The Other Me

by Saskia Sarginson

  “Eliza.”

  Cosmo blocks my path. His gaze travels downwards, taking in what I’m wearing, or not wearing. I can’t speak. He slides his hand to hold mine. Our fingers entwine. He tugs, and I follow, as he pulls me back into the office, folds of velvet sliding across us.

  He lets go of my hand. We stare at each other.

  “I thought you were away…” I struggle to push words out. “In Rome.”

  The fact of him here, when in my head he’d been in Italy, has unraveled me.

  “I was.” He pushes his hands into his pockets and takes them out again. “I’m back for a couple of days. I wanted to see you.”

  My heart is thundering.

  “You’re about to go on?” His eyebrows shoot up. “I always hoped you’d do it.”

  My lips waver around the shape of a smile.

  “I’m ashamed of myself.” He rubs his nose with his knuckle. “I owe you an apology.”

  “Apology?”

  He rolls his head from side to side as if his neck is stiff. “Just hear me out, Eliza. Please.” He wrinkles his brow. “I need to do this. Last time … I was childish. Going off like that. It was rude. I worried later, about you getting home when it was so late. Then I got on a plane without telling you. There was no excuse, even if I was disappointed. But the truth is I’m not good with rejection.” He’s speaking quickly, not looking at me.

  I try to interrupt. I can’t bear the irony. It’s me that should be apologizing. But he continues, rushing his words.

  “When I was a kid, I was never good enough. I didn’t want to be a doctor like my parents. I wasn’t into science like my brother and sister. But I still wanted to be like them.” He shrugs. “It made me feel useless when I failed science exams, when I was afraid of blood. They thought it was funny. But I took it all as a rejection. Over-sensitive, you see.”

  “No.” I jerk my head up.

  A laugh ignites inside me. All the misunderstandings piling up behind us. The confusion and muddle. And it’s so simple really. I love him.

  The laugh stays inside. “Please don’t. You have nothing to explain, nothing to be sorry for. It’s me…”

  But he’s still speaking, and I recognize the determined look on his face, his need to tell me something. “Eliza, I know there are reasons for you pushing me away. You were trying to tell me something before, and I lost my temper. Whatever it is, I’m here now and I promise I’ll listen.”

  We’re standing next to Josh’s messy desk in the cramped space. I’d only have to take one more step and I’d be able to reach up and slide my arms around his neck.

  The noise of the club presses into the office: music and the muttering of an impatient crowd. I blink. Remembering.

  “I’m supposed to be on stage … I have to go.” I look behind him towards the curtain.

  “I’ll wait.” Cosmo stoops and kisses my cheek. “Good luck…” He pulls back. “Am I allowed to say I’m proud of you?”

  I raise my hand and caress my cheek, put my fingers where his lips have been. My heart stutters. He’s holding up swags of red velvet. I look through into the dark club. Sound swells around us: a choppy sea pulling us apart.

  My mouth is dry and I moisten my lips. “Cosmo.” I turn back. “You’re right. We need to talk. There’s so much to tell you.”

  Out in the crowd, I push through customers to the bar and ask Josh to put “Harlem Nocturne” on. I’m not looking at people as I make my way to the stage. My legs are shaking. The music has started and I can feel the attention of the place turning towards me. I climb the steps.

  The chatter in the room has quieted. I blink in the spotlight. Someone makes a shushing sound. I can hear the clink of glasses. Then Josh must have turned the track up because everything else is swallowed inside its lush rhythm.

  I stand, frozen. The hammering of my heart drowns the song. I close my eyes against the glare. An uncomfortable murmuring starts, a shifting of feet and someone’s nervous laughter. I remind myself that Cosmo is there, somewhere in the faces, watching me. I can still feel his lips on my cheek. I lift an arm, moving my hip to the left, moving into the music.

  I’m dancing. I’m using Voronkov’s ballet routine like a map; but I’m already adapting it, adding a burlesque flavor. I can’t brave the gaze of the audience yet; I’m staring at the floor. But then I feel it—a prickle of electricity running between the crowd and me, a tug of connection that makes me look out into the space beyond the stage, at the watchers behind the lights. I begin to play to them. I anticipate their reactions. It’s like a game, or a conversation. I’m enjoying myself. I slow down, sensing the pull of their collective looking, and a thrill shivers through me. All those afternoons in Scarlett’s room have left their mark: I know how to tilt my head; I’ve mastered the slow slide of fingers over skin; I remember the power of stillness. Can almost hear them holding their breath as they wait for me to move again. The music is reaching its conclusion. I’ve slipped the scarf from my shoulders. It flutters into dusty darkness.

