Hannah & Emil

by Belinda Castles

  Before long he reached the furthest edge of the pond from the house. The boats gathered at the corner, water slapping between them. No one was out this afternoon. It was only April, the water very cold, the breeze off the pond chilly. Everyone was over on the sunny plains of the heath, not here in the shade by the water. He gazed across its surface towards her house and saw that she was out at the French windows. There was her little shape, in a pale blouse and skirt, hand over her eyes, peering out over the pond. He stepped out of the shade, raised a hand. Her body leaned forward, froze for a moment, then she began to run around the rim of the water towards him. Her curly bobbed hair lurched and streamed. She never cared how she looked. Something white and stiff, not a handkerchief—paper, flapped in her hand and then she disappeared behind the trees.

  He walked quickly to save her running all the way around the pond. What news could there be that would make her charge through the grass like this? He had never seen her break out of her perpetually brisk walk in the three years since he had met her. He could not yet tell whether the news was good or bad, but then, after a minute, her face emerged from the shade of the trees and he saw that though she was breathing hard, she was beaming.

  When she reached him she leaned like a schoolboy on her bare knees, which bore bright scratches from the undergrowth. She smiled up at him, trying to catch her breath. ‘What is it?’ he asked, her smile infectious.

  She thrust the letter towards him. He peered at it, making out at first only a few words. It took him several passes over an English sentence to reorder the verbs into a sequence that made sense, and her eagerness distracted him. His eye picked out: Winchester, hostel, straightaway. He felt her hand on his wrist. ‘I have been offered the position of warden at the Winchester youth hostel. Though of course it is really you who has it. My friends in the party have arranged it. It is work, Emil. Proper, steady work, and a home, and meals, and safety. Can you believe it?’ she whispered, glancing back towards the house. ‘We will have our own room. Our own house!’ He took her in his arms. Her eyes were wet against the skin where his shirt opened at the throat. He held her as tight as he dared. ‘You are a miracle. You make magic. How do you do these things?’

  Hannah stepped back, her heel splashing at the edge of the pond, laughing. ‘I have very kind and clever friends.’ She smiled. ‘They have sent a photograph, too. It is the most beautiful place. The old city mill, on a little bridge, right over the river. It is like magic. And we are to start as soon as we can pack up and move. The warden is quite ill, and they have bookings for next month and throughout the summer.’

  He studied the letter again. This time he saw the words: twenty beds. All this time he had waited only for one for themselves, and one, somehow, one to spare. Now this, written on headed paper, with a signature beneath: twenty.

  She took his hand, pulling him towards the heath. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘I cannot sit still. Let’s walk up the hill and make our plans. Oh, Emil. I cannot believe what has fallen into our lap.’

  No, he thought. You did it: with your letters and your telegrams and your unsleeping will.

  The sun slanted across the heath, shooting out long shadows from the feet of the afternoon walkers. The smell of cut grass burst from every footfall. It was dangerous to hope, to cast his thoughts too far ahead, stupid and dangerous. He watched her back, her neck as she pulled him out into the open. She looked like something fey, enchanted, in her white clothes against the spring-green grass. His legs felt strong, his chest quiet. He found he could keep up with her easily.

  Emil let himself into the courtyard through the high gate off the bridge. As he opened the door to the kitchen the voice of Robeson filled the air above the narrow river. She had set up the gramophone, unpacked her records. He hung his satchel on the kitchen door, went through to the common room with its vaulted ceiling and oak beams, and found her sitting at the far end of one of the long trestle tables he’d put together from old church doors last week.

  She had not noticed him, reading her book as she was, smiling, at Robeson or the story. Her body looked tired reclining against the wooden chair, legs straight under the table. This afternoon she had washed and polished the window frames and floors in time for their first guests, due in the morning. He had planed the rough beams in the ceiling and now the air was thick with the smells of sawdust and linseed, in spite of the doors and windows being open to the spring afternoon. Always there was the sound of rushing water beneath the building. He felt constantly cool and wet.

