Remembrance Day

by Brian Aldiss

  His mother had become involved with a German in Dresden, an ardent Communist, who was helping to rebuild the Dresden ballet after the end of the hostilities. This man set great store by Lena because she was a Russian woman, and therefore presumably Communist born and bred. Although she had had to imbibe many of the slogans of the regime, she cared not a fig for politics.

  The ballet company began to acquire a reputation. The new authorities of the new country, the German Democratic Republic, funded it generously. The company began to travel, performing in such places as Weimar and East Berlin. Lena and her Communist friend, Wolfgang, went with it. Dominic believed that his mother, perhaps out of fear, never revealed that she had been previously married. Wolfgang married her in 1955, when she found she was pregnant.

  A son, her third, was born to her on 1 May. The date delighted the Stalinist-minded Wolfgang. They christened the baby Dimitri. When Dimitri was seven years old, the Dresden ballet made its first tour of non-Warsaw Pact countries. It visited Helsinki, then Stockholm. When it was performing in London, Lena claimed political asylum.

  ‘It was in the English papers. She showed me the cutting. She just walked into a police station in Kensington. With me.’ Dominic paused for Winter’s response.

  ‘Why did your mother wish to leave the DDR?’

  ‘I think she hated Wolfgang. She was a good hater. He would beat her often when drinking, and sometimes without drink, yah? He beat me too. Also, she was afraid of the occupying forces, the Russians, in the DDR, in case Vasili caught up with her again. She never wished to be dragged back to the Soviet Union. At that time, she had not learned that Vasili was already dead and buried in the Ukraine.’

  There followed the English years.

  ‘Lena had the constitution of a horse, but I was always ill.’

  When she was granted permission to stay in Britain, she got a job in a London supermarket and lodged with the Mayer family, Eric and Daphne and their three children. The Mayers were a cheerful tribe, and treated Lena and her son with great kindness. Both adults worked, Eric being the manager of a small building-supply firm, Daphne teaching German and other subjects at a secondary school in Islington.

  Lena’s life took a turn for the better. She was forty-five, and began to look and dress better. She learned English rapidly, and obtained a better job. She was good with her hands, and helped in the house, to Eric’s admiration. Unfortunately, her son, little Dimitri – whom she now took to calling Dominic – remained withdrawn, and kept to himself, unable to mix with the Mayer children, despite Daphne’s encouragement.

  For a year or two, life sailed on an even keel. London was a pleasant place to be.

  One fine summer Sunday morning, there were notes for Daphne and little Dominic. Lena had run off with Eric. They had gone to Spain, to start up a hotel on the Costa Brava. She sent love. Love and apologies.

  Dominic got to his feet and wandered restlessly round the room. He could not speak. The old memory choked him.

  ‘Was there someone you could turn to in your shock?’

  ‘I was glad she had gone. At first I was glad. I was nine. She was an awful mother. It was not her métier. Lena beat me – she who was so accustomed to being beaten. What she would do was smack me sharply in the face.’ Rage overtook him. He stood over Winter, demonstrating in the air. ‘She would do that, flick of hand, right in my face. Always when I was unprepared. I feared her, I feared Lena. Her tales when she was drunk tormented me also. It’s only this last year that I’ve come to miss her, and to feel sorry for her. What a life she had! And two sons lost … Three? She must regret it … Maybe the smack also, yah?’

  ‘And are you in touch with her?’

  ‘A card from Portugal, soon after my twenty-first birthday. No address. I suppose she’s still alive. Lena.’

  After a long silence, during which he went back to his chair, he said, ‘I sometimes wish I could speak to her, maybe forgive her. At least she got me out of the DDR …’

  Winter asked, ‘Do you feel it is important to forgive your mother?’

  ‘Excuse me, she is no more my mother. When she left, I acquired a better one.’

  When he spoke of Daphne Mayer, he thought of light. Daphne herself was a light-coloured woman with short-cropped fair hair. Although substantially built, she wore mini-skirts for a while, for this was the mid-sixties, and he loved looking at those solid pale legs. She sang when she went to work; she sang when she came home. If she was tired, she never showed it. She looked after her own children uncomplainingly. She gave a special show of affection to little Dominic. There was never a question of her turning him away although Lena had run off with her husband. For the first few weeks after Lena had left, Dominic reverted to wetting his bed, much to the disgust of the Mayer children, but Daphne never scolded him. She sang as she rinsed his sheets.

