Just Relations

by Rodney Hall

  It turned out that the men they fired at were our machine-gunners on the hill. We had no defence and the airplane was turning in a wide circle to attack us again, I grabbed hold of the nearest soldier with two legs and we ran to see if the gunners needed medical aid. They were beyond mortal assistance, Archie, God rest them. We crawled in beside them to take cover as the Jerry swooped in again with his guns rattling away and I prayed our helpless lads would be spared, and I can tell you I demanded the soldier with me should fire the Vickers and bring down the airplane, it was flying low enough Lord knows, only then I realized he had both arms in plaster! But he knew how to work it, so I told him to teach me, I got down in the mud and did exactly what he said. Next time the hun flew in low over the Casualty Station, I opened her up and blasted him with as many bullets as the gun had in it, it was enough to shake the flesh off my arms and I only realized afterwards that I’d seen chips fly off the wing. Sure enough when we looked as he passed, there were splinters and tatters. My soldier went wild with excitement. You got him, sister, you got him, he shouted and I truly believe he waved his plastered arms. The airplane swooped up in the sky steeply, then it seemed to falter and a puff of black smoke floated out, by this time a whole crowd of crippled men had struggled up the hill to help me, but now we realized the Jerry was going to fall right in among us, you could even make out the pilot wrestling with the controls trying to pull it out of the dive. Would you believe those fools went on cheering? In the sunset light the flaps on the wings and tail switched this way and that, like flashing signals, I shall always remember this, next the pilot’s body came tumbling out, falling ahead of the machine. I shut my eyes, but that was worse than having them open and as I looked up the wind was blowing the airplane aside like a kite, mercifully away from us. Just before it hit the ground the engine dropped out and my tummy dropped with it.

  As I was escorted to the hospital in triumph, the acetylene lamps were being lit, so that put a stop to the highjinks, it meant there was a batch of operations ready. I had to get busy, though I felt sick as a dog.

  Great-aunt Annie didn’t see active service in the next world war, being fifty-three when it began, but she still had her part to play. In 1937 her husband’s small-time import-export agency was based in Bristol and he went to Germany to negotiate a sub-agency with a Bremen firm. Annie was with him.

  Mr Rosenbloom took me to a restaurant for dinner one night and during coffee adopted a pensive expression. I have something to tell you, he said, which no one else knows. It is written here. He passed me an envelope. Here you will find pages from my diary I kept years ago, I have translated it into English for you. There is no need to say anything more to me about it; also I give it to you trusting you will never mention this to your aunt, it is simply entre nous. He toyed with his empty wineglass, twirling it to catch the light. When he was ready he looked me in the eye and smiled, so that I was nonplussed: he was pleading with me. Coming from this worldly person it appeared so very unlikely. I was young. That night, sitting up in bed making a ceremony of having waited till then, I opened the envelope and read what he had given me:

  Travel all day by train, expecting to arrive Bremen late pm. Hannah and self. *(my sister Dr Hannah Reuben, married to Dr Benjamin Reuben a famous surgeon.) Opposite sit two foreigners, married? large woman, small husband. Hannah and woman in animated conversation in English. Too fast and fluent for me. Occasional words suggest wide range of topics. Becoming friendly, what a bore. Perhaps becoming personal. H. condescended an aside to me that they had much in common, wartime service, medical ideas. All put me out of humour. Short-tempered: a fault. Uncomfortable, being excluded. Left compartment, Now in the dining car. Coffee and bread. Tasteless. Spent the past hour studying score for SSS (Saint-Saëns Septet). Not really to my taste. Looks best for the piano. Rather regret accepting engagement. Clever though. And Dieter asked for me … so.

  Approaching Bremen. Raining as always. Streaky brick. Passing mile on mile of grey slate roofs all wet, metallic, depressing. Back in compartment. When I commented to Hannah about dismal Bremen: How can people live in such places? H. shrugged. But large woman answered (grotesque accent): ‘Yet we all must live there.’ End of conversation. Her tone of voice as disagreeable as her interference. Ignored her.

