Hannah & Emil

by Belinda Castles

  I sat next to him on the bed. He took my hands. His were as small as mine. He has been ancient in my memory but he was younger than I am now. How long has he been like this, I wondered, and no one thought to fetch me? I looked at Geoffrey looking at his father, recalled my desertion, and retracted the thought before it was expressed.

  ‘Now, Hannah. No tears. Not my bravest girl.’ He patted my hand, turned to Geoffrey, who was peering now with a slightly appalled expression at the other patients, who were, if sentient, watching our little tableau unfold. ‘Do you see this, Geoffrey? My Hannah has come home.’

  Geoffrey brought his attention back to us, nodded vaguely. He gave me a quizzical glance, as though to say, what will you do now?

  ‘Papa,’ I said. ‘I did not know—’

  ‘Hush, Hannah.’ His voice was so soft, where it had always boomed, too loud, too foreign. ‘You think I would prevent my Hannah and her grand career? The child of mine at Oxford!’

  ‘It was not the university.’

  ‘Hush, hush. You are living the life, my little. Speak to me something in French. I will remember.’

  I took a quick look at Geoffrey. So far as I knew he did not understand French. ‘Mon cher Papa,’ I whispered. ‘Je suis désolée que j’ai vous départis. Vous et Maman.’

  A little smile in his grey face, another cough.

  ‘N’oubli jamais ta mére, ma petite,’ he said, and it was so strange to hear him speak in this language, though he had several. It was as though we were new people.

  ‘Now,’ he said to Geoffrey, ‘take my little one home to see her mother. It is time for my nap.’

  His eyes were closed before I was on my feet. I touched his sleeve, and Geoffrey stooped to pick up my case, and we walked past the row of beds, the men with their big harried eyes watching us depart.

  We walked across the lovely heath, through its solemn corridors, a hundred shades of living green, towards our pond. As we approached it I broke our silence to say, ‘Do you remember the strike?’ He nodded. ‘I was here,’ I said. ‘By the pond. I heard the miners’ choir sing to raise money for the families of the striking men. It was just before I went away to college. I saw you looking out from your window.’

  He nodded again.

  ‘Did you see me, Geoffrey?’

  ‘Yes, Hannah. I did.’

  ‘Then why did you not come down to talk to me?’

  ‘You looked as though you were crying. I thought it—private.’

  ‘Oh. It was the choir. Did you hear them singing “Bread of Heaven”? I had never heard anything like it. It was—I can’t explain. It was being poor, and I heard Wales, somehow, in the men’s voices. And I was standing beneath our house and not able to come in. Did you hear them?’

  ‘Yes. I wrote about them for my paper.’

  I laughed. ‘The Hampstead Herald? Did it take on a political bent?’

  ‘I worked for the real Herald by then.’

  I looked at him. ‘No!’ I put a hand to my heart. We were just reaching the foreshore. I stopped before the little gap in the hedge that took us through to our French windows. ‘You work for the Daily Herald? You are a writer?’ I realised that I had assumed he was a student without having bothered to ask.

  ‘Why so surprised?’

  ‘For the Labour Party?’

  ‘I do some pieces for Pankhurst’s commie rag too, under a pseudonym. Don’t tell anyone. I’d lose my job.’

  ‘I am astounded.’

  He laughed, and we went in, and Benjamin was tearing down the stairs, all his baby fat gone, as lean and eager still as a puppy, and wearing, quite miraculously, an RAF uniform. What a handsome young man he was. I was, again, astonished by a brother of mine. His black hair gleamed.

  I did not see Mother until the next day, when she returned from the hospital at dawn. I was in my old bed, my room just the same as it always was, except Geoffrey had stolen my desk, and when I woke she was sitting beside me in the chair in the horrible void the desk had left. She did not say a word, but as my eyes lit upon her face, older now, everyone older, her chin crumpled for a moment and I knew that Father had gone, and I wept on her chest until the boys came in, and we all sat together on my bed holding hands until the sun came into my room. I had wasted time so irretrievably, the last of Father’s years, and yet neither my mother nor my brothers, not at that moment nor any after, ever uttered a word of reproach.