  Daphne’s younger sister Rosemary, who worked nights at a bakery, came to live for a while. She was some support during the day, and stopped the other children bullying Dominic.

  Dominic had been terrified of Wolfgang, his father. Now that both parents had faded away, he began to develop. He liked the house with the two singing sisters. It was light and bright, unlike the grim block in which they had lived in Dresden, and had a back garden with a swing and visiting cats. The music on Daphne’s transistor was light and cheerful, not heavy and patriotic. He quickly learned the names of the four Beatles.

  Overcoming bureaucratic obstacles, Daphne eventually adopted Dominic as a Mayer. Unfortunately, owing to a malfunctioning typewriter somewhere in the ranks of officialdom, he emerged as Dominic Mayor instead of Mayer.

  He laughed as he told Winter of this error.

  ‘Isn’t that symbolism for you?’ he said to Winter. ‘Some mindless thing decided that I should never become quite a Mayer. Only a Mayor.’ He paused. ‘No, perhaps mindless things decide nothing. Maybe it was God. I remember Daphne laughed and said it was God – “he must be illiterate,” she said. So there I was, a little English boy, learning to speak good English from the German teacher.’

  Daphne coped well with reduced circumstances. The sixties were an easy time in which to live. She worked on translations in the evening, sitting at the table while the TV blazed and four children noisily played round about her. Novels she translated, and even some poetry. On Sundays, she often managed an excursion out of London, taking them all by Green Line bus to Beaconsfield or Chesham. Did she miss Eric? She never said.

  By his mid-week session with Winter, Dominic was prepared to talk about Fenella.

  For all Daphne Mayer’s kindness, to which he happily responded, his experiences had left him isolated. Daphne had a good understanding of children, and never gave up, even ignoring her own children on occasion in order to help Dominic. Seeing his dexterity with crayons, she bought him some watercolours. Rosemary looked after the Mayer children when Daphne took him on a special weekend holiday to Great Yarmouth, arranged through the kindness of another teacher. It was his first sight of the seaside. Then it was he had painted his picture of the barn and old mill. But nothing had changed his withdrawn nature.

  ‘When I struggled to reject my father, he came back in dreams,’ Dominic told Winter. Winter merely nodded encouragingly. ‘I hated Wolfgang, yet one thing he gave me. I was street-wise from an earliest age. You had to be in the DDR. I ran messages for him. You know what, he had a “secret hobby” – as he said. Messing with telephones, bugging. Wolf could bug anything. Electronics I learned from him, and didn’t forget when I was with Daphne. It became my secret hobby. Something told me it was a dirty little DDR secret, even when used in London.

  ‘You see … I realized much later Wolfgang was with the ballet but also worked for the Stasi. Only secret police had such modern equipment as was in his room. As a kid I found a way to key into computer systems – mainframes of banks. Early in the seventies, I was ordering goods on forged accounts. You understand? A little crook, thinking it a game.’

  His repertoire w
as greatly extended when home computers arrived. Dominic was the first boy to own a Sinclair ZX, the youngest member of the computer generation. Size did not matter in this unexplored world.

  ‘Imagine! That poor child could obtain things like any adult. And he soon learned to play the stock exchange game …’

  In no time, he was able to lavish small presents on his adoptive mother. His room began to fill with fraudulently acquired equipment.

  Fenella Cameron was working for one of the mushrooming computer trading firms in London. She had been deputed to check on frauds and failures. At that time, she lived with her mother in a flat in Kensington, only a short distance away. She took it upon herself to visit Dominic personally.

  He was shocked when she called. He had scarcely visualized human beings at the other end of the line. Fenella had threatened him with the police, but he had promised to return the equipment, and all was smoothed over. He was impressed by her calm demeanour. Daphne gave her a coffee. While they were talking round the kitchen table, the lights went out. There was a power cut in Islington. The nation’s miners were on strike.

