“A Czech passport in a false name. A real one.”
“I doubt it. The consul gives his anti-fascist friends a document with a pink cover, not the official green one. It’ll do. Until the French authorities realise these are just interim documents. Your real problem is that you’re so recognisable, Albert.”
Ilse, making the tisane, was gripping the pan of boiling water much too tight. How was it that her father always knew everything and yet arranged nothing for himself? Distressed, she looked at Albert, who raised a hand, signalling to her to be calm. “All these crackpot schemes and permits and visas for Peru and Panama—it’s all hopeless. We’re shunned like the plague by every neutral country.” Otto was warming to his theme. “Even with connections and money it’s impossible to get a real visa for anywhere. Nobody wants refugees. Especially not German Jews. We have to accept that our destiny is to fight.”
Albert set his cup down with a bang. “Too much red meat has heated your blood, Otto. And the child, what is her duty? Is she supposed to fight too? This is no place for Ilse.”
“This house is safe. You’re ten times more likely to be picked up in a hotel which the police visit every week than living as we are. Even with your fine new papers.” Her father’s voice was getting louder. Ilse stood with her back to the dresser and felt its knobs sticking into her. It was like sitting on the stairs while her parents fought over her. “The French are already locking up their Jews. Kicking them out of the professions. They’ve given themselves the right to arrest foreign Jews and put them into concentration camps or wherever they like. It’s another Germany. Nobody’s affected. Nobody protests. Then it’s too late. But there has to be protest, Albert, there has to be a voice raised.”
They bristled at each other.
“Forget it. The only thing to do is to get out. Don’t be wilful, Otto. You know what I’m talking about. Ilse can’t live here with prostitutes. My dear friend, think of Paris and learn—let’s both try to grow wiser—”
“You are such a bourgeois, Albert,” her father snapped. “I’d forgotten. You never cared about the proletariat. Only saving yourself. And your work.”
Albert’s good eye glared at him. “You’re right. I have work to do.” He picked up his hat.
Ilse looked from one to the other. “Please, Albert, don’t go.”
“Sit down, Ilse,” her father said. “It’s not safe for you to walk the streets. Or to be in this den of vice. Didn’t you hear what Albert said?”
“Please, Vati, don’t—” But already Albert was in the hallway. “I’ll come to your hotel later,” she whispered. Of course her father had spoken sarcastically.
But later he said it again: “I forbid you to go out.” Head down, concentrating on her mending, Ilse nodded.
She waited a week. School started in September and Ilse reckoned that children, out with their satchels, would not be stopped. On the street, she wore her lucky school dresses and stayed on the outside of the pavement. That way she could get away if the police suddenly blocked the streets. People whispered about these roundups, called the police vans “paniers à salade”49 because they took anyone and everyone. She had her safe way. She crossed the road at a certain corner, stepped off the same lucky sloping piece of kerb at the little patch of tired green where the blind man sat. It was lucky to say hello to Madame Dumont, to sweep in front of the church in case God was watching.
“Did you hear? They tried to invade England,” the old woman whispered, pouring the lemonade. “The English are so clever. They poured oil onto La Manche50 and lit it. They say all Paris is full of the burn cases. All the German military hospitals are full. So many men burnt, thousands of them. And of course plenty drowned, also. Go on, my girl, eat,” said the old lady, seeing her looking at the bowl with the hard-boiled eggs on the counter. “Thank God, England’s safe.” Ilse thanked her and took one.
“Give it to me, my pet.” Expertly, she cracked and peeled an egg, and cut it into neat quarters, shaking on salt and pepper, and arranging the pieces prettily on a plate with a gherkin. Now that she avoided eating with her father, Ilse was often hungry. She tried not to eat too fast. Smiling, Madame Dumont took another one, cracked it on the zinc counter. Ilse savoured the second egg.
“I must go. School,” she said.
“Welcome!” Albert’s room, tucked away in the attic, was very private. Ilse sat down. The pile of paper waited in the exact centre of the desk.
