Griefwork

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  Strangely, it was not until the last few months of the war that the city folk, wearied and gaunt after nearly five years’ occupation and food rationing, had begun to think of the Zoo as an untapped larder. It was touching how long their inhibitions had lasted, how sacrifice had been piled on hardship yet precious food was still diverted to keep the animals alive. That final winter, however, when the occupying forces could see their doom and began to be less interested in maintaining civil order than in saving their own skins, bands of famished people finally ransacked the Zoo. They found very little. Exotic menus had long since passed through the ovens of the officers’ mess and indeed the officers themselves: cassowary Kiev, giraffe steaks, panda pie, llama sausage. Three elephants, two hippos and a white rhino had provided hundreds of troops with tough but nourishing meals, while to the highest-ranking officers had gone one bonne bouche after another: koala tongue pâté, lion tamarin in raisin and kümmel sauce, buttered marmoset. By the time the populace arrived there was not much left alive in the tanks and cages. Most of the reptiles had long since died of cold, though such was their hunger a few people would undoubtedly have overcome taboo and phobia for a plate of constrictor stew or fried monitor. The last two sealions were eaten, together with a brace of Tasmanian devils and a scrawny dingo. The Zoo was now a desolate and overgrown wilderness full of cages containing nothing more than an end of chain, a drinking bowl of green water, a drift of dead leaves. Before long some of the refugees roaming in directionless tides across Europe had taken up residence in the cages, lit fires of brushwood and had a roof over their heads.

  Behind the Botanical Gardens’ high walls, within the steamy glass palisades of his private land, Leon’s beleaguerment had increased with each new threat. There are ways of retreating from the world which nevertheless involve an awareness of its doings. The gardener remained in touch with how things were beyond his precinct; its survival depended on knowing the nature of possible menace. Going out only to collect his rations, he was taciturn but listened well. In this he resembled an extension of his own House, the sheen of war-grime on whose glass looked steely from outside but admitted more light than one would have thought. Once he was back inside his taciturnity vanished. The trickle of visitors had now dried up altogether and days went by without his seeing anyone other than the blurred shapes of the few old gardeners moving slowly about outside. His own conversations grew steadily. The assiduous study, the self-tuition went on and spilled out in long harangues with plants whose sophistication and articulateness now equalled his own. They were fit company, and the enabling pact he shared with them in private made it a pleasure to limit himself in the outside world to few and dark words. When occasion demanded, though, he could come up with a schoolmasterly outburst right there on the street. When in 1943 two identically-hatted men in civilian clothes stopped him in Palace Square and asked to see his papers, the folded rag which Leon had produced after much searching through pockets filled with tarred twine, dried seed pods, corks, washers and copper glazing pins had not at first satisfied the inspectors. They had, indeed, collared a frightened passer-by in order to show Leon what an identity card ought to look like.

  ‘It got damp,’ said the gardener truculently when the other card had been handed back with sinister courtesy and the man scuttled off, sick with relief.

  ‘It looks as if you’d buried it. Maybe the same thing ought to happen to its owner. Look at it – you can’t even read it. “Place of work …” Something about a garden, is it?’

  ‘The Botanical Gardens. I am the Curator of the Palm House.’ Leon said this with a certain quiet dignity, slightly stressing the definite articles. He knew one didn’t trifle with these little rodents from the Gestapo but neither was he going to grovel.

  ‘Tell us some botany, then.’

  ‘Vascular bundles, gentlemen? The drawbacks to Paris Green as a pesticide? Or maybe –’ and he launched into a lecture on August Borsig, a German industrialist of the last century who diverted steam from his own ironworks at Moabit in Berlin to heat glasshouses in which he reared one of the world’s great private palm collections, including the so-called ‘thief palm’ named borsigianum in his honour. Long before it was over the men had handed back the mould-stained document and walked off. Turning oneself into a classic bore had distinct advantages, Leon considered, and carried on his daily rehearsals.