  ‘I walked some way back with her before she caught a taxi to Kensington. Of course, Fenella seemed immensely grown-up to me. I don’t know what she saw in me, spotty, just reaching puberty. Perhaps she saw my excitement. I liked escorting a woman in dark streets. It made me feel big. And I knew she was scared. Poor Fenella. Always scared. She told me how lonely she was, how she lived with her mother, how she thought she’d never marry …’ He fell silent.

  ‘Did she talk about her mother?’ Winter asked.

  ‘Her father was still alive. She talked about him. He lived up in Scotland. Malcolm Cameron. Malcolm James Cameron. She loved him, but her parents lived separately. She never said anything against her mother … Come to think of it, she never has done so. More’s the pity, Dr Winter. I believe she needs to throw the old witch out of her system …’

  He was sitting forward, hands clasped. Looking up, he saw his fifty-minute hour was nearly over.

  He went on hurriedly, ‘The upshot was, I saw her again. It was a new, strange experience for us both. I soon persuaded her to have sex. She was lonely and thought she would never marry. Daphne also said she would never marry after Eric had run off, though there was a chap interested. Of course, the Cameron Scottish estate sounded romantic. Anyone born in the depths of Europe has a curiosity about Scotland …

  ‘I was slightly ashamed of this new relationship, and hid it from all my new friends.’

  He caught Winter’s eye. ‘Tomorrow, yah?’ he said.

  On the Thursday afternoon, Winter came into the reception room to greet Dominic as usual in his slow polite manner.

  ‘I notice you always leave me with what is called a cliff-hanger as you depart, like a true storyteller,’ he said, showing Dominic into the consulting room.

  Dominic looked guarded. ‘I’ve forgotten what I said.’

  ‘Really? Yesterday, you paused at the door and said, “I’ll tell you tomorrow how she invited me up to Scotland.”’

  ‘I have to keep your interest.’ He smiled. He clasped his hands behind him.

  ‘You have my interest.’ Smiling in return, he indicated the armchair by the fire. Dominic sat down.

  ‘Look, Dr Winter, I realize we have only today and tomorrow. Fenella thinks I’ve deserted her. I must go home for the weekend. Really, my first intention was to bring her to see you. Not me. Her. I think she’s really in trouble in a way I’m not. That’s what Lucy Traill believes.’

  ‘Did you think that when you married Fenella?’

  ‘Mmmm … I imagine not. I had had little experience of women, did not know how they would behave.’

  ‘You had experience of two deeply troubled women, Lena and Daphne.’

  ‘They were older …’ His sentence died away. ‘You’re saying I’m fatally attracted to older women?’

  ‘You’re saying it.’

  ‘Shit. I’m not saying it. I don’t think it. But I suppose I saw Fenella as an escape from all my past, even including Daphne. At that time, being young and thoughtless, I wasn’t half as grateful to Daphne as I’ve lately become. She deserves – well, everything. Everything I could give her.’

  ‘And Fenella, nothing?’

  ‘I married her, didn’t I? Look, somehow I find it hard to go on. I’m at the end of the narrative, which I hope you enjoyed, by the way, yah? Now there’s just entanglements. The marriage, I mean.’

  ‘The narrative was interesting, I agree. But it was somewhat impersonal, not being so much about you as your parents. Now that you reach more personal matters, you naturally find it more difficult. So you tell me you must finish tomorrow.’

  ‘I’m not trying to avoid … OK, perhaps I am. It’s so painful. Listen, there are two salient points as I see it. First, Fenella’s wish not to be loved. Second, these terrifying sick monologues she gets into, which no one can understand.’

  Suddenly, he came up against her apparition in the hotel bedroom, when he had not been able to grasp what she said. It had been a projection of his brain; it summed up the situation: she always spoke and he never could hear, never grasp her meaning.

  He felt truth swim like a fish just below the surface of his comprehension.

