The Accomplice

by The Accomplice (retail) (epub)

  “You’ll want to have a word with her,” she said. “I could take you up to see her one afternoon. She’s in a home, of course. I’d better come with you to introduce you, like. Not that it makes any difference to her, but the people running the place like to know who’s going in and out.”

  Zita met her the following day outside the Rose Bank Residential Home, a suburban villa with a modern extension built on at the back, which doubled its size. Its old front garden had been tarmacked to provide parking for staff and visitors, and everything else that could be considered non-utilitarian had been stripped away. The entrance hall held a faint undercurrent of odour in its air, tainted and sinister, composed of urine and rancid cooking fat. In a lounge on their right Zita could see a row of old women arrayed in chairs along one wall. They looked like a shelf of second-hand books, untidily propping one another up. One of them was talking, but without addressing anyone in particular, and none of the others gave any appearance of attention or even of understanding what was being said.

  Mrs Hovell glanced inside and then made for the lift. “She’s not downstairs today. They usually bring her down. It does her good to be with the others, they say.” On the third floor she led Zita through heavy fire doors, along a narrow featureless corridor, stiflingly hot from the lights that burned twenty-four hours a day. She reached the last door and waited a moment for Zita to catch up with her.

  “I’ll leave you alone with her for a while. I’ve got a bit of shopping to do, so I’ll just come in to say hello.”

  She had been speaking in a conspiratorial whisper; once she had opened the door she raised her voice to the self-conscious tone used for children, the handicapped and the elderly. “Hello, Mother. How are you now?”

  From behind Mrs Hovell’s bulk Zita could see a wispy figure sitting in a chair gazing out of the window. She turned, regarding them with cloudy blue eyes. Her white hair was parted on one side and held on the other with a blue plastic clip in the shape of a bow. Her expression was childlike, but no child, apart from Tom, would have had such a blank, unrecognizing stare. Her daughter-in-law bustled in the tiny space, making Zita edge round her to sit down on the other side of the window. When she left a silence fell on the room. Old Mrs Hovell looked placidly back at Zita. Perhaps she thought she was a new doctor, a nurse, a carer; perhaps she made no explanation to herself to account for a stranger’s presence; perhaps everyone was a stranger, however often they came.

  As Zita stated as clearly as she could what she wanted to know, Mrs Hovell watched her wonderingly. When, at last, she began to speak, her words had nothing whatsoever to do with what had come before. She had failed to take in any meaning from what had been said to her.

  “My mother always said that people with yellow eyes couldn’t be trusted. She meant those very pale eyes, like a glass of water. And she’s right; that new girl’s no good, I’m sure of it.”

  “One of your nurses?” Zita asked. She decided that she would accept Mrs Hovell’s own topics, rather than impose her own.

  “A nurse? Oh, no, I wouldn’t have thought she was a nurse. She was a land girl, as far as I remember. They were always very flighty pieces. She came from London. Funny to be a land girl and come from London. You wouldn’t have thought she’d’ve known a cow’s tits from its tail, but the truth was that she was a very good worker. That’s what my mother said. But she got around, I’ll say that for her. Her… her…” The word would not come. She made vague circular movements with one hand, looking appealingly at her visitor.

  Zita realized that she was looking at someone who was a witness to a past which was as deeply buried in her mind as the skeleton had been buried in the earth. None of the normal conventions for the exchange of information applied here. No offer of lunch or a drink, no thought of reciprocation, no idea of helpfulness or duty could persuade Mrs Hovell to part with information that she no longer knew she had. She must, Zita thought, have been a very chatty cleaning woman. One whose work was simply an opportunity for conversation. She was still talking now. For her the past was the present, infinitely repeating itself. Here it had its revenge at last. It was no longer ruthlessly mastered as Valentina mastered her own history, nor suppressed as Yevgenia had suppressed hers for almost fifty years; the past lived again in random replay. The bliss, she thought. No need to struggle to abolish Oliver: he would always be there in her mind, which would have shed the painful reality of his absence.