  It was not all book learning which echoed among the roof’s dripping traceries as the silver midges of warplanes twirled and smoked in the skies above. In night hours fitfully lit by hectic bursts of light and shaken by concussions, as he walked his aisles in danger of death by falling glass, his plants spoke eloquently to him of loss and anguish. Sometimes he thought he heard a girl’s voice. ‘I may be going away,’ it said and he would turn involuntarily in the blackout, straining to glimpse the beloved face, a few strands of hair crossing a cheek. But it was only a plant. ‘I thought you couldn’t speak,’ he told it bitterly, yet even then was sure his nose caught in its vicinity an aching wisp of the fragrance – marine sunlight on young skin – of his lifetime’s one act of utter homage, of the feet he had once kissed.

  Just as a desire to preserve the illusion of normality had for so long kept people feeding a shrinking population of zoo animals, so by a mixture of inertia and oversight fuel was still delivered to the Palm House until the last winter of the war. True, it had degenerated from top quality coke through brown coal and peat to nearly anything burnable including dried beet pulp which should have gone for animal feed, railway sleepers damaged by Allied air attacks and tarred oak blocks blown by bombs out of tramway beds; but still it arrived. With the onset of winter, though, supplies stopped. Both the winter and the war were predicted to end at much the same time, but that was still months away. It was a matter of surviving until then. With Dr Anselmus’s permission Leon took to raiding the gardens. What with the able-bodied younger gardeners having vanished into war, most regular maintenance work like the pruning and lopping of trees had not been done and there was five years’ worth of dead and surplus timber to be thinned out of the mature planes, elms and beeches.

  The wood for supplementing his dwindling fuel stocks was there, but Leon was scarcely in a fit state to bring it in. The exertion of sawing and dragging combined with the colder weather went straight to his lungs. After hardly any time he was forced back inside the Palm House’s sanctuary, weak and wheezing, while minatory shades of purple and cinnabar flashed across the retinas of his closed eyes. Nevertheless he and a small band of mainly elderly men did move steadily from tree to tree, heaving ladders and labouring with saws, while the piles of firewood at the foot of the trees grew.

  One evening as dusk was falling he was bringing in a final barrowload when there came the familiar sounds of a disturbance in the street on the other side of the high wall. In the war’s early months there had been spontaneous protests against the occupation, against conscription, against the curfew, against rationing. These had usually been put down with such overwhelming displays of force majeure that often there were not many fatalities. The centre of the demonstration was suddenly surrounded with tanks and troop carriers, a few ringleaders were pulled out of the crowd and either driven away to SS Headquarters and never seen again or tied to a tree in the park and summarily shot. The rest of the demonstrators were allowed to melt away and within ten minutes there was little to show for it except some brass cartridge cases and a body or two. Even the rounding-up of the Jews had been conducted with hardly any fuss or resistance. They had been driven away in army trucks to a goods yard out in the eastern suburbs and had vanished. Not a single trainload had left from the platforms of Main Station. After this initial period things had quietened down and gone back to being as nearly normal as was possible in an occupied city in wartime. Recently, however, with some sense of an ending in sight, little fermentations of the anarchy brewing beneath had begun bubbling up with increasing frequency. As the hardships grew and repression had less effect terrible revenges w
ere taken, scores settled and reprisals exacted.

  On this particular evening Leon was just the other side of the wall when he heard the sounds of an old-fashioned hue and cry coming down the boulevard. Running feet and harsh shouts passed and stopped in a knot fifty yards beyond. Out of this stalled baying there rose a despairing, piercing cry. Nearly a word, it soared up into the cold twilight like a rocket and shed tingling sparks of anguish over the entire sky. For some reason it made him snatch up his pruning hook and run for the wicket gate. By the time he had reached the street the cry had become pulsing screams. Ten or so dark shapes were grouped at the foot of the wall, some of them squatting and busy with their hands, others watching.

  What was it that possessed him to intervene, suddenly to break every unwritten rule learned over the previous five years to stay out of trouble, never to interfere? He didn’t even think what to shout, simply advanced with his pruning hook rigidly at his side, bellowing:

  ‘How dare you? How dare you? This is the Botanical Gardens! You’ve no right to do your filth here! Get back to your holes, you vermin!’

