Once a month we got on a bus for meetings in village halls to try to persuade farmers to form collectives. They listened politely. They applauded the speeches. Then they stood up one by one to make their declarations. ‘Martin Furster is taking too much water from the river.’ ‘Karl Winter put poison out for my dog.’ ‘The son of Kurt Vorchert goes out in the night stealing turkeys.’ Once Dieter was beside me on the bus back to Berlin. He was long in thought, and then he spoke. ‘You cannot stop believing, even for a moment,’ he said. He had the look of surprise and fear that can come with a malign revelation. ‘Otherwise everything falls in. Isn’t that right?’ He blinked rapidly, as though a wind was throwing dust at his eyes. ‘But how is such a belief possible?’
When I think of Angelina, it is usually at that moment when she turned the corner of the lodging-house in Berlin, her hand on the railing, her grey dress falling and folding as she moved down the steps. It was there that I first saw her. Just as then I can let it pass, turn the other way. But I don’t.
When she reached the foot of the stairs she lifted a coat from a hook on the wall and placed it on her shoulders. She did not put her arms in the sleeves. She did not fasten the buttons. It was the kind of coat an old man from the times before the war would wear to his law office, a belt across the back, velvet on the lapels. She took a step and her grey dress moved up her leg. The man in the blue metallic suit had gone through a door, the parrot had called out and the caretaker was carrying a basinful of wet steaming clothes into her room. I was sitting on a bench by the door under a round bronze clock waiting for Pawel and when Angelina passed by I stood up as though she was a general. She looked at me. I remember her eyelids lifting very slowly, like the wings of a huge bird. She smiled deeply and then moved on. Her eyes were deep and brown, in a minor key. It was not the electricity of expectation that I felt, but rather a sense of completion. I did not know how this could be at the time, nor ever after.
When she passed she left behind the trace of her perfume. She did not look back. There was a shake of her black hair over the back of her coat, then the turn of her ankle at the door.
Even after forty years I cannot make peace with my memory of her. With her I had rapture.
PART THREE
10
White Horses
AS I ENTERED the bar and heard to my left the clinking of glasses and scurrying speech and laughter, I already knew that here were Pawel and his colony of Poles. At the counter were two building workers reading the same newspaper and opposite them the barman with his enormous head propped up by his hand. I did not look at any of these people because ahead of me, in a corner, was Angelina. She was alone. There was a small lamp beside her, she was smoking a cigarette and she was reading a book. The long black coat was over her shoulders. A glass of crème de menthe was on the table before her. She was smiling as she read, an eerily polite, accommodating smile, like that of a schoolgirl being introduced to a new teacher. The entire time she was in this bar reading this book she had on her face this identical smile. Nothing she read caused her to change expression. I tried to see the title of the book, but couldn’t. The light from the lamp fell on her hands. Her fingernails were short and ragged. There was something white and congealed like plaster on the backs of her hands, a hatching of little cuts on the top of her thumb.
I had seen her on the streets since that night in the hallway of Pawel’s lodging-house, carrying a bottle of milk, waiting for a bus. She never seemed to see me. You are a distributor of eggs, I told myself. And she is a woman a war could be fought over. I never approached her, but I knew from Pawel that when people tried to know her it seemed she turned to smoke. In the lodging-house over cups of coffee in someone’s room they passed whole nights like theologians at a seminar debating the origins and the direction and the meaning of her life. It was a time and place of small pleasures. I was occasionally there too, but I did not speak about her. I thought it would be an intrusion. I thought it might break the spell that I imagined had existed since our eyes met in the hall under the bronze clock. She had come by foot over the Carpathians, they said. She had been mistress to a Hungarian prince. She had worked for the British. She was a gypsy who in answer to the slaughter of her family at the end of the war had led seventeen Germans to her bed and castrated each of them. She could play the cello like a master but would not do so because of her sorrow.
I sat down at the edge of the group of Pawel’s Poles. I watched Angelina. I paid no attention to them even when they taunted me. Finally Angelina closed her book and walked out, her head down, the same smile still on her face.
