by Linda Grant
Stephen’s father was struggling to hear the conversation. Two of the voices, English-accented, were unfamiliar and his slight deafness could not always register what they said. He knew they were talking about the terrorists, but the ghost-woman, who was not a ghost but a friend of Andrea’s, had a mouth which went up and down like the opening and closing of a pair of shears and gornisht mit gornisht came out. Nothing, salted and sweetened with nothing.
“Can we talk about something else?” said Stephen. “We have, after all, just got back from Poland.”
“How did you feel about returning, after all this time?” Andrea said, laying a hand on Si’s arm in the sleeve of a pale blue sweatshirt, a garment he had begun wearing after his retirement. “Was it traumatic, or a happy experience?”
“I saw my house, it was still there after all this time, but not in good condition, the Poles haven’t looked after it.”
“And did you find out what happened to your parents and sister?”
“I don’t need to go to Poland to find that out.”
“Was it not upsetting, being in the town of your childhood, walking the streets you walked when you were with your mother and father?” To Andrea, Si’s case was fascinating. What childhood could have induced such life-affecting trauma as his?
“I don’t get upset. Life is too short for tears. And what should I be upset for? I lost my wife, that was a tragedy, I thought I would go first, but these tragedies are normal. We live with them. I have nothing to complain about.”
“Warsaw was disappointing,” Stephen said. “We’d planned to spend longer, but there didn’t seem to be anything much to see.”
“My parents were from the sticks,” said Si. “I realize that now. To them, Vashar was Paris and Rome. Maybe before the war it was beautiful, but now… a really ugly place with a horrible monument to Stalin. And no beach. That’s the thing I forget about Vashar. I couldn’t stand that.”
They ate ice cream, and went into the sitting room to watch the ten o’clock news on TV.
“We start tomorrow,” Andrea said to Grace. “Please be in my office at eleven a.m.”
The day finally ended, the sun setting on the garden and the trees, the geraniums gradually losing their color, turning black in the twilight. Cats passed and repassed across the lawn, hunting mice in the shadows. It was only two weeks since the solstice, and summer seemed still like the normal condition they would always be in.
Sunday Lunch
Max knew. He was the only one she had ever confided in about having a married lover.
“It’s him, isn’t it?” he said, looking at the photograph on her living room wall of the field hospital triptych.
“Yes, that’s him.”
Seeing Janek interviewed from his hospital bed on the news, Max got in his car and drove across London to his sister’s flat. She had always justified her situation to him, she would batter him with words. But looking at her now, sitting on the white sofa, the desolation of her face staring out onto the street, he wished he had not been so malleable. He was the younger child, the little brother, and he had not manned up to the situation. He had been too placid, he should have forced her to understand that she was making for herself a grave of her life. He should have said, he should have said, and he hadn’t. Now she was going to make a shrine of the mantelpiece with Janek’s picture above it, she was going to turn the flat into a mausoleum.
He didn’t know anything about sorrow, he had not yet felt it. He fell in love aged twenty-two and the girl he had chosen had loved him back. He learned sign language to talk to her with his dextrous hands, he practiced words of love with his fingers. Cheryl was an accountant, she spent all day with her fascinating numbers and in the evening she went out dancing, tap and modern ballet, and he met her at a wedding where he pulled scarlet ribbon after scarlet ribbon from her high-heeled shoes, bending down at her feet. All the happiness their parents had wished for their children had come to him, in compensation for what they thought of as his late start in life, but which he considered a gift. The reward of silence, dark, mysterious, profound. He heard things Cheryl did not: birdsong, wind in the trees, waves, and he tried to make hand-words for her to express them.
And here was his sister, his noisy, confident sister, saying, “I feel like I am in a black hole. I’m buried alive. Am I going to have to spend the rest of my life in solitary confinement?”
They were expected for Sunday lunch in Islington to see their grandfather and listen to their father tell them of their origins, of the small town on the plain with a river running through it, in Poland. The idea was that they would find out who they were, but Max knew exactly who he was. His passport was just a travel document.
Max did not get on with his father, he had no opinion of his grandfather. He was oppressed by loud voices and his father shouted. “He doesn’t shout,” said his mother, “he just enunciates clearly. He says the British mumble and swallow our words.” He saw his father’s face bearing down on him with its nostril hairs, shouting, “You gotta have an education!”
“We will have to both go,” he said to Marianne. “I don’t think there’s any way we can get out of it, but I will try and do most of the talking.”
He sat down on the sofa next to her and held her in his arms. It was the first time he had ever done this. She felt all kinds of strange objects beneath his clothes, it was second nature to him to keep magic things about his person. A few cards nestled in the small of his back and coins dropped from the hem of his jeans.
“I tried to go to the hospital, I got into his room for a minute but he told me to go away. It was like I was one of the bombers, he was scared of me, he was scared Lucy would come back, she’d just stepped out to go to the bathroom and I’d snuck in when he was on his own and the nurses weren’t guarding him, and he looked at me, his face stricken, and he said, ‘Marianne, you have to go.’ Why? Why was he so cruel to me? I don’t understand.”