  I slipped back into my London life of Labour Party meetings and haunting the bookshop at South Hill, wishing I had a source of income that would allow me to buy everything I laid my hands on. Some evenings I lounged on Geoffrey’s bed while he sat at my little black desk over a shiny typewriter with silver keys. He curled himself around it, as though he were drawing it into the workings of his body. His shoulder blades stretched the fabric of his tweed jacket and he smoked, peered out the window or fixed his gaze on me, without I think really seeing me, pecking out words furiously, reading them back to me after a couple of paragraphs. He wrote about the rising unemployed, the Wobblies in America, fascism in Germany and Italy. He had friends in these places, but he also travelled widely. He referred to Pankhurst by her first name: Emmeline. He had become something quite incredible while I had been looking in a different direction. I coughed in the smoke from his endless cigarettes and said, ‘Yes, bravo. Very stirring!’ at intervals. Occasionally I might add a suggestion of my own, which he would accept and include, nodding seriously, and I had to still the little leap in my chest.

  Benjamin came home from base some weekends and everything was cheerier when he was about the place. He palmed me the odd shilling—to buy hats, he said, but I bought books and eventually a pair of shoes. I was aware of preparation, of stocking provisions for my next adventure. One Saturday I went with them both to the pub. At the southern corner of the heath was a smoky, dark little tavern filled with working men and a couple of tarted-up women who looked glamorous from a distance but old and heavily set, mannish, up close. We sat with half-pints of ale in front of us and told stories about Father, did his voice—Benjamin was spot on: Children! There are Christians at the door! Come, come! Convert them!—and banged the table until eventually we looked up to find the landlord standing over us. ‘You oughtn’t to have this young lady here. Is she even twenty-one?’

  ‘She’s no lady,’ Benjamin snorted. ‘She’s our sister!’

  Geoffrey stood, took my elbow.

  ‘You’re a rude man,’ I said, shaking my gloves at the landlord. ‘For your information, I am twenty-three and a woman of the world!’ I slipped a little on the stair on the way out. I should not have begun on that second glass of beer.

  I was desperate to be away again. I felt I had been snapped back like a piece of rubber from the life that beckoned me. I wrote letters constantly to old friends from Ruskin, to my contacts in the Labour Party who had begun to spread about the country, to anyone I could think of that might know of an opportunity for me to travel and work, to restart my faltered career. It was thrilling to watch Geoffrey at his life of the newspaperman, but searing too, to witness him pounding out his stories at my very own desk.

  One morning in August I received a letter from a friend still in Oxford, a lovely Scot, Annabel McCloud. Mother brought it into my room with my cup of tea. I had attended economics lectures with Annabel, we girls sitting to one side, away from the young men, but nevertheless in the theatre, allowed to listen, and to notate, and to learn. Here is her letter, in schoolgirl handwriting, tucked in my journal for the ninth of August, 1930. Dearest Hannah, it begins. You have been much on my mind lately. I have a proposition to put to you . . .

  It seemed that she had won a travelling scholarship from Ruskin which presented the princely sum of fifteen pounds to a woman for the purposes of travel and study ‘with a particular focus on the education of working people’. Oh, I thought. Such a thing was made for me! Her mother was ill, she went on to explain, and Annabel could not now take it up. The college would be happy to give it
to me, as its purposes were so close to my own frequently expressed wishes. The scholarship must be for travel to Berlin, as Annabel had already made arrangements there. They would house me with workers, and I must attend classes at a workers’ college for a period when I arrived, and after that I was free to fulfil the terms of the scholarship as I saw fit. Annabel could not know the course she set me on. I am very glad I still have her letter, and indeed that her mother was ill, though I hope of course that she recovered quickly and completely and carried on robustly into old age.

  I ran into Geoffrey’s room, letter clutched in hand. He was asleep, having worked late on a piece, laid out fully clothed atop the blankets. I shook the letter over his face. ‘I am to go to Berlin! I am to attend a workers’ college there! Geoffrey, wake up!’

  He peered blearily at me. ‘Well, write to me then,’ he said. ‘I’ll do a piece on it.’

