Kindergarten

by Peter Rushforth

  “Comfort me, boy.”

  Corrie put his arm round Jo’s shoulders.

  “Remember when I was younger, and you used to come in and sit on my bed when I was scared of the dark? You’re my big brother!”

  “Little though I am.”

  When he was younger, Jo had been frightened of going to sleep. He didn’t understand where he went when he was asleep. He had told Corrie nothing about the nightmares he had been having lately, apart from saying that they were about darkness.

  “How canst thou part sadness and melancholy, my tender juvenile?”

  “Why tender juvenile? Why tender juvenile?”

  “I spoke it, tender juvenile, as a congruent epitheton appertaining to thy young days, which we may nominate tender.”

  Jo grimaced. “We went a bit wrong there.”

  “A most acute juvenile!”

  “Well, it was a long time ago.”

  “Back in the days when I was quite young, really.”

  It was two years since Jo had played Moth in Love’s Labour’s Lost.

  “My first major triumph on the histrionic boards.” Jo sighed with theatrical nostalgia.

  “Your nine-year-old kneecaps caused quite a stir in those tights. Girls came from miles around just to ogle. When you turned sideways, whole rows fell over backwards.”

  “Like Guy Richens’s grandmother.”

  “Showing her knickers.”

  Jo suddenly began to giggle helplessly, very high-pitched, like a very small boy, like Matthias. Tears ran down, splashed on to Corrie’s shirt.

  “Frankenstein and Mirth!”

  He reached under his bed, and held up a parcel.

  “Your present,” he said, “cunningly removed from inside the wardrobe. Nearly time to open it. Let’s go to supper, big brother. How do you feel on this, your special day?”

  “Older.”

  “Well, you are pretty ancient now.”

  “Could you help me down the steps, young man?”

  Jo gave Corrie his arm, and he began to stagger slowly towards the stairs, walking like someone very old.

  eleven

  LILLI didn’t have a television, and she came through into their living-room when Jo switched on for the ten o’clock news.

  It wasn’t until the newscaster briefly added further details to earlier news stories of the day—the search for the murderers of the Turin kidnap victim, the latest casualty figures in the Paris bomb explosion—that they realised what was going to happen. The frightened child’s face appeared again at the back of the newscaster, and the words “School Siege: Day Eleven,” and then, abruptly, the picture on the television screen was the front of the West Berlin school, the three-storey bulk across the snowcovered field, from which the children’s voices had come on Christmas Eve, singing “Der Tannenbaum.”

  The news programme was being transmitted live from West Berlin.

  A reporter wearing a heavy coat stood in front of the camera, holding a microphone. There was noise all around him, a siren somewhere, a crowd in the distance, and floodlights illuminated the whole area in front of the school. The reporter kept glancing around him as he spoke.

  There was one thing different about the front of the actual school building.

  The last time they had seen it, every window had been dark, the whole of the school looking empty and uninhabited, but now one window in the middle of the second storey was brightly illuminated. The zoom lens of the camera moved in rapidly. In the centre of the window, sitting on an upright school chair raised so that she was fully visible above the sill, a little dark-haired girl, her hair in plaits, faced out across the newly fallen snow on the empty field.”

  It was ten minutes past ten. Almost half an hour ago the lights had been switched on to show the girl sitting there. She was the first child who was going to be shot by the terrorists. Just at the edge of the window, on the girl’s right, was the figure of a woman with a gun. She had been described as a “girl of 28” in some of the newspapers, but she looked like a woman to Corrie. Her most recent act, before the attack on the school, had been the shooting of a West German politician’s elderly invalid mother in her bed.

  As the time moved nearer to quarter past the hour, the reporter gradually stopped talking and the sounds around him stilled. The area in front of the school suddenly became absolutely silent.

  Corrie realised what was happening.

  They were waiting for the sound of the gun.

  There was a sound, sharp in the silence—the window in the illuminated room being opened outwards.

