I had run down a bricked-off lane. What I really wanted to ask him was: What on earth happened to your shoes? Instead, I picked over my omelette, and wondered what could with decorum be extracted from Rupert tomorrow.
From the other side of the table there was a repeated, rapid movement. I cast my eyes at his plate for a moment. His fork was going like the shovel of a navvy at a ditch that was filling with mud even as he dug. He had just about cleared his plate, while my own was still more or less full. He laid down his fork and pulled a packet of cigarettes from his shirt pocket. I pretended not to notice that he had eaten his meal like a starving wretch and continued with my own.
There was money in my pocket. Rupert had pressed a note into my palm as we left the office and there was plenty left from the shoes. Emil had chosen the cheapest, though I had told him that he should choose according to comfort. The clerk had also provided socks. I busied myself with some gloves by the window then. In any case, I had money for our meal, so I paid, and we left our table ready to make our way to the demonstration.
As I weaved my way through the other diners I sensed him behind me, and did my best not to hurry—or as Mother might have put it, charge like a baby elephant—or stumble, or to appear ruffled in any way. He was quite close; once I felt his cool breath on my neck where the skin was bare beneath my clipped bob.
In the streets around the Grand Place workers were gathering. The narrow cobbled lanes were filling with men and women and banners floated overhead, the red silk billowing in the spring breeze. Emil scowled a little into the faces of those around us. It was quite crowded in the lane and as we edged towards the square his elbow brushed frequently against my arm.
The mild chaos, the cheery jostling as the crowd squeezed towards the square, seemed nothing more than a slightly boisterous market night in comparison to my time in Berlin. The barely contained fever of that city lurched in me every time I heard a cheer or the sound of a motor revving. These medieval lanes, filled with the smell of melting chocolate and ladies’ perfume, occupied a world in which there was no such person as Adolf Hitler, or the dark-uniformed SS in their sleek motorcars, or burly SA forever hanging about the streets, searching out some commotion.
We shuffled into the back of the square. It was my French-speaking mining delegate at the podium, as I had known it would be. He was speaking about the dreadful conditions in which the men worked, to which I now felt I could enthusiastically attest. I peered sideways to see what Herr Becker made of this. Perhaps the never-ending horror of the miners’ working conditions seemed beside the point to this German, whom I was beginning to believe had experienced equivalent horrors. Yet he stood patiently, keeping close. The Flemish speaker took the stage and the crowd crumbled at its edges. Air moved among us again. Now his attention seemed to harden. I saw that he understood this language, whereas the speech in French had merely washed over him. Eventually I felt his hand grip my upper arm lightly, his breath pass across my ear: ‘Come, he repeats himself.’ I did not know Flemish, and was happy enough to move on, though I feared this might be the end of our evening.
We edged free of the mass at the back of the square. Out here, beyond the press of demonstrators, a breeze passed over my bare arms. There had been no time to go home and fetch a cardigan before dinner. I could not help but smile. It was one of those moments in which you are fully aware of where you are, and where you have come from, and for a second or two take full possession of the delicious improbability of your life.
‘Excuse me,’ he said, a finger on my forearm. ‘I have no currency, Miss Jacob. But I will take you to a café, please. Perhaps we can drink one brandy for an hour.’
‘We’ll make it last,’ I said with a laugh. Even my laugh, I remember, was circumspect, as though I should not frighten him with extreme emotions. ‘It would be my pleasure.’
‘One day, I will repay you.’
We found a round metal table whose legs creaked against the sloping cobblestones every time one set down a drink too firmly, which he did every few seconds, between sips, for all his talk of one brandy in an hour. He was nearing the end of his third, while I was still on my first, letting its fire warm me as my arms grew cool in the dusk and the cheerful demonstrators disappeared from the steep lane. We talked of the novels of Conrad, whom he had read at sea. He did not once lapse into German, though I offered to speak it several times, and so when he attempted to explain what he liked about Conrad he had to say it simply, in his limited vocabulary. ‘He is always the foreigner.’
‘Stranger?’ I ventured.
‘Yes, that’s right, stranger also. Foreigner.’
As I came to the end of my brandy, swishing the last viscous drop in my glass, I found the nerve once more to regard his handsome face without looking away. His features had relaxed. I saw that I had distracted him from his troubles and dreaded the moment that he would notice it was dark, that I was shivering, and that inside the café the tables were stacked and the gloomy, ancient proprietor was sweeping the floor with long melancholy strokes of his broom, leaning on it occasionally to peer out the doors to the street, where we were the only remaining customers.
He clanked down his glass on the table and raised a hand in the air. Our friend was with us in an instant with our tally scribbled on a little square of paper. I paid, with a small tip, and for a moment felt as old as my companion, his equal.
‘I will walk with you to the house.’
I slipped my arm through his, sensing him freeze for an instant within his jacket. Then his chest loosened and we walked through the maze around the Grand Place to my pension. We reached it in moments, walking in silence. Our bodies connected, I felt something that I had not seen; he had a very slight limp, a little pause before placing down his left foot that was so brief as to be invisible. I thought: I will see him tomorrow, surely, at the union offices, but how can I make certain of this? I could not contemplate the possibility of a night cooped up in my stuffy room, in my narrow bed, worrying myself for hours about it.