  Not yet 4.30 pm, but the street lights going on. Lime trees dripping in the rain. What a place. The buses, black cars. Lights, lights. The road a mirror of lights. Far up ahead our locomotive lets out a melancholy howl. Even the carriage lamps in little yellow shades come on above our heads, swaying. Cold out there. Warm in here, stuffy. We’re comfortable it seems. Is that what we wish above all?

  Something dreadful. The conversation. H. very angry. Expressing disgust, outrage. Snapping words in English at the foreigners. They are suspicious of me writing. H. now staring with absolute hatred. Tells me the woman said she found fascists really quite nice people! decent, clean and full of good sense, she says. Says people spread wild fears about them. Says she has been obliged to modify her views of Hitler and Germany at large.

  Look at H. to signal: trust you haven’t told her who we are. H. signals back: do you take me for a fool! Bremen station now. What lies before us?

  We live in fear. Bremen a trap. Look at yesterday. Yesterday when we got off the train, we joined the queue moving with luggage through the turnstiles. General bustle, very busy. Somewhere ahead raucous young voices were singing O du scköner Westerwald. A brooding atmosphere in the place, not just due to rain. Suddenly there were shouting men and people pushing towards us against the mainstream. I suppose my violin case gave us away. A gang of youths clustered round, isolating Hannah and myself from the rest. They began to denounce us, challenging us to deny we had been members of the Communist Party. When we admitted that once we had been members, as reasonably as we could, they hurled insults at us and demanded to know why we were in Bremen. They stopped the queue and called on the whole crowd to witness what monsters we were. They shouted at us that things were too dangerous for them to keep quiet and leave us to our ‘work’. One leapt on a wooden crate and waved his arms telling everyone the city was in an explosive state. Perhaps he just wanted attention. He certainly got it. I was shaking. He shouted: ‘People like these traitors put us all in peril.’ There were officials in uniform around us now too: police among them and a few military. The platform was crammed with people, all listening, many stopping to stare, others hurrying past with their eyes cast down, some joining in abusing us. Perfect strangers! They seemed to be respectable people turned savage animals in pinstripe and velvet. Their leader on the crate went through the standard routine of denunciations: You are the well-known Jewish agitator Martin Fischer and she is your sister the notorious communist scientist Dr Hannah Reuben, where have you been Dr Reuben, selling military secrets to the enemy?’ The situation had become extremely threatening. I wondered if they’d trample us underfoot there and then. A lout tugged the violin out from under my arm. Ridiculously he and I stood struggling for possession of it. Then he had it off me, my precious instrument. At this moment something swept through the air narrowly missing me. I realized my assailant had been struck across the face by an umbrella, a sharp painful blow too. It was that foreign woman from the train. Without any show of embarrassment at her unladylike behaviour, she dropped her umbrella, grasped my violin case with both hands and wrenched it away from him. I noticed how enormous her hands were, like a farmer’s. We were all astonished, a complete hush fell, so that my saviour had time to harangue us in a mixture of nearly incomprehensible German and strange English. Nevertheless she made herself clear. No doubt about that. She had been deceived, the scales fallen from her eyes, she towered with her anger. She confronted the man she struck as if he had wronged her personally. She pinched a sample of his brown shirt between thumb and finger, held it displayed like some soiled article. In the midst of my fear I loved her for that. She spoke out: ‘I have changed my mind!’ she said so that everybody was even more surprised. ‘U
p till today I thought you Fascists had a lot of sensible arguments on your side. But I was wrong!’ Then she turned on the people watching. ‘All you people over there,’ she called in her terrible and understandable German, ‘are being led to the butcher like a lot of silly sheep. These people in their beautiful brown shirts are amateur thugs. I never believed it possible. But anybody can see the truth of it right here.’ She handed me my violin as if awarding me a prize at a ceremony. ‘I am a player myself,’ she said. ‘Now,’ she called out, ‘you policemen come and earn your keep. These people and ourselves require safe conduct to a taxi.’ She bent over, unself-conscious in a way I’ve never seen before, retrieved her umbrella and led the way to the gate, even instructing one of the officers to carry her suitcase. Showing him her ticket like orders from his superiors. So we passed, a charmed procession, away from that angry gang of nazis, straight out through the gate and into our respective taxis – under official protection. A policeman closed her taxi door like a footman. I wasn’t even able to thank her or say goodbye. In our own taxi Hannah dumbfounded me by bursting into tears, a thing I had not known her do since she was a child. ‘This is the beginning, Martin,’ she whispered, ‘What will the end be?’

