Interpreters

by Sue Eckstein

  My grandmother was interested in nothing as much as ‘the Family’, by which she meant both her ancestors and descendants and those of her husband. With the help of an elderly and amenable second cousin, she had managed to draw up an immense and highly complicated family tree which went back to Polish rabbis of the seventeenth century. One of my great-uncles claimed Einstein as a relative but, try as I might, I never managed to find him among the hundreds of names.

  I’m not sure my history teacher was expecting a chart covering most of one wall when she set us the task of tracing our ancestors as part of a fifth-year genealogy project.

  ‘Are you quite sure that’s right?’ she asked, squinting up at the chart and pointing to the names three lines above mine and Max’s.

  ‘I’m positive it is,’ I replied. ‘I can’t imagine my grandmother making a mistake about her relatives. She’s like the Rose Kennedy of the Rosenthals.’

  ‘But your grandmother’s mother and aunt were twins.’

  ‘Yes, identical ones. Even their parents couldn’t tell them apart. They were legendary.’

  ‘Ah –’ said Miss Harvey. ‘And then two of their children married each other.’

  ‘They were cousins – yes. It was very common at the time. For first cousins to marry each other.’

  ‘I see,’ said Miss Harvey, looking no less concerned.

  When I got home, my mother smiled as I described my teacher’s disquiet. ‘It’s the biology, not the history that Miss Harvey is worried about.’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘They’d do anything to keep the money in the family, those Rosenthals and Eisensteins. And you wonder why you’ve got so many mad relatives.’

  ‘I don’t!’

  ‘Well, maybe you should. Ask your grandmother about Tante Greta.’

  ‘What about Tante Greta?’

  ‘Her father was one of the leading anatomists of the time. Another of those over-achieving famous men, of course. But when Greta didn’t grow properly, he just said, “Well, that’s good if she stays small; it’ll save buying her new clothes.” I bet your grandmother didn’t tell you there was a dwarf in the family!’

  ‘Tante Greta wasn’t a dwarf! I’ve seen photographs of her. She was just a very small person.’

  ‘Dwarf. Small person. It’s all the same.’

  ‘No, it isn’t!’

  And then there was Tante Käthe. And here, my grandmother had said as she helped me copy out her family tree, pointing to a gap in the branches with her gnarled index finger. Put down Hänsel Eisenstein married Eva Rosen 1905 and they had, in 1907, Erik and in 1910, Hilde, and in 1911, Käthe – but don’t bother to write her down.

  I wanted to ask my mother about Tante Käthe, but I couldn’t bear the prospect of her triumphant contempt. Nor did I want to hear too many stories of seriously mad blood relatives, particularly those born in the same century as me.

  ‘We’re supposed to do both sides of the family,’ I told my mother. ‘For this history project.’

  ‘Haven’t you got enough relatives on your father’s side?’

  ‘That’s not the point. I need your side too. Just because you’re ordinary and English and your parents died when you were quite young, it doesn’t mean you’re not interesting. It doesn’t mean I can just leave you out.’

  ‘I’m really not in the mood to go through all that. Can’t you just make it up?’

  ‘Hardly!’

  ‘But that’s what you’re good at – making up stories.’

  ‘But I can’t make up an entire family.’

  ‘I don’t see why not.’

  And that was that. I never did manage to assemble my mother’s family tree. There were no other living relatives on that side, or at least none I’d ever been told of. And so I made up a small dynasty of Croydon railway executives, Merton brewers and Bromley shoe shop owners going back to the 1920s and Miss Harvey gave my efforts an A minus.

  X

  My happiest times? I think they were when I was away at my teacher training college which had been evacuated from Berlin to the country. I had finally escaped from my father. There was nothing he could do to me. He paid for me to go. The last thing he wanted was an unemployed cheese head, destined to live at home and be a financial drain on him. As far as he was concerned, the sooner I left and started supporting myself, the better. And the feeling was mutual, I can tell you.

  And what about your mother?

  She stayed with him. Where else could she have gone? But I think he hit her less when I wasn’t around. Or maybe she was able to keep out of his way more when she didn’t have to be home for me. I think she even stopped making him his meals, which must have annoyed him a lot.

  But you never became a teacher?

  No. History rather saw to that.