“How many pages did you do?”
“Seven,” he said, beaming.
“How many more will there be? Make it a long book, Albert.”
“I wonder. You see, the war combined with the additional complexities of your helping me just makes it go faster.”
“Explain. Or else this donkey won’t walk another step,” she said, happily reviving the nickname.
“It’s a lovely donkey. Listen, this is Goethe’s sonnet about a sonnet.
“This is the way with all kinds of creation
Useless for an unbridled spirit
To try to achieve the summit of perfection
Only self-discipline can lead to greatness.
Accepting limits will reveal the master,
And only the law can give us freedom.”
He meant that the constraints were making the book better. That made sense. The difference was that he wanted the book to go fast while she was desperate for it to be as slow as possible. She had her stratagems. Sometimes she stalled by making barley coffee before they started work; sometimes it was tea.
She scanned the pages, then read out loud. Albert said that when she read, he heard the words flowing in a way he could not when, with his bad eyes, he had to puzzle them out for himself. Once she had put it back into his head, he could write. Nearly two hours went in this way, with her reading out loud and him telling her what to change and her writing corrections on yesterday’s pieces of paper. Then Albert took a fresh sheet of paper and started to work, rewriting what they had done in his tiny neat hand while she read the corrected version out slowly. Only then could he continue and add words. This he did rapidly, head down, in an unstoppable flow. The well would run out in perhaps five or, on a very good day, ten pages, but in the morning it was always renewed. She had to keep an eye on the time, to remember to leave at lunchtime when the streets filled with children going home with their satchels. She was back when the house woke up. Sometimes her father was not in the room; sometimes he sat and wrote at Renée’s table, scribbling away or reading proofs of his pamphlets and posters. He never asked where she had been; she did not enquire what he was doing. He seemed not to notice that she went out. Perhaps he was avoiding noticing. Perhaps it did not occur to Otto that she might simply disobey him.
Afternoons dragged until the six o’clock mass. Kneeling in the quiet pew, she would close her eyes and use the words, which she was getting to know by heart, as a kind of stepping stone to a calm place where things would be made right. She was no longer a child, to believe in buttons. This was the place for prayer, and if she sat very still and never scratched her nose, even if it itched, if she truly concentrated, then the God of the Catholics might help them. She worried about getting what she prayed for; perhaps God was laughing at her when he sent Renée. She had been wrong to try and cheat him, to ask him for things when she did not have the right. Only those who belonged had the right. The priest who seemed so kind had a mouth that turned down in a disapproving line when she started to explain that she had been brought up as a Lutheran Protestant and now she wanted to become a Catholic. The saints hid their faces behind their smooth blue cloaks.
“I want to be christened and then confirmed,” she said in a small voice. “I have faith, Father.”
The small man looked at his feet, then looked back at her. He knew. “It will take a little time,” he said in a whisper. Jews probably asked him for this all the time.
“Of course, mon Père. Thank you very much.”
Her father and Renée occupied the kitche
n like a married couple.
“La soupe c’est bon,” her father said laboriously. “Un peu de poivre, peut-être.”51
“Bonne, it’s feminine soup, of course.” Renée mocked him for his mistakes and for liking spicy food; he seemed to enjoy her making fun of him. When, after supper, Renée went upstairs to look to her clients, Ilse had her chance.
“Vati,” she said, “what does it mean to be a Jew? Will you explain it to me?”
“Nothing. It is the same as being a Christian, or a Muslim. Or a communist. Or a Buddhist. It’s a name. A sect. In the modern world, nobody believes in these archaic things.”
“Some people have faith.”
“People who think—intelligent people—know it’s all superstition.”
She felt a surge of anger which she tried to suppress. “So all Germans are superstitious? They believe in Jews, don’t they?”
He shrugged. “They need somebody to blame. Somebody to hate. They picked the Jews for economic reasons. Maybe they envied us our beautiful names. After all, they are called miller and tradesman and smith. But we are flower-filled valleys, fields of roses, golden stars, mountains of blooms.”