  In ten days they had unpacked the few things they had accumulated after two and a half years of shifting in and out of her mother’s flat to friends’ back rooms and hostels. The same friends—unionists, party secretaries—donated linen and books. In the corner of their room, under the eaves, she had asked him to place her black desk, and the typewriter she had bought with her Belgian earnings.

  He watched her tuck her hair behind her ear. There was a little colour in her face from working outside, on the windows. The surface of her was calm, but underneath there was movement, always. Her brain was a bright and noisy place. Even in her sleep, she chattered away in her various languages, asking questions usually. ‘And how do you manage the children in your little house?’ ‘Where will he go for work if they shut down the colliery?’ ‘Is this sweet? I have not seen this kind of bread before.’

  She put a finger on the page to mark her place and looked up, thinking, saw him, smiled. After the work of the day, of the past years, she had found a moment of peace, and he was sorry to break it. He crossed the floor, sat next to her, the music in his ears, water beneath their feet, put a hand on hers. Her face when she saw him up close—he must look a fright. ‘Where did you go?’ she said after a moment, her voice small.

  ‘Past the college and the Dom, out into the fields.’

  ‘Cathedral.’

  ‘Hannah, I must ask you . . .’

  ‘What?’

  He pushed on. ‘I want to bring them here. We have some room now.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Hans. Ava.’

  She took her hand from under his, with her other placed her book on the table on its open pages, firmly. ‘Here?’ He nodded. She had told him more than once that she would love to meet his boy. ‘But you can’t be serious.’ He waited, watching her face. He had learned. You had to let her think and wear herself out. ‘She is your ex-wife. Am I supposed to feed her and wash her smalls?’

  What was this ‘smalls’? But he could imagine. ‘She will not permit him to come alone. Hannah—’

  ‘Hannah what? Damn you!’

  She stamped out through the kitchen. He registered the slammed door through his feet, rather than hearing it. He went to the gramophone, lifted the needle. Robeson was too much at this moment. If I just wait a little longer, he told himself. She is a person with a kind heart and a short temper. She will walk along the river and argue with herself until she is tired. He had only one idea, one plan with poorly worked out details, and he had taken the first step.

  Emil watched Hans sleep against the red seat of the train, England rolling past him at the window. The boy opened his eyes and Emil said, ‘When I first laid eyes on you, your ear was the size of a grape.’

  ‘Papa,’ the boy sighed.

  Ava, thinner, with a few more lines at her eyes, gazed out at the English countryside. He saw again the strangeness of the bright fields, the sparsity of trees. She had never before left Germany. The boy sat next to her, knee to knee with Emil, long and thin now, all the fat of early childhood gone entirely. His calves were almost as long as Emil’s—his legs seemed to have shot out from under his body, waiting for the rest of him to catch up. His hair was still as pale as Ava’s. The pair of them sat against the red leather seat, foreigners with outlandish white heads, cool blue eyes, smooth tanned skin, among the pale faces and muddy blond and brown hair of the English.

  ‘Do you remember, Papa, when you and Opa took me to the foundry? And you put a big mask on
me, and we watched them making pipes?’

  Emil cast his mind back across the borders to his town. ‘Yes, I do remember that. I’m amazed that you do. You were only small then.’

  ‘He never stops talking of it,’ Ava said quietly, still looking out the window.

  After a time Hans too seemed to notice he was in a foreign country, and watched the fields and little towns pass by outside the window until he fell asleep once more against his mother. ‘He didn’t sleep on the boat at all,’ she said. ‘I should tell you,’ she went on quietly, still looking outside, ‘I am going to be married.’

  ‘Oh?’ He watched her face. ‘To whom?’

  ‘You know him. Karl Bremmer.’

  He closed his eyes for a moment. His sense of the world, of what he had known about it, shifted a little. The night Karl came to the apartment, his wife had stood silently in the dark kitchen with him. He put it to one side. He saw her hair the day they married, braids like corn rows against her head, a giddy smile he could not imagine returning. She danced with everyone in the room: the children, the old men. ‘Do you trust him?’