  Such was his tone of voice, a quality in his advancing presence, that the lynchers suspended their work and turned to face this newcomer with belligerent incredulity. They saw a gaunt man wearing ragged overalls, muddy, scratched-faced and with dead leaves in his yellow hair who shouted ‘Back! Back! Back!’ and wheezed audibly between shouts.

  ‘Stay out of this, Dad,’ said one who appeared no younger than Leon and might even have been older. It was still light enough to see his features, which were all muzzle. The gardener was reminded of a crazed greyhound. (A year later almost to the day, on a visit to the pensions department in the Town Hall, he came face to face with this same man, now two stone heavier and wearing a bureaucrat’s cheap suit, and recognised him instantly. Then, the man appeared not to notice him and the snout he was bending over a secretary’s head as he walked had fattened into that of a bear, but Leon had known him at once, might almost have predicted the ribbon of an honour threaded through the buttonhole of his lapel.) ‘Stay out of this,’ his wartime persona was yapping. ‘You keep out. Nothing to do with you. Just some thieving little turd of a gypsy we’re dealing with. I thought the Germans had cleaned out all these scum years ago.’ A high moan escaped the wall of legs.

  ‘Not here you don’t.’ The gardener was still advancing. ‘Not ever here! You keep your dirty battles in your own quarter!’ He was beside himself, bellowing directly into the muzzle, which opened, weakly underslung.

  ‘What’s it to you?’ came through the side of the teeth. ‘In any case we’ve finished.’ And the moment passed when the ten or twelve panting men and youths might casually have diverted some of their overflowing ferocity and killed this irritating spoilsport. For a moment they stood, silently roaring plumes of grey breath. A hand came out dark with blood, offering backwards a knife. The vulpine leader took and folded it without wiping it, saying ‘Why waste energy? This gyppo won’t steal again in a hurry, not now we’ve nicked his jewels.’

  With parting kicks and spits the group slouched away up the boulevard. Bursts of laughter ricocheted back along the wall to where Leon was standing, gasping and trembling, less rescuer than survivor of a moral disaster. At his feet, half lost in the shadow of overhanging branches, hunched a form whose torn garments lay around in a tattered puddle. Once on his knees Leon could see that the puddle was actual, no trick of the light. With immense effort he gathered the dripping body in his arms and rose unsteadily, leaned briefly against the wall and set off for the wicket gate into the Gardens. By the time he was inside he recognised he would never have the strength to pick it up again once he had put it down. He kicked the wheelbarrow over, spilling the logs, and managed to right it with one foot while balancing on the other. Finally he was able to ease his burden into the barrow which he trundled, a hank of black hair flopping over its lip, towards the Palm House. He opened both doors, backed the barrow inside, closed and locked them behind him. Having made hasty arrangements in his quarters he summoned his last strength, picked the lightly moaning deadweight out of the barrow, carried it through into the boiler room and laid it gently on the mattress he had dragged over to the furnaces.

  In the yellow light of forty watts he inspected the victim. A young man, a youth, folded into a bloody ball with arms between thighs, quivering with the strain of hunching himself ever smaller until he might mercifully wink out of this world. His eyes were scrunched shut, his mouth and chin juddered with each indrawn breath like those of a chilled and exhausted swimmer.

