The Spy Game

by Georgina Harding

  'German, not Japanese.'

  As if the difference were no more than language.

  Or climate: the Japanese camp humid in the jungle, men's shirts streaked with sweat, cicada noise and the calls of strange birds; the German camp cold, to my mind, always cold.

  Daphne Lacey was writing again. More writing curling across the envelopes.

  'It quite ruined his health, of course. He was lucky to survive but his health was ruined. He never looked a well man, not when he came here. I only met him once or twice but I used to see him about in the village. They had a dog, I don't know what happened to it, but they had a dog, a nice little dog, a spaniel I think it was. He used to walk it. You used to see him out walking. Not up the hill, I shouldn't think he could have managed that, but through the village. He had TB, I heard. Lots of them had TB poor things when they came out but then I suppose they had to count themselves lucky they got out at all.'

  Why did they not explain things, those adults? They did not explain, they did not define, but clipped their speech wherever anything mattered; and we were left to fall through the gaps between their words. There was some-thing about the Japanese, the hush of something appalling which our people had suffered, British men and women held in some slant-eyed oriental silence. Then there was the vast horror that concerned the Jews, deeper and more distant. (And there was what Peter had said about the soap. I had never forgotten about the soap. For a time, I had not felt easy washing any more.)

  I have two days in Berlin and then I shall take the train to Poland. If there is time, I might go to see one of the death camps. All the tourists go there nowadays. Auschwitz is too far, but my guidebook tells me I might go to the smaller camp of Stutthof, which is close to where I will be.

  Yet I do not think that I could bear it. Not now, not alone. Another time perhaps, if I ever come back. These are chill grey days, these days of German spring. Spring here comes later than at home though I understand the summer will be finer. Cold days reel slowly by and I let them pass. I see the sights. I walk the streets. I sit in cafis, anonymous. Thoughts become intense. It is because there is no one to break them. I observe, and I think my English thoughts. Those about me speak German and I see them from a distance as if they are no more than figures moving on a screen, subtitles lost, I the viewer, uncomprehending. I order another coffee. The present is less meaningful than the past.

  'Stop daydreaming, dear. Come along, Susan's nearly finished hers.' Susan's pile of leaflets done, mine only half folded. Daphne Lacey's red fingernails on the pen, writing fast. The stamps still to do. There was always something still to do if you were Daphne Lacey. The mailing, the stamps, a drinks party, meals-on-wheels, some other thing. As if being busy kept Daphne Lacey whole. As if all the pieces of her held together only so long as she was in motion. That if she stopped she might disconnect, fall apart, just cease to be.

  He smoked some kind of cigarettes that had a heavy, dark smell, different from what I was used to -French cigarettes, I suppose they must have been, or Camels. I knew he was there as soon as I went in. I did not see him but I smelled the cigarettes, and saw his brown overcoat hanging on a hook in the passage between the entrance and the stairs. The door to the kitchen was closed. I imagined him sitting in the kitchen smoking, reading the newspaper, his chair pushed back beside the fire.

  I was glad that I did not see him because I would not have known how to speak to him. With Mrs Cahn it was not so hard. I could play my scales, say the same things I always did, and forget about the wine-coloured dress. Today she was wearing a plain black dress that she had often worn before. She looked elegant, tautly poised as she always was, the same as ever. People did not change because you knew something else about them. They still looked the same. Only, if you thought of it, the way you saw them changed. There was the person you saw, who was always the same, and then there was the other person that you found out they were inside. Like Russian dolls. Or spies. Like Helen Kroger and Leontina Cohen.

  Once during the lesson I heard him cough. (The tall man throwing his cigarette into the fire and sitting back, folding the newspaper.) The lesson seemed to go very fast, and I did not stay on for cake.

  I was already outside, gloves on in the cold, when Sarah Cahn called me back.

  'Wait, Anna. I had a little Christmas present for you, just a tiny thing. I had it all ready for you and then I forgot. Don't stand outside though, come in just a moment and I'll find it.'