  The little girl’s face, in grainy close-up, was in the centre of the television screen, blurring in and out of focus as the cameraman tried to get the sharpest possible image.

  “No,” Jo said, beginning to get up. “They’re going to show it happening.”

  Suddenly the camera jerked upwards, and all the lights in the area went out, inside and outside the school. There were screams from the unseen crowd behind the camera, a high-pitched shriek of metal as the microphone hit against something, and then a brilliantly bright explosion on the roof of the school and the sound of gun-fire from inside the building. Total confusion, glass smashing, voices shouting out harshly in the darkness, lit by the lurid flare.

  As the camera righted itself, flames were gushing out from a window on the top floor of the school. The reporter poured out a flood of excited words. Figures ran in front of the camera, in the flickering light from the fire. Something fell from a window.

  There was a lull in the noise and movement; then the doors at the front of the school were flung open, and children came running out across the snow.

  In the ensuing confusion was the sound of a child’s name being called over and over again, but the siege was over.

  Towards the end of the news, the reporter said that it was believed that three terrorists, four children, and two soldiers were dead. One of the terrorists had been blown up by his own hand-grenade.

  “Good,” Jo said, with great viciousness. “Serves the bugger right.”

  Corrie and Lilli looked at each other, and then at Jo. He covered his face with his hands and turned to press himself in against the back of the chesterfield, drawing his knees up towards his chest.

  LILLI’S was the last present Corrie opened. He opened it very carefully, trying not to tear the paper. She always wrapped her gifts beautifully.

  They had carried supper through into the dining-room, clearing the game of Dungeons and Dragons from the table. The remains of Corrie’s birthday cake were still in the centre of the table, and the fir-tree in the corner of the room.

  They were sitting in the same places as on Christmas Eve, with Lilli opposite him, Jo beside him. Just before he lifted the final sheet of paper away, he looked up at her. He thought he knew what the present was going to be. She was watching him very intently, almost nervously.

  “You look very thoughtful,’” Jo quoted, looking at her closely.

  “I’ve been keeping something secret from you all,” she said.

  Corrie looked around for a gap amongst the paintings on the wall, but he couldn’t see one. When the final sheet of paper was pulled away, he stared at the glazed painting for a long time in silence, his emotions confused, struggling to contain the wide smile of someone modest who has suddenly been extravagantly praised in public.

  It was a new painting by Lilli.

  Jo bent over beside him, and they studied the water-colour together, the size of a double-page spread in a book.

  It was a painting of Corrie doing his homework at the kitchen table during the power cuts in January. In the soft glow of the candles he was facing straight out of the picture, his face rapt, as if committing the words of a play or a poem to memory, books and papers scattered on the table in front of him. The dresser was behind him, and every detail of the room around him was minutely recorded: the wooden weather-house, the Blue Denmark crockery, the Wind in the Willows calendar, the chiming pendulum clock, the en
amel advertising sign for St. Bruno tobacco, the flowers in the Victorian jug, the Droste’s cocoa tins, the Pears’ soap advertisement, the pine plate-rack, the blue-and-white pottery village made by Mum on the top shelf of the dresser. The detail was so fine that he recognised the individual designs on the miniature Kate Greenaway playing-cards on the fridge door. The illustration on the queen of hearts card was for I had a little husband. A little girl stood at a table beside an open window. On the table were two jugs, and a tiny figure of a man dressed in the scarlet tunic of a soldier. Corrie’s eyes returned to the figure of himself, at one side of the painting with its intensely realised interior, looking out at anyone looking at the picture. It was like looking into a miniature mirror, into his own face.

  “Corrie doing homework” was pencilled at the bottom, and the signature was “Lilli Danielsohn,” the name of a woman from forty years ago. For a moment he felt that he was looking back into the past, into the face of a boy from long ago who was himself. He saw the face of the second sister in “Fitcher’s Bird,” the face of a girl of about his age, absorbed and inward-looking, although she was gazing out of the picture: the face of a girl intent on making lace, reading a letter, playing a piece of music. Lilli’s draughtsmanship was as pure as when she was producing her early work in the 1920s, the colours as delicate, the details as finely observed.