  ‘Safe now,’ Leon told him. ‘Hush.’ He fetched a bowl of hot water and a towel while planning what he would need. In his dispassionate way he had already assessed the likely damage and knew there was no help except what he could give. The city’s main teaching hospital had been commandeered for wounded German troops; the only other hospital was out in the suburbs and partly bombed. He also knew there was no transport to be had after dark and that if he were to go wheeling his patient about the streets during curfew in search of a doctor neither of them would survive ten minutes. With the end of the war in sight the occupiers’ morale was low. Drunk and panicky soldiers careered through the streets in military vehicles taking pot-shots at anything that moved, cheering and roaring on. Nor would his luck hold for a second time were he to meet up again with muzzle-face and his gang. From a shelf he brought down a box of dried moss and two bottles of decoction, one of Arnica montana flowers and the other of marigolds. He found a clean dish, put the moss to soak in the marigold lotion and returned to his patient. With the deliberation of self-reliance he set to work. As he did so he talked unceasingly, quietly, as to two visitors whose identities merged, separated briefly, merged once more. ‘Ssiiih,’ he whispered as he held the boy’s head and coaxed him to drink warm Arnica mixture laced with cane syrup. ‘We have to dress your wounds or they’ll take chill.’ Gradually he unfolded the body, opened clothing, took stock of the constant bleeding, applied a compress of moss and held it firmly in place. The patient gave no sign of additional pain but seemed to have retreated behind a grey barricade of shock.

  All night long Leon sat with him while a winter wind sprang up outside. Its cloutings and rushing over the Palm House’s acre of glass came through to the boiler room like the sound of a railway station’s distant cavern filling with softly escaping steam as a train prepared to leave. At intervals he pressed the boy’s own hands over the pad and got up to stoke the furnaces, fetch a blanket or more of the hot Arnica and syrup which he insisted be drunk. His patient lapsed in and out of consciousness and as he bathed the side of the bruised, puffy face he wondered whether one of the assailants’ kicks might not have caused concussion or worse, but the pupils in the dark eyes were of equal size and responded promptly to the light bulb’s yellow glow. Sometimes he caught the eyes open and fixed on him without expression; at others they were closed and he could stare back wonderingly at this piece of human wreckage washed up at his domain’s door. Beneath the asymmetry of bruising was a thin dark face framed by lank hair. Seventeen? Nineteen? Twenty-one? Impossible to tell. Years of hunger and fear had made everybody’s age hard to guess. Europe was full of old men of twenty and children in uniform. Death might briefly restore a person’s youth as the protective mask relaxed or it could make even the young look ageless, as if their features had resolved into the stock lineaments of an antique species.

  Towards dawn the bleeding largely ceased and the pulse grew stronger. The pad became suddenly soaked with hot urine. The patient’s eyes opened, then clouded with realisation. Speechlessly he rolled his head. Leon reassured him, fetched a clean handful of moss moistened with lavender oil. Tears of loss and humiliation leaked from closed eyelids and ran back into the dirty hair. As daylight blanched the small dusty windowpanes Leon gazed at the sleeping face and saw himself as he had been, lying in a cottage hospital not expected to live while nurses spooned hot milk and calves’ foot jelly into him or else drew the ten
t and tried to fill his clotted lungs with aromatic steam. How vulnerable, how frail, he marvelled. Why should any of us survive? Whereas plants, unchecked, would take over the Earth in a few years and smother it with simple fecundity. From the corner of the mattress on which he sat he could see the leafless twigs of a beech scratching uneasily at the sky. It was going to be a scuddy, blusterous day which might with any luck bring down some dead wood. He was immeasurably tired.

  All that day the wind blew, and the next. Having put the ‘Closed to Visitors’ sign in the window of the outer door he dragged himself from chore to chore, catnapping between. At noon the first day the patient’s temperature rose alarmingly and he thought he could see the first signs of infection in the still-seeping wound. To the Arnica syrup he added some powdered sulphur and a few drops of Aconitum. For hours he sat and talked, drowsed into silence, awoke with a start and carried on. Maybe he told the youth the story of his life, about the sea and the coast and the smoking of fish. Maybe he discoursed on plants and their properties, on the changing ideals of botanical collections, on the finer points of constructing stove houses. Probably he didn’t talk about war and air raids and rationing and queues and the black market. They were the common incubus, too widely experienced to be worth mentioning. And besides, what could one tell a casualty of war which he was not already confronting? That twenty-four hours ago he’d been like any one of millions of semi-fugitive men, women and children concentrating only on staying alive, but that shortly afterwards he was singled out for ragged knifework which, if he survived, would change his life?