  She opened a door on to a bright strip of kitchen. I saw the sink, a wooden drying rack on the wall above the draining board, some cups waiting to be washed, the back of a chair. The man's coat was close in the passage so that I could smell the smoke on it, deep in the wool like its own smell.

  'You can open it now if you like.'

  'No, that's all right, I'll take it home and put it under the tree.' I said that even though we didn't have the tree yet. I just didn't want to stay any longer.

  I didn't go further than the doorway because he made the kitchen crowded. You could see he was tall even though he was sitting, his legs stretched so far across the floor.

  * * *

  I had seen enough of the man to know him when I saw him again a few days later.

  As Peter said, Christmas shopping in Oxford was only Mrs L's idea of fun: lunch at a Kardomah, and a visit to Father Christmas that we were too old for, only Peter said that we had never done it and Daphne Lacey had insisted, as if we were not just motherless but deprived. So we had to queue in the department store for what seemed hours, hot in our coats because Mrs Lacey told us to keep them on or we might lose them, all to see a cardboard grotto and a man with old teeth and a too-red face. Peter dragged behind all day, and Mrs Lacey kept calling him on crossly, looking hectic, her face askew so that you could not imagine that it was really any fun for her either.

  We were in another shop buying a dress for Susan. Peter was hanging about the door waiting for us to leave. Just outside there was a three-foot-high plaster panda that had a green tray in its paws that tilted when you dropped money on to it so that the money went into a collection box. He had put in a penny, and a threepenny bit, and now he was experimenting with folded sweet wrappers and what-ever was in his pockets.

  'You shouldn't do that,' I said. 'It's for charity.'

  'So what?' said Peter, and took a piece of chewing gum from his mouth and wrapped that.

  Out on the street it was dark now. It had got dark while we were in the department store, and now that the lights were on the town looked happier than it had before, the lights bright in shop fronts and over the heads of the crowds that spilled out from the pavement on to the road. There was such a mass of people, you did not at first distinguish them as individuals.

  'Look, it's him, the man who was at Mrs Cahn's. I saw his coat. There!'

  It must have been the same one. It was a distinctive coat, unusual for England - for the country anyway, as I would not have known whether or not men wore coats like that in London - a soft smooth wool, expensive-looking, not so much brown as the colour of caramel. (Even when I had seen it in the passage I had thought: I will know that coat if I see it again.) And the man who wore it was taller than everybody around him. Even at that distance, fleetingly in the street, I knew that it was him.

  Peter ran out.

  'What are you doing?'

  'Tailing him.'

  'But you can't. We have to stay here.'

  'This is our only chance.'

  Peter was fixed, walking fast, cutting a determined line through the crowd, taking advantage of his slightness to nip into the spaces between people, almost running. I kept up as well as I could. I was already out of the shop and did not want to get separated from Peter too.

  'Wait for me.'

  'Don't you see, we have to get close or we'll lose him. There's such a crowd, we'd lose him in it.'

  The man wasn't shopping. He was going somewhere. He treated the crowd like dust to be brushed through. We would have lost him if he had not s
topped. We thought we had lost him when we came to a slightly more open space and saw him cross the road to stand at a bus stop.

  'Don't let him see us.'

  'He doesn't know us.'

  'He might do, sometime in the future. He mustn't know we saw him here.'

  We stood beneath an awning on our side of the road. One bus came, then another, but the man did not get on either of them. It was cold, standing there. A third bus came and, just as it did, a woman walked up to the bus stop beside the man. I did not see where she had come from. I hadn't noticed her anywhere on the street till then.

  A big, bell-like coat in a coarse dark tweed. That coat also I had seen before. From where I stood I could see only the back of it, and the back of the woman's head and the headscarf she had on, but I could have told you that on the front of the coat were five big tweed-covered buttons and two pockets set at a slant above the hips.

  My mother's coat. I knew it immediately.

  Peter saw it too.

