by Sue Eckstein
And there is your father with his private tutor, Frau Mehmet. She was a most marvellous teacher – a German married to a Turk. But then in 1939 we decided to send your father to England so that he could attend a really good school there. For he was such a very clever boy and the schools in Turkey were not so good at that time.
But we had not expected that it would be nearly seven years before we would see him again.
‘What, dear?’ said my father when I asked him to tell me about his time at boarding school. And then he changed the subject. I never even found out the name of his school.
In my early teens, I went through a brief period of steaming open my parents’ letters. I think we must have been shown how to do it on Blue Peter. Sadly we weren’t told how to re-seal them, but I don’t think my parents ever suspected me of tampering with their post. Mostly the contents of their envelopes were pretty dull – bills, advertisements, samples from drug companies. Sometimes there would be letters to my father from grateful patients, often containing childish drawings that he would leave on his desk for a day or two propped up against his reading lamp before throwing them in the bin.
Then, one Saturday morning when I came down to pick up the post, hoping for a letter from my good-looking Mexican pen-friend, I found an airmail envelope with a Spanish stamp on it, addressed to my father. I turned it over. There was an address – just a PO Box and a Spanish city – on the back of the envelope. There was no sign of anyone else at home so I took it to the kitchen, held it over the boiling kettle and opened it very carefully. Inside were several small sheets of flimsy blue stationery, covered in neat italic writing in black ink.
Curious, I carried the letter up to my bedroom and lay on the bed. The letter started without a salutation, as though, unable to decide how to address my father, the writer had decided not to call him Dear anything.
Last month I was back in England for medical treatment – I run a property business in southern Spain – and found myself watching a documentary about surgeons at a London teaching hospital carrying out some ground-breaking new surgical technique. This is not something I would do under normal circumstances, but since being diagnosed with cancer of the oesophagus I have had a morbid curiosity about all things medical. When one of the surgeons spoke, the voice was somehow familiar, though all I could see was a pair of eyes peering at the bloody mess on the operating table. Then the narrator mentioned you by name and I immediately knew exactly who it was behind the green mask.
You may remember me – in fact, I fear that there is little chance you could have forgotten me. Though I doubt you ever knew my Christian name. What we did to you during those years at Massingham was, and is, not condonable. All I can say in my – in our – defence is that it was poor timing. Those war years were a bad time to be a Jew with a German accent at a second-rate Methodist public boarding school in rural Suffolk. If you had excelled at rugby or fives rather than biology and chemistry, if you had challenged us, if you had resisted, maybe there would have been some hope for you. Maybe every day wouldn’t have been such torture. But I doubt it. We were a cruel lot. Someone should have noticed what was going on and put a stop to it, but the masters were little better than we were. There was just Mr Creighton, but we soon got rid of him. A few whispers in the right ears and he was gone. I doubt he ever got another teaching position. He was a good, kind, man who tried to do the right thing and deserved better than an ignominious dismissal.
That you have clearly done so well and been so successful in your chosen career is a source of great pleasure and, dare I say it, relief. After that documentary, I made some discreet enquiries and learned that you are married with children. That, too, gives me pleasure. But it does not give me absolution – only you can do that. I do not deserve it, but I ask for your forgiveness. It is the pathetic plea of a dying man.
I live in hope of hearing from you.
Yours,
Eric Long
I read the letter again and again, committing the terrible words to memory. My hands shook as I folded the sheets of paper and pushed them back into the envelope. The stamp was curling up at the edges. I pressed hard on to the corners. I could feel my pulse pounding in my thumb. I got out my tub of almond-smelling glue and pasted the envelope shut. Then I went downstairs and slid it between two ordinary-looking brown envelopes on my father’s desk.
That evening, when I went into his study with my algebra homework, I saw the blue pages lying on the desk. He was holding the envelope in his hand, just staring at it.
‘That’s a nice stamp,’ I said as casually as I was able to. ‘Where’s it from?’
‘Spain, I think.’
‘Can I have it for school? We collect them for guide dogs.’
‘I don’t think it’ll be much good for that. It’s rather ragged at the edges.’
‘Who do you know in Spain?’
‘No one.’
‘So who’s it from, then?’
‘What, dear?’
‘Who’s it from?’
‘Just someone I was at school with.’
‘Who lives in Spain now?’
‘Seemingly.’
‘That’s nice.’ I wondered if my father could hear my voice shaking. ‘Are you going to write back?’
Without saying anything, my father put down the envelope, collected up the sheets of notepaper, and slowly tore them into tiny pieces. He did the same to the envelope. Then he leant over towards his waste-paper bin, held his hand high above it, and let the fragments whirl and eddy into the depths.
‘So what’s my homework for this evening, dear?’ he asked.
