Is There Anything You Want?

by Margaret Forster

  The robin had gone. She opened her book. She didn’t use bookmarks, or turn down the corners of pages. She always knew where she had got up to, always remembered the page number. This was an unusual book for her to have bought. It wasn’t about a woman. It was about a man, about Primo Levi. He didn’t fit in to what she thought of as her special interest and, in fact, she had never heard of him, though after she’d bought the book and seen who he was, she couldn’t believe she had been so ignorant. What had attracted her was the size of the volume. It was vast, it would keep her going a long time. She’d read the jacket copy and when she saw that Primo Levi had been a survivor of Auschwitz, she’d bought the book immediately. Ever since she’d read Anne Frank’s diary when she was at school she’d been drawn to Holocaust literature in a way that she worried wasn’t healthy. It appalled and frightened her to read about Auschwitz and Belsen, and Ravensbrück and Treblinka – she knew all the names – but at the same time the horror of what had happened, of what had been endured, was something she could not keep away from. It was the fascination of knowing it had really happened, that nobody had made it up, it was not simply a terrible story, worse than any nightmare thriller. But what worried her was the fear that reading about the camps, and what had been done in them, was somehow disgusting, until, one day, she came across the phrase ‘bearing witness’. She read in a newspaper article that bearing witness to the sufferings of those who died in the Holocaust was right and proper and the only way of honouring their memories. It was wrong to suppress the truth, wrong to argue that it should not be talked about because it was over, that it had happened a long time ago, and no good was done by dwelling on such atrocities. Edwina was relieved. Afterwards, when she sat reading and wincing and even weeping over a survivor’s story, she said to herself that she too was bearing witness, and that she was not being masochistic by torturing herself with the images.

  She was two-thirds of the way through the biography, the Auschwitz experience over (except she knew it never would be for Primo Levi). Surprisingly, the book was proving easy to read – she’d been afraid it might be too academic for her. The author’s style was clear and direct, the sentences simple and short. She was reading about Primo Levi’s wife, Lucia, and as she read on she began to feel there was something missing here. Lucia was surely more important than she was presented as being. This man had come back from Auschwitz and had had to rebuild his shattered life. He married Lucia (whom he had not known before) and she enabled him to do so. His real love, or the woman suspected of being his real love, had perished in the camp but Lucia was the one he married and with whom he had two children. Without her, would he have managed as well as he did? Edwina stopped reading, and frowned. She stared into the garden and wished there was more about Lucia. In spite of the photographs in the book, she couldn’t see or hear the woman in her mind. Lucia was vague. She was (to Edwina) the all-important wife, but she was shadowy. Not enough consideration was being given to what it had been like for her to marry a man with 174517 branded on his arm.

  Harry was Jewish. His paternal grandparents had originally come from Poland to Germany, and then to England, changing their name from Greneski to Green when they arrived. Their son, Harry’s father, had married a Jewish girl, Rebecca Rubenstein, so Harry was indisputably Jewish, though he never went to the synagogue and observed none of the Jewish laws on holy days after he left home to get married. Edwina was blamed for this lapse by her mother-in-law, but it was not her fault. She would have been quite happy for Harry to practise the faith and observe the customs of his parents and grandparents, though she had not sought to please them by converting and marrying into that faith. They had married, she and Harry, in a register office, and his parents, though upset and, in his mother’s case, resentful, had attended. When Laura was born, Edwina had been glad she was a girl, which avoided any dispute over circumcision. Harry had been strangely emphatic: if he had a son, the child would not be circumcised, however much his parents pleaded. Why not? Edwina had asked and been told it was barbaric. It fascinated her that the mild-mannered, conventional Harry, always anxious to please, had in this one respect proved such an unlikely rebel. She’d wondered if this rejection of Jewishness was a kind of fear, but he said it wasn’t. ‘Look,’ he’d said, ‘you were brought up a Methodist and rejected Methodism and all religious belief. I’m no different. I don’t believe in any of it, it’s all a nonsense.’ She’d said to him once, ‘Do you ever think about what would have happened to your family if you’d lived in Germany when Hitler came to power?’ He’d said no, but then later admitted that he had thought about it but had stopped himself, because such speculation was morbid and sick. Edwina never mentioned the subject to him again. She thought about it often, though she hadn’t confessed that to the impressionable Emma (who, unlike her dark-haired sister, was blonde, taking after her mother, and didn’t look at all Jewish). She’d fantasised the knock on the door in the night, and the SS arriving and dragging Harry away. She’d shuddered as she imagined him crammed into an overcrowded cattle truck (she’d seen the films so her imagination hadn’t had to work very hard). And then she’d tried to imagine him surviving and coming back to his family (who, miraculously, would in her fantasy have been on the last transport to England). At this point, her imagination had always failed. What would she have done, as his wife, greeting such a man after what had happened to him? It was a test she was overwhelmingly glad not to have had to face; but reading about Primo Levi, and thinking about Lucia, she saw it in a different way. The test would have been Harry’s more than hers. It would have been up to him to dictate how his recent hellish past should be dealt with. And knowing Harry she knew what he would have decreed: forget it.