  Mrs Hovell had fallen silent, for a moment, pondering. Zita had given up all hope of learning anything from her by questioning her. What she needed was some sort of stimulus to memory which would induce Mrs Hovell to give up her information without realizing it. A photograph of Asshe House was the best thing she could think of; she would have to come again with one. She looked around for something to direct the old woman’s attention. On the chest of drawers were a few snaps tucked into the frame of the mirror. They were all in colour, modern. Zita picked up one of a young woman and a baby and held it out for Mrs Hovell to see.

  “Is this your granddaughter?” she asked.

  Mrs Hovell took the photograph and admired it without recognition. “Very nice,” she said. She put it back on top of the chest. Her eye fell on a small metallic disc stamped with a head lying on the surface closer to Zita than to her. She reached for it; Zita pushed it towards her. Mrs Hovell smiled and nodded, holding out her hand. Zita placed the medal in the cupped palm. The old woman looked at the disc for a moment and caressed it with the tips of her fingers. The feel rather than the sight evoked a response.

  “I lived and the child died; that I never understood, never understood.” She held the medal between her fingers face outwards as though the sight of it would ward off a threat, gorgon-like, turning it to stone.

  “The child died?” Zita repeated.

  “I lived and the child died.” She muttered the phrase again counterbalancing the two halves of the sentence. “The… killed him and saved me.” She could not say what it was that had killed her child. Lacking any knowledge, Zita could not supply the understanding with which her family would have filled up the lacuna. This time Mrs Hovell seemed aware of the failure of communication.

  “I know what it is,” she said. “It’s just the name won’t come. The…” She was making gestures, as if scooping something out of her lap and throwing it in the air. “It made a… a hole.” Zita gazed back at her blankly. Then, abruptly, she knew who the child must have been, without proof, as surely as Stevens knew that Yevgenia was guilty. The intrusion of the thought of Stevens reminded her that she knew nothing.

  The younger Mrs Hovell entered as the mother-in-law was repeating her actions, still muttering the first half of her incantation. “I lived… I lived… I lived.”

  Zita looked for help. “Something that makes holes,” she said, as if it were a cross-word puzzle.

  “A road digger?” the daughter-in-law suggested helpfully. “I must take Mrs Daunsey away now, Mum,” she went on without waiting to see if she had solved the riddle. “I’ll be back to see you at the weekend, then. So, look after yourself. Take care, goodbye, goodbye.” She led the way out briskly.

  Zita said, “There was a medallion on her chest of drawers. She wanted to talk about it but couldn’t find the words.”

  “That happens sometimes. She’s got the idea in her head but the words for it won’t come. Well, it happens to all of us sometimes, doesn’t it? The medallion? She was very superstitious, was Mother. You wouldn’t believe the things she fussed about. She didn’t like green in the house. I think that medal thing brought her luck. Anyway, she likes to have it around.”

  They were in the lift descending to the ground floor. “No good asking if she could tell you anything you needed to know. It was one of her bad days. I could tell as soon as we saw her. She has good times and bad times and when it’s bad she talks a lot but doesn’t get anywhere. Well, you could always try again, another time. Or see if my husband can help. He was in his teens in the 1940s. He might
remember something that would be useful to you.”

  It was almost funny, she thought, driving home afterwards. It was funny. It would certainly be funny if she had anyone to recount it to. Her independent witness turned out to be senile, whose memory could not be tapped and most of whose random remarks were masterpieces of irrelevance, but who, nevertheless, had made her understand what could have happened. Stevens was not the man to whom to tell her story. He would take her effort seriously and pour scorn on it. She might have told Yevgenia. Until recently she had often done so; now Yevgenia was so absorbed by her own past that she would not respond to Zita’s anecdote. It only belatedly occurred to her that she had not thought of Oliver. Not that Oliver was there to listen, or would have been interested even if he were. That was the point. His absence had always been the first thing she noticed at that moment, which arrived daily, when she wanted to share amusement. It was odd she had not thought of him at first.