  Postscript:

  So my dear Vivien, and that is all I knew of our saviour. I shall not say what happened to us afterwards, the experiences in the ghetto, the local postman who saved my instrument and my papers, the terror, our arrest, life in the camps and cattle trains, torture and so forth. But I survived. I’m afraid my sister died; nothing has been heard of her all these years. I came to England when the war was over. I worked with the BBC Symphony, then I retired, leaving London and moving down here. One day a neighbour called to say a lady was enquiring for a violin teacher. No, I said, absolutely no. I was in the grip of death, you see. A week later the same neighbour pointed out this lady in the baker’s shop. I was frightened. Fear, yes, that was my first reaction to anything unexpected. The past flooded back in all its horror. I knew her. At once I decided to allow her to recognize me. Whatever came about, this was England, at least I would pay my debt of thanks. You see, during the terrible decade of Hitler’s rule many people, maybe dozens, had similarly marked my life … but she was the first I had stumbled across in the years since. I was watching her as she turned away from the counter with her bread in her hands, those farmer’s hands. For a moment I had a panic, thinking I must be wrong. She looked full in my face without a sign of recognition. But it was too late to go back, already my attention must have seemed rude, so I stopped her and asked her if it was she who had been enquiring about violin lessons. The moment she spoke, I knew without any remaining doubt that this was the same woman, a voice in millions. Fourteen years had passed, I’d become a shaky old man in that time. Yet it is hard to believe I’d changed so much. But of course it might not have seemed such an important event to her, anyhow. Often I catch a glance in her eye, an expression, a tiny hint of this or that, and wonder whether she hasn’t known me all along. Who can tell? She was lucky to escape from Bremen, we all were, all of us who did survive.

  When it became obvious that I’d never make a professional violinist, Aunt Annie presented me with the keys to her house in Australia, also a packet containing the title-deeds and papers. You may as well make do with what you’ve got, she told me ruthlessly. All you need do is get yourself to Whitey’s Fall, New South Wales, and tell Brinsmeads at the general store to show you Annie McTaggart’s house because it’s yours. Had she never thought of returning herself? No, she replied, I’m someone who can’t go home; I’ve made my bed.

  Australia seemed an outlandish suggestion, but I persuaded myself to take it seriously because I loved her and I could see how she valued her gift. Meanwhile I told the old lady I’d be moving to London to look for a flat and a job. To my surprise she was delighted and advised me for the umpteenth time to get busy and stand on my own two feet and not let anyone make up my mind for me. As I was leaving she took my arm. We kissed: not like affectionate relatives of different generations but like conspirators, her strength flowing out to me. Whatever you do, Vivi, she told me, if you decide it’s not right for you, have the guts to give it up. Say: That’s enough, I’m not going to waste my life. Do something else. It’s only too late to change when you’re dead!

  So you’re a schoolteacher at last, I knew you’d make the grade! she exclaimed delightedly when I visited her a year later, as if I hadn’t failed in all I wanted to do. She picked a fresh peonie for me. From her own bush. She gave me a wonderful welcome disguised as a stern lecture on my previously aimless ways. I remembered her keys, her house on the mountain. That was the moment I knew I would come to Whitey’s Fall some day.