  Primo Levi didn’t want to forget it, he had had no intention of ever doing so even had it been possible. To forget would have been to betray those who had died, a victory for their murderers. But it occurred to Edwina as she took up the book again that Lucia might have wished he could, if not forget, at least not keep hammering home the memories over and over. The biographer related how Primo Levi always wore short-sleeved shirts, even in winter, and that the number 174517 tattooed on his skin stood out. It was intended to stand out. No one could avoid seeing it. Lucia certainly couldn’t. She had to look at it all the time. She couldn’t escape it, or its significance. During the most intimate moments of her relationship with her husband it was there. She saw it, she touched it, she felt it. The pity of it caught in Edwina’s throat. She wondered if Lucia ever suggested that her husband should wear a sweater, it was cold, he would be warmer, might it not be a good idea . . . She wondered if Lucia hoped the ink would fade over the years, that given time and hundreds of baths and showers and dozens of bars of soap the colour would fade, the number at last become so faint, it would not call attention to itself and its meaning.

  She admired Lucia Levi, much more than this biographer seemed to. She would like to have been her, providing her brave husband with the love and tenderness of which he had such need. But at this stage of the book Lucia seemed to be receding. She was off stage, coping with the children and her mother and her mother-in-law. Edwina read that people said the Levis seemed happy a lot of the time, but how could anyone know? She thought of how her own unhappiness was hidden, even from Harry. She was sure that people thought she and Harry were happy and on the surface they were. She had a sudden mad impulse to put the book down and go and write to Lucia Levi, to ask her if she had indeed been happy with her husband or whether throughout her marriage she’d been struggling to fight the great sadness engulfing it. The moment passed. She smiled slightly to herself at her own absurdity. She was, as Harry would put it, getting carried away, so immersed in the lives of others, and one of them dead, that her own life hardly existed. She herself was a background person, someone upon whom attention would never focus. If it did, on the rare occasions she was noticed, it scared her – when that woman at the hospital, for example, that bossy Friend, caught hold of her she couldn’t
wait to escape and merge back into the crowd. She didn’t want to be noticed.

  It suddenly struck her what an advantage that might have given her, if, like Primo Levi, she’d been taken to Auschwitz. It was good not to attract attention. She had no skills that might have saved her, as his knowledge of chemistry saved him, and no beauty that might have preserved her life as a sexual slave, but maybe she had other qualities which she had never recognised. Primo Levi, she read, said that years after he left Auschwitz he could still tell within the first five minutes of meeting someone new whether they would have survived in the camp. He’d said this without needing to know what talents people had – it was all based on a reading of character. Character was everything, character and personality, which had nothing to do with either physical strength or cleverness. Did she have it? Was there within her an innate toughness in spite of her reserve and shyness? Would it have been a life-saver, looked at through Auschwitz eyes, that she was usually quiet and rarely spoke up for herself and avoided confrontation unless provoked? Would all these traits she despised in herself actually have proved to be assets?