  Do you regret it?

  In some ways.

  Do you want to expand at all?

  Not really.

  Does it make you angry? You sound angry.

  Does what make me angry?

  That you weren’t able to qualify as a teacher?

  I sometimes wonder if you really hear anything that I’m saying. Anything at all.

  What makes you say that?

  Where were you during the war?

  I was at school. Not far from here. Why?

  Have you never read any books? Never seen any documentaries? Have you any idea what it was like?

  But this isn’t about me, is it?

  Have you any idea what it was like? The war?

  I’ve some idea, of course.

  Then how can you ask me whether the fact that the war stopped me training as a teacher makes me angry? How important are qualifications? The lies are what make me angry. The lies. And the unspeakable cruelty of what one person is capable of doing to another. That’s what makes me angry. And the millions of pointless, stupid, unnecessary, terrible deaths. And still feeling like the enemy, all these decades later. Those are the things that make me angry and you might as well stop looking as though you’re interested in hearing what I have to say because I don’t have anything else to say to you today.

  Well, just think about it. That’s all.

  I’ve got more important things to think about than whether I regret not becoming a teacher.

  Like what?

  Like how I’m going to summon up the energy to get up in the morning. Like how I’m going to keep going. Day after day. Year after year. It’s all right. You don’t have to look at me like that. I’m not going to kill myself. I’ve thought about that. That would be far too easy.

  Chapter Eleven

  It appears that Anna and Eleanor share the room that used to be Max’s. It is dominated by a sturdy pine bunk bed and posters of androgynous boy bands that I vaguely recognise but cannot name. Bisecting the pale pink carpeted floor, from the centre of the base of the bed to the opposite wall is a thick, slightly wobbly chalk line. I wonder what the rules are for crossing it. The resident of the zone on the right is clearly tidier than the one on the left, where pyjamas, notepads, cuddly toys and half-eaten tubes of sweets cover much of the territory.

  I lie down on the bottom bunk. On the slats of the bed above me are written the words ‘Eleanor stinks like a scunk’ in blue biro. A little further to the left is a large heart, neatly coloured in with red felt-tip pen. An arrow runs through it with the word ‘Anna’ at one end and ‘Jack’ at the other. I see that under ‘Jack’, but fainter and with angry lines crossed through it, is ‘Liam’.

  I lie here listening for the sound of the violin but, apart from the ticking of one of the girls’ alarm clock, the room is silent.

  ‘You know what they say about violinists?’ I asked Max once, sitting down on his bed and idly opening his copy of Sherlock Holmes.

  ‘What?’ said Max, continuing to play his scales. He could practise for hours at a time and it drove me mad.

  ‘They’re all really weird. Violinists. The real loners in an orchestra.’

  ‘That’s viol
a players, actually, if it’s stereotypes you’re after.’

  ‘Viola players, violinists – they’re all the same. The sort of people who are really quiet and stuff and then go and hack the oboists to bits.’

  ‘Oh, yeah?’

  ‘Why don’t you listen to Radio Luxembourg like normal people? What’s the point of all that scraping away? It sounds like you’re grating chalk.’

  ‘When did you last listen to the sound of chalk being grated?’

  ‘Well, you know what I mean. What’s this like?’ I asked, holding up the novel in Max’s line of vision.

  ‘It’s good,’ said Max, pausing as he reached the top of a scale. ‘About the search for the killer of a teenage girl with spots. A talented but tortured violinist is the prime suspect. They’ve already found the murder weapon – a sharpened bow.’

  ‘Oh, ha, ha, very funny.’

  He finished the scale. ‘So go away if you don’t like me playing.’

  ‘You can hear it all over the house.’

  ‘You can’t hear it all over the house.’

  ‘And anyway, I’m bored.’

  But I wasn’t bored. I was frightened.

  ‘What if she never comes back?’ I asked Max, putting the book down.

  He propped his violin up against the wall and sat down next to me on the bed.

  ‘Of course she’ll come back. Why wouldn’t she?’

  ‘Why would she?’

  ‘Because of us.’

  ‘Maybe we’re not enough.’

  ‘Enough for what?’

  ‘Enough to make her want to come back.’

  ‘Of course we are. She came back last time. And the time before. And the time before that.’

