All This by Chance

by Vincent O'Sullivan

  Some evenings when Esther carried a coffee through to Milan’s desk and asked hadn’t he done enough for one day, surely, he grinned and leaned back and let his hand rest on her thigh, as she bent forward to press her lips against his forehead. ‘I can taste your thinking.’ And she sometimes thought, without telling him even as a joke, that she could see an elderly woman with both hands carefully balancing a cup, bringing coffee to a balding scholar at his desk, whose book on borders was almost finished. It’s so hard to keep up with them, she imagines the old man saying, they keep outsmarting you. Wars. Boundaries. But the young man says, ‘You’re right, this is ridiculous.’

  He neatens the papers in front of him and says, ‘Shouldn’t we be in bed? Like normal people?’ There are moments when he wonders at how casually he can say such a thing, how after two years she is contented still to be with him. Everything in life seeming so ordinary, and then here she is, living with him. Thanks to the bush, as he still calls it, the scrap of farm high in the blue hills, in that other world. He tells her so, and she makes light of it. She tells him back, ‘You English think “exotic” where we’d say “run-of-the-mill”.’ And the long silences they both revel in. The closeness, he would not have believed it, of how saying little can so suffice. Yet the utter frankness, when they choose it.

  He holds her hand in the dark. He sometimes thinks she is asleep but she is wide awake. He likes to tell her, ‘I don’t know if deep down you really approve of us.’

  ‘Us?’

  ‘Us, I mean. Brits. Not one of you. From over there.’ When she tells him things he is surprised to hear her say.

  She leans against him. She says, ‘Complaints should be submitted in writing.’

  ‘That’s the book after this.’

  ‘Us,’ she says again. ‘The things you come out with. You’re only half-Brit anyway.’

  Esther thinks about it now. About the man she lives with. She admires the way his writing so comprehends duplicity, and yet at times there is such innocence as well. His believing that given a choice, people will act for the best. His commitment once he believes a thing to be true. Her own wanting to tell him far more often than she does, ‘You’re so certain others aren’t necessarily worse than yourself!’ She knows she hurts him when she says, ‘If I wrote down all these pronouncements I could set up as a moral guide.’ He says, his fingers stroking her arm, ‘They’re simply possibilities. Things worth giving a chance.’

  She remembers her father, his heavy dismissive shrug that anything might be taken on trust. As if we haven’t reason enough to doubt that. Milan’s hand dabs at her throat, he brushes at the tight black mass of curls. She turns her head for his mouth to graze at the beat of a vein. The smell of his skin comforts her. She thinks of him as she walks in the city that she has come to, the third in line: after Lisa, after Eva. She likes thinking that. Likes it that Milan belongs here without having to consider it the way she does. ‘He gets on with things,’ as Debbie likes to say of him. His mother who works in a café in Camden Market, with its plain wooden tables, its mix of students and locals and tourists who are a little off the track. No one would be there for the food alone, the scones and the no-nonsense sandwiches that she prepares out back. The place ringing with voices and orders called through and the clatter of the Jamaican kitchen-hand who scours dishes as though he has it in for them. It does not bother Milan that his mother works at something so unassuming. He laughs with her, ‘You work. It’s not a word a lot of people are proud of but I am. The place would close without you.’ Her slapping lightly at his arm. ‘You needn’t condescend to me, lad. You might even try it on yourself some day.’ The closeness between them Esther likes to watch and envies, thinking as she does so of her father in the big house he had always wanted and at last comes to own, on its cliff looking out to sea. As good an address, he reminds her, as any woman could wish for. Tell him one that was better? Yet her father, she guesses, as on most days of his life, wanting to declare, We are born to be uneasy. It goes with who we are. ‘Your gift for misery on behalf of the world!’ she had shouted at him as a teenager, and regretting it before the sentence is even out. Daddy saying nothing as he looked at her. His turning then so she would not see how he had been stung. Now for his sake as much as any she would go. She would have to go. That certainty coming to her so intensely she feels it almost as though she were physically shoved. Milan says to her, blurred from waking, ‘Is anything wrong?’

