Out of Such Darkness

by Robert Ronsson

  He holds her close. Her fists beat against his back. He pulls away and uses his thumbs to wipe the tears from her cheeks. She looks up at him, her eyes brimming and her top lip crumples. ‘Oh, Jay. It’s your floor. They flew into your floor. None of them can have lived through that. We have to go home – to England. Can we go home?’

  Rachel’s driving along Route 22. Jay’s sitting in the passenger seat. The silence invites the presence in Jay’s mind to intensify his torment. Choose a scene, it suggests. Which one makes you shudder most?

  The camera is following a woman as she falls. Her hands are tight to her sides to stop her skirt from billowing. She’s concerned for her modesty even as she plunges to her death. Jay looks closer at her right hand. She holds it awkwardly and he can make out a pair of shoes with high heels.

  Did she think she was going to need them when she reached the ground?

  Jay tries to remember the formula for computing the speed of a falling object. The phrase ‘32 feet per second per second’ surfaces from the swamp of his grammar school education. What does it mean? The building has a hundred floors. So, 15 feet per floor, that is 1500 feet. How long does it take to fall 1500 feet? At 32 feet per second, rounded down, it’s 50 seconds. Nearly a minute? It can’t be right. The rate of fall: per second per second. It means there’s acceleration but it doesn’t answer the question, how long?

  He plays back the woman’s jump in his mind and counts to ten before the camera pans away as the ground looms up to meet her. Ten seconds.

  Enough for her to anticipate the instant she hits the ground and becomes no more than a mess of butcher’s slops on the sidewalk. When did she lose consciousness? What did it feel like in the moment of impact when Nancy’s thighbones speared into her brain?

  Jay shudders. What’s got into him? Is he torturing himself because he should have been there? Is this how his life is going to be?

  He groans and presses his hands to his face. Rachel reaches across and squeezes his knee.

  Route 22 takes them past chic estates with high walls and robust electric gates. Trees lean out from either side and join arms overhead. The effect is of the 4×4 shooting along a tunnel like a hover car in Blade Runner. Jay wants it to stop. He doesn’t know how to act when they get to the house. The neighbours are going to congratulate him on his good fortune but how can he smile when all his work colleagues have disintegrated into dust particles that drift across the East River?

  There’s a lurch in his chest. ‘Ben! What about Ben? Does he know?’

  Rachel is upright in the driver’s seat with her knuckles white on the steering wheel. Her lips are pressed thin. There’s a blue-veined tic in her pale temple. Her voice checks as if she is trying to swallow down bad words. ‘He knows you’re safe. Katy went to collect him and Tyler. He’s home now. The school has closed.’

  ‘What about others … neighbours?’

  ‘It’s too early – who knows?’

  Jay takes a deep breath and his body tenses. ‘You said it hit our floor – SDC. Have you heard anything from anybody?’

  There are spasms in Rachel’s neck. She puts a knuckle to her mouth as if she’s holding back sickness. ‘You’ve only been there – how long is it?’

  ‘Six weeks.’

  ‘Six weeks.’ Her voice is cold and flat. ‘They don’t know you. Nobody will think to call us. They have their own problems. Were any not in today?’

  He shakes his head. ‘I’d forgotten when I missed the train. It was a senior team meeting today. Everybody was due in early – by 8.30. Perhaps someone else was late like me.’

  She turns to him. ‘Why did you miss the train? You left in good time.’

  His eyes look out of the windscreen but he sees only the morning’s horrors. ‘I saw it go in. I knew it was our floor, Rachel. I ran. I ran away.’ He presses his fingers into his eye sockets to force the tears away and the accusations rain inside his head. You survived. You left them to their fate. They were your colleagues but you didn’t lift a finger.

  The car swings into Ponds Lane. Jay registers Ben sitting with the screen door wedged open by his body. He’s bent over as if examining the ants’ nest that Jay knows is there in the crack between the steps. Of all the things to say that scroll through Jay’s mind, the one he elects to use as he approaches is, ‘Don’t leave the screen door open like that, Ben. The house will be full of flies.’