  “It’s me” was all he could say, quietly.

  Lilli looked around at the paintings on the walls.

  “It’s so long since I painted,” she said. “I was frightened I wouldn’t be able to do it. I wanted to produce paintings like the work I did in Germany all those years ago.”

  “It’s just the same,” Corrie said. “I feel as if I’ve been given a famous painting from a museum. I feel like someone special.”

  “You are someone special. You’re my grandson.”

  “Paintings?” Jo said, smiling. “You said paintings.”

  Lilli looked at them both, her blue eyes very intense.

  “I have painted other pictures. I’m painting still. I feel as though it’s all starting to come back to me.”

  “When?” Jo asked, interested and excited. “You haven’t said a word about it to anyone. Have you?”

  Lilli shook her head.

  “No. This is the first one I’ve shown to anyone. I’ve been keeping secrets.”

  She stood up. “Come with me.”

  She moved to the door, beckoning them towards her.

  “Magical revelations?” Jo asked

  Lilli smiled. “These are my hoards of precious stones.”

  They went into the hall, and through into the living-room at the back of the house. She made them go into the room in front of her, before she switched on the light, and then remained near the door as they moved inside.

  The room was still uncarpeted, and the furniture covered with dust-sheets, but Lilli’s easel stood in the centre, with a paint-covered smock hanging from it, and all round the wall at eye-level, unglazed, the heavy paper pinned directly against the wall, were at least twenty water-colours—the room seemed full of them—so rich and intricate that they seemed to nourish the sense of sight, and they were all of their family, and their home.

  Lilli and Matthias side by side at the loom, bent over together absorbed, looking at the pattern as it began to emerge. The back of Tennyson’s from the edge of the low cliff, seen through the burial-ground. The family on the lawn in summer sunshine, reading and talking around a picnic meal. The whole of the length of the sun lounge on a cloudy afternoon, with the connecting door open, Matthias painting at the table in the far part and Baskerville lying asleep in his basket amongst the scattered toys. Mum at the piano in Lilli’s house, paintings on the wall behind her, Corrie’s cello leaning against a chair. He, Jo, and Matthias at the edge of the sea, on the beach just beyond the end of the garden, Matthias holding his hand and about to throw a twig into the water for Baskerville. Mum and Matthias intent on a picture-book in Matthias’s bedroom, beside the open window. Mum and Judith holding a sheet between them in the garden, beginning to fold it inwards towards each other, as Matthias, through the open window of the kitchen, knelt at a chair up against the sink, washing yoghurt cartons for Lilli’s seedlings. Mum, Dad, Jo, and Matthias sitting around the breakfast table on a Sunday morning as Corrie adjusted the weights of the pendulum clock, as he did every Sunday morning. The Ferry House from across the playing-fields in autumn, with himself just visible practising his cello in the upper window, and Jo walking away with Baskerville at the end of a lead. Mum and Dad listening to music, tired, at the end of the day, in the living-room, books put to one side, the curtains drawn back from the window, the evening sky across the Green. The transient moments of a family in its home, engrossed in the everyday tasks of living and being together, were recorded and given permanence in the paintings which filled the walls, small-scale, intense, and deeply felt.

  “This will be your birthday present,” Lilli said to Jo, coming up behind them, and they looked at a painting of Jo asleep in bed, bedclothes twisted around him, books scattered on the floor, photographs, maps, and posters on the walls.

  They were the first words anyone had spoken since they first came into the room. Corrie and Jo had moved slowly and attentively from painting to painting, not looking at each other.