  Last time I saw her, Great-aunt Anne had shrunk into an old old woman half her proper weight. It was pathetic to see her so gaunt, how long and fine her nose, how high her cheekbones. In a macabre way, under the thick overlay of wrinkles and dying skin, she was being reborn as a beautiful girl. In vigour she hadn’t aged a scrap. She sat in her same chair, the street going about its business beyond her window, the people, the flowers, maharajas under umbrellas beaded with rain; and still she refused to reminisce. What’s the use of the past, she declared, it never did me any good. Live for the present, my girl! A lovely young woman like you has no business with the past. The only thing I remember is a river called Dry River. Now that tells you what you need to know.

  I promised I would think about it. And then announced my surprise: I showed her my airline ticket to Sydney with the keys she had given me. There and then she wrote a letter of introduction for me to take. Her slanted writing dashed waveringly across the page.

  Dear Seb,

  If you have not forgotten an old acquaintance, you will surely do me a favour. I dare say you are well in command of Whitey’s Fall by now, you have had sixty years to make it since I saw you last, all said and done!

  This letter is being brought by a dear young woman who is buying the old house off me. It’s no use to me now. Please be sure she manages all right. I am certain that I may depend upon you, of all people.

  Give my love to all my friends, and most of my blood relations.

  Ever yours. May the Good Lord bless and keep you.

  Anne McTaggart

  When she finished, she slapped the envelope against her tongue and wet it thoroughly, her fingers stroked the flap closed, then she banged it shut on the table. She watched the letter pass into my hands and her eyes were blurred with tears, I saw the slack rims fill helplessly and tears gathering in her poor stunted lashes.

  Can I take any messages, Auntie? I asked.

  Yes, yes, she replied eventually, to my darling Arthur.

  Arthur who?

  Just call him Uncle, everybody does, it grew on him. Say to my darling Arthur … her voice failed her, but she swallowed hard. Say, she began again … Give him a warning from me, if him and his rowdy mates get up to any old buck, I’ll be after him with a big stick to sort him out! Say that, she said downright, her lip trembling in its delicate feminine curve.

  Three – The Narcissist

  Why are you standing at the mirror with that look on your face? said the man inside him.

  I’ve just seen what I’ve seen, replied Mr Rupert Ping.

  What is there to be seen?

  The years.

  You look like something not properly made.

  That’s because I won’t agree to grow old.

  How many years are there then? asked the man inside him.

  Seventy-four, there are seventy-four, that’s why I’m standing at the mirror.

  That’s why you’re looking like you are.

  Mr Ping stared at the wall the mirror was screwed on to. He had screwed the mirror there himself a very long time ago so that he’d be able to see himself full-length when he wanted to.

  I know what to do though, Mr Ping said. At last I do know what to do.

  You won’t forget to have it really sharp, I hope?

 
; I won’t forget.

  If it’s blunt you’ll never be able to see this through.

  I know.

  Then take off the rest of your clothes or you’ll get weak and regret it.

  Mr Ping slipped his singlet and shorts off. He stood in his underpants while the mirror spared him nothing.

  Did you want a drink first? asked the man inside him.

  I look like something not properly made, don’t I?

  Do you want a drink?

  Yes perhaps I need one.

  It’s the years, all those years have done it.

  Perhaps I won’t have a drink after all, said Mr Ping stropping his cut-throat.

  If you’ll take my advice you won’t begin with your arms because that’ll make the rest too messy.

  I see what you mean. Legs first then?

  Legs, the dear legs, first.

  Let them go first. No I don’t want a drink. I’m ready now and after a drink I might not be ready any longer.

  Take it steady then, perhaps you should stand on a towel. Obediently Mr Ping reached for a towel, folded it and stood on it. Then he bent over and began drawing the razor lightly across one leg, lightly across the calf, up around the thigh, cutting a little deeper.

  It doesn’t really hurt after the first shock, said Mr Ping.

  You seem to have it sharp enough then?

  I won’t look in the mirror yet.

  Do the other leg first, that’s my suggestion, then it won’t be any different from this one.

  Mr Ping stooped over, attending to his other leg, drawing the razor this way and that, crisscrossing from the foot up so that blood started out suddenly like the thonged stockings of a medieval peasant.

  My trouble is, said Mr Ping sadly, I can still recognize them for what they were.