  Finally, she turned to him. ‘Everything has changed. You don’t know anything.’ She lifted a hand towards the window. ‘Now that you are English. Yes, I trust him. I trust everyone. Everyone is the same.’

  He recalled what Greta had said in her last letter: There is no fighting. They have all made themselves quiet. Me too. We are all quiet. The boy slipped against his mother as the train leaned into a turn. His white hair fell over his eyes. ‘I am not English,’ Emil said. ‘I am not anything.’

  The sun was high as they approached the bridge. ‘How long have you been walking with a stick?’ Ava asked as they walked slowly through the town.

  ‘Some days it’s worse than others. This town has many hills.’

  The boy ran ahead and returned, like a puppy, running twice as far as they walked in order to cover the same distance. When they reached the bridge, he had to call him back from the far side. He pushed open the gate to find Hannah in the courtyard, down in the new herb bed, watering plants, pulling out what it seemed she had decided were weeds, but was actually new parsley.

  She turned in her crouch, peering into the sun at them, red in the face, perspiring. This morning she had said, several times: ‘She will take me as she finds me.’ Having wiped her hands on her apron she offered one up to Ava, who was regarding her silently. Then the boy was bowling into the little courtyard, a streak of white-blond hair, skipping across the flagstones, thrusting down a hand to her where she crouched in the garden beds. She shook his hand and he pulled her to her feet, laughing. He was taller than she was, already.

  ‘Das ist Ava,’ Emil introduced her, careful not to touch his former wife. Hannah scowled into the light, and then smiled. ‘Und Hans.’

  ‘Speak English, please.’ Ava smiled, turning to him. ‘Hans wishes to learn.’

  Hannah once more held a hand out. ‘Welcome, Ava. Please come and have some tea. It’s a long journey. I have made it many times. How was the crossing?’

  Ava looked uncertain. Emil translated. ‘Very calm,’ she told Hannah eventually. And England is pretty. It is a surprise.’

  Inside, Hans ran straight up the wooden staircase and Emil followed him while the women chatted in the kitchen. He showed him the dormitory, with the guests’ rucksacks leaning against the walls—torches, watches and penknives on the wooden crates he’d painted for bedside tables—and then the little room under the eaves Hans was to share with Ava. The boy immediately jumped on his bed and bounced in the air, coming within millimetres of bumping his head on the sloping ceiling.

  Down in the courtyard he heard their German guests, a youth hiking group, filling the courtyard, back from their walk, singing, laughing. German voices in the English countryside. He peered down at them through the open window as the boy jumped. Loud, tanned boys. White shirts, long shorts, bony knees. The quantity of food they put away reminded him of army days, when the cook dished up everything he had and it disappeared in seconds. The last three through the gate bellowed a song he remembered, a Christian folksong about the glory of spring. The boys stamped the mud off their boots on the paving stones. The leaves hanging over them were pale green and the cherry blossoms cast a pink light on their faces.

  ‘Deutsche!’ Hans yelped and jumped off the bed, tumbled downstairs. Emil followed him down, heard him in the kitchen. ‘Kuchen!’ he said. Hannah must have tea out for the German boys. ‘Kann ich?’

  ‘In einem moment,’ he heard Hannah say, her voice stern. Please, don’t annoy Ava, he thought. But then, more gently, in English: ‘Come, Hans, join the others at the table. The cake is for everyone.’

  The following morning Hans rode on Emil’s shoulders as they walked up through the narrow streets on the edge of town and into the countryside. The sun was hot and Ava had pinned a cloth around the boy’s shoulders when he refused to wear a shirt. He had decided that he was a pirate on his bridge, commanding his vessel. Behind them Hannah walked with Ava. In the shady lanes the foliage grew dark and thick and the boy skimmed the leaves with his outstretched hands, shouting orders. Emil heard Hannah ask Ava about Duisburg, and the health of Emil’s mother. He did not hear her answers over Hans’s nonsense. Emil’s chest wheezed with the weight of the boy on his shoulders, but he didn’t put him down. He’d have all the time in the world to rest, later.