  The song ends and I bow deeply, my head hanging over my knees. My scalp is wet with sweat. Salty drops flicker as they fall. I stand upright and the applause begins. It buzzes around me. My mouth is parched and I’m breathing hard. My legs feel hollow. I negotiate the steps carefully, straining to see where I’m putting my feet. A hand takes mine, warm fingers closing around my own.

  Cosmo is looking up at me.

  And suddenly I know that it’s going to be all right. I can’t wait to unburden myself of my lie. I can’t wait to be alone with him.

  There’s a noise at the back of the club. People are jostling and pushing. Someone shouts. Cosmo glances up, and I see Josh gesturing to the bouncer. We get troublemakers in occasionally, beery men who misunderstand their environment. Cosmo spreads his arms protectively as a figure emerges out of the crowd: a heavyset man with a square face under a crew cut. He smirks as he draws nearer.

  “Klaudia,” the man says, the slash of his mouth spreading into a leer. “Well. Well. Who’d have thought it? All these years. I would have known you anywhere. Even in that get-up.” He winks and puts his head on one side. “You always did have a good pair of legs, princess.”

  Cosmo positions himself in front of me. “Look, I don’t know who you think you’re talking to, but you’ve got the wrong person.” His voice is low and reasonable.

  “Piss off, mate,” Shane says. “I wasn’t talking to you.”

  “I’m sorry, but you’ve made a mistake,” Cosmo persists. “She doesn’t know you. This is Eliza, not whatever-you-said.” He doesn’t even glance at me for affirmation. His certainty is terrible. “I think you’d better leave now.”

  Shane laughs. “Eliza might be her stage name—but this juicy little number knows me all right. Don’t you, Klaudia?” He reaches a hand to pinch my cheek. I flinch at his touch. “We had a good thing going back in the day. We were at school together. We come from the same manor. Did she tell you that her old man’s a Nazi?” His eyes glitter. He taps the side of his nose. “I know all about her. She used to wear her hair down her back. Two plaits. But I like the cropped look. Kind of sexy.”

  Cosmo squares his shoulders and I see Shane sizing him up, closing his fingers into fists. They flex and glower at each other.

  “Don’t.” I put my hand on Cosmo’s arm.

  He glances at me, his face sliding into doubt.

  A long sigh runs through me. “He’s telling the truth.” I’m not sure if anyone hears. The words melt into the shove of movement gathering around us.

  The bouncer is at Shane’s side, all bulky biceps and hard brows, and he’s motioning for him to leave. Shane looks amused, holding up his hands to show he’s making no resistance. With the bouncer steering him, Shane strolls away. The back of his thick neck glistens, an inked swastika dark against the mottled pink of his skin. The crowd parts for him. I can hear his laughter.

  Cosmo is staring at me; his mouth is working, trying to find words.

>   My mind is a blank nothing. I feel ludicrous, standing here in the corset like a clown.

  “I have to get out of these things.”

  I turn and blunder into the office, ripping at the bodice with trembling fingers, pushing the corset off me, laddering the stockings with my nails; kicking them away under the table. I ram my feet into my jeans, struggle into my top and grab my bag.

  As I pull the curtain aside to leave, Cosmo hasn’t moved. He is completely still, every atom of him arrowed towards me. His dark eyes won’t let me go.

  “That man.” His lips twitch. “What was he talking about?” He opens his hands and lets them fall. “How do you know him? Who’s Klaudia?”

  “I am.” I rub my face. “I’m Klaudia.”

  It’s a strange relief to say it. I’ve been holding back the moment for so long. Even as it falls, crushing me, I have a sense of destiny reached, of the inevitable happening. Cosmo’s expression changes; doubt and confusion pull at his forehead; the muscles of his jaw harden.

  “I don’t understand.”

