Interpreters

by Sue Eckstein

  (SILENCE)

  Go on.

  And one day, very early in the morning, it was barely light – dawn must have just broken – through the trees stumbled a skeleton. I thought I must be dreaming as I walked. I hadn’t slept for two days. And I just stopped and hid behind a tree and looked at this creature with its shaven head and sunken eyes. Of course it wasn’t a skeleton – not quite. There was some flesh pulled tight on its face – here – and here. And spidery fingers hanging from the sleeves of a tattered striped shirt. If you had seen the image in a horror film you would have laughed – it was just too grotesque to be real. Then another skeleton appeared and then another. Each as wasted as the one before. Each staring ahead as they staggered on through the trees. Twenty, thirty, forty passed where I was hiding. I lost count. And I saw that they were being driven on by a small group of uniformed guards. Then I saw that the prisoner at the end of the line had stopped walking. And the guard nearest to him screamed out, ‘You there! At the end. Keep going!’ And I watched as the prisoner looked up at the sky – it was as though he was trying to warm his face in the early morning sun. But the rays were still too weak. Then, very slowly, he sank to his knees. The guard shouted, ‘Get up! Keep going!’ and he pushed at the prisoner’s head with the barrel of his gun. And I covered my ears to muffle the sound of the bullet. But there was no bullet. The man just toppled sideways. And I saw the guard bend down and put his hand on the man’s neck. Then he stood up and he brushed the pine needles from his trousers. I saw him pause for a second or two and then he rolled the body off the path, covered it with some fallen branches, and strode off through the forest to catch up with the others. And I didn’t know where the prisoners were from, or what they’d done, or where the guards were taking them or why they were all so terribly thin. It was 1945 and I still didn’t know that less than a mile away was a concentration camp, and I still didn’t know it was called Buchenwald, and I still didn’t know they were Jews. It was only later, when I saw the same pictures in newspapers and newsreels, that I thought, my God, I’ve seen them before. (SILENCE) And that is something that you never forget.

  Have you told this story before?

  What do you mean?

  Have you told it before?

  Who do you think I could tell it to? The neighbours in the Close?

  It’s just, it sounded like a story you’d told before. Many times.

  In my head. That’s where I tell it. Over and over and over. In my head.

  Chapter Twelve

  I look over at the built-in cupboard in which Max used to sleep when he was a little boy and I suddenly feel terribly sad. I don’t know why. It wasn’t as though he used to huddle in there to escape the blows of our parents – neither of them ever hit us. Not once. Or to hide from his sister. I could be pretty vicious sometimes, but I was never that bad. By the time my mother started to disappear, he was too big to sleep in his cupboard. Maybe that’s what all those scales and arpeggios were about.

  When Max was nearly eighteen, the music stopped. One day he shut his violin in its case and I never saw it again. He told me he’d sold it.

  ‘So where’s the money?’ I asked disbelievingly.

  ‘I gave it to charity.’

  ‘What did you do that for?’

  ‘It seemed the right thing to do with it.’

  ‘Getting rid of the ghastly instrument was right, but you could have kept the money.’

  ‘Well, it’s gone.’

  ‘Where’s it gone?’

  ‘I put it in that collecting box outside W.H. Smith’s. The one with the sad girl in a calliper.’

  ‘You’re the spastic!’ I shouted. ‘Mum’ll go mad.’

  But my mother didn’t say anything very much when Max told her about the violin and the money. She was much less reticent when he explained, very calmly, that he’d given up everything else as well – like turning up for school and revising for his A-levels.

  I heard them arguing as I sat in my room trying to commit swathes of Antony and Cleopatra and Laurie Lee to memory for my O-level English mock. ‘You don’t have to be a doctor,’ my mother shouted over the unfamiliar sound of Pink Floyd – at least he’d started to listen to decent music rather than all that Vivaldi and Bach and other square rubbish. ‘You don’t have to be like any of that lot,’ my mother went on. ‘You don’t have to get the best results in the school. You don’t have to be a famous anything. Not a famous doctor, not a famous violinist. Whoever said you did?’

  ‘No one had to say it.’

  ‘You just have to stay at school and take your A-levels.’

  ‘What’s the point?’

  ‘Why throw it all away now?’

  ‘I’m not throwing anything away.’

  ‘You are. It’s your education. Do your A-levels and then you can do anything you like.’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Like get a degree. Have a career.’

  ‘And what’s the point of that? You never got a degree.’

  ‘And don’t you think I wish I had?’ she raged. ‘Don’t you think I’d like to have done a degree when I was your age, if things had been different, instead of struggling away trying to study now? Don’t you think it would be nice if your grandmother hadn’t been able to look down her nose at me all these years?’

  ‘She doesn’t look down her nose at you.’

  ‘Oh, no? Generations of physicists and doctors and surgeons marrying professors of maths and professional musicians and lawyers. And then her son, the famous doctor, marries some nobody who just had children and a nervous breakdown and never did anything else again. You think she didn’t laugh? Don’t be ridiculous. They all did.’