  My mother disappeared for the first time when I was nearly fourteen. At least, for the first time since her sudden disappearance eight years before. One day, we came home from school to find that she had packed a small bag, and was sitting with it by her feet in the kitchen, waiting for us.

  ‘Where are you going?’ I asked, eyeing the bag.

  ‘Just away for a while.’

  ‘But where?’ asked Max.

  ‘I don’t know yet.’

  ‘When will you be back?’ I insisted, my voice shaking.

  ‘I don’t know that yet either.’

  ‘But you will be back?’

  ‘I’ll be back.’

  ‘What about Dad?’ I asked.

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘Does he know you’re going?’

  ‘You can tell him if you like. Or don’t if you don’t want to. I really don’t mind.’

  ‘You can’t just go.’

  ‘I’m afraid I can. I should have done it years ago.’

  ‘But what about us?’ I said, beginning to cry.

  ‘You’ll be fine,’ my mother said, kissing me on the cheek. ‘There’s absolutely nothing to cry about. There’s food in the freezer, Mrs Woodley will be in to clean as usual on Wednesday, and it’s not as though you haven’t got a father.’

  Then she kissed Max and left.

  There was no point checking to see if she’d taken her passport with her. It was a running joke between Max and me that she never went anywhere without it. We used to ask her why she always kept it in her handbag when she rarely went further than London, or wherever it was that she’d started going off to for a couple of hours every fortnight, but I don’t remember her ever giving us an answer.

  It was quite a while before my father realised my mother had gone, that first time. If he wondered why there was no supper waiting for him, he didn’t say anything. He just helped himself to a couple of gherkins from a jar, fishing them out very efficiently with his long, thin fingers, and went back into his study. At about nine o’clock, he came up to my room, swaying very slightly. ‘Any sign of your mother?’

  ‘She’s gone away.’

  ‘Where to?’

  ‘She didn’t say.’

  My father raised his eyebrows.

  ‘No, really, she didn’t say,’ I said quickly, worried that he would think Max and I knew something that he didn’t and were somehow party to her plan, whatever it was.

  ‘Did she say when she’d be back?’

  ‘No. But she did say she would be back.’

  ‘Did she?’ he said, wearily.

  ‘I’m sure she won’t be gone long,’ I said, feeling that it was my duty to make the best of what felt like a pretty disastrous situation. ‘She only took a very small bag.’

  I think she was gone for a couple of weeks that first time. We ate our way through the meals she’d left in the freezer for us. When they were finished, Max or my father put together strange but not unpleasant meals from whatever I bought at the little Spar on my way home from school. None of us mentioned our mother during those meals, but it felt as if we were all sitting there waiting for something to happen – for a phone call, or the sound of her keys in the door.

  ‘Where did you go,’ I asked tentatively when she finally returned.

  ‘Oh, nowhere very much,’ she said. And that was that. Until the next time.

  ‘One day she won’t come back,’ I said to Max as he picked up his violin again and started playing a Bach partita. ‘Why don’t you care?’

  ‘Of course I care. I care terribly.’

  ‘Well, you don’t look as though you do,’ I said angrily.

  Max stopped playing again and rolled his eyes. ‘Can you really imagine Mum going off for good and never seeing us again? It isn’t us she’s getting away from.’

  ‘So why don’t they just get divorced?’

  ‘She’d never do that. She doesn’t believe in divorce.’

  ‘How do you know? Have you ever asked her?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, then.’

  ‘But I’m sure she doesn’t. She once said, If you marry, you marry for life, whatever that life may be like.’

  ‘I know Dad thinks we’re lying about not knowing where she is.’

  ‘Well, we’re not.’

  ‘But he doesn’t know that. It must feel to him like we’re lying.’

  ‘You can’t know what he feels.’

  ‘What do you think he tells Clara?’

  ‘God knows! I’d love to hear the tale he spins! Want a game of Monopoly?’

  ‘OK. Anything to stop you playing that horrible thing.’

  If I had drawn a heart with an arrow through it at that time, I think it would probably have said ‘Julia’ at one end and ‘Tony’ at the other, with a couple of crossed out names underneath it. ‘Tim’. And ‘Chris’, I think.