I turned to Pawel.
‘Why don’t you have a party?’ I said.
‘I’m always having parties. What’s new?’
‘Well, have another one. Except make this one slightly bigger.’
‘Why?’
‘So I can meet her.’
He rolled his eyes.
‘Have you heard him?’ he said to the others.
‘Please,’ I said.
He considered this, then he said, ‘You buy the vodka.’
‘All right.’
‘But I have to tell you, no one can be sure that she’ll come. She’s been living with us for more than a month and I’ve only ever heard her speak twice. And that was in a whisper.’
* * *
I did not hear this voice until just after two o’clock on the night of Pawel’s party. Cigarettes spilled from the ashtrays into pools of beer on the tables. A girl from Poznan had fallen asleep on the lap of a young man who had once been a candidate for the priesthood in Katowice. Two students of electrical engineering leapt from chair to floor to bed fencing with umbrellas. There was a couple on the balcony, the boy singing to the girl. I passed the night walking out to the landing, looking at myself in the mirror and talking without listening.
Finally she came in. She was wearing a long green velvet dress such as might have been worn to a ball. Her hair was swept back, her red lipsticked lips sparkled in the light. She was barefoot. Her nails were polished, but there was a streak of white plaster running up her forearm. What was that?
‘Sorry,’ she said to Pawel, meaning the hour.
He asked her what she wanted to drink.
‘Red wine, if you have it,’ she said. She held up her hands, looked down at the dress, laughed. ‘It was all I could find. But not the shoes.’
She walked around the room, looked at the oleographs of old Polish patriots, a view of Gdansk taken from a plane, the titles of books. She nodded sweetly to those she recognised and took her glass of wine from Pawel. He put a record from France on the turntable of his gramophone and then made an elaborate gesture to me behind Angelina’s back as if to say that the stage was now mine. The voice on the record was that of a woman, mournful and plaintive. Angelina stood before the bookshelf and swayed to the rhythm in her long dress.
I was sitting on the floor in a corner. She looked at the leaping dancers, the sleeping girl, the kitchen air billowing with cigarette smoke and talk and then sat down on the floor with her back to the wall just adjacent to me. Our knees were almost touching. What was I to do with this stroke of fortune? On her face was the same smile she wore in the bar while reading, this smile of virtuousness and agreeability I would come to know well which she used while walking in the street, stepping along the aisle of a tram, sitting at the edge of a group of people who would like to have known her, a smile like the veil of a dress hat. She leaned her head back against the wall and listened to the music. Her forefinger traced a circle around her thumb. I wondered how much time I had. Her nail caught the edge of one of the dried cuts on her thumb. A bead of blood appeared on the surface of her skin. She didn’t notice this. It was a tiny cut, growing into a red globe, catching the light, like a ruby mounted on a ring. Then the blood’s frail viscosity could hold this shape no longer and it ran in a track down her thumb and on to her wrist. I took a handkerchief from my pocket and pressed it to the wound. She turned, but sl
owly. I got the idea that she used no speed faster than this.
‘Your thumb,’ I said.
‘Oh,’ she said. She looked down and then back up at me. The grand, grave notes of her eyes. She let me press the wound a little longer, then lifted the handkerchief to take a look.
‘You look like you’ve been building walls,’ I said.
Her brows rose, a question.
‘There,’ I said, and pointed to the streak of plaster on her forearm.
She picked it off, dusted herself.
‘I didn’t see that,’ she said.
We began to speak. It was simple, like moving through a door into another room. It was about nothing other than what could be heard and seen there at Pawel’s party. I would be lying if I said I could remember. Her voice was light, caressive. I can hear this voice now as clearly as if she were speaking into my ear. It was the voice of a person accustomed to speaking seldom. She moved back as though surprised when she said something she was uncertain of. I begged her pardon, leaned forward to hear and then she spoke again just beside me, chin upstretched, the pulse beating in her neck, her hand on my arm. She laughed often, knowingly and without mirth. Her laughter was collusive, meant to be directed at men. Everything seemed so alive and unknowable. The room began to disappear. There was no time other than what we were making. Nothing was hidden. This was an illusion, I knew, just as I thought it – Nothing was hidden. Yet that was the feeling, eye to eye, a question and then an answer.
