Remembrance Day

by Brian Aldiss

  ‘Go on,’ Lucy said, regarding him steadily from the end of the bed.

  ‘That’s all. I said it once, I wanted to leave her. She hung on to it. I can’t understand. Grasped it, like a rope. Then she forced me, really kind of forced me to say I did not love her. I swear it was what she wanted to hear. And of course – of course I love her—’

  She spoke softly. ‘But you do want to leave her …’

  He found he was crying convulsively. Her arms were round his shoulders. His tears and saliva poured into the crimson peony pattern of the duvet. She rocked him gently, saying nothing.

  Such was their situation when the door of the bedroom opened and Malcolm Mayor walked in.

  ‘Hello, Dad, hello, Lucy.’ Life was so full of astonishment for a five-year-old that Malcolm saw nothing unusual in the scene before his eyes. He climbed on the bed, hugging his father, saying, ‘Don’t cry any more. I was only with the Barnabys. I’m back now.’

  Reg Barnaby, a motorway consultant, lived just down the road with his wife and three boys, one of whom was Malcolm’s great friend. Fenella had sent Malcolm there to be out of the way of the party.

  After drying his face and beard, Dominic essayed a laugh and cuddled his son, telling him he was happy to have him back.

  ‘I won’t go away any more, Daddy. Not if it makes you sad.’

  Lucy stood up and said in a formal voice, ‘A little help is needed, that’s clear. A close friend of mine, Joe Winter, has a brother in practice in Oxford who would be helpful. I shall ring you and give you his address, Mr Mayor. It would be a good idea to get in touch with him.’

  ‘We’ve been through all that,’ Dominic said, wearily. ‘But thanks all the same, Miss Traill.’

  She offered him her hand. It was small and tough.

  ‘Can I have a ride round in your car?’ Malcolm asked her, following her from the room. ‘Daddy’s Porsche is in the fish pond. Did you see? It looks ever so funny. Its nose is right in drinking with the fishes.’

  Three days later, Dominic Mayor drove to Oxford in his second-best car, parked it in the multi-storey carpark, and entered a small waiting-room at 13 King Edward Street. After a few minutes, he was shown into the presence of Clement Winter, the psychotherapist whom Lucy Traill had recommended.

  After some preliminaries, Dominic confessed he did not know where to begin.

  ‘You can begin where you like. Everything will lead very shortly to the heart of the problem.’

  ‘I sometimes think I’m going mad.’ He was surprised to hear himself make such a definite statement. It silenced him for a moment, while Winter sat at ease on the other side of a small electric fire, apparently in no hurry for anything more to happen in the history of the world.

  ‘I don’t know what’s what any longer.’ After another pause. ‘I blame myself … My wife’s very – but I blame myself.’ Pause. ‘You see. Well, there were my parents …’

  ‘Perhaps they would make a good starting point.’

  Not without surprise and delight, he found himself relating the confused story of his early years, and how Daphne Mayer had come to adopt him. The words began to flow easily. Everything unrolled, so that he had a sense of sitting back and listening to himself. The longer he talked of earlier times, the longer he kept the problem of Fenella at a distance.

  Dominic had little sense of history, only a series of pictures. He always pictured his grandparents – who had never been his grandparents – fishing by a lake in south-east Russia. Grandfather, the story went, was a great fisherman as well as a brave soldier. These grandparents bore five sons and a daughter. The eldest boy, Vasili, married Dominic’s mother Lena, his real mother.

  Lena was born in 1919, a time of great hardship in the newly established Soviet Union. After she married Vasili, she and her new husband moved to Moscow to find work. Life was tough. They had two sons, one of whom died of diseases related to malnutrition. When the Great Patriotic War was declared against Nazi Germany, Vasili joined the army. His courage became renowned. He was soon promoted, and given command of a supply train.

  This story Dominic learned only through his mother. Details were obscured by hate, even many years after the events. It appeared that Vasili had led a raid somewhere and captured a German field hospital. A blonde nurse was spared from the general carnage. Vasili held this woman himself, and raped her.