  He became agitated. ‘It’s no good … Jesus, she is trying to communicate with me and I just refuse to hear. It’s my fault, and I’m to blame for the failure of the marriage, and I am coming to you just to try to shift the guilt from my own shoulders. I’m really a bastard, just as Lena always said. Doctor, I can’t go on with this. It’ll always be a farce. I’m lying even when I think it’s truth. I’m too messed up for anyone to mend.’ He stifled a sob, glancing swiftly at his watch.

  ‘Forgive me, I’ll pay but I must leave. It just gets worse. You can’t believe – I can’t believe – a word of it. It’s all too twisted up in my head, yah. I never loved Fenella, never loved her properly. All she needed was to have someone to listen clearly to the pain she got from her fucking mother – and I wasn’t listening. That’s all she needed. Now – too late! I wasn’t listening. Too busy making money. Money! As if it’s worth anything … Why do I blame her at all for my faults? I act as if I hate her. So I do. When I told her I would leave her, that was what I really meant. I didn’t know … What do I know?’ He spoke fast. ‘Yes, what I really meant …’

  ‘In the heat of the moment, possibly. Yet you entered here telling me you wished to go back to Fenella at the weekend. I see you need fortitude to return. But words are not set in concrete.’

  Dominic brushed his hair back from his forehead. ‘When you tell something to Fenella, then those words are set in concrete. In stone. Marble. There for ever. One day after a row, she looked so sad. She has a good expression of sadness. So I put my arms round her, just to comfort her.

  ‘“What do you do that for?” she asked. Such a silly question. “What do you do that for?” Isn’t it the common language of compassion, understood even in a war? “Lust, madam, pure lust,” I replied in annoyance.’

  ‘And what did she reply to that? “Very well then, no more sex till this quarrel is over.” That’s what she said. In great horror, I said to her that perhaps if we had no sex we could never cure the quarrel. But what she said had already become marble. She has no way to make … um, concessions. No way. I bend before her, take back my own words, eat humble pie, lose all my pride, and hate myself for it, all for the sake of peace and happiness. She? No such thing. She’s so unbending, like her mother – and I admire it. The slab of marble moves forward towards me like a glacier, blocking off my options, till my back is against the wall. You understand that?’

  Staring wide-eyed at Winter, he added, ‘Do you grasp a word? There’s a sword in my heart! – do you grasp what I say?’

  Winter was sitting upright, all attention, his hands resting peacefully on his lap. The landscape of his face was humane – benign but slightly weary. After a pause, as though he had deeply considered
Dominic’s question, he gave a slight nod, encouraging his client to continue.

  ‘I understand. You put it well.’

  ‘Put it? It’s what I live with six years now. I don’t understand, I really don’t understand whether she wants me or not … No, that’s a lie, another lie – under it all, I understand – well, I think I understand – that she does want me, needs me even. Desperately. But on her terms. Terms which would kill me.’

  A stony silence fell. Finally, resignedly, Dominic said, ‘But I’m trying in some perverse way to impress you. You see why I work so happily with computers? I don’t lie to them, they don’t lie to me. I have done here a whole lot of self-blame. Perhaps it is so that you in your mind will think I am not to blame. This I will say. If you had Fenella here, she would not blame herself. She would blame only me. Her old mother likewise. They are quite unable to see any fault – any little fault in themselves, yah?

  ‘Lucy Traill worries that Fenella may commit suicide. I feel like it myself at times. It’s an escape from the living trap.’

  Again the silence, in which the minute hand of the clock on the mantelpiece moved perceptibly.

  ‘I suppose I’m saying that only to impress you? I would not really do it. Suicide.’

  ‘And you think Fenella might?’

  ‘I think I had better return home. I don’t know what she will do. Not suicide. But you see my problem. She speaks in two voices. Does that mean she is mad? If she is mad, then the more important that I stay with her. At the same time, the less I wish to be there. I must drown my wishes for the sake of little Malcolm. And for Fenella’s sake. She has no other friends, only that all-devouring mother.’

  He rocked back and forth in his chair. ‘I wish the old hag was dead. That’s the truth.’

  He took a long walk after his session, heading westwards without thought, without heed of traffic. He was furious with Winter, who offered him no comfort. He was furious with himself. He had given too much of himself away, for no return. Shostakovich played in his ear, but he tore the headphones off impatiently.