  All there was for me to do now was to learn German, which I set about doing over the next month with some assistance from Geoffrey and a dictionary I found at the library. I confess here to the only theft of my life. When it was time to travel, I did not return that dictionary, packing it in my case with my new shoes, and it fell apart, thumbed to death, before the 1930s were half finished. Later, in 1940, when I returned briefly to Mother’s house for the most desperate of reasons, something possessed me to set aside two shillings of my sorry little heap of savings, place them in an envelope and slip it into the returned-books slot.

  But I am running ahead. My grand departure. As my train pulled out of Liverpool Street, Benjamin waving me off in his uniform, a plump girl opposite me eyeing me with clear envy, my notebook was already open on my lap. I caught sight of my pulse, visible and strong. I watched the miniature heart beat at my wrist, my secret hope: that the nib of my pen would break open the skin of the world.

  I rolled into Berlin as the bright morning spread across the fields and forests. I had travelled so far east it seemed that if I continued just a little further I would reach the land of Father and all my grandparents. I peered into the dark pine trees gathered at the edge of the track, unnerved by the black space between them, so unlike the welcoming shade of an English wood.

  I changed trains for Wedding, and as I stepped onto the train I saw a trio of girls not yet twenty sitting opposite, leaning back in their seats, surreptitiously eying off a cluster of SA at the other end of the carriage. I took a seat close by and watched them murmur to one another. One offered me a shy smile. I beamed in return, happy to be acknowledged by a Berliner. The girls wore blouses open at the neck and their décolletages were tanned and shining in the late summer heat. They all wore bobs, loose locks artfully veiling their eyes.

  I followed their gaze to the five or so young men, who were affecting not to notice their admirers, talking a little too loudly, one giving another a playful punch. There was a ban on political uniforms at the time, but they all wore identical white shirts and grey trousers with highly polished boots and shaven hair, and looked around themselves with that confidence of men in a gang. They stood without holding onto the leather straps above them as the train juddered and sped around bends and halted jerkily at the stations. Their muscular legs, outlined in their fitted trousers, held their shifting ground while all around them women struggled with prams, men made their way uncomplainingly by them with briefcases and children gambolled down the aisle, treating them as a large piece of furniture or a wall around which you must unthinkingly make your way.

  After a time one of them nodded at his companions, separated from the pack and approached the girls, walking towards me down the aisle. I stared, invisible, his attention firmly elsewhere. As he drew level with me I smelled his cologne, saw how his eyebrows almost met at the centre of his brow, heard the quick sigh as he screwed up his courage to talk to the girls. He was very close to me. If he were to sit down here, in this spare seat before me, I believed I might with enough time persuade him to change his mind about what he was, about the purpose of his life. That was my view of politics in those days: that if one only had the chance to explain things all sorts of progress would be made. It has hardened somewhat since then.

  As he reached the girls the door opened and I saw that it was Wedding station and jumped to my feet, lugging my case past the girls as they gazed up at the boy, waiting to see what he would say, to whom he would say it. I alighted, case bumping my legs. The platform was filled with men who looked at the ground, dressed in old blue shirts, frayed trousers, washed-out caps. There were women, as poorly dressed as the men and old before their time. Young mothers behind prams missing teeth, no colour in their clothes or in their hair. As I passed out of the station there were a few men shuffling about, and as I drew closer a thin, stooped man with a matted beard stopped in front of me and stretched cupped, shaking fingers towards my chin as though he were going to stroke it.

  ‘Entschuldigung,’ I said, as clearly as I could. ‘Ich habe keine.’

  He passed by, very close, his breath rotten, his coat giving off the reek of old tobacco. I thought at once of the reichsmarks pinned to the lining of my case and blushed, walking quickly on.

  I found the address without trouble, a tired-looking tenement with strips of fabric strung up inside the windows. I set down my case and looked up at the building. The street was empty, the sun hot on my back. I was wearing my coat, as it would not fit in my case with the books I had accumulated over the summer. It was very still in this narrow street, the air close with drains and refuse. For a moment I considered returning home to my pleasant room and Mother’s cooking and the teasing of my brothers. I could find work as the secretary to an MP. An image of Geoffrey at my desk appeared to me: belting away at the keys, shoving the return, a cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth. I lifted a hand and pressed the doorbell. I heard it ring loudly inside and wondered whom I might be disturbing, whether the family was actually expecting me. I knew they were to be paid a little by Ruskin for my board and wondered whether I might already be a source of resentment, a difficult necessity, in a struggling household.