VIII
In my class in Berlin there was a girl who was so obviously different from us – she was very bright, well-educated, very sophisticated. Effie Feldt she was called – and looking back she was so obviously Jewish, a very extrovert Jew. And we became great friends but nobody knew anything much about Effie. She’d joined the school halfway through the term and, although she was very friendly, she kept herself pretty much to herself. Then one day she said, ‘Come home for tea with me,’ and it was a very big, beautiful house – and she introduced me to her parents who were both university professors and we sat and drank coffee. They were very polite. Polite but a bit distant, I thought. I was surprised at how old they were. Then her parents went out for a walk and I got up and looked at the pictures on the mantelpiece. There was one of her father in an academic gown presenting a certificate to a young man with dark curly hair. And I said, ‘What’s your father doing in this picture?’ And Effie said, ‘What do you mean?’ in a rather startled way and then came and looked at the picture. And then she said, ‘Oh, he’s the vice chancellor at the university. He’s handing out degree certificates.’ And it was only much later that I realised that she was probably the daughter of a Jewish student of the professor’s. And it was only much later that I realised that her real parents were probably in a concentration camp somewhere.
And how did that make you feel?
Is it important?
It might be. I don’t know.
I can’t remember. How I felt. Stupid, probably.
Stupid?
That I hadn’t known.
And if you had known? That this girl was Jewish?
Would I have been friends with her? Is that what you are trying to say? Or would I have reported her? Is that what you are really trying to say?
I’m not trying to say anything.
Of course you are. You sit here, pretending to listen, but you’re judging me. You know nothing and here you are, judging me.
I’m not judging you at all. Go on. Tell me more about Effie Feldt. Please do.
There’s not much more to say.
Go on.
I remember one day she said to me, ‘You are such a good friend. You are the nicest person I know. I just can’t get over the fact that you believe in Hitler.’ And I remember saying to her, ‘What difference does that make to our friendship?’ I was walking down the Kurfür
stendamm with her once, and we passed a haberdashers that was all boarded up. If you looked through a crack in the boards you could see hundreds – thousands – of ribbons lying all over the floor – buttons everywhere. I said, ‘What a shame about all those lovely ribbons,’ and I remember that Effie said, ‘Just about the ribbons?’ And I didn’t know what she meant.
And did you ever find out what happened to this girl?
Happened to her?
After the war?
I hope she’s still alive and perhaps living in Israel or America. That no one ever realised the professors were harbouring a Jew. That they all had the good and long lives they deserved.
Do you ever think of trying to find her? To get in touch? I’m sure there are ways of doing that. There are lists. Registers.
And do what then?
Just rekindle the friendship.
Are you crazy? Do you think she would want a friendship with me? After all that happened?
You weren’t responsible. We’ve established that at least, haven’t we? She liked you a lot. You were friends.
Don’t talk to me about friendship.
But don’t you think it’s important? Friendship?
Friends have to know you.
And?
And if they know you – if they know who you are and who you were and what you were – how can they possibly want to be friends with you?
Is that what you really think?
It is.
So you’d say you have no friends?
None.
And you think you can live with no friends? With no one really knowing you?
I seem to manage.
Do you?
I think I do.
And what about your children?
They’re my children, not my friends. And I told you that I don’t want to talk about them here.
But they would love you even if they knew – who you were, as you put it.
You really think that?
I’m sure of it.
Well, then, you’re madder than I’ve ever been.
And your husband?
He knows.
You told him?
No. But he knows. He’s always known. And he says nothing.
How do you know? That he knows.
I see how he looks at me. He knows. And he knows that I know that he knows. And he says – nothing.
Chapter Nine
I hesitate outside Ben’s door, then go back and look into Catherine’s room again. I stand in the doorway and try to remember Susanna’s bedroom in Dorset. If I shut my eyes I can see her paintings, with their exuberant, watery patterns on rough, cream-coloured paper; her dream-catchers; her hand-woven hangings; her pieces of pottery; her photograph of me with my arm around her on the bedside table that she and Max had made from driftwood, a garland of dried daisies draped around the frame. I think she must have been about eight in that picture. On a visit to Togo. She has Max’s wide, generous smile.
I think of my visits to her and Max – two or three times a year, much more often when I came back to live and work in London. It seemed that nearly every time I went, there would be a new foster brother or sister; a visitor who had come for a few days and stayed on for months; a new member of the household; or a woman, invariably sad and beautiful, who thought that maybe – just maybe – she would be the one. I watched Susanna grow and thrive in her chaotic, loving, fluid family, with Max the calm and constant centre, and eventually I stopped begging him to try to persuade her to go back with me to Cameroon or London.
I close Catherine’s door and head back towards Ben’s room. On the landing is a large framed black and white portrait photograph of the Plaistow family, probably taken a couple of years ago, the six of them arranged artistically over bean bags, the background pure white nothingness. Everyone is smiling at the camera, even the oldest girl who is clearly trying hard not to.