  She read for another hour and then put the book aside. Harry would be home soon. When she’d brought the book home, he’d groaned and said couldn’t she have picked something more cheerful. It’s bad for you, he’d said, reading this kind of depressing stuff. But he was wrong. On the contrary, she knew it was proving good for her. Primo Levi’s survival consoled her. It was making her more respectful of her own survival. What she had had to survive was as nothing compared to Primo Levi’s prolonged ordeal, it was offensive to speak of her own ordeal in the same breath, but nevertheless she saw that by not collapsing or breaking down, but instead carrying on as normal, she had shown some small measure of courage. Bravery didn’t have to come in dramatic form, it could emerge in tiny doses and be built on. She should give herself some credit. All those nights she’d lain awake sweating with terror, convinced that in spite of all the reassurances her disease was terminal, but she hadn’t woken Harry, she hadn’t turned to the girls. She’d got up in the mornings and made breakfast and sent Harry off to work and the girls off to school, all with a smile. Didn’t that count for something? She hoped so.

  When Harry came in, she was rolling out pastry, but the Primo Levi biography was on the table in the conservatory where he settled himself for a drink. She finished making the chicken pie, put it in the oven, and joined him. The book separated their two glasses. ‘Still reading this?’ Harry said. She nodded. ‘I might give it a go sometime. On holiday. Except it would fill a suitcase.’ She smiled, but said nothing. He would never, of course, even open it. He read crime fiction on holiday, or else sports biographies. She didn’t want him reading it in any case. It was too precious to her. He would madden her by fidgeting and yawning and reading so slowly he never seemed to turn a page. But she knew that she in turn irritated him by becoming so absorbed in the books she read that, though she heard his voice, she couldn’t pull herself out of them to answer him. The pull of what he was saying was not as strong as the pull of the print. She didn’t want to leave the alternative world she was inhabiting even if it was Auschwitz. It made him jealous, though he was not a jealous man. ‘Talking of holidays,’ Harry was saying, ‘how about being adventurous for a change and going to Thailand?’ ‘Thailand?’ she queried, astonished. Harry usually thought it madly adventurous to go to Scotland. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘the young seem to like it. Laura loved it, and Emma’s dying to go.’

  ‘We’re not young, Harry.’

  ‘We’re not old.’

  ‘No, but we don’t back-pack, we like a bit of comfort. And Emma wouldn’t come with us, she’s finished with family holidays, you know that.’

  ‘Finished with wet weeks in Scotland,’ said Harry, ‘but I bet she’d be keen to have her fare paid to Thailand whoever she was going with.’

  ‘I doubt it. She’s got a Saturday job anyway. You said she had to earn her own pocket money, remember?’

  ‘She could still take two weeks off.’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t know if I want to go to Thailand. I mean, why? Why Thailand? Why not Greece or Italy? We’ve hardly been anywhere, why go so far?’

  ‘Because we can.’

  ‘Oh, Harry . . .’

  ‘And we should. We’re stick-in-the-muds.’

  ‘What’s got into you?’

  ‘I feel restless, sort of restless.’

  He got up suddenly and asked if she wanted some more wine. She said no. She watched him go through to the kitchen and refill his glass. He wasn’t a big drinker, two generous glasses of wine before his meal was unusual. She saw him stand, glass in hand, facing the wall. He stood quite still. She knew what he was looking at: the calendar. Well, she hadn’t specifically marked the clinic day on the kitchen calendar, just put a tiny cross by the date, he would see nothing significant there. She didn’t need to write down clinic appointments anywhere. The date, even a year ahead, was fixed in her mind. She kept her hospital card in her jewellery box, in a little drawer at the bottom of the two-tier box, a place neither Harry nor the girls would ever have cause to look. Harry came back into the conservatory and sat down. She knew what was coming. ‘It was yesterday, wasn’t it?’ he said. ‘What? What was yesterday?’ she asked. ‘Don’t be silly, Edwina, you know what. Don’t play these games. Was everything OK? I assume it was good news.’ ‘Oh, do you?’ she said, and got up and went into the kitchen and began banging about.