  ‘Dad wasn’t famous when he married you. And he never laughed at anything you did.’

  ‘He never noticed what I did. Do you think he knows what I’m doing now? Do you think he ever wonders where I go every day?’

  ‘But if you told him, he’d probably be quite interested.’

  ‘Max. Just do as I ask and stay at school. You’ve got less than two terms left. If you leave now, you won’t hurt your father or your grandmother or any of the rest of them. You’ll only hurt yourself. Do you think your father would even notice?’

  ‘I’m not trying to hurt anyone. Why would I want to do that?’

  ‘No? Well, just think about it.’

  ‘I’ve thought about it, Mum. I haven’t thought about anything else for weeks.’

  ‘Please, Max. Do it for me. If you won’t do it for yourself.’

  I wonder what my grandmother would have said to someone trying to fit Max into her family tree? And then there was Max – but don’t bother to write him down. But I’m being unfair. She continued to enjoy his visits, long after he left home to eventually study art in Leeds after working in a hostel for homeless men for a couple of years. I imagine her shaking her head sadly over their game of chess and saying, Your great-grandfather was a famous doctor, your grandfather was a famous doctor, your father was a famous doctor and you, too, could have been a famous doctor. And I imagine Max just smiling at her kindly, moving his knight across the board to safety.

  ‘Why did you give it all up, Max?’ I asked him one time when I went up to Leeds to see him.

  ‘All what?’

  ‘All your music. All your being brilliant at everything.’

  ‘I wasn’t brilliant at everything.’

  ‘You were.’

  ‘Only in comparison with you.’

  ‘Shut up!’

  ‘You asked for it.’

  ‘But, seriously, what happened that day? When you gave up the violin and everything?’

  ‘Nothing happened on a particular day. And I didn’t give up everything. I gave in, you might remember. I stayed at school. I got those A-levels Mum cared so much about.’

  ‘But people don’t change overnight for no reason. Something must have happened to you. People don’t just suddenly give everything up.’

  ‘What did I give up?’<
br />
  ‘The chance to be as unhappy as Dad, maybe? Was that what all that was about?’

  ‘It’s not that simple.’

  ‘But that must’ve had something to do with it. What good did it ever do him – being the best? Being famous? Who remembers him now?’

  I saw Max swallow.

  ‘We do.’

  ‘But that’s not what he cared about. He just wanted his mother to be proud of him.’

  ‘She was. She was always going on about how incredibly famous he was.’

  ‘But she stopped, didn’t she? When he started to shake too much to operate. When they suggested he might like to take some leave and perhaps not try to rush back to work too soon.’

  ‘He was hugely respected at the hospital. Didn’t you used to tell me how much the nurses loved him?’

  ‘Yeah, well. Let’s not go there.’

  ‘Okay, perhaps not.’

  ‘You know, it took them less than a week to paint over his name in the hospital car park. I went to have a look. Some ambitious registrar must have opened a bottle of champagne the day they announced Dad’s death. All that work, all the time he didn’t spend with us – what was it all for?’

  ‘There are lots of parents out there who remember Dad, I’m sure, and lots of children who are alive today because of him,’ said Max, and I could see that his eyes were brimming with tears.

  ‘Do you think they even knew he had children of his own?’

  ‘I don’t know. I doubt it. Why?’

  ‘I sometimes wonder if we existed for him at all, the moment he drove out of the Close. I mind, you know.’

  ‘Mind what?’

  ‘That Dad was only ever really happy when he was at work. When we weren’t around. It was never us who made him happy.’

  ‘We don’t know that. There’s nothing much we do know about him so I don’t think we can hazard a guess at what, if anything, made him happy.’

  ‘But what about you, Max? Are you happy now?’

  ‘What do you think?’ He smiled at me and suddenly everything began to feel a bit better.

  I looked round his tiny studio room, at the dirty skylight, the jars of brushes on the floor, the half-finished canvases piled up against the wall, the unmade bed. ‘It’s hard to tell, really.’

  ‘Well, I am, actually. Very. Though I miss the men at the hostel. They still write, one or two of them, which is nice. But the other students in this house are really great. We cook together and stuff. And you? Is all your exotic travelling making you happy? Thanks for that thing, by the way,’ he said, nodding up at the wall from where a dark wooden mask with tufts of reddish-brown hair glared out at us.

  ‘I thought it would remind you of me.’ I laughed.

  ‘Not quite angry enough. Or ugly enough.’

  ‘Shut up! And it’s not just exotic travelling. It’s part of my course. And I’m thinking of going back to West Africa when I graduate. There’s an incredible anthropologist I want to work with.’

  ‘Oh, yes?’ Max looked at me quizzically, a smile playing round his eyes.

  ‘What?’ I said, and realised too late how defensive I sounded.

  ‘Nothing. It’s just the way you looked when you said incredible. Like this.’

  Max put on a dreamy, lovestruck expression. I picked up a pillow from his bed and hurled it at him. It caught one of the jars of brushes. A stream of turpentine flowed towards the wall. Max untied his scarf and blotted the liquid up just before it reached the canvases.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said.