When he thought of it Pawel returned the needle of the gramophone to the beginning of the record of songs by the Frenchwoman. She was singing, I think, about walking alone under the light of the moon. It was an hour when no one in the room was aware of what anyone else was doing. I asked her to dance.
She laughed.
‘But no one else is dancing,’ she said.
‘That does not mean that it’s forbidden.’
‘It’s more than four years since I danced.’
‘Look at yourself,’ I said. ‘You are wearing a dress for dancing.’
She looked down at the dress.
‘I found it in a trunk. There was a photograph with it. It was of a woman in a straw hat with a dog, laughing. There is a boathouse behind her. I imagine she could dance well.’
‘There you are then,’ I said. ‘Come. No one is watching.’
She considered a moment, looked at me, then stood. When we began she kept herself a little further apart from me than was usual for dancing. I saw her looking soullessly at the wall. In this I refused to believe. There was too much to lose. I tried to remember how long this song about walking under the moonlight lasted. I drew her a little closer. I felt the long muscles of her back tighten as she stepped one way, then another. Some dialogue of the body began, of which we were the spectators. Then the song came to an end.
She stopped and drew away. She seemed embarrassed. Pawel turned on a light and with the others was down on his knees looking for a lost ring. The couple on the balcony had gone, the girl from Poznan was standing up and rubbing her eyes, one of the duellists was gathering glasses and bottles. At any moment I could lose her.
I touched her on the arm.
‘Would you like to walk?’ I asked her.
‘Walk? Where?’
‘Anywhere. Just to see the first light.’
She looked down, pointed to her bare feet.
‘I can’t walk without shoes.’
‘I’ll wait,’ I said.
She went out and started up the stairs to her room, holding the front of her dress up out of her way. Pawel watched her, then called the attention of the duellist with the handful of bottles.
‘Do you see that woman there?’ he said. ‘Since she came here to live in the rooms at the top of the building we have all worshipped her. Us and our guests. We have sat together like schoolboys discussing one of the stars of Hollywood. We have lain awake planning our tactics and dreaming of how it would be to be with her. She comes, she goes, she smiles a little, she says “Good morning” or “Good evening”. But no one gets to know a thing about her. Certainly no one gets to dance with her. And what happens? My comrade here presumes on my good nature to get me to host a party so that he can meet her. All right, I think, he will have the same disappointment as the rest of us. I think this will be a good experience for him. Consider him, please. He works in an office that decides where to send eggs. He is neither short nor tall, fat nor thin. There is nothing about his aspect or his experience that would set him apart from the rest of us. Yet within a couple of hours of meeting her he has held her in his arms and now he is leaving with her! How has he managed it? He has listened to her. That is his secret.’
‘In order to listen,’ I said, ‘you must be able to be fascinated by something other than yourself.’
‘Listen to the philosopher. And at such an hour. Is that a slogan from a Party meeting? But no. We in the Party don’t recognise such a thing as self. That would be too banal.’
I thought, Pawel, be careful.
Pawel came to have troubles, bad troubles, and not only because of his loud, caustic mouth. But in time he prevailed. I followed his progress. I had reason to do so. He married a very pretty doctor’s daughter from a small town called Zywiec in the south of Poland. She bore him four children and never lost interest in sitting in her chair with her hands folded before her on her lap looking at him with delight.
Angelina came down the stairs and stood at the door. She was holding her coat and wearing flat shoes and a sober brown dress meant to mark a frontier. Yet her fingers touched mine when I held up her coat to lay it over her shoulders. On the way down, the bulb on the stairwell did not ignite and she let me guide her, hand in hand, past the ticking clock and the red parrot racing back and forth on his perch. As I closed the door the caretaker put her head out from her room, her hair in a net.