  This was a time of year when he was usually especially present, or absent. Wednesday was Tom’s birthday and the punctual arrival of cards and gifts despatched by Shobana according to the notes transferred from her diary year by year always threw into relief the lack of anything actually chosen by Oliver himself. The birthday this year was to consist of a visit to a cinema to see a Walt Disney film, followed by tea at home, to which two of his friends from the Centre had been invited, with Lynne, Xenia and Yevgenia. The cinema was a new experience and one to which Tom was looking forward with great intensity. No video seen at home could compare with a film seen in a cinema. It had taken Zita several weeks of persuasion and organization to get the manager to agree that three wheel chairs would not contravene the fire regulations, as he had at first insisted. Tom’s invitations to his friends were also a new departure. Birthdays had hitherto been celebrated only with his mother and Lynne. With Xenia’s help and that of Lynne, Zita had one able-bodied adult for each wheel chair in the cinema. Before the expedition started she had already decided that there was never to be a repetition: it was all too difficult. However, the afternoon passed off well and the children’s delight in everything, the film, the visit to an ordinary cinema, the tea, was so great and so evident that at the end she felt that, as long as the numbers did not grow and nothing more ambitious was attempted, she would certainly do it again.

  Finally the party broke up. Tom’s friends had been taken home and Lynne was putting Tom to bed. Zita begged Yevgenia and Xenia to have a drink with her before they left.

  “Sit down again. And, Xenia, I must pay you for your help this afternoon. You were marvellous with them.”

  “No, you must not pay me. I thought I was a guest today, invited as Tom’s friend.”

  “Of course, you were. But still I must pay you. If you had only been a guest you would have come just for tea, like Yevgenia.”

  “The birthday is something serious in England,” Xenia remarked as Zita handed her a glass of wine.

  “It’s true. Often children have extraordinarily elaborate parties, magicians, films, outings. I think it’s particularly guilty working mothers who put on these performances.”

  Xenia was less interested in learning about English children’s birthdays than in talking about her own family’s.

  “In Russia we celebrated a birthday by trying to buy something special to eat. When I was little, you could sometimes find caviar, the red if not the black, in our town. And there was a certain kind of cake, like a chocolate wafer, that I would get for my father’s birthday. But in recent years, during perestroika, you did not often find caviar or even cake. His birthday was St John’s Day, 7th July, and when I was a child, when my mother still lived with us, we had wonderful feasts of soup and caviar and blinis, a whole special meal for his day.”

  “Tom-Tom will have to wait until he is grown up before he can demand caviar for his birthday party,” Zita commented. “For the moment a Thomas the Tank Engine cake will have to do.” Then she said, “St John’s Day is 24th June in the West, isn’t it, Yevgenia? Midsummer’s day.”

  “Yes,” Yevgenia replied. “That’s right; 24th June, Old Style.”

  “How confusing,” said Zita. “It’s as much as I can do to cope with birthdays in one calendar without muddling it up with another. In spite of the fact that she is in Russia, Valentina remembered Tom’s birthday this year, which she never normally does. He got a card this morning from St Petersburg.”

  Yevgenia was getting up as Zita spoke. “Xenia, my dear, I think I must go back. But you stay with Zita, there is no need for you to come.” Zita, seeing she was determined to go, accompanied her to the front door. “It was very sweet of Tom to ask me to his party. I enjoyed it very much. Delicious cake, Zita. Forgive me for leaving like this. I want to sit down with my tape recorder for an hour or so. I have the worst bit yet to do, the most painful confession to make.”

  “I hope it won’t be that bad,” Zita heard herself saying, in the same tone that Mrs Hovell had used to her mother-in-law, the tone with which the young humour the old. It was not clear whether she meant the emotion or the text.

  Yevgenia set off, leaning forward on her sticks. “By the way,” she said. “May I make an official appointment for next week. I want to make some changes in my legal arrangements.”

  “Of course. Would you like to come to the office, or shall I come to you?”