I relinquished his elbow and fished in my bag for the key. ‘This is my building, Herr Becker. Will I see you tomorrow at the Maison du Peuple?’
I found he had taken my hand with both of his, the one over which my bag was hooked. ‘I will make a strange proposal. I will stay with you. For only a few hours.’
My other hand closed on the cold metal of my key at the bottom of my bag. A hundred questions forced their way into my head. I had become a confident traveller, a capable linguist. I was at home in the world, never more so than in a new country. Yet this thing he was asking, I knew nothing, practically, of what it might be. ‘Yes,’ I said, and smiled at him in the weak light of the street lantern. I could make out only enough to see that he breathed out, his brow smoothing momentarily, and that he took a small step forward, uncurling his fingers towards me for the silver key.
It was not what I imagined, what happened next. I asked him to come up the stairs quietly. My landlady made a habit of appearing in her white gown like a phantom at her door as I passed on the middle landing in the dead of night, gabbling in Flemish at my retreating back. He did not make a sound, stepping lightly as a bride in his new shoes. And I, with every step on the stairs and down the long creaking landing with this German close behind, wondered what on earth I thought I was doing. Every woman passes this way once, I told myself. Now it is my turn, at the grand age of twenty-six.
Finally, I opened the trapdoor above our heads. There was almost no light here, the one lantern on the corridor below casting very little our way. I felt his arm reach past me to hold the trapdoor open and I climbed the last stairs into my room. I went forward carefully in the dark the few steps from one end of the bed to the other to switch on the lantern on my nightstand. He was in the room now, the trapdoor closed behind him. If we were to sit, it was to be on the bed, or my packing case, piled high with dictionaries and papers.
He sat on the bed, the springs creaking quietly. ‘Come.’ He placed a hand next
to him. He was not looking at my face. I felt it was my shoes he was studying again. ‘I will not hurt you, I promise.’ I sat down a little heavily, the bed shifting, tipping me towards him. He whispered, in German, still not looking at my face. Now that he could use his own words, he changed, became himself, fluent. I concentrated all my experience on catching the precise meaning of every word, spoken so softly, in a voice already made low by cigarettes. ‘I mean nothing by being here. Just for tonight, it is very difficult to be alone. I shall lie on the floor while you sleep. I will not touch a hair on your head. You are a kind young woman. Just allow me to lie here on the floor until it is light, and I will leave in the morning, before anyone in the house awakes.’
I stared at him for a moment. He looked up at last. ‘I speak too quickly?’ he said in English, fearful.
‘Emil, I can make room for you. We will lie here together until morning. I feel—’ I switched to German. ‘It is not I who must be made to feel safe, but you. You are safe here. Please, sleep in the bed. Leave when you have rested.’
I pulled back the counterpane. He studied his hands for a moment, then my face, and nodded. We removed our shoes in silence, placing them softly on the rug in a row: his shiny cheap shoes, hard, smelling of new leather, my old worn things, shaped to my feet, a hole appearing in the sole as I removed my foot. We lay, creaking, stiff, back on the bed, side by side, on our backs, like bodies in the crypt. After a moment, I gathered the courage to take his hand.
‘I had a wife, a son,’ he said in German. ‘And Father. I saw the men come, they went into the building in the morning. There were so many. I stayed in the apartment. I stayed all day. They brought them out, marched them with torches. He was not among them. I searched every face. He is easy to find, Father, he is a fat man these days. He was not among them.’
I was afraid to move, to alter the pressure in my fingers, to breathe. He was silent. I waited for more but there was nothing but his breath and his beating heart. We lay for hours, into the night, towards morning. It seemed then I dreamed and stirred. There were church bells. And then I must have slept again, because I woke briefly to a thing entirely new to me: I was lying on my side, with a man’s knees tucked up behind mine, his body repeating the shape of my own, the weight of his hand resting on my waist, the light breath of his sleep rushing softly past my ear.
Emil
HAMPSTEAD, 1936
He did not expect to sleep a full night anymore. He was used to some sort of disturbance in his dreams, in his body, and then an hour or more of watching the edge of the windows for dawn. His days in England were spent in a light-headed confusion, a slippage between worlds. The language seemed like something from another planet. On the building sites and production lines perfectly normal-looking people opened their mouths and emitted the sounds of aliens. He had to shake off this feeling, concentrate. Only then did he find he knew the language, understood what they were saying.
Sleep was easier when Hannah was beside him. At least he was able to drop off again, when he had assured himself that she was there, placed a hand on her leg. Then he closed his eyes and sank down. But he had run out of work in the towns of the north. Now they stayed at her mother’s house in Hampstead, and they did not sleep in the same bed here.
Night after night as he drifted in and out of sleep he found himself standing outside a room, watching, as two fat wolves crammed through the door and leaped with sickening agility onto a table. He saw only their backs, hunkering over something on the ground. The same dream for two years, since his mother’s letter. Walkers had found Father’s body in the woods with those of three of his colleagues. In the months between his disappearance and the day he was found, Nazi officials had written Father letters, insisting he report for work. After he had been dug up, they sent Mother a bill for gloves and cleaning fluid, and arrested the unionists who attended the funeral.