  He sat on, not moving. She was being unfair, of course. It was ridiculous, her anger, her fury that he hadn’t remembered till now. Why should she expect him to remember a date a year ahead when she’d taken such care to hide it? Nothing he could do or say was ever right. She didn’t even know what she would have wanted him to say or do. From the very beginning it had been like this, distancing herself from him on clinic days, freezing him out, and then raging because he wasn’t giving her the nameless something she wanted. She blamed herself for this state of affairs, but she also blamed him. It was his refusal at the beginning to consider the possibility that the treatment might fail and that she might die which had separated them. She’d wanted to contemplate the worst outcome and he’d refused, point-blank refused. There was no need. She was going to be fine. She would not only survive, she would flourish. He even said that he was sure there had been a mistake and there was nothing wrong with her; though he admitted he knew at the same time that this was absurdly wishful thinking. He had said – his only concession to the kind of discussion she wanted – that if she did only have a short time to live (though he had referred to this as ‘if things go wrong’) he didn’t want to waste it talking about her dying. He wanted it to be a happy time.

  She didn’t hide the scar. She had no need to do so, from Harry’s point of view. He wasn’t squeamish and it wasn’t a very big scar, but on the other hand she became expert at turning away when she was dressing and undressing, turning away at just the right moment. In bed, Harry’s fingers sometimes strayed towards the scar and she pushed them away. She didn’t want it touched. He obeyed. He didn’t want to do anything to upset her and there was all the rest of her body to fondle. Her illness hadn’t made any difference to his desire for her, or hers for him, which seemed to her extraordinary enough to make her weep sometimes. She even felt, at the beginning, soon after the tiny tumour was removed, that all her fear was moving out of herself when she was making love – for that short while the pleasure annihilated the sickening worry. But then, later, as the years went safely on, that had ceased to be true. Panic over, the anxiety had burrowed deeper and dulled her senses, the terror had withdrawn from the forefront of her mind to bury itself cunningly in the very centre of her body, biding its time. She could never be sure when it was going to surge through her again and this made her first tense and then numb. It was the strangest feeling, one she couldn’t have begun to explain to Harry even if he had wanted to listen. He seemed to notice nothing. It amazed her.

  ‘Di
nner’s ready,’ she called. They hadn’t spoken for a full half-hour. Harry had gone on sitting in the conservatory, she’d stayed in the kitchen watching the vegetables simmer, peeping unnecessarily at the pie in the oven. He came through and sat down, looking wretched. She knew she was being cruel, refusing to tell him about the visit to the clinic. ‘There was nothing to tell,’ she said, ‘so it didn’t seem worth mentioning it, that’s all.’ He stared at her, food untouched. ‘What?’ she said, eating her own food with exaggerated enthusiasm. ‘Ages since I made this,’ she said. ‘It’s good, don’t you think?’ Slowly, he began to eat. After a few mouthfuls, he nodded, but still he didn’t speak. The clink of their knives and forks on their plates was awful. When they’d finished, he cleared his throat and said, ‘They must have said something.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Please, Edwina.’

  ‘Oh, you make such a performance of it. They said I seemed fine. They said that if I still seem fine next year they won’t see me again.’

  His face expressed such delight she could hardly bear it. ‘But that’s terrific!’ he said. ‘That’s brilliant news, how can you say there was nothing to tell, it’s wonderful!’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘Yes, it is, how can you not think so, what more could you want? We should celebrate, it’s incredible how well you’ve done.’ He got up and came round the table to her and tried to hug her. She felt like weeping.