  It seemed that he had kept this German woman on his supply train during its long journeys, and was fascinated by her. He had never travelled beyond the boundaries of his own country before. All that was new he found wonderful. He developed the wish to learn the nurse’s language. Along with German, she taught him something of the West. She showed him a photograph of her home in Hamburg, and he conceived a wish to go there.

  Once, he managed to get back to Moscow to see his wife and child. He must have been in two minds about the women, or perhaps he was deficient in his sense of danger. He found Lena and the surviving boy starving. He disguised his wife as a soldier, and smuggled her and the boy aboard the supply train, where food rations were comparatively plentiful. They were travelling through Poland when Lena discovered he was keeping a foreign woman in another carriage.

  Her fury was boundless as she told the tale. Lena was a strong woman, and she had attacked her husband. He hit her right in the face, breaking her nose. She bore the token of his violence ever after.

  Vasili had stopped the train. Throwing down a sack of rations, he kicked Lena and the boy off. The train then moved on again, leaving them there, standing in a Polish field a foot deep in snow.

  Lena never saw Vasili again. But by roundabout means she eventually learned what happened to her husband. The German nurse must have come to love him. She stayed with him when he joined a Cossack force fighting against Russia on the German side. When the end of the war came in 1945, both he and the woman fell into British hands, and were confined in a prisoner-of-war camp, where they were kindly treated. The British then handed them, together with hundreds of others – men, women and children – over to the Russians. They were shot, and their bodies buried in a mass grave in the Ukraine.

  It was only by good fortune that Lena had survived in a hostile country. In war it was a matter of luck who lived, who died.

  Clement Winter listened to Dominic’s account with only two interruptions, to clarify something Dominic had not made clear. Now he said, ‘I’m afraid that our time is up.’

  Dominic stood. ‘I’ll buy another hour. I wish to go on. I have hardly started, don’t you see that? I’m not even born yet.’

  ‘Perhaps you’d care to make another appointment with my receptionist?’

  ‘Look, here’s money.’ He brought a roll of twenty-pound notes from his rear trouser pocket. ‘Let me please buy the next hour.’

  Winter consulted his watch, and also rose.

  ‘Forgive me. I have another client in ten minutes’ time.’

  ‘You see, my name isn’t Dominic at all. It’s Dimitri. I’m not real, I’m a pretend person. Dimitri. Dimitri.’

  He felt himself at the heart of some terrible drama. The day had turned cold and wet. He walked in the Oxford streets. There was an injustice, a cruelty, pervading human lives, something inherited. He could not go back to Winter until ten past four on Friday afternoon, in two days’ time; it was the first available appointment. His story was suspended. Yet it was not even his story. He had, as he said, not yet been born. He could not think ahead, but was encased in what had transpired, in what he had revealed, blurted out – a secondhand story, after all. He took shelter in a college doorway, feeling his cold still on him. When the rain faded away in inconclusive fashion, he walked on.

  He bought a suitcase. He bought toilet things, pyjamas. He booked into a hotel and lay on the bed staring at the ceiling. He could not go back to Shreding Green, not until he had talked to Winter again. When he tried just once to phone Fenella, there was no reply.

  He thought briefly of his work, then dismissed it. He could, of
course, go to London to stay with his adoptive mother, Daphne. But he was caught in the heart of the terrible drama beside which even work was irrelevant.

  Why had he said he had blamed himself? He was a victim of circumstance. A millionaire victim.

  He ordered dinner in the hotel, but left it almost untasted. Upstairs, he unlocked his room door and entered, switching on the lobby light as he did so. The bedroom, its curtains not being drawn, was faintly illuminated by beams from a street-lamp. On the far side of the room, by the bathroom door, Fenella was standing. She wore a dress which swept to the floor.

  A shock ran through him. He found himself unable to move. Yet it was confusing – he was going towards her, against his will.

  She put up a warning hand. In the metallic light from outside, her face was bleached ghastly white. The other hand went up to clutch her throat, as so often it did.