  It was too late to worry about it now, the door was being drawn away from me and a head appeared low, as low as mine, and then there was a woman as small as me with a lovely oval face, hair scraped back, smiling warmly. She was in her thirties, with a wide mouth, bright teeth, green eyes with kind wrinkles at the corners. What a thing it is to be in another country, reliant on strangers, and for one of them to be pleased to see you. And what might have become of such people? Those apartments are not standing now. The entire street was demolished by British bombs during the war.

  The woman reached a hand around the door and took my wrist, gave it a little tug. ‘Fräulein Jacob?’

  ‘Meinen Koffer,’ I said. Extricating myself from her gentle grip, I retreated onto the bright step for my suitcase. She waited for me, smiling in the dim light, hands folded in front of her apron. ‘Kommen sie bitte.’ She led me down half a flight of stone stairs where it was darker still and the cold of the stone even in summer pressed itself against the soles of my shoes.

  She unlocked the door before us, took my case from me, and stood aside to let me enter. I was in a gloomy room about the size of our kitchen at home with one high, small window, barely illuminating a space crammed with a narrow bed, a cot across its foot, a tiny kitchen bench with a stove and cupboard, a bathing stand, a laundry rack hanging from the ceiling and a dining table which, though small, was too big for the area allotted to it. A man and toddler of indeterminate gender sat at the table, plates in front of them, looking at me, or at least the dark shape I made in the doorway. After a few long seconds I gathered myself to say hello, and to move forward into the room to allow my hostess to come in behind me, though this meant pressing myself up against a dining chair and looming over the room’s inhabitants.

  The toddler, who it seemed was a girl, laughed at me as soon as I spoke. My accent was suspect even to an infant. It must be remembered I had taught myself German quickly, and
largely from a dictionary. And then the woman was settling me down at the table and asking me about my journey, and the man was standing to offer me food from the bench, and I did my best to smile at the baby.

  Scraps of bread and a jug of milk were pushed towards me. The woman, who had by now introduced herself as Frau Gunther—Anna—offered me a plate and a mug. I drew them towards me uncertainly. My stomach was threatening to growl. I shifted position in my seat to quell it. I had packed no food for the last part of the train journey, not having the experience to plan ahead, but there was so little here that I wondered what this child would have for lunch if I took this bread now. They watched me, waiting, and so I took a small slice and bit it, nodded, smiling: my first taste of sourdough. It had a chewy, tasty rind.

  The man stood from the table. He was more serious than his wife but similarly handsome and, like her, little. He was thin but straight-backed, with a head of thick black hair, greying at the temples. It was cool in this room cut out of the earth but the smell of bodies made me feel hot and I thought that perhaps the child was sitting in a wet nappy.

  Herr Gunther smiled shyly as I chewed my bread as slowly as I could manage, and moved to the end of the table, turning his back to me. Frau Gunther fed the child some sort of mush from a wooden spoon scraped around a cooking pot. A movement beyond her caught my horrified attention for a second. The man was removing his shirt. I fixed my eyes upon my food, the baby, the woman, who did not act as though anything was amiss. I looked at my last square of bread, which I had been trying to eat slowly but which had somehow almost disappeared, and put it into my mouth.

  The man was washing at the stand, sluicing water under his arms, over his shoulders, through his hair. He shook his head, whinnied quietly at the cold. The woman leaned over the child, intent on packing in the last few spoonfuls. I swallowed down my food and glanced very quickly towards the other end of the table. I had not after all seen the back of a male adult before. The men in shirt sleeves rowing at Oxford, forearms pink and shining in the sun, backs pressed against thin cotton, sunbathers at Brighton in their bathing suits, but never the naked spine, its ripples, the shipwreck of the ribcage, the muscles of the shoulder blades, together in a man’s body. All this I absorbed in a brief moment. A crumb caught in my throat and I tried not to cough. My plate clear, I smiled at the woman fearfully, as she was looking at me, waiting perhaps for me to speak, to talk of my plans.