  Jo stopped in front of the painting of Mum at the piano, and caught at Corrie’s hand as he moved past, as he had done when he was little and wanted to be taken on a walk. He spoke quietly, almost a whisper to himself.

  “‘A Young Woman…” He looked at Corrie.

  “…Seated at a Virginal.’”

  They smiled at each other. A secret they shared with Dad.

  “Mum.”

  They stood, finally, in front of the painting that was still on the easel.

  It was a painting of the Victorian Evening, the moment just before Mum and Jo had started to sing “Won’t You Buy My Pretty Flowers?” Dad was just glancing across from the piano at Corrie as he prepared to play the first notes on the cello. In the light from the oil-lamp, in front of the scrap-screen, Mum and Jo held their sheets of music and looked straight ahead towards the spectator, their faces very serious, drawing in their breath before the opening words.

  “This is for your father,” Lilli said. “It is the scene I tried to paint first, but I have only now completed it.”

  They gazed deeply into a scene that already lay within their minds, like memory given form.

  “When did you paint them all?”

  Jo’s eyes had not left the painting as he asked the question.

  “I made my first attempt on the day of your mother’s funeral, Jo,” Lilli said, quiet, matter-of-fact. “They were not paintings, just pencilled sketches. I wanted to draw some of the scenes I remembered with Margaret when they were vivid in my mind. I did not wish to mourn. I wished to remember the happiness in her life. I had wanted to draw for months before that, when I was still affected by the stroke, and, of course, I could not write down the pictures that were in my head. My hands worked against me.”

  She turned towards Corrie.

  “The very first picture I completed—I had abandoned many others—was the one of you, Corrie, doing your homework. When I saw you in January, in the candlelight, the scene stayed in my mind. It brought back memories to me that I realised no longer gave me pain, and it was a scene, even then, at that time, I wanted to record. I painted that picture in May. Then all the other pictures came.”

  They walked back through into the dining-room, and sat around the fire, as they had done on Christmas Eve, before they opened the presents. Imperceptibly, they had drifted into the mood of their weekly teas together, when they first started to talk seriously to each other.

  “I wanted to see whether I still had the skill. I destroyed so much of what I did at first, but I was determined. It made me fight the effects of the stroke more than anything else. Nothing would stop me. At the beginning of the year, you used to describe scenes
for me to draw in your lessons, Corrie, as I began to improve. You were helping me to begin again, although you didn’t realise. This Easter, I knew I would paint again, though I had told myself when I left Germany that I never would, ever again. In February I had a letter from an art gallery in West Berlin asking whether I would be able to help the director there, who was hoping to hold an exhibition of my work. They had collected first editions of all my books, and had tracked down some proofs that still existed, and had an almost complete survey of all my work. They asked if I would be willing to loan them any letters, or documents, or original paintings. I wrote back to him, and said that I had all my paintings, and that I would be happy for them to be on show again, for the people to look at them in the city where they were painted. I laid down some conditions of the way the exhibition had to be arranged.”

  They looked at the paintings on the walls around them.

  She turned to them both, one after the other.

  “I hope you will loan me your paintings—the English ones and the German ones—for the exhibition. They belong to you now, but I would like all the paintings to be together this one time in Berlin.”

  She indicated Corrie’s birthday present on the table.

  “The exhibition is to be next year, and the arrangements have now nearly all been made, but when the letter came in February I thought, Could I paint anything now, to add to my German paintings, to show that I am not like someone who died forty years ago? Could I show that Lilli Danielsohn is still alive, still capable of painting? So, in the way I told you, I began to paint. In the sun lounge, in the morning light, when you were all out, or at school, I began. I hid everything like a thief. At first I was afraid I would produce nothing I would like to show people, but when I painted the picture of you in the candle-light, Corrie, I was happy. That was the scene I had inside my head that I wanted to show other people. And so I painted more. Then there were the designs and posters for The Winter’s Tale. I had become a painter again, and I wished to show my family to other people who had never known them, as I had done before.”