  ‘How did you get here?’ he asked.

  She spoke. ‘I have seen you. The real trouble is—’

  But what was the real trouble? What did she say then? He could not hear or understand. Desperately, he asked her to repeat what she had said. ‘Was it all my fault, Fenella?’

  Giving him a sad smile, or at least a rictus he interpreted as a smile, she turned, went into the bathroom, and closed the door firmly behind her.

  ‘Oh Jesus,’ he whispered.

  He stood in the dark, looking about. The wallpaper was mottled. No comfort there. The room felt cold.

  Going forward, he tried the bathroom door. ‘Fenella, please let me in. Don’t always lock me out. Let me come in to you. Please.’

  He dragged the door open and pulled on the light cord. The room with its sky-blue suite leapt from darkness into light. It was empty. He rushed in, peering into the shower. She was not there. Of course.

  Sitting on the bed, sprawling, sitting up again, peering about, Dominic struggled for rationality. She had definitely been here. ‘I have seen you.’ That baffling sentence. ‘I have seen you.’ Oh, he had heard it in a voice outside his head. And what was the rest of that vital message?

  Half afraid to enter the bathroom again, he went and rinsed his face.

  She had been here. He was convinced of that. He had no truck with the paranormal. The episode was more chillingly truthful than ordinary deceptive reality.

  He fell into a swoon, sprawling face down on the bed.

  That night, in his overheated room, he could not sleep. Scenes of violence haunted him: the attack on the German field hospital, with deaths he could only imagine, the repeated rapes of the woman on the train as it forged from one scene of carnage to another, the abandoning of his mother in the snow, by the side of the track, the mass shootings and the mass grave that ended it all. That Second World War, the Great Patriotic War as the Russians called it, was to him some terrible distorted Homeric tale, ended long years before he was conceived, yet somehow living within him, corrupting him.

  When he roused himself enough to look at his watch, it was almost two in the morning.

  He dressed and went down to the lobby. An old porter sitting there reading a newspaper seemed glad of his company. He related an anecdote concerning a pair of real leather shoes an American tourist had left him, with all the details of how the gift had come about. ‘And do you know, sir, the right shoe fitted me a treat, but the left one – why it was far too big, so I had to stuff it with newspaper.’ He gave a creaking laugh. ‘Now what do you make of that?’

  In the morning, by daylight, Dominic phoned Fenella, saying he had been called away on business, and would return as soon as he could: though in his mind the idea formed that he might never be able to return.

  He steeled himself to ask her the vital question. ‘Where were you at about nine o’clock yesterday evening?’

  Her answer was cold and disinterested. She was at home. Where else?

  ‘Do you want to tell me something, Fenella?’

  ‘You have put yourself in the wrong. You have left me, as you said you would.’

  ‘That’s not true. I’ll be back soon.’ Again, he could not tell whether or not he was lying.

  It was ten past four on the Friday afternoon. Greying, distinguished, Dr Clement Winter sat on one side of his electric fire; Dominic Mayor sat on the other. Winter’s expression was open, receptive, though he seemed mainly to study a point on the ceiling of his room.

  ‘The evening before last, I had a vision. I haven’t been home since our meeting. I stay locally. My wife came into my hotel bedroom. Then she was not there. I’m sure she was physically present. Or perhaps it’s just strain. Do such things happen?’

  ‘Did your wife stay for long?’ So he did not show disbelief …

  ‘No. She told me something. I feel it was extremely important. Unfortunately, I could not understand quite what she said. Perhaps it’s all to do with trying to make sense from my life. I’m only twenty-six, yet I feel ages old … I suppose I’m … well, I try to make sense from my life, speaking with you. Yet I thought I came to seek assistance for my wife.’ He clutched himself as if against external cold.

  ‘You probably see that the two questions are related.’

  ‘Ah … yes. Perhaps that is why she was with me.’ And he found himself plunging again into the terrible drama of the past.