  Chapter 4

  Wolf was shivering as I undressed him in the bathroom. Naked, his ribcage showed blue through his vellum-like skin. His shrimp-like penis cowered in the seaweed twist of his pubic hair. His buttocks were hollowed out and pale. The steam from the bath rose around us and I sensed Wolf’s fear passing from him to me like an infection.

  I sat on the edge of the bath dribbling hot water on to his chest from a sponge with my right hand as I massaged his neck with my left. Despite myself, I could feel the stirrings of my arousal and I was disappointed to see that he was unmoved by my ministrations. “What happened?” I said. “You’re safe now. You can tell me.”

  He closed his eyes; the fair lashes fluttered. “I’m sorry, Cammie. I lied to you. You are not my only friend.”

  It was a dagger in my heart but it was something I knew had to be true. Beautiful boys like Wolf were in demand and I often wondered why he had chosen to spend his time with me. I was generous, of course, and I knew he held a genuine affection for me – but I was only one of … how many?

  “Ssh, Wolfie. Don’t worry about that now. You can tell me anything. Where have you been?”

  “I’ve been staying with an SA troop at a barracks in Munich. I will be too old for the Hitler Youth soon and I, and some other boys, had been singled out for officer training with them. I always wanted to join the SA.”

  I didn’t let him know how much this disappointed me. The SA rabble were the worst of Hitler’s thugs. They beat people nearly to death for no more than not giving way on the sidewalk. The sight of their brown uniforms made Jews scurry in any direction to avoid being in their path. “So it was a recruitment weekend?”

  “An induction. We were introduced to the SA tradition.”

  It was difficult to imagine an organisation of quasi-criminals having “a tradition” when it had only been in existence for a decade but I declined to demur.

  He closed his eyes. “The Hitler Youth boys were all chosen because we are … the way we are. They paired us up with experienced men – men who are also like us. We were all in the dormitory together.”

  I had heard rumours that Ernst Roehm, who founded and led the SA, had adopted the Sacred Band of Thebes as the model for his bodyguard. “You were to become lovers?”

  He covered his face with his hands. “Yes. For the good of the unit. We would have incredible fighting spirit – willing to sacrifice ourselves for each other.”

  I shuddered. “Tell me what happened.”

  His tears started and I held his shaking shoulders as he leaned forward, head bowed, sobbing. “We were settling down after … you know … it was an orgy … I am so ashamed.”

  “Try to tell me, calmly,” I said, stroking his back.

  “Suddenly, the doors at the far end of the barrack-room burst open and the Blackshirts ran in. They lined up against the wall and started shooting. My man, Max, was hit in the first seconds. I used him as a shield. I could feel more bullets hit him. I slid back onto the floor. I was one of many scrabbling around. My clothes were there next to me so I grabbed them and crawled under the beds to the end of the room where the showers were. I escaped through a window. I ran away naked. Others stopped to get dressed. I don’t think they made it.”

  His forehead was touching the water. I spooned some suds onto his blond hair and began to rub the soap into his scalp. “Go on.”

  “I hid in some trees and put my uniform on. I knew better than to go to the railway station. I got my bearings and walked to the road. I waved down a truck and the driver took me to Leipzig. I hid there for most of the day and then p
ersuaded another truck driver to bring me to the outskirts of Berlin. Then I walked here. I knew you would look after me. You will, won’t you, Cammie?”

  “Can’t you go home to your parents?”

  “The SS will have my papers. They know I was in Munich. They will go to my house looking for me. You are my only hope.”

  I knew then my time in Berlin was over. I would leave and, somehow, I would smuggle Wolf out with me.

  In his book Isherwood admits that “To Christopher, Berlin meant boys.” This implies that he was an open and obvious bugger in those days but none of us was ‘out’ in the same way as we are now. If you were like Crisp – which I never was – you flaunted your campness in London and risked ridicule, arrest or outright hostility and violence. For the rest of us it had to be enough to move in the same shadowy circles and haunt the same dubious nightspots. I could never live truly as myself.