  At breakfast she tells him she has decided. ‘Don’t press me too much on why.’

  ‘And it never occurred before?’

  ‘Not the way it does now.’

  ‘A voice from a cloud?’ And then, ‘That’s not much of a joke.’

  ‘I won’t be making you wear your hair in long curls.’ She twists a finger at the side of his ear. She wants him to take it lightly. ‘But it’s not a whim.’ She wants him to know that too.

  She phones a travel agent in the King’s Road. By lunchtime she has the ticket in her hand. ‘I agree,’ the direct young man who attended to her nods when she remarks on how reasonable the price of the flight was. As though he intends a career somewhere other than in travel, he says, ‘Ryanair are cattle trucks but they’ll get you there in one piece.’ Then ‘Oops,’ he says, his hand across his mouth.

  ‘And back, I hope,’ Esther says.

  That evening Milan tells her about what Wrocław used to be. Festung Breslau. About when the borders changed. How one people become another. ‘We’re before all that,’ she says. ‘Mind you, that’s about all I know. Out of a vague Eastern village I sentimentally imagine every time I look at Chagall, how’s that for avoiding fact? But always on the rise. David always insisted on that. There was nowhere for a Jew to go but up. As if that isn’t true of most people, most of the time.’

  ‘Not that I know much more about my lot,’ Milan says. ‘We’re a gritty social-realist movie.’

  Debbie had ‘filled Esther in’, as she said, with the few details that seemed important. ‘Married when we were twenty, would you believe it.’ Milan’s father was a Czech, they both worked at a Butlin’s holiday camp. ‘He was the camp electrician and I looked after what they called a crèche which meant the snottiest kids in England could run amok.’ Milan apart she had never seen a baby in her life she’d give you the time of day for. But his father liked the trade he had learned from his father in another country that was no longer the same country and they fell for each other and it was goodnight nurse from then on. And there were perks. Debbie said she must have been one of the last girls in England to see George Formby alive. Not on stage, she wasn’t wanting to make too grand a claim. He had come into the big room where dozens of children shouted and yelped and had looked at them and said to her, with honest to God the biggest teeth you’d ever seen, pictures gave you no idea, ‘Only a lion-tamer should be in with this lot, love,’ and gone out again, grinning all the time so you wondered if it was actually a grin or just the way his face was. It was a story she liked to tell. So she and Milan’s father married, didn’t they, as she said, and that was that, married in a church with bells galore, prayers you couldn’t understand, oh no, the English version not good enough for Czechs. Then after a few years Bruno ups and goes east, that’s how he used to put it, going east. Sent money back, never a problem with that. Never said he wasn’t coming back but never said he was either. Then his brother writes to say he had died and Milan eight years old. ‘And that’s that. Not such an interesting story,’ Milan says, ‘but the only one we had.’

  ‘All lives are interesting if we know enough about them,’ Esther tells him. ‘Virginia Woolf’s father said that.’ She takes hold of Milan’s wrist. ‘Keep your hand quiet until you’ve stopped telling me.’

  ‘And Debbie had the house not far from the Market. That was something. Why she still thinks of him as a good provider.’

  ‘As he was.’

  ‘She’s still got photos of him everywhere. Pity I didn’t know him.’

 
Their lying there, the radio beside the bed playing quietly. Until Esther adds, ‘I’d like to know more about our lot. I know the end but more than that.’

  ‘There’s always something. Enough to start from.’

  ‘But it’s never right. Not exactly.’

  ‘What we don’t know, then,’ Milan says. ‘We at least know that.’

  She leans across and kisses him, his hand runs along her side. ‘That doesn’t make sense,’ she tells him.

  No more than a week then, until she leaves. ‘About time,’ Milan says. He has been to a conference in Ghent and is home again. He talked with a German publisher from Frankfurt who liked the borders book, as much of it as he has done. She tells him an American journal has taken a piece she sent without letting on to him that she had. She said they had thought it was autobiography but she doesn’t mind that. ‘If they believe that they’ll believe anything.’

