melancholy.
During the daytime, the children would be given improvised school lessons by their parents in the larger space with table and chairs that doubled as their sleeping area. They called it, half jokingly, ‘the living room’. Classes were held in a variety of subjects, including mathematics, geography, physics, biology and rudimentary English. They used writing materials and books that were left for them, whenever possible, outside the connecting door to the apartment of Mr and Mrs Wouters.
These sessions were conducted as formally as possible, but at a volume that was often little more than a whisper. This generated a strange atmosphere, which left Otto with the feeling that the knowledge he was gaining was somehow forbidden. Perhaps in part for that reason, he developed a great appetite for learning, especially in mathematics and the sciences. He would gladly have spent more time reading than was allowed by his parents, who were concerned about its possible effects upon his eyesight.
Twice a day, buckets containing fresh water for the washing of people and clothing were left outside the door for them to collect, along with modest supplies of food. Normally this consisted of black bread and a hard yellow cheese of indeterminate type. Sometimes they were also left items of clothing.
Otto’s sisters, kind-hearted girls with long black hair and large eyes, doted on their younger brother, often giving him their rations of cheese or bread. Their mother and father did the same, meaning there were certain days when Otto ate more than the rest of the family combined. This left him with feelings of intense guilt.
For obvious reasons, the most feared presence in the cellar was the large metal bucket that served as the family latrine. Its normal place of residence was a small recess in a corner. Once a day Otto’s father carried it over to the door, from where it was lifted out to be emptied by a benign and unseen hand.
In order for Otto to use the latrine at night, he had to crawl across the mattresses of his sisters, then carefully edge past his sleeping parents. In winter, when temperatures dropped below freezing, using the bucket could be a most uncomfortable experience. In an attempt to avoid this depressing prospect, Otto tried to ignore the aching in his bladder that had woken him each time. Instead, he tried to focus on drifting back to sleep. Normally he failed, and so resigned himself to tackling the human obstacle course that lay between his resting place and his destination. As the disorientated Otto plunged and scrambled across the line of mattresses, his sisters would curse and groan, if they had been asleep, or sometimes giggle, if they were already awake. Yet this drama took place quietly, almost silently, as they all knew that to make any kind of loud noise would be dangerous.
Like the smell from the latrine, fear was a constant presence in the cellar, although the family became highly accomplished at disguising it from Otto, who was not yet of an age to fully comprehend the circumstances in which they found themselves. There were moments when he clearly sensed something. His mother’s voice was naturally weak, but at times, when she sat at the table talking to his father, it became even more tremulous than usual. The occasional look that his father gave his mother also told Otto that mysterious issues were moving beneath the surface. His sisters, who were older and knew more than he, remained generally playful in his presence. But even they sometimes appeared a little pensive, as they gathered in a huddle on a mattress to whisper among themselves.
Despite the distraction of the daily lessons, life in the cellar was routine. Often the worst thing for the children was not so much the constant fear of discovery as the boredom of containment. For all of them, therefore, those hours away from studying were spent thinking of the courtyard above; awaiting the hour when they could go outside and stand once again in the fresh air.
Three sides of the courtyard were surrounded by the backs of tenement buildings – blank walls offering protection from prying eyes. The fourth side was overlooked by workshops that had once been used by local diamond-cutters, now replaced by unfamiliar faces. When these strangers had finished work for the day, the family would receive a special ‘knock from above’, telling them that the coast was now clear.
Each day, as they awaited this signal, Otto would sit on his mattress and watch the blade-thin shafts of light – specks of dust swirling in their midst – penetrate down into the gloom through the hatch that was the portal to those few short hours of bliss. He would feel a surge of nervous excitement whenever the knock on the wooden hatch came: two firm blows from a hobnailed boot, and then three more at a faster rhythm. After waiting a few minutes, his father would go first, pushing up the cover and clambering out, before turning to help up the children in their turn. Their mother, a nervous woman, usually preferred to stay in the relative safety of the cellar rather than join the others outside, fretting until they returned safely to their hiding place.