She had never heard him say anything so fanciful.
The next morning, still puffed from climbing the attic stairs, it was the first thing she asked. “Albert, doesn’t anybody believe in God anymore?”
“I believe in literature,” he replied.
“But I’m serious.”
“So am I.”
“So, is there a God in heaven?”
“We will leave heaven for angels and sparrows,”52 said Albert. “I wish I’d written that. It’s Heine, of course.”
“Of course. How would I know? I haven’t read anything,” she said mournfully.
“There’ll be books in Lisbon. I’ll buy you whatever you want.”
Nothing he said was predictable. Ilse never knew what Otto would say either, but as the words came out, his face always made just the expression she expected. It was that she could not bear.
“Albert, when did you decide to leave Germany?”
“When I saw that books by Jews wouldn’t be published. When non-Aryans could not study, just before the Nuremberg laws. A thousand conversations went on about when the regime would fall, but it became clear that people loved it. They were all happy,” he said, shrugging his shoulders.
“When was that?”
“I suppose—1933.”
“And it was easy to get out then?”
“Simple. People left in droves—off to London and New York and Stockholm or Constantinople. Canada, South Africa. You know, Ilse, I can give you a precise moment—in 1934, I went to see Don Carlos.53 In Hamburg, in the Staatstheater—and when Posa said, ‘Sire, allow freedom of thought!’ people clapped for a long time, maybe five or ten minutes. And straight afterwards Don Carlos was banned from every theatre. And then I knew that there would be no limit to how far it would go and no detail they would overlook.”
“Why did it take you so long to go?”
“I think in German. My dreams are German.”
“And why didn’t you go straight to America, Albert?”
He looked at her with his good eye. “It’s one thing to be in Europe and another to choose to go outside. I didn’t want to go outside. I still don’t.”
“Not even to save your life?”
“You do anything to save your life, but actually the choices aren’t like that. It’s not if somebody says if you want to live, join this queue. That queue is for those who’ll die. It’s never that obvious.”
“Then you’re not going to America? Or Palestine?”
“An immigrant arrives in Tel Aviv,” he said. “The immigration officer looks at him. First question: Tell me, are you coming from conviction or from Germany?”
Albert’s face had a special way of crinkling up when making a joke, which she found delightful. His face was peculiar and yet so full of intelligence that she never tired of looking at it. He had been fat and now he was thin. The skin that hung down at his chin line and neck had a kind of special softness, which other flesh did not have, a buttery-toffee feeling to it. It made her think of the ruins of an ancient building, which could be reconstructed and imagined in any number of different ways. Though he twinkled at her now, Ilse could not laugh at such jokes.
“It’s very expensive,” she said. “My cousins took fifteen thousand marks with them. The English won’t let anybody in with less. And America—it’s just impossible.”
Albert saw through her right away. “Your father would never contemplate it,” he said. “The money is not even the problem.”
“I won’t be spending the rest of my life with my father,” she said.
“No. You’re coming with me.”
She loved him for saying that.
“Albert, if we didn’t know where we were—or how or where to meet—where would it be?”
“Paris. That’s where I’ll be, after the war. Café Tournon,” he said at once.
“Three o’clock in the afternoon on Tuesday. Every Tuesday. I’ll wait for you.”
“Three o’clock on a Tuesday.”
He took her hand in his big one; they shook on it.
“Come, let’s work.”
She picked up the paper, read aloud. “It was the land that the people needed, the land that drew them.” She worried about these people. A tiny band moved across a desert landscape of rocks and sand, subsisting on very little and bickering eternally with one another about where they were going and why. Their shadows lay so heavily and so long across the landscape that they seemed to mark it. She had long since worked out that under this pitiless light, under the ironic scrutiny of their creator, their end could only be sad or bad. In these pages the language was extremely simple, in contrast to previous parts of the book, some of which were written in a kind of free verse that was complicated and full of allusions. His work was like a necklace with different beads, she thought, the effect of the conjunctions not becoming visible until the next bead had been added.