  ‘What fiction means,’ Milan says. And then he tells her, ‘They get along quite nicely living together, don’t they? Scholars and writers?’

  ‘Early days yet.’

  She doesn’t mind that he thinks there was something more considered to her deciding on Wrocław than was actually so. She thinks again how it had been Daddy’s obsession, and yet one he did nothing more about than talk and write his querying letters. Stephen telling him, ‘You’ve got as much as you’re likely ever to get, David. Names. A few addresses. There’s walls you have to stop at.’ She thought of his desk drawers, the correspondence that went on for years, the organisations that helped when they could, the queries that came up with nothing new. Stephen repeating to him, ‘They were as good almost at destroying records towards the end as they were at keeping them beforehand.’ Her father insisting he would go there one day, already knowing he never would. His bitterness at himself when there was no one left to blame. Wives. Business commitments. Inertia. Stephen cited for not getting more from Babcia, and the old man mildly explaining, yet again, ‘It wasn’t possible. Not the way you think it was.’ David telling her when there was no one else to tell, ‘If I went there it might pull the threads together.’

  That hard last year before she came away, the months when his speech was difficult and there was his relentless and implacable glare for whatever came into his sight, at existence itself and its goads that seemed directed at him. She had sat and read to him from the Psalms, finding beforehand the ones that might carry consolation. She had phoned his friend Harry Liebermann, whose father had kindly brought the teenage David back to faith. ‘If you’d come and read to him from the book he’s marked in lots of places,’ she’d asked. Her knowing how awkwardly, how laboriously, her father had learned to spell out the words he was never at ease with, which even when not understood consoled him. She thought of him leaning back against the stacked pillows, Harry Liebermann’s voice softly reciting to him, his friend’s hand resting on his. She had left the men together in the hospital room and sat on a bench in the carpark and thought, What if this is the end? But the miracle, as we blithely say, his recovery against the odds, his happiness now with Judith, the discipline of his no longer drinking, his exercise, his seeming not to fret. ‘His third marriage,’ Stephen said to her, smiling, gently sardonic, can one say that? ‘Practice presumably does make perfect.’

  She liked to talk of Stephen as Milan liked to listen. ‘We’ll go there anyway one day,’ she said. The bach, she meant, the beach, the waterfall she thought of as her own, because her grandfather had told her that so often as a child when they walked there, ‘Esther’s stairs, see?’, and they would stand after the heavy rains and the spray laid veils on their faces. And her laughing, ‘God, this is the way old people natter on. Before they’re locked up!’ But her lover knows enough by now for details to find their place, with the grandmother too whose photographs on the mantelpiece Esther loved to look at as a child. She would stand and touch their frames and turn them, trying to make the features move, the always unsmiling, directly gazing woman who was young enough to be a girl, for none of the photos were of Eva once her children were too old to sit on her lap, or lean against her knees. Who had died before Esther could remember her. And her Aunt Lisa who looked so like herself that even Milan for a moment had mistaken her in the snapshots she kept in the drawer of her desk. She had tried to tell him how the mad bastard she spent time talking with and recording would look at her when she sat with him. The regret and sorrow, she supposed, to give him the benefit of that. The one time she had ever used appalling for the grief she guessed at behind the eyes, their intense attention. What she guessed they saw and returned to and no end to their regret.