During those hours outside in what seemed like the harsh light of the courtyard, Otto sometimes played with his sisters, who had developed between them a range of improvised games in which they didn’t need to make a single sound. There were ‘clapping’ games without any clapping, ‘singing’ games that were extravagant mimes, and games of ‘catch’ that involved no ball. At other times, Otto walked silently beside his father, who paced endlessly around the perimeter, his hands behind his back and his long head bowed. At every turn, almost without fail, his father’s moustache would twitch; a restless antenna, transmitting to Otto his thoughts.
At other times, when Otto was in a more solitary mood, he would stand or sit in a corner, his back resting against the cool brown wall, and study the sky above him. Sometimes he would sketch the view in a notepad, but more often he would settle on contemplation. Only the narrowest of views was visible, of that famously wide Flemish sky, closed in above them between the encircling walls of the tenements. Yet month after month Otto studied in all weathers that small patch of sky: the soft cloud-brushes against the intense blue; the thick and glowing layers of grey; the flakes of snow that tumbled from on high in swirling, chaotic patterns – seeming to take an eternity to reach his face.
While looking upwards, he thought of the skies he had seen in the great landscape paintings his father had shown to him; at one time, in leather-bound books in their Viennese apartment, nowadays by the light of candles in the cellar, in pages torn from old magazines. Some of those paintings were kept here in Belgium, in the fine-art museum in Brussels. His father had promised that one day, when it was safe to venture outside once again, he would take them all.
During summer, they spent two or three hours each evening in the courtyard, fewer in winter. As the afternoons advanced, Otto would watch the shadows from the surroundin
g tenements lengthen across the courtyard, submerging the light until only a small patch of it remained in a corner by a wall. His sisters would gather in that corner, where they stood and sunned themselves with arms outstretched, or played within the glowing circle, their movements increasingly curtailed by its gradual closing. Until suddenly, almost unnoticed, the scrap of light would be extinguished altogether, casting the last of the courtyard into dusk. Their father, stepping forward in the blueness, would signal with his hand that it was time for them to go, and they would gather in a silent group around the hatch.
At night, Otto lay staring at the red-brick ceiling. It flickered dimly in the candlelight from the corner, where his mother and father sat talking at the table. Their words were indecipherable from this distance, and so Otto would let the low comforting hum of their voices wash over him, his thoughts meandering far beyond the ceiling at which he gazed. Sometimes he would think back to Vienna, although his memories of the city were already hazy. He retained no specific incidents, only vague and abstract impressions, removed from any context. He remembered the clanging of a tram bell, the smell of horse manure and rooms with tall mirrors reflecting layers of chocolate cake. There was also the leather couch in his old home, mottled and smelling of antique books, with a texture that would sink softly against his face as he lay and listened to his mother read him stories. Otto liked to recreate that texture in his mind as he pressed his face into the rough hessian sack that acted as a pillow and often left chequerboard patterns on his cheek in the morning.
Sometimes he would think of Antwerp, which lay somewhere unseen beyond the roof of the cellar. The wide River Scheldt he could still picture, black and swaying hypnotically against the quays. And he could taste the pickled herrings that his mother bought at market, dropping them laughing into his mouth while he grunted and clapped his hands as if he were a seal pup. He also liked to think about the trip they had taken to see the tulip fields at Lisse in the Netherlands, back before the outbreak of war. He remembered riding between the long strips of flowers on the back of his father’s bicycle. The individual heads had blurred into thick streaks of pigment, as pure as any squeezed from a paint tube. A long line of pink, and then a long line of red; yellow, orange, purple – each one in turn becoming Otto’s favourite. Later, they climbed up to a platform on the edge of a field, and saw the bright colours run in thick bands toward the steeples on the horizon; a landscape as painted by a child.