Head bowed, his good eye two centimetres from the pen as it scratched across the page, his nose nearly touching it and frowning with the strain, Albert wrote. The pen went fast. The book was nearly done; he spoke of going farther down the coast, to Cassis, where things were quieter. In Lisbon or wherever he was going, in a safe place where noise did not betray a person, he would engage a woman secretary. Somebody else would read all his new words. Then that lucky person would type them out. He would like the text much better when it was typed. Albert claimed that there was greater clarity, when the words themselves were exactly even. Ilse had nimble fingers. She found a piece of cardboard and drew the keys of a typewriter, copying the one she saw in the window of the Bon Marché. She put it on the table in the kitchen and closed her eyes to practise. Rumours persisted that the Germans would occupy the south. But perhaps they would not come. If Otto stayed with Renée, if it was safe, then she would be free to go with Albert. If she could type, she would be indispensable to him. Then she would be worth whatever it cost to buy her freedom. Her fingers flew over the imaginary keyboard.
When Otto came for supper, washing ink-stained fingers at the kitchen sink, the words came out in a stupid rush. “Marseilles is very dangerous, but Cassis is safe. Albert is going to go there and we could stay with him. He’d like it. He’s found a house.”
“Three Jews in a French fishing village? Speaking German? How very inconspicuous,” Otto said. “When did Albert call? Did I miss him?”
She would not answer that.
“We can’t just sit here and wait to be picked up. Please, Vati.” Her voice rose querulously, she could not help it.
“I’m not sitting, I have work to do. Albert can leave. For us, the safest thing is to lie low.”
Ilse stood up. “The safest thing is to get out of France. If I only had a visa, I would go with him. I’d give anything to do that. To get away from you. Anything.”
B
efore her father could say anything, she brushed past him and went out, slamming the door.
On the stairs leading to Albert’s attic room the next day, she heard her father’s voice booming out. Shocked, Ilse stopped dead.
“What insane fantasies are these? Visas and leaving—what right do you have to interfere with my child?”
“What right do you have to neglect her?” Albert shouted back.
She hurried up and into the room.
“Shh! The whole hotel can hear you!”
“I’m going to take her with me. Out of France.”
“Vati—please—Albert!”
The two men were facing each other across the table. Hectic spots burned on Otto’s cheeks.
“Why don’t you have papers? Why haven’t you even tried to organise some? Living in a brothel. You have a duty to get your child to safety. Trailing her about. What life is this for her? Who even knew in Hamburg that you had wife or child? You’re completely irresponsible.”
This was a painful revelation to Ilse.
Her father slammed his hand on the table. “Ilse, come with me. You are forbidden to come here.”
“You don’t behave like a father!” Albert started shouting. “You behave as if she doesn’t exist!”
“I’m irresponsible. I’m insane. And you? Encouraging her to traipse all over Marseilles in broad daylight, risking her life so she can read to you? Duplicity and madness, selfish madness. But your book’s worth the risk, isn’t it, Albert? Come, Ilse.”
Head down, she followed Otto. He paused in the door.
“Goodbye, Albert.” Her father’s mouth was working as he spoke. “I don’t wish to see you again.”
She did not, could not, say goodbye. With flaming face, impossibly conspicuous, she followed her father as he marched down the Canebière.
On a bright Sunday morning in October when the bells were calling the early worshippers, Albert sent word that he was moving to Cassis sur Mer. Ilse stole from the house, determined to see him one last time. He insisted on showing her the place he had chosen to settle in. She had the honour of carrying his manuscript in the little red leather briefcase. As the train chugged along the coast, he tried to amuse her, telling how he had obtained his permis de séjour54 the previous week by giving somebody at the Hôtel de Ville a very hefty bribe. She could not smile. Cassis was over twenty kilometres away, much too far for her to dare to visit.
The Children's War Page 22