  “I’ll come to the office, I think. You’ve got a lift, so I can reach your room. It will be an outing for me. I’ll ring your secretary tomorrow.”

  Part Twelve

  YEVGENIA

  23

  I think he was the happiest time of my life: I had almost four years of Alek’s company. Because of him, I have forgotten the terrors and difficulties of the war years; that is, I remember the facts, but I do not feel them; they have no residual pain.

  In June 1941, just after Xan was killed, and just before Alek was born, the Germans invaded Russia. They swept forward on a huge front, one army group curling north to take the Baltic States. The Russians retreated, disappearing into the East, driving their prisoners before them like cattle. The Germans took over the Russians’ control of the country and their methods, but their violence was directed at different people, or the same people for different reasons.

  When we were told, after the war, that ordinary people in Germany had not known what was going on, I know it wasn’t true. I lived out the years of the war on a farm in Latvia, about as remote as you can get, and we knew what was happening. It’s impossible to do the sorts of things that were being done without people knowing; to round up one group of the population of a small town with the utmost brutality, to march them out to the woods, to make them dig their own graves, then shoot them, all of them, men and women and children, so that they fall into the pit they have just dug; or to load them onto cattle trucks and ship them off to a place from which they never return. We knew what it meant when the Soviets did it to intellectuals, aristocrats, capitalists; it meant labour camp and death somewhere in Siberia. We knew what it meant when the Germans did it to the Jews; it meant labour camp and death somewhere much closer than Siberia. I don’t think I had heard the name of Auschwitz before the end of the war. I didn’t know about Zyklon B and the gas chambers. But I knew in essence, if not in detail, what was happening. In the villages all around us the Jews who had been the artisans, the traders, the travelling packmen, the loggers, were rounded up and sent to live in ghettos in the towns where they worked as forced labourers. Sometimes they were just paraded and shot. We all knew about it. I knew about it, and I did nothing. I saved no one, except the man whom I believed was responsible for my husband’s death, because I had Alek, because I was afraid. So, like many others in Latvia, I stood between the bully and the victim, an unwilling accomplice.

  For me the arrival of the Germans at first made life better. Lai told me to start calling myself von Korff again, rather than Chornoroukaya. As a Baltic German and an aristocrat, I fell into two categories which, if not honoured, were more favoura
bly regarded by the Nazi authorities than by either the Soviets or the Latvians. So I was able to live at Kornu unmolested. Life was not bad; it went on much as usual. We had always lived very simply; we still had the farm and the difficulties of supply faced by people in the city were much less for us.

  So I was able to live in my paradise with my son. It seems to me that women have two childhoods; the first is their own, and no sooner have they emerged from that than they are plunged again into a second with their children. I lived in a child’s world with Alek: his discovery of the world was mine too; his toys, books, games, were mine. Nothing outside Alek and Kornu counted for anything. Naturally, I cared about what was happening in the war. I listened secretly to the BBC. I listened to German propaganda about the eastern front; I even heard Russian radio and followed the siege of my birthplace, Leningrad. But these things only mattered in so far as they might affect Alek. And while the Germans pressed forward into Russia, that meant they did not matter at all.

  For Lai it was different. For a time he tried to go on as he had under the Russians, training as a doctor in Riga, secretly doing what he could to undermine the occupiers of his country. He came to see me and Alek very frequently, almost every week, taking a train from Riga, cycling from the station on a bike which he left in the stationmaster’s keeping. It was after about nine or ten months of German occupation that he decided to do more. It was sometime at the end of winter in 1942; Alek was at the stage of sitting up and beginning to creep around the room holding onto furniture, pulling things down on top of him. One afternoon I had put him on a little sleigh and towed him over the snow to the lake which was starting to melt, water lapping through the ice, when I saw Lai coming towards us. He had a bag on his back and he was walking. He had decided to join the partisans, and had come to say goodbye. He could no longer stand the ambiguities of trying to live a normal life under the Nazis.