  Was that how tall my mother was? I couldn't have said. I suddenly wasn't sure that I could quite remember. But that was like the way she moved: that brisk, graceful way the woman lifted herself on to the bus, with the tall man standing aside and getting on behind her.

  There were lights on in the bus but the windows were steamed up from all the people on it. We could just make out these two new passengers as they walked down and found seats. The woman first, the shadowy form of her settling in a seat that was spare beside a window, and her dark-gloved hand going to the window and with a waving motion beginning to wipe away a patch of steam, just as the bus began to move off.

  We watched it go, the yellow clouded windows and the hand waving.

  Peter went on watching as other traffic followed it away: a car, a van, more cars, a lorry then that hid the last of it from view. Another bus drew up at the stop. This one was almost empty. The windows were clear because there weren't so many people breathing inside. It pulled away, following the first one.

  I was really cold now.

  'Come on. We've got to find Mrs Lacey.'

  I could not put words to what I thought I had seen. Looking about, at the street and the people, I could not so much as think which way we had come. The people's faces seemed all the same, the faces of strangers and nothing else, nothing more personal or individual, nothing in them that meant that they could be stopped and asked the way. And the street, I knew the street at least. That was itself, the shops one side of it, the long wall of some college building on the other, a gateway that had a tower like a crown above it - only I could not say if we had come up it or down.

  'Where do we go? Where is it?'

  I was standing in the middle of the pavement, looking along it, looking at the shop signs, not seeing what was close. I was in the way, jolted by one person and then another, jolted against Peter.

  I grabbed on to him, his arm in its thick duffel, held tight as if I would be swept away if I did not do so.

  Such a long time it seemed to take to walk back the length of the way we had come. A flood of people washing by, breaking before us; Peter walking on, turning every now and then as if to check that I was myself. His face was cold and strange. His hair was sticking up. I noticed that he did not have his hat.

  'Where's your hat, Peter?'

  'I dunno. I lost it somewhere. Maybe in the department store.'

  At least he knew where he was going. He got us back. Daphne Lacey was standing in the street, holding Susan tight to her and quivering with anger. She walked ahead of us holding Susan's hand all the way to the car.

  When we got home Dad was already back from work. The hall was full of the scent of the bare Christmas tree that he had just brought in and propped up against the stairs. I ran into his arms. I could smell the forest on him, dark and green and soft underfoot.

  Building a card house brings the mind to a fine point. Concentration complete, brain to fingertips. Tongue to lips. Control.

  The card is crisp and clean between my fingers. I am standing a nine of diamonds against a four of clubs. I work on the floor. I know from experience that the rug before the fireplace makes the easiest surface, its fine pile helping to support the cards. The only problem is if someone else were to enter the room and the vibration of their steps move along the planks beneath.

  There are lots of packs but most of them are incomplete. We keep them for card houses. Dad has just bought two new packs for teaching us to play canasta. They have pictures of sailing ships on them, one pack blue, one yellow. The stiff new ones are good for walls. I will start by using them. I will build a lower floor, with rooms that are roofed and between them open courtyards, running all the width of the pattern of the carpet; and then with what cards are left I will make an upper floor. The older cards, which have worn soft at the corners, I use for roof, so far as I can.

  Building a card house like this takes hours. That is what it is meant to do: to take all the rest of the day, so that I need think of nothing else.

  The door opens. I hold still, afraid that a draught might spill it all. But the door is opened slowly, only halfway, and Peter leans on it, gripping it with his two hands.

  'What are you doing?'

  'You can see.'

  Peter sags against the door as if he must need it to hold him up.

  'Don't stand there with the door open. Close it or there'll be a draught.'

  And he comes in, slowly, sits across the arm of a chair.

  'The fire needs stoking,' he says. He is used to stoking the fire since there is no one else in the house in the afternoons.

  'Well, you can't do it now. You can't get to it without knocking down the cards.'

  'That's silly. It'll burn down.'