  I went to live in Berlin because of money. I had written the first Dexter Parnes mystery, The Silver Eagle Device, when I was still at Oxford. After I came down I had a job in a dreary insurance office in Cheapside, London. For three years, while I tried to impress a publisher, I filled in forms, calculated premiums and copied line after line of policy details into ledgers. It truly was a Bob Cratchit life. My only adventures involved furtive gropings with men in the public gardens behind the back entrance (yes, really) of the commuter station in my home town of Surbiton in Surrey.

  Sidgwick and Jackson took Eagle when I was 23 and published it the following year. It earned out its advance inside twelve months by which time I had finished the sequel, The Seven-Second Timepiece. It too sold well. Sidgwicks contracted me for two more Dexter Parnes adventures.

  With this behind me I worked out that, if I could find somewhere inexpensive to live, I could leave the insurance business and write full-time. That’s where Berlin came in. With the outline for the third book in my suitcase I caught the boat-train to Paris and thence to Berlin.

  Anybody who, like me, went to a minor public school during and after the First World War will admit that adolescent fumbling – mostly involving mutual masturbation – was rampant. In fact, it was quite the norm. Most boys knew that they were going to ‘grow out of it’ when they had the opportunity to interact with girls.

  But, even at school, I knew I was different. Boys weren’t second best. I enjoyed giving pleasure and this made me a popular onanistic companion. If I could find a boy to love, it would be a relationship of the heart as well as body. Despite my promiscuity I failed to find the right boy at school.

  At Oxford I had my physical urges satisfied by the occasional fling, once or twice even with young women, but without a true love appearing. So, in terms of a fulfilling relationship, I was still a virgin as the train steamed into Bahnhof Zoo.

  Besides my valise, which was large enough to have smuggled in a small boy for my gratification, I carried my passport and the name of a hotel near the station. This had been arranged by my agent, Peter Everley. “I know you’d prefer to be in the Nollendorfplatz area, Mortimer, but you’d never get any work done. Carmerstrasse is opposite the University of the Arts. The academic air will be good for you. Stay away from the Nolli,” he had said.

  My heart was thumping as I hauled my bag along Hardenbergstrasse. In London I would have accosted a likely-looking layabout and asked him to carry it for me for a few pennies but I had no way of knowing whether this was the done thing in Berlin. Goodness knows there were enough men loitering on street corners with their jackets hanging off their wasted frames and with sleeves or trouser legs pinned up because they had thin air where the limb should have been.

  I was unsure how to buy a ticket for the tram that ran along the centre of the bustling street. Motor cars beeped as they passed the occasional horse-hauled cart piled high with barrels, crates or bound sacks each stencilled with words I didn’t understand. There were unintelligible posters on columns that seemed to have been constructed purely for their display. The air was tainted with the exotic tang of foreign cigarettes.

  The nearside traffic came towards me as I walked along the left-hand pavement and this added to my sense of disorientation. I worried about how I might cross the first road I encountered. The city was strange to me. But I was the stranger, the outcast. Perhaps I had made a mistake …

  Chapter 5

  The Halprin’s next-door neighbour Katy Cochrane had left Ben in the house alone. ‘You don’t want me around when your father gets home,’ she had said.

  As soon as they turn on the TV, Jay notices that the North Tower has gone. His legs give way and he collapses onto the sofa where he slumps watching the screen between his fingers. He can’t imagine ever being anything other than cowed, stunned, uncomprehending ever again. If only he could sleep and never wake up.

  He has to ‘pull himself together’ for Ben and Rachel, who sit alongside him like relatives at a death-bed, and robot-like he turns to one of his business techniques – an ‘action pathway’. First, he’ll find out what has happened at Straub, DuCheyne. If, as seems likely, all his colleagues have perished he’ll talk to the widows of the men who brought him to New York. He can’t imagine how these conversations will go. After that, he’ll know where he stands workwise.

  While the images flash and the commentators prattle he tries to think of something normal – routine. He recalls the evening of Ben’s first day at school nearly a week ago when he had made sure he was home in time for dinner. The garlic-rich smell of a pasta sauce had met him as he opened the screen door.