  They emerged into sunlight at the end of a row of beeches, the fields spread out below them, yellow and green amid the farmhouses and the nearby village, and Ava took a camera from her leather satchel. ‘Be still, everyone. I will take your photograph.’ Hannah stood close to him, squinting in the morning sun, while Ava adjusted the lens. He felt her grip his shirt at his hip with her strong little fingers. Ava, the bright fields behind her white hair, long brown legs, was at ease with the camera, relaxed with the little box between her and what she saw. She took the picture and then held out the camera to Hannah. ‘You can take one of us?’ Hannah approached dutifully. ‘The settings are correct if you stand here,’ Ava told her, pointing at the patch of ground under her own feet. Hannah’s body radiated ill temper.

  Pictures taken, the boy slithered down his back and ran off into a pea field with his arms in the air and his hair and clothes soon just little flashes in the green. Emil went in after him, amid the tall pea plants, listening for his voice. It was dark and cool and smelled fresh. If he could maintain the walls encircling him, he could preserve this happiness.

  He heard the women at the edge of the field, beyond the hedgerow. He waited for a moment, Hans calling from further and further into the field. ‘He is a beautiful boy, Ava,’ Hannah was saying. He listened to the tone of her voice. It sounded friendly. That was good. ‘You’ve done well with him. How does he manage, without a father?’

  There was silence. He imagined Ava’s coolness, her lids heavy. ‘Thank you, Hannah.’ So strange to hear her speak English. ‘He is bad boy sometimes but he will have new father soon.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Emil has not told you. But that is normal. I will marry again.’

  The boy called, muffled, distant. Emil waited still. ‘Papa! Papa! You cannot find me!’

  Hannah’s voice: ‘He doesn’t mind you coming here?’

  ‘He knows Hans must say goodbye.’

  He stood among the bright greenery, unable to move. The boy’s call sounded as though it was in another field now.

  ‘Perhaps I should not ask, but Emil can tell you I will always say what I am thinking. Is he a member of the party?’

  ‘I don’t know this word, “Party”.’

  ‘The Nazis. The Nazi Party.’

  Silence. Emil tried to breathe quietly.

  ‘And does Emil know this, Ava?’

  ‘He knows Karl. Everybody is a member now.’

  ‘Well, you must know, Emil never was.’

  Ava sighed quickly. ‘No, of course not. He left.’ After a few moments: ‘You wear no ring.’
<
br />   ‘No, I don’t. We are not married.’

  ‘Not—verlobt?’

  ‘Oh well, yes, after a fashion. But Emil is stateless. I would become stateless too if we were to marry, and we should have no home at all.’

  Be calm, Hannah, he thought. There was a rustling crash and it seemed the boy had made a loop and tumbled through a hedge and out of the field at the women’s feet. Ava was hushing him, that cool disapproval at low frequency. Emil returned to himself, thrashed his way out of the field, found a gap in the hedgerow. He was breathing heavily. ‘Emil,’ Hannah said. ‘You must stop running about like a mad thing. You will kill yourself.’ There was an edge to her voice. He tried to catch her eye, but she was watching the boy race off again, a scowl making her seem older than she was, still not thirty.

  When they had caught up with Hans they sat under a broad-spreading oak in a field which lay fallow and grassy, and Ava conjured and unstoppered two bottles of lemonade she had made with her son that morning. All around them were the smells of the country: grass, cow manure, earth. Clouds of little insects floated around them. The boy climbed the tree, hanging like a monkey upside down above their heads. Ava lay in the shaded grass, eyes closed, forehead smooth, eyelashes resting on her cheeks without a tremor as the boy swung back and forth above her head calling: ‘Mama, Mama!’ Her hands lay on her flat stomach. Hannah was watching her. Her temper had not lifted. She caught Emil’s eye, reddened and turned away, steadying her gaze on the blurred horizon.