  I take up one of the old packs, begin to lay a section of roof, dropping each card lightly from just a whisker's space above the structure, precisely across the joins and the walls.

  'It'll go out and then we'll be cold.'

  The fire is almost all red, most of the coal in it, which Margaret had put in earlier, either burnt away or alight. Just a few lumps at the tip remain black, like the peaks of a mountain range.

  'Are you just going to do that, make a card house?'

  'Yup.'

  'All day?'

  'Yup.'

  I shall go on doing it until I have used up all the cards. Until it gets dark, until children's hour television starts, until we can go to the Laceys' for tea. Until Daddy gets home. Until there is something else going on.

  Peter throws something across the card house into the fire. It is a dirty jelly baby that he must have had in his pocket for days. The little figure shows up for a moment against the red coals and then burns away.

  'If you were a sleeper, how long do you think it would take before you forgot who you really were?'

  'I don't know what you're talking about.' I am starting on the second storey. The first pair of cards slip on the shiny surfaces of those beneath and fall flat, but the structure holds.

  'If you were living undercover for years and years. Wouldn't you get confused?'

  'I'd always know who I was. I couldn't be anyone else.'

  'How can you tell? You've never even been away on your own.'

  'I just don't think I would.'

  'If you didn't have your name. If you weren't Anna any more. If you didn't have any of your things, anyone at all who knew you from before. Not Dad, not me, not anyone. What then?'

  'I'd still be me, wouldn't I?'

  'Yeah, but who would that be? Think. You're speaking another language. You've got another name. Everybody calls you by that other name. You've got friends, maybe even another family. Which person would be you?'

  'I don't know, Peter. I don't know what you're going on about.'

  Peter is not slumped any more but stiff, leaning forward on the arm of the chair. He is bent forward at an angle like his penknife when it is half-folded. Even when I concentrate on the card house I can feel him there, stiff like a knife above me.

/>   'What if you've got a husband, children? What are they then? Just part of your cover?'

  There is an intense moment of silence then he puts his feet to the floor and stands up.

  'Don't stamp,' I say. 'It'll fall down.'

  3

  Margaret said the man's name was Istvan Kiss. Susan thought that was funny and did not understand why we two did not laugh as well. And he was a musician. The neighbours heard him playing the violin. That was noted in the village, that the widow and her exotic visitor played music together in the afternoons.

  'Must be a Russian,' Peter said.

  'Well, he couldn't be English, could he, with a name like that? Neighbours say he doesn't talk at all. Might not even speak English for all we know.'

  'What language do you think they use to talk to each other?'

  Of course the name was Hungarian. It wasn't a Russian name even. I know that now. He was only a Hungarian violinist. And yet there were nights when he loomed up in my dreams, following me through a crowd as we had once followed him, but the following never ended and I got nowhere against the flood of people, and he never drew closer and nobody stopped.

  It was Peter I might have feared. Peter drove us into it. He made us think what we should not have thought. Peter made everything so complicated, his denial distorting everything around us.

  Country children should understand about death: that it happens and it is there and that is that. Don't they see dead things all their lives? Myxy rabbits. Squashed hedgehogs on the road with their innards spilling out, tangled lengths of intestine in lurid waxy shades of red and blue. Dead birds that you can pick up by their feet or by a stiff wing and bury. In that winter that followed, that cold winter, there were many dead birds. Once I buried a thrush in a shoebox. I had found the bird close by the house, on the open snow. Perhaps it starved, my father said. Look how all the ground where it might have found worms is covered deep in snow, how the berries are gone from the whitened bushes. Or perhaps it had just died of cold. That was what I thought, taking it inside, laying it in the box on a bed of green tissue, noting when I brought it into the warm how soft the speckled feathers were on its breast. Of course the ground was too hard for digging. My father suggested we make a place at the bottom of the compost heap, the rough heap he had by the gate to the orchard. He lifted out chunks of frozen debris with jabs of his fork and made a hole where I laid the box, where there was brown soil beneath.