We walked slowly through the streets. There were paper streamers lying in the road, and an upturned carnival mask. Dark clouds moved past the moon like a procession of carriages. High up in an attic window there was a light and we could hear the slow playing of an insomniac violinist. We moved down a hill through the rubble of a broken building, the moon throwing long shadows like mountain peaks on to a far wall. We seemed to be entering a world of blue and white and black that was being made for us as we walked.
Her foot turned on a piece of masonry. She lifted her leg, rubbed her ankle and then sat, looking out. Ahead of us there was not a thing that was whole. There were just the peaks and troughs of a long rolling field of brick and timber, like a sea in storm, a single wall standing, the moonlight flowing through the holes where once there were windows.
‘It’s beautiful, no?’ she said.
‘The moon?’
‘Everything just lying there. Given up. The moonlight shining on it.’
‘Were you here when any of this happened?’
‘No.’
‘Where were you?’
‘South. Another city.’
‘Did you get hurt?’
She laughed.
‘Did you?’ she said.
‘I was lying on my back on a bale of hay most of the time.’
‘At first I was in Belgrade. That’s where we lived. I was in an academy learning to draw. My father had a factory. My mother had already gone to her sister’s house in the country because we all knew that we were going to be overrun. When the invasion came there was more noise than I had ever heard – bombs, artillery shells, everybody running around. There was something exciting about it. I suppose not everybody felt that way, but many did, I think. There was a feeling that all the laws had been revoked. But then people were getting hurt, too. Hundreds, thousands. I thought I would like to help. Maybe I should say I wanted to get closer to it. I volunteered. One of the people organising the services had the mad idea that I should do nursing because it was supposed I knew something of anatomy from studying art. There were places in shops and cellars and tents and I went from one to anothe
r doing what I was told by people who were supposed to know. Most of the time I was useless. Often I was worse than useless because I got in the way. I ran and got things. I lifted people. I cleaned wounds with soap and water or bottles of raki and bound them up with bedsheets. A child could have done most of it. Sometimes children did do it. I watched a lot. It was best to keep clear when something serious was happening. I used to long for something serious to happen. That’s a confession here in the dark. You could get bored fast. At least I could. You could sit for hours and hours, maybe even for days, and suddenly there was bone and blood and screaming. It didn’t seem to be connected to anything. Not to people, not even to pain. A man arrived who had lost a piece of his skull. I could see the brain. It was like a wet snake. He came in carrying the piece of bone and a nurse fitted it back into the hole. Nobody there knew anything about what to do. The injured man opened his eyes and looked at each of us in turn. Then he died. Usually that’s the way it was, we hadn’t any effect on anyone’s fate. But sometimes I could do things. A shell hit a tram and the driver came in with a wound the size of a dinner plate at the top of his leg. Blood was pouring out because the artery had been cut. I was told to take off my blouse and stuff it down into the wound and press. This was meant to close the artery until a doctor could come and sew it shut. And it happened as it was supposed to. The man was all right. Then you would go on to the next thing. Or at least you hoped to. There were so many surprises, things you would never imagine, things you couldn’t take your eyes from. Then it would change again. There was a blast in a house that drove nails out of a door and into a woman’s head. We had to find a hammer to take them out.’
I watched the glow of her cigarette as she drew on it, the lines of her face. I seemed to be falling, as though into a river, willing to be carried somewhere.
‘There was something different about wounds to the legs,’ she said. ‘Especially if they came from explosions from below – if a shell hit the lower floor of a house, or the ground blew up when a person was walking. Everything gets pushed up. The bones in the legs splinter around the pelvis. The feet appear under the hips. The legs are there, or what remains of them, but you can’t see them any more. After I saw this I looked differently at people walking around in the streets. It looks so improbable, don’t you think? Walking, I mean. The head, the torso, the area around the pelvis. The size of all those things and the weight, all that happens in them. For it all to be held up on two long thin legs and then balanced on the feet. They don’t seem very secure. It hardly seems possible. You wouldn’t think that the mathematics would work. And then for the whole system to be able to move, back and forth, side to side, slow, fast. Well …’ She laughed. ‘This doesn’t seem sane, I suppose.’
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