  He smiled.

  ‘No problem.’

  XII

  It took me over two weeks to get to Berlin. I got there on the 20th of April. I stood on Alexanderplatz and suddenly there were bombs dropping. And I looked up and I couldn’t see any planes. There was a man standing next to me and he pulled me back and said, ‘The Russians are shelling Berlin!’ And I thought, you stupid idiot! The Russians are nowhere near Berlin – we’re winning this war. I got home and my father was there, sitting in his summer house and he looked a bit surprised to see me and he just said, ‘What are you doing here? Have a bath and wash your clothes – you stink.’ And I said to him, ‘People are saying the Russians are coming. What are you going to do?’ And he said, ‘I think I’ll go out for lunch.’ So I had a bath and changed into the SS man’s woollen trousers, an old pullover and a jacket, which was all I could find in my wardrobe. And I took my wooden angel from under the floorboard where I’d hidden her. And a little red leather notebook that Effie Feldt had given me for my last birthday. And I put them in one pocket and my identity card in my other. And then as I was towelling my hair dry, I looked out of the window and I saw that the tanks were coming up our road. I went out of the back door and I ran. And I met my mother who was coming back from the shops – she had some sugar and some oats and some apples – and before she could even greet me or ask me what I was doing back in Berlin I said, ‘Run! There are Russian tanks coming up our road!’

  (SILENCE)

  What did you do?

  We ran for about a mile until we came to a factory and the door was open. It was teeming with people, all moving towards the cellar. I recognised a Swiss family from our street but, apart from them, the rest of the crowd seemed to be factory workers – mostly Poles. For three days, my mother and I and about two hundred other people stayed crammed in that cellar while bombs were exploding all around us. So much for us winning the war. So much for the Russians having been forced back at the border. It was so crowded that we had to take it in turns to sit down. By the second day, everyone’s food had been shared out and there was nothing left. The smell of urine and faeces is something I’ll never forget. On the third day, the bombing stopped. We thought everything was over – that we’d be all right. Then suddenly the door burst open and we were all ordered out. The Russian soldiers didn’t seem to notice the stench that greeted them. They shouted at us in Russian – trying to separate the Poles and the Germans into two groups. The Swiss family were trying to make them understand that they were neither German nor Polish and should be allowed to go free. A fight broke out – I don’t know what about – and for a second or two nobody was guarding the door. I grabbed my mother’s hand and we just ran.

  And then what happened?

  We just ran and walked. From the 22nd of April until the 31st of May.

  (SILENCE)

  Go on.

  We walked at night. We ate when we found food. One time we came across a burnt-out farmhouse and a group of men and women and a few children, all as thin and filthy as we were, were sitting in the cellar. It was piled high with glass jars of gherkins, cabbage and celeriac, piles of dried sausage and smoked ham. And we sat and ate until we thought we would burst. Then one of the men patted his swollen stomach, picked up an unfinished jar of beetroot and threw it against the wall. It looked as if there’d been a massacre! And then all the others picked up jars and smashed them – even my mother, who never wasted a thing. If we couldn’t finish the food, and we couldn’t take it with us, no Russian was going to get any.

  Chapter Thirteen

  It’s impossible not to hear the sound of the violin in this room. It’s as though the walls have absorbed the millions of notes that have been played here. I find it hard to believe that, in the silences between the bursts of computer-generated automatic rifle fire, the sharp detonation of caps, and the sound of wailing boy bands, Ben and his sisters don’t sometimes hear the distant sound of Bach or Vivaldi.

  ‘Don’t you miss it?’ I asked Max on one of my visits back to England, when he had been living and working in a sheltered community in Devon for a few years. We were lying side by side on his ancient bed in one of the huge old shared houses, as the only chair in the room was doubling up as his wardrobe and filing cabinet.

  ‘Miss what?’

  ‘Your hideous violin.’

  ‘You obviously don’t.’

  ‘I don’t miss the endless practising – the same two bars played a tho
usand times.’

  ‘Do you think you might be exaggerating just a little bit?’

  ‘Who, me?’

  Max smiled. Rather sadly, I thought.

  ‘I tried to buy it back, you know,’ he said. ‘I was going to borrow the money from Clara.’

  ‘So why didn’t you?’

  ‘It was gone by the time I got back to the shop. It was quite a rare instrument. Someone would have been pleased to get their hands on it.’

  ‘Couldn’t you have found out who had bought it and asked them to sell it back to you?’

  ‘I suppose so, but I thought maybe it was a sign.’

  ‘What kind of sign?’

  ‘A reminder of the consequences of decisions made in haste.’

  ‘You’re mental.’

  ‘So you’ve so often said. And I thought we’d been through all this. Years ago.’

  ‘You could have got it back easily if you’d tried. You were really good. You could have been a professional musician. Don’t you ever wonder what would have happened if you’d not sold it? Or if you’d borrowed the money and bought another violin? It didn’t have to be the one Mum gave you. You might not have had to live in a hostel in Islington, or a shit-hole in Leeds for years. Or live in this Munster House now with a bunch of spastics.’