He opened his eyes. The walls of Benjamin’s childhood room were growing pale. On the shelf by the window his trophies for football and archery caught the early sun. Birds had started up in the trees on the heath. Emil’s first thought was to wish sickness, some permanent affliction, upon the perfect body of his boy so that when the day came for the young men to leave town on an endless train he would remain behind with his mother, baking the bread, teaching the schoolchildren.
He slept a little more, lightly, and then Hannah was speaking in her room. ‘Yes, Mother. You know he likes tea. You can go in.’ Shy footsteps pressed the boards in the hall. He pulled the blanket over his chest as the door opened slowly towards the bed.
He sat on a bench out of sight in the trees at the top of Parliament Hill, away from the paths any of them might use to go up to Golders Green or the tube. Though he was hidden by the deep shade of a group of oaks, from up here on the hill he saw way down across the green parklands to St Paul’s and the taller buildings of the city. One could place the whole of the centre of Duisburg on top of this park. He closed his eyes and imagined for a moment that just down there, where a woman with a red hat leaned over a child, was his first school, Hans’s school now, and that further down where the ponds began was the river and the docks.
He had never expected London to have such places. Though you could be in the midst of a heaving crowd descending into the tube or surging onto a bus, in a minute or two it was open, green and a little wild, that tamed wildness the English liked to make around their country houses, and from his bench he could see a few of those. You could shoot rabbits, if you were up early, and if the sight of a German with a rifle were not likely to have the bobbies hurtling across the park, holding onto their ridiculous hats. And then he’d be on the front page of the Ham and High as a warning against letting in any more Fifth Columnists from the Continent.
He checked his watch, given to him by Benjamin, who had just bought a new one, he claimed. ‘Here,’ he said, catching sight of Emil’s bare wrist over dinner, ‘you must have this, until your things arrive.’ Before he could refuse it Hannah was buckling it onto his wrist and kissing her brother.
It was just after three. In an hour he could respectably return to the house. The truth was he had barely looked for work today. At the window of a building site cabin by Camden Lock a mottle-nosed foreman batted him away without bothering to speak, like a man tired of shooing the cat off the dining table. That wasn’t so bad; there were those thrilled at the chance to unleash something waiting within them, calling him a filthy kraut, spitting, deliberately or otherwise.
Still, it was enough to put him off, tired as he was and with his latest chest ailment giving him trouble. He rarely got work unless it was through Hannah’s long-tentacled network of Labour friends from college and her work in the party. He went out looking because a man could not stay in an old woman’s house, or let his lover work, without at least trying. Once he’d managed to get himself a week in a pub, a job he’d liked: the instant fug of warmth, beer smells and smoke in the narrow rooms, the grand emotions of the British after a couple of pints, but then the landlord gave the job to a friend in need. Emil, stateless as he was, paid from a paper bag hidden beneath the cash drawer, was sacked on the spot with a shrug and the offer of a free pint.
Today his body had rebelled, brought him up here, sitting until his back had grown stiff against the metal of the bench. Hannah had given him Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London. The author, whose real name was Blair, worked in the local bookshop and had advised Hannah on her reading once or twice, let her borrow books without paying. She seemed almost in love with the man, talked about him at dinner while her mother cast worried glances at Emil. Hannah told him later, when they found a moment to speak alone in the kitchen, ‘Mother thinks that you are too handsome for me as it is, and that it is just tempting fate to rattle on about famous authors all through a meal.’
He read the book slowly, smiling at this middle-class Englishman’s eccentric love of poverty. Ah, if Hannah were only here to help with the vocabulary. From time to time he took his litt
le notebook from his pocket and wrote down words that looked interesting: leprous, pawnable, grimy, verminous.
He wished she were just here, beside him, for any reason, talking herself into a red face about something or other. It had been weeks since they had even slept in the same bed. When they stayed with friends in the north, they slept on a narrow trundle or lumpy sofa. There were never enough blankets for those cold houses in their wet streets. He did not care, so long as her small plump body was there when he fell asleep and when he woke. Now he slept in Benjamin’s room, stared out into the dark over the pond until late, wondering whether she was awake or asleep.
Eventually he tired of wrestling with English sentences and snoozed, head lolling against the back of the bench, the afternoon sun creeping across his face. He was woken by a nanny calling some children away from him. He opened his eyes to a pair of crop-headed boys, and it seemed to him he saw the same green-eyed boy in two heads, one ten centimetres higher than the other. The little one let out a rude snigger and they ran off. He checked his watch. He could go home now.
He walked a little faster than he intended, glad to be moving. The sun in the open was warmer than it had been yet this year and you could smell flowers in the park beds and gardens. He headed down into the cool avenues near the ponds. He wondered whether she would come out for a walk before dinner. He always felt at his best walking, but it was hard to get her away from her desk. Every job she was offered she must take, and she did so without complaint, though he saw that she wore her glasses more and more, that she stifled yawns at dinner, that her mother found her asleep, head on her papers.
Hannah & Emil Page 20