I wonder if a photographer could catch the essence of Max’s extensive, ever-shifting family. I doubt it, somehow.
Above Clara’s sofa was a massive oil painting of two men standing over an iron cot in which lay a curly-haired infant. Both men were bald. The older one had round, black-rimmed glasses and appeared to be explaining something to the younger man.
‘Who are the men in the picture,’ I asked once.
‘They are your grandfather and your great-grandfather. The picture commemorates the opening of the paediatric hospital my father founded. It is a copy actually, but a good one. You can hardly tell. The original is in the Kunst-Palast – the museum – in Düsseldorf.’
‘Crikey!’
‘Perhaps I’ll take you there one day.’
‘So how did you and my grandfather meet? Was it at that hospital?’
Well, one day, my father brought home his new registrar Arthur Rosenthal. And my father said, Clara, you must make him feel at home here, for by then my mother had already died. So we saw a lot of each other.
And then, after some time, my father said to me – that Dr Rosenthal is such a good doctor, the best I have ever seen. I would have to shoot anyone who wanted to marry him and take his interest and attention away from his work. And I said to my father, well, you had better shoot me, then, for Dr Rosenthal and I are engaged. And then he was so delighted – he loved my husband so much. For he was not only a brilliant doctor, he was a most marvellous person. Often my father would say how he loved my husband more than his own son.
‘Who was he?’
‘So much interrupting! Who was who?’
‘Your father’s son?’
‘That was my brother Ernst.’
‘What happened to him?’
‘In former times he was a pharmacist. But he didn’t have so much luck, for many different reasons. He too left Germany with his wife, Berthe, but a little later, in 1938, and they went to New York. And then for the next twenty years he pressed the lift buttons in a big department store and went up and down, up and down all day while Berthe made clothes in some sort of a factory. Later she had a little shop in Orchard Street, selling ribbons and buttons, and all those kinds of things.’
‘Poor them!’
‘Ach, it wasn’t so bad. That way they managed to pay for their son Helmuth to go through Harvard, and of course you know what happened to him.’
Though I’d never met Helmuth, I knew he’d become a very eminent economist, frequently quoted in the pages of Time magazine. He then made millions in the newly emerging computing business and lived a life of modest plenty just outside Washington DC. My grandmother would occasionally show us photographs of him standing by his pool with his very large wife and four very large all-American children. Beside them, he looked rather small and serious.
And so, where was I? Ah, yes. We married in nineteen hundred twenty-five and in nineteen hundred twenty-six there came your father. And immediately I got a very excellent wet nurse so I could continue my work, for in those days I no longer practised as a doctor but was in charge of the orphanage. And in any case, in former times, there was not all this nonsense feeding of babies whenever they demanded it. The nursemaid would put your father in his pram at the end of the garden between feeds so neither we nor our visitors needed to be disturbed by any of his horrible crying. For in former times we had a very big garden. So many times when you and Max were babies, I would say to your mother, ‘Put the baby down – all this nonsense picking it up when it cries and carrying it around will spoil the child. Let it cry itself to sleep.’ But she never listened.
But then in nineteen hundred thirty-five my husband lost his job in such a depressing and humiliating way. And we knew that it would not be safe to stay much longer in Germany. And then came a phone call from the Foreign Office, which was not yet fully under Nazi domination, that the Turkish Minister of Health was there and was looking for German professors for the hospital in Ankara, so as to promote it into a university hospital. As well as that, the paediatrician was to build up the entire system of infant-and child-care in Turkey – th
e same task that my father had started for Germany at the turn of the century.
So I was first the daughter of a famous doctor and then I became the wife of a famous doctor and now I am the mother of a famous doctor.
Max had long been marked out to be the next to take on the mantle of medical greatness. And when you become a doctor… my grandmother would proclaim as she got out the chessboard and set out the meerschaum pieces. Or, And when you become a famous doctor… when she felt particularly proud of her ancestors and descendants. For some reason, I didn’t mind that I was never included in this family hall of fame. Max never commented, he just smiled and nodded slightly, but that was enough for my grandmother to feel reassured that the dynasty would continue.
I hated chess, with its endless silences and brooding pawns. My grandmother’s efforts to teach me didn’t last long.
‘It is lucky Max isn’t as unintelligent as you,’ she observed. ‘And your father, when he was only eight, he was chess champion of all the schools in Germany.’
‘Big deal,’ I muttered.
‘You are right,’ she said approvingly, unfamiliar with the phrase. ‘It was a very big deal and a great honour. So, as you are far too stupid for chess, I had better play with Max. Come, Max, you set up the pieces again. Here, Julia, you can sort out my sewing box while Max and I play. And if you are very quiet, I’ll tell you some more family stories later.’