  Lena, his real mother, always remembered the desolate field, the snow, and the train pulling away into the distance. She was well aware that, as a Russian, she was liable to be killed by the first Pole she encountered. When she saw that someone was coming, leading a horse, she made her son hide in a hedge, so that he at least would stand a chance of surviving.

  The someone was a woman, and some spark of female sympathy must have crossed between them. She took Lena and the boy to a ruined farm, where she lived in a barn with three men. The relationship was never clear. All the farm animals had been killed, either by Russians or Germans. Without a word of the language, Lena existed in a kind of mist. They lived on turnips. She slept on the floor, on sacking, cuddling the boy against the winter cold. It was a brutal form of existence.

  Although they never molested her, the three men were like animals. They seemed to have no blood bonds between them. Only the youngest one, whose name was Wiktor, showed a semblance of kindness towards her. He was often absent.

  In order to increase her chances of survival, Lena tried to pick up some Polish from the old woman. The woman was a poor teacher, very impatient, and away most of the daylight hours, gathering wood for the fire. Many a day they were without warmth.

  The spring came late. One day, Wiktor returned in haste. He had a revolver, which he exhibited as a preliminary to making a long and passionate speech to the other men, with frequent reference to Lena. She became very agitated.

  A bottle of vodka was passed round. Finally, the other men came to an agreement with Wiktor, despite lamentations from the old woman.

  At dusk, Wiktor indicated that Lena should go with him. She gathered that they had far to travel. Her son was to stay behind in the barn. Then came a scene which Dominic’s mother had acted out for his benefit or her own many times when drinking brandy at night. The lad had run to her and clung about her neck. She had fought to keep him, but the two older men pulled them apart, and Wiktor had dragged her outside.

  Lena re-enacted this scene with great earnestness, without showing compassion for the boy. Either she was glad to be rid of him and looking forward to going off with Wiktor, or she had invented the scene, perhaps as an assuagement for some other sorrow she preferred to keep within herself. Dominic did not know.

  Lena and Wiktor covered almost two hundred miles on foot, so she said, taking many weeks, hiding from Germans. Wiktor was a sniper and joined other partisans. She was never clear about, or else Dominic had not listened to, this part of her saga. What was clear was that Wiktor was shot, and she passed into the hands of the Wehrmacht.

  It was a time of terrible degradation for Lena. Somehow she survived until the end of the war, when she was caught up with the
remnants of the German army fleeing westward before the Russians. When the great swirl of conquest, destruction, and defeat settled somewhat, she found herself in ruined Dresden, penniless and homeless and alone.

  ‘She was then the age I am now,’ Dominic said, ‘ragged, dirty, with no country. It was the state of many people in that dreadful time. All Europe in ruins.’

  He found himself compelled to go over the story again, like a hound running back and forth to pick up a scent, searching for clues. But there were links in the story, contradictions even, not to be brought to mind, even in the calm Oxford room. Part of his history, his prehistory, was lost for ever, and he felt its loss keenly.

  Winter was accommodating (so Dominic guessed). He agreed to see Dominic at the same time every day of the following week.

  Dominic bought a track suit and spent the weekend walking by the Isis. He could not eat. He moved to a better hotel and liked it no better.

  On Monday he looked round an art gallery and saw nothing that moved him. He hated art. He looked round a bookshop and found a book called Phantasms of the Living, but could not find strength to remove it from its shelf. He hated reading.

  Although he also hated music, he went to a music shop and bought a Walkman. For this he obtained a tape of the one piece of music he did like, Shostakovich’s Sonata for Viola and Piano, with its dialogue between the two instruments. It was meditative in character. A Russian critic had once said of it that it would make the world a better place. For that reason, Dominic had grown to love it. And because Shostakovich’s first name was Dmitri. He lay on his double bed and listened to the noise between his ears.

  During the week, he continued to unfold the patchwork of his narrative in the room in King Edward Street, while Winter listened. In the narrative was something cleansing. Dominic began to feel that it would release a new phase in his being. Possibly Fenella’s apparition in the hotel bedroom had been a farewell to the previous phase.