He held her tighter but she floated out of her body and through the open window. She felt like a balloon let loose from its moorings, with nowhere special to go.
Andrea had laid the table in the conservatory. Grace was already there, standing with a drink, looking out at the garden. She looked as old as time, Max thought, the fabulous cheekbones remained but the skin was mottled and brown spots were already on the backs of her hands. He noticed she swayed slightly, as if unable to keep her balance, but still she remained standing, on her feet.
“Hello, Max,” she said. “Long time no see. Where’s your wife?”
“At home.”
“Can’t stand enforced family occasions, I suppose.”
“Only Mum and Marianne have sign language and neither of them are very good at it. It’s quite boring for her having to wait for me to translate.”
“And then what you would translate would be inconsequential anyway.”
Max tended to agree, but he couldn’t see the point of Grace. She had not excited him as a child with her comings and goings, and he thought there was nothing romantic about her life. Her opinions, her experiences bored him. He wasn’t interested in politics, the bombings were just random acts of sadism, incomprehensible, they were not worth the effort of investigating their cause. They did not matter.
Andrea came out into the conservatory. Stephen and Si were in the study preparing a slide show on the laptop of the visit to Poland.
“He’s very much on the ball,” she said. “He doesn’t remember what he doesn’t want to remember, but that’s just a tactic, I suppose.”
Grace did not care about the visit to Poland. She was thinking about herself, and what had befallen her, about the Algerian who had finally become so unpleasant that she had been forced out of her own flat: she paid the rent, the furniture was hers, the scraps of jewelry, the pictures on the walls amassed over all the years she had had a base in Paris. He had driven her onto the streets with a knife, and she had spent two nights in a homeless hostel. She rang everyone she knew but no one would
take her in. They were all fucks, total fucks, these people you thought were your friends. She despised them, the so-called artists, the so-called intellectuals.
She was a down-and-out standing with a drink in her hand looking out at a garden which suddenly appeared to resemble closely the garden her mother had made in Kent. Andrea had never had any hint of imagination, she just copied.
But Andrea was the final default position, she had taken Grace in. She had defied her husband. Because they had once lain down together on the college lawn, aged nineteen, and looked up at the sky and told each other all their secrets. And everything was innocent and their day was only just beginning. All would turn out well, and they would do great things. Very great things, or that was what Grace had thought of herself; Andrea had thought she had already achieved the limits of her greatness by being there, a student at Oxford. But I have done nothing, Grace thought, apart from exactly what I wanted to do.
Marianne arrived, white and silent.
What is wrong with her? thought Andrea. Something has happened.
Stephen set up his laptop and they sat round it, looking at the photographs of the market square, the Latvian folk dancers, the apricot-colored house where Si was born, the distant wheat fields, the cemetery, the plaque marking the fate of the Jewish population, the flour mills, the concrete hotel, the road back to Warsaw, the site of the ghetto, now interred under blocks of flats, the synagogue. They were bad photographs, indifferently shot on a cheap camera. Marianne observed that there were generally no people in them. Neither her father nor her grandfather were posed by any site of interest. The only inhabitants were passersby who could not be removed from the shot. The pictures were evidence: that they had been to Poland. At the airport they had bought a bottle of kosher vodka.
And what did any of it mean? Simon Newman, displaced in time and space from his natural environment, the house in Los Angeles, sat watching as the pictures flickered, one to the next. “That’s right,” he said, nodding. “That’s what it looked like.”
Max, who had promised he would do the talking, had no idea what to say. His grandfather was remote, strange, a relic of his father’s paternity. The two of them looked so alike, were so alike, he thought.
“Come and sit next to me, Marianne, darling,” said Si. “It’s been so long since I saw you.”
He wished she had turned out pretty. The genes of her two paternal grandparents ran strongly in her, and they had not combined the way they had in her aunts, who had briefly blazed as beauties. There was something heavy about this girl. She carried a weight around in her soul. Something wrong.
She laid her lips on his cheek, he smelt of soap and fragments of the previous night’s risotto. A line of startling teeth lay across his mouth, white and even and plastic.
He tried to think of something to say to her. She was a woman of the world, that he knew.
“So tell me, young lady, who do you think are the terrorists? I guess you met plenty of terrorists in your time?”
“Not really terrorists, they’re usually dead by the time you find that out. But I met plenty of warlords.” The words in her mouth were formed of lead letters like old-fashioned type.
“What’s a warlord?”
“Someone with an armed militia.”
“Doesn’t sound like a nice gentleman at all.”
“Not really, no.”
“But here in London. Warlords?”
“Do you mean are there warlords here?”
“No, I mean, who do you think is responsible?”
“I don’t think responsibility came into it.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Never mind, it’s a play on words.”
“No one knows who planted the bombs, Grandpa,” said Max, leaning across the tablecloth. “We have to wait and see.”
“It’s probably al-Qaeda,” said Stephen.