  But the only photographs Esther takes with her, once her passport is on the desk with her tickets, are the copies she had made years back, that Stephen said were handed to them fifty years before. They had not been married more than a few months before the official letter came to Eva. The stocky, bewildered woman who waited for them, whose age as he had then thought might be anything up to sixty, but decades younger, the woman who had proved her strength simply by surviving and whose body seemed—yes, he had thought this, Stephen said, absurd as it was—seemed as if that of another person, this woman who looked at them with neither apprehension nor at first any hint of pleasure, who waited until the translating woman beside her moved her hand to indicate they might come together, she and the tall young woman who was her flesh and blood. Each stepping across the carpet between them as if in some strangely scripted drama, the tall vase of spiky flowers on a table behind them, it was like that, Stephen remembered, like a play that he watched and neither actor knew her lines, nor even the language she should speak in. He saw his wife’s hands clasped in front of her as she had never held them before, a schoolgirl covering her nervousness. The older woman’s eyes that made him think, as she moved forward, that what she looked at was not in fact what she believed she saw. And then her features crumpled as if actually distorted, quite beyond her will, and she raised her damaged hand, a crushed half-opened fist sliding down the fall of Eva’s hair. There was another photograph of the woman, much younger than when Stephen had first seen her. She was smiling slightly, her hair cut short, standing on the step of a building, a door with a heavy ornamental handle behind her. Esther now placed it in a compartment of her purse. That, and the head-and-shoulders photograph of the woman looking directly to whoever may have taken it, the rusted indent of a paper clip marking an upper corner. ‘They were all my old aunt brought with her,’ Esther said as Milan held them for a moment, then placed them down. ‘That and the list of relatives who didn’t have her luck. The address in the street I hope to find. That’s about as close I guess as the rest of us will ever get.’

  She had hoped the flight from Stanstead might be clear all the way. The weather was good, after a week of indeterminate English grey. The look of lovely summer. The trees across from the terminal’s parking area the gorgeous July as one always hoped for, then the spill of handsome countryside, hazed as it rose towards a wooded skyline.

  Esther asked for a window seat. The plane crossed the long sandy sickles before the Dutch coast and the neatness, the packaging, the intricacy of European farmland that enchanted her. Then soon enough the more expansive reach of Germany beneath her, and the excitement she did not expect, the thought of how at last it would come to her, the city she had always heard of, yet as remote as if its reality was in stories heard and repeated rather than in streets, in people, in ordinary things, as of course every place became once one was there. The woman in the seat beside her spoke to her, thinking perhaps she was a young woman coming back from holidays. But the language sprang between them, and they smiled at each other, and Esther turned again to look from the window. The captain made an announcement in English, then told his passengers again in Polish, they would soon begin their descent, and when they might expect to arrive. But a sudden canopy of cloud opened beneath them, a great swathe dull as canvas. Only for the last few minutes they emerged, the flow beneath them of fields th
at seemed larger, less chequered, than those earlier on. She looked down to the quick frothiness of clumped trees, the dull strip of a river, a distant tilting rake of spires and immediately beneath, the white blocks and orange roofs of farmhouses.

  The terminal was much as any other, the movement through Customs brisk and impersonal. The man in his peaked cap looked at her twice, back to the page of her passport, handed it to her without speaking. An incommunicative driver on the taxi ride to the city. The farmhouses she had seen from the plane and now glanced up to with their gabled roofs. Why was this, she wondered, her quick stab of disappointment. At what, she thought? How dare she? From the cab radio the long tolling of a bell, the sound of what may have been a recited prayer. She thought the driver spoke to her. She asked, Excuse me, what was that? Then asking again, in French. The driver glanced up at her in his mirror but made no attempt at courtesy, simply tapping the clock in front of him showing midday. And the sentence repeating itself in her mind, I am back where we came from. This is where we’re from. How she would like writing that to David. To phone him, even better. That odd pause whenever he took up the phone, a hesitancy she noticed nowhere else. To say simply to him, ‘Breslau, Daddy!’ And it coming to her more strongly than ever, how he might have so easily have come here himself, on one of his business trips to England. How he met with people from one of the German companies he dealt with. ‘Pfizer’, a word that puzzled her when she first learned to read and saw it on an ornament on his desk, and her mother saying, ‘You must ask Daddy why it’s spelled like that.’ It would not have been so hard, even in those days. Or perhaps it may have been. The days of East and West, of blocs and serious borders. Daddy so blustering to the world and afraid of it too. She felt the prickling of her eyes as she thought of how for all his talk, his sentimentality, his obsession with what he called—he must have taken the phrase from somewhere—‘history’s implacable erasing’, he could have done as she did now, for all of them.