  He takes a step back. The clamor of the club continues: a muttering of voices and a track from a musical blaring out. Curious faces turn towards us, pale smudges swirling out of the gloom.

  “Everything he said is true. I’ve lied to you.” My voice is flat. “I’m not Eliza. I’m not who you think I am.”

  Cosmo’s mouth goes slack. He looks at me as if he can’t believe what he sees, as if I’m a monster.

  ERNST

  1941–1948, Russia

  IN THE BEGINNING I kept a diary, scribbling things in a small notebook, the pages protected by oilcloth. I recorded skirmishes with the enemy; I wrote about the brilliance of sunflower fields; I tried to do justice to vast stretches of land broken only by the distant shapes of collective farms and wooden windmills. I’d never been in a landscape so huge, so seemingly endless. I faithfully recorded our rations: Slibowitz, Komissbrot, tinned liver, cold tea, vodka. I described a dead horse rotting at the side of the road, flies feasting on its dusty eyes, and how it had made me stupidly sad, as if the death of a horse meant anything there. But I’d remembered the smell of the stables at home, Lotte’s muzzle twitching against my palm.

  I stopped eventually, stopped writing things down. I didn’t have words to describe men blown to pieces in front of me. I was too exhausted from hauling dead and dying men out of the mud, searching for identity tags on unrecognizable carcasses to compose lines of text. Exhaustion and terror and the need to survive shaped my days. I tried to sleep, curled into muddy foxholes, or stretched out on a hayrick, my helmet banging against my forehead, but the lice were an unbearable torture. And the rain. Dribbles of water crept inside my collar; damp cloth clung to my freezing skin; inside wet socks and boots, my feet grew clammy, swollen and rotten.

  If I did sleep, I usually fell into a coma-like state. But I had nightmares about Sarah. I’d heard stories. There were rumors about what the Nazis were doing to Jews. I had a recurring image of her kneeling by a pit, a man holding a pistol to her head. In the dream, I stood by, unable to move, watching him pull the trigger. I would wake gasping, filled with a sense of loss, catapulted back into the misery of the new day.

  We marched and fought. Marched and fought. The drills we’d done in Hitler Youth were no preparation for this: we were ambushed, shot at by snipers from deserted buildings, knifed in the guts as we stalked the enemy through tangled forests. The ground exploded under our feet. Battles were unremitting, lasting days. Nights turned white with flares. Our ears and senses were pummeled and blasted by continual shrieks and bangs. Men were separated from their original units. Through the confusion, Damaske and I managed not to lose each other. I began to think that having him beside me kept me human. Sharing a cup of vodka, making jokes at each other’s expense, a quick pat on the back. These things allowed me to remain me. I would have gone mad, or become animal without his friendship. No one else would ever understand what we had seen and endured. Our uniform was oily, filthy with grime and mud. There was no opportunity to wash. We weren’t fed for days. While searching for partisans in a village, I found a couple of grubby potatoes and ate them raw, almost choking on the splintering flesh.

  After a bitterly cold night spent in a shelter, canvas stretched over the entrance, we woke to find a fresh fall of snow had rendered the world brilliant—strangely glittering and blue. Snow concealed the mire of sucking sludge, softened bomb craters and burnt-out tanks, smudged the starkness; it healed the broken landscape around us. We hated it. This was the beginning of winter. Each day the temperature fell further. It made marching impossible; we sank up to our thighs in the dense white. We pulled our caps down and wrapped scarves around our noses. Still our nostrils froze. My numb fingers couldn’t feel the trigger on my gun, and touching metal was an agony. When we pissed, other men put their hands inside the stream for a moment’s warmth.

  It was five degrees below zero. We’d been forced back, away from territory we’d won weeks before, and we were dug in, attempting to hold an area of flat, desolate land. The line was thin and long. We crouched in the trench listening to the Russians advancing: the grumble of their tanks sent shock waves through the frozen ground. We heard them singing, the roar of their voices, an outnumbering mass of Red Army bearing down on us. I clutched an anti-tank grenade in my hand. I was certain that I was going to die. The others felt it too. That mutual certainty of death was a tangible force in the freezing air. It made us feel skinless, raw, almost euphoric.