Grace snorted. ‘What is al-Qaeda? Does it really exist?”
“Here is the expert,” Si said. “Marianne, what do you think?”
“Have you ever met anyone from al-Qaeda?” said Grace.
“I’ve met people who claimed to support them.” They had no idea how much she hated al-Qaeda now, having never previously given them much thought.
“See? This is a girl who knows what she’s talking about.”
“I’ve met people who believe in God, but that doesn’t mean he exists.”
“What are you talking about, Grace?” said Andrea.
“Al-Qaeda is a convenient free-floating concept which attaches itself to actions and ideas we don’t like and to people who want to feel powerful, that there’s something bigger than themselves which can challenge known reality.”
How long can you hold your breath before you fall unconscious and your breathing starts without you? Marianne thought. You cannot kill yourself this way by your own volition. And Max is no use, you didn’t think he would be.
“Marianne?” said Andrea.
“What?”
“Do you think what she says is true?”
“I don’t know.”
“I thought I was going to get an education,” Si said. “I thought the girl was going to explain everything.”
“Don’t nag her,” said Andrea, “she’s not a politician, she just photographs what she sees.”
“Look,” said Stephen, “let’s not beat about the bush. These people are nihilists, they believe in nothing but some black hole of destiny.”
“I thought we had established that they believe in al-Qaeda?” said Grace.
“Which you just said is nothing. Doesn’t exist.”
“To believe in something which doesn’t exist isn’t the point, the belief is the point.”
“You get this from the Algerian, don’t you, who took everything you had.”
If you can relax people you can produce an elephant, Ralph had once told Max. But perhaps producing an elephant would relax them.
“When we’ve eaten,” he said, “I thought I’d do a show.”
“But you never do a show for us,” said Andrea.
“Well, it’s in honor of Grandpa.”
“That would be wonderful.”
“I saw David Blaine many times on TV,” said Si. “The man is a genius. If you are half as good.”
“I’m not even a tenth as good, but I’ll do my best to please you.”
After the show, he told them that Cheryl was pregnant. It seemed disrespectful to flout her wishes, that it was bad luck to say you were pregnant until the third month, but the sight of his father’s face, as he said, “So you’re going to be a grandfather, Dad,” gave him a satisfaction he rarely felt in his dealings with Stephen.
And Marianne was forgotten, except by Grace, who saw that she too was trying to fly away from the table and out of the room, and out out out of there.
Stopwatch
If Marianne lays her watch on the table and waits until the second hand reaches its highest point on the dial, and then, concentrating, carefully follows the steel rotating round until it almost reaches the quarter—then fourteen seconds passes fast. But she has to try it five or six times before she can focus her eyes to fix on the fourteenth second. Eventually, she realizes that the only way to do it is with the stopwatch timer on her mobile phone and over the course of a morning she comes to develop some understanding of fourteen seconds.
If, she thinks, you were on a descending plane and the pilot announced that you would be landing in fourteen seconds, your brain would alert you to an event that was happening right now, the wheels would have hit the runway before you really registered the passage of time. But if you were an athlete, watching the retreating back of your opponent taking the final strides to the finishing tape, it would be another matter, the fourteen seconds would pass agonizingly slowly as you willed yourself to catch up (though it might depend on the duration of the event—how long does it take to run a mile these days?). So time is not fixed, it’s all relative, just as her father had explain
ed to her. Time has its own agenda and operates in its own interests.
Sitting at the kitchen table waiting for fourteen seconds to pass, she is free to let her imagination roam. For as long as she can remember her father has been a hypochondriac, detecting in every symptom the announcement of a fatal illness. A headache could be a brain tumor, heartburn is obviously a heart attack. Pain is magnified by his fear of what exactly the pain means. Pain itself, as a pure experience, is something different from the anxiety attached to it. But Marianne is investigating pain alone, unaffected by emotions. Pain for, say, fourteen seconds.
So, sitting in the kitchen, she takes a pair of pliers and clamps her little finger in them. She tries to hold on for as long as she can, but she finds she is able to bear a metal ache with reasonable fortitude for fourteen seconds, so next she tries putting her finger in the flame of the gas grill and doesn’t last for even three seconds before involuntarily pulling her hand away in a reflex reaction that someone experiencing real pain would be denied. But that was pain’s point: it was a signal, to let you know something was wrong. Her father had once told her about a girl born with no sense of pain: she was a mass of scar tissue.
But how does anyone know it was fourteen seconds? It might have been two hours and this is intolerable because she cannot imagine that length of time. In two hours anything can happen.
Shoes
Meeting his father at the plane in Warsaw, Stephen had been so anxious that Si would disembark alive, in good health and not mentally disturbed at the sudden realization of what returning to Europe meant, he had not noticed his father’s shoes. Failed to take them in until father and son were walking through the square with the folk dancers, looking around at the video rental shop and the minimarket.
“Dad, what are you wearing?”
“These? They’re all the rage.”
Orange plastic clogs with holes in them? And since when did his father wear anything that was all the rage?