  ‘Jay, how was it?’ Rachel tried to lift her tone but the fragility in her voice was obvious.

  ‘You know that company Heroes of the Alamo – the one I went to see in San Antonio?’

  Rachel shook her head. ‘Companies here and their strange names …’

  ‘Well, they’re coming round.’ He shucked off his jacket and hung it over a chair-back. ‘That’ll be two clients inside a month. Glenn and Francois are already talking end-of-year bonuses.’

  ‘That’s good. Ben has news as well. He’s happy with how it went.’

  Jay loosened his tie. ‘Where is he? Up or down?’

  Rachel signalled ‘up’ with her forefinger.

  Jay went to the bottom of the stairs. ‘Ben, I’m home. Want to come down and tell me about your day?’

  Rachel was at the table pouring sauce over the tagliatelle by the time Ben’s fast feet percussioned down the stairs and he fell into the room.

  ‘This is good, Rachel. Delicious.’ Jay said it before the food had passed his lips. He rubbed his hands together. ‘So what’s your news, Ben? Everything okay, first day?’

  Rachel looked across the table. ‘Go on. Tell your dad your news.’

  Ben looked down at his plate. ‘They had an audition for chorus–’

  ‘Chorus?’ Jay said.

  ‘It’s what they call the school choir. Anyway, I sang a bit and they got all excited.’ He blushed. ‘I’ve been a bit self-conscious about my voice – haven’t sung anything since it started to break and it was all over the place. Well, they loved it. Said I’m a natural counter-tenor, whatever that means.’

  ‘And …’ Rachel tapped a fingernail on the table-top.

  ‘And they want me to audition for the school show at Christmas.’

  ‘Really? What is it?’ Jay asked.

  ‘Cabaret,’ Ben answered.

  A frame from the film loomed up in Jay’s mind. The cabaret’s Master of Ceremonies, in white-face makeup and painted-on eyebrows was leering into the camera. Jay tapped a foot as the music crawled into his ear. ‘Doo doo de, Ca-ba-reyey,’ He swayed his upper body in time with his singing and clicked his fingers. ‘Doo doo de, Ca-ba-reyey.’

  ‘Da-ad!’ Ben put his fingers in his ears.

  ‘Sorry, Ben. It’s great. Go for it.’ He looked up and saw Rachel frowning and making round, dark eyes. ‘You won’t hear any more singing from me – promise.’

  Now, there’s something more significant abo
ut the image that came to him that day – the chalk-complexioned, ruby-lipped Master of Ceremonies. An idea as elusive as an eel on a boat-deck is squirming in and out of the foreground of his mind. He focuses on it, trying to pin it down but it slips away.

  He switches to yesterday when Ben came home agitated with news of the audition.

  ‘They’ve given me a part!’

  ‘Who? What?’ Jay said, looking up from the dinner plate. Rachel gave her husband a scowl.

  Ben put on his talking-to-a-moron voice. ‘Cabaret? The audition on Friday?’

  Jay noted how his son now punctuated the majority of his statements with question marks.

  ‘Dad?’

  ‘Jay!’ Rachel put down her knife and fork. ‘Ben wants to tell you something.’ Her articulation was precise and she emphasised her warning with a nod of her head.

  ‘Sorry, Ben. I was miles away there for a moment. The show – Cabaret. Go on.’

  ‘They want me to sing a solo.’

  ‘Wow!’ Jay was impressed but at the same time was concerned. He couldn’t imagine his shy son carrying it off. ‘Which part?’

  ‘Not one of the main characters. They showed us the movie in lunch-break? So we’d know the setting – the rise of Nazis in Germany and all that?’

  Jay nodded. ‘I’ve seen it hundreds of times. It’s a great film. Liza Minnelli as Sally Bowles – what a great performance. What a tremendous character. I read the Isherwood book that started it all – Goodbye to Berlin – years ago. Have you read it, Rache?’

  Rachel gave him her turn-to-stone look and nodded towards Ben. ‘Tell your dad about your part, Ben.’