  A blast threw me against hard dirt. When I staggered up, Damaske was curled amongst rubble. I turned him over and saw that the right side of his face was torn away. A shock of pale bone and muscle showed through blackened flesh. One eye stared up at me. He tried to speak. I held him on my lap, hunched over, sheltering his body with mine, while shouting men stepped over us, and explosions tore through the earth above. I don’t know how long I cradled his head in my arms, looking into his wild, pleading eye, wishing for it to shut, wishing for it to end. He died gurgling blood from the dark hole where his nose had been.

  The retreat was chaotic, a shambles of men attempting to escape, hitching lifts on anything that moved, shuffling along in boots stuffed with straw or paper. Ambulance trucks crawled past overflowing with dying men, too stunned by pain and despair to even groan. It was then that I saw the boys from Hitler Youth: kids who can’t have been older than fifteen, marching in the opposite direction into the line of fire, with a fervor of conviction blazing on their unfinished faces. And I recognized that expression, that light in their eyes, the same one Otto had had. None of them would come back alive. But Otto would. The Red Cross had gotten a letter to me. My brother was a POW somewhere in England, captured in the first months of the fighting.

  I’d imagined that he was enduring similar things to me; that he was living through his own hell, as I was. But, turning the letter in my hands, I understood that we’d shared nothing.

  * * *

  The order for unconditional surrender came in the spring. We stood with our rifles tied with rags, hands up, while Russians went through our pockets, stealing watches and wedding rings. The Nazi insignia of eagle and swastika was ripped from our uniforms. We were marched for weeks, going farther east with almost no food. We chewed bark on trees, ate grass. Soviet Intelligence Officers examined us under our left arms, looking for the blood group tattoos found on Waffen SS. These men disappeared. We never saw them again. I thought of Otto and his failed ambitions.

  We were herded into cattle cars, packed closely inside. The doors slammed shut, just as they had on Sarah and her family. The journey was long in the stinking cars as they swayed and jolted, and we fell against each other in the dark. Our daily rations were a slice of salt herring and a slice of bread. When we reached the gulag, we were shoved into a rambling line to march inside. A crack rang out and an officer at the front of the line crumpled to the ground. The Russian who’d shot him ambled up and pulled off the dead man’s leather riding bo
ots.

  On November 7, 1945, we were told that the German Wehrmacht no longer existed. All insignia were to be removed. We were to work to repay the war damage inflicted on Russia by the fascists. Day after day we went out into the snowy forests under armed guard to chop down trees using axes and cross-saws, dragging the wood back to the camp. Every morning there were gray-faced cadavers in bunks—men killed by exhaustion and malnutrition. I planned an escape, managing to first hide some rotten cabbage leaves in my sock. It would be better to freeze to death as a free man than die in the camp. I wriggled under the gate inside deep ruts made by trucks, and waded knee-deep in snow for two days before they found me, delirious and frostbitten.

  They called the whole camp out, made them stand in line and watch while I was beaten. Five men with guns and ropes. I tried to shield my face, curling up on the ground, hands over my head. But there was no escape from the blows. They struck until I was unconscious, a pulpy mass of bleeding flesh. My face was so swollen I was blind for days. My left eye never recovered.

  I was in solitary confinement after that, months of living in a room hardly bigger than a crate, with no heating. I had nothing to keep me alive, except thoughts and memories. And plans. I had no idea what had happened to Sarah and Daniel. In the madness of my lonely days, I tried making bargains with whatever forces existed in the world, good or bad, for their survival. I dreamed of finding them. I dreamed of rescuing Sarah, of holding her in my arms.

  I thought of Otto too in his POW camp. I was certain that his camp was nothing like mine. The English would abide by the Geneva Convention. Otto might even have been set free. I wondered where he’d gone and what he was doing, and what angel stood by his side to protect him.

  KLAUDIA

  1996, London

  THE BLEAK LIGHT OF early morning peels my eyelids apart. The memory of Cosmo and yesterday overwhelms me: an agony of shame and loss hitting my solar plexus in one hard stab. I groan. I want to pull the covers over my face, curl into a ball and stay in bed, curtains drawn, window and door shut. Instead I haul myself out of the covers. As I reach under the bed for my slippers, my fingers drag something else out by mistake: a pair of dusty trainers, long forgotten.