  In all the months we were ‘going out’, I made sure Tony Wealden never met my parents.

  ‘What’s wrong with them?’ he asked. ‘They can’t be worse than mine.’

  ‘Nothing,’ I said. Nothing, I thought, apart from the fact that my dad would probably be drunk and say something really embarrassing about me in front of you and my mum would probably not say anything at all or just not be there.

  Sometimes, when we got fed up with wandering up and down the dreary High Street with its endless shoe shops, lighting showrooms and bakers, or got too cold lying in a secluded corner of the park with our hands up each other’s jumpers or down each other’s waistbands, he’d persuade me to go to his house, in the hope that his parents would be out. They never were. So we’d sit in the sitting room, well away from each other, trying to cover up the grass stains on our clothes and bruises on our necks, sipping Nescafé and eating digestive biscuits, while his parents looked at us with politely disapproving expressions.

  ‘How’s O-level revision going, then, Julia?’ Tony’s father would ask.

  ‘Fine, thank you, Mr Wealden.’

  ‘Wish I could say the same for Anthony. When was the last time you opened a textbook, son? You’ll never pass physics at this rate. Never make anything of yourself.’

  I was impressed that Mr Wealden knew his son was taking physics. I wasn’t sure my father even knew that I was taking O
-levels.

  ‘Would anyone like a sausage roll?’ Mrs Wealden chirped up one time, possibly to divert Mr Wealden from his animated, but not particularly interesting, lecture on the relative merits of a polytechnic or a university education. Then she made a little squeaking noise and covered her mouth with her hand. She had beautifully manicured fingernails, I noticed. And rather flushed cheeks.

  ‘Oh, silly old me! Of course you wouldn’t want pork, Julia.’

  ‘Actually I’m not a vegetarian any more, Mrs Wealden. I stopped being one last Christmas,’ I told her. ‘I’d love one. Thanks.’

  The one advantage of my mother’s absences was the increased opportunity for Tony and me to indulge in undisturbed, unbridled foreplay. Once my father had shut himself in his study for the evening, I’d bring Tony in through the back door and up to my bedroom where, to the sound of Max’s arpeggios, we’d snog for hours, our lips chapped and swollen, my cheeks rubbed raw by Tony’s emerging stubble, the flies of his shiny black school trousers stretched to bursting point.

  XI

  The day the Americans arrived, they closed the teacher training college. We were in the middle of lunch and the principal came in and said, ‘I am sorry to have to announce that, with immediate effect – 12.15pm today, the 4th of April – I am declaring this college closed. I have just received news that the Americans are advancing on us. All of you will be safe if you keep calm and stay here until we know more about what is happening. Neither I nor my deputy, Frau Friedrich, are members of the Party. There is no reason to suppose the Americans will do any of us any harm.’ And I stood up and one of the teachers said, ‘Where are you going?’ and I said, ‘I’m going back to Berlin – I want to die for my country.’ She’s probably still laughing.

  Why do you say that?

  It wasn’t really my country because they didn’t consider me a proper German, but there I was – going to die for my country. I never questioned my decision for a moment. I never even went to my room to collect my things. I just left. And there at the crossroads was a huge black man in a uniform with a gun in his hand; I’d never seen anyone like him in real life before. And he shouted out in English, ‘Hey, you, kid! You OK?’ But I didn’t stop. I ran into the forest and started walking. I got to a road and an army car stopped and picked me up and we passed all the tanks, which were running out of petrol so they just poured the last of the petrol over the tanks and put a match to them. There were all these burning tanks everywhere with soldiers setting off into the forest, taking off their jackets and walking on in their shirt-sleeves. Towards evening we turned off the road and stopped deep in the forest. The officer set up his radio and listened. One of the other soldiers divided the remaining rations between us. Then, one by one, the three other soldiers climbed out of the car and disappeared into the trees. The captain saw them leave but didn’t try to stop them. And he said, ‘Look, I’m going to have to go back and pick up more soldiers. It seems the Americans have crossed the Rhine. Some idiot failed to blow up the bridge. The American tanks are on their way. Here – take the rest of my food. You’re on your own now. If you can get to Halle, I think there are still some trains to Berlin. Just keep off the main roads and you’ll be fine.’ And that was that. So I started to walk.