‘That’s what Barbara said it was. Amazing.’
‘Barbara?’ he said, floundering now.
She shook her head irritably, as though he should have known. ‘Basia. My mother. Afterwards she changed it to Barbara. It was easier for people to cope with. Basia and Malka didn’t die of typhoid. Amazing. But later on, Malka died, probably of TB. Basia wasn’t sure, but she said she used to cough blood. In the laundry — ’
‘The laundry — she worked in the laundry?’
‘Very clean they were in Sobibor, Barbara said. Always scrubbing and cleaning. The inmates, you understand. Not the guards.’ Miriam’s eyes were wide and staring at him, but he knew she wasn’t looking at him. ‘They made them scrub and clean and wash and iron on the big machines and then scrub and clean again. On cabbage soup if they were lucky. What they could steal if they weren’t.’
He pushed her coffee cup closer to her, as though to compensate for her mother’s hunger; an absurd gesture.
‘That was why she wouldn’t ever clean again, she said. Even when Geoffrey was just teaching a bit and writing his books and they had no money to pay for help, even then she’d never clean anything. It had to be tidy, but clean didn’t matter. She said it never mattered.’
‘How — when did she get out of Sobibor?’
She blinked and then focused her eyes so that she was looking at him at last and managed a sort of smile. ‘Get out of Sobibor? Oh, there’s a story for you! A story and three quarters.’
‘Tell me,’ he said.
‘I’m thirsty.’ She drank some coffee and made a face, for it was lukewarm, and he waved at the waiter, who fetched more. And she drank and thought for a while and then said sharply, ‘Are you going to use what I tell you? In your film?’
‘I don’t know’ he said. ‘How can I know till I hear it all? You don’t want me to?’
‘I don’t give a shit,’ she said and he actually leaned back at the venom that was suddenly in her voice. ‘Why shouldn’t you if you want to? It’s not as though she didn’t tell the whole bloody world. Anyone who’d listen. It was no secret. Not even from me.’
‘Should it have been?’ he said softly and she looked at him with her eyes as blank and opaque as pebbles. There was so much anger there that he felt he could strike sparks off them.
‘Of course it should! I was a child, a small child. Wasn’t it enough it had happened to her? Did she have to make it happen to me, too? Tell it to me so that I lay in bed, night after night, thinking of her, crying for her, being her, going through it the way she did? Only having the worse hell of getting up every morning knowing it hadn’t been happening to me badly enough to make me feel better? For her there was at least the knowledge that she had paid for everything. For me there was never that. I had the suffering and the pain and the hatred and I never paid for it at all. I got up to eat cornflakes for breakfast and to watch Andy Pandy on the television and to be given chocolate on my birthday, while she told me how it was on her birthdays, working in that goddamned laundry. You ask if it should have been a secret from me?’
He shook his head. ‘Mine never told me,’ he said. ‘I found out by accident. It made me — I was very angry.’
‘Because you found out by accident? Or because they never told you?’
‘Both, I suppose,’ he said after a while. ‘Both. They had no right to hide it from me.’
‘She had no right to show it to me,’ Miriam said roughly. ‘She destroyed my childhood as hers had been. You, at least, had your good years undamaged.’
‘Did I?’ he said. ‘How can you be so goddammed sure? What do you think I remember when I think of being a kid? Good things, happy things? Like hell I do. I never knew a time when I didn’t feel alone and lonely. I remember — the first memory I have — waking in the night ill. Feverish, I think. And crying, calling for someone to hold me, make me safe and comfortable. And she came and looked at me and told me not to shout so loud, it was only a cold, and he watched from the door and said nothing. And they went away and left me alone. In the dark. For seventeen years it was like that. Alone and in the dark. All I remember is anger and distance. They were always so far away, both of them, it was like I walked round the outside of them. They had their Shoah Club and their friends, the people they talked to, the ones they saw every weekend and every Monday night, but me, all I had was TV and the kids from school — ’
‘And you slept at night without nightmares,’ she said flatly and stared at him, daring him to argue with her.
He couldn’t. ‘Yes. No nightmares.’
‘It wasn’t so bad for you then,’ she said and bent her head. ‘No scores being kept here, but take it from me, it wasn’t so bad for you.’
‘No scores,’ he echoed and then took a deep breath. ‘How did she meet your father? How did she get to come to England?’
‘Oh, that’s the one-and-three-quarter story,’ she said and leaned back in her chair. ‘That really will entrance you. It entranced her. She told it so often to so many people and every time she did she lit up like a — listen to this, my friend. Just listen to this. And then tell me you can make a film that’ll match it?’
‘I’m listening,’ he said as equably as he could, chilled by the rage in her voice. ‘Is it all true?’
She flicked her eyes upwards and glanced sharply at him and then away. ‘Why do you ask that?’
‘You didn’t seem to believe it, whatever it is. You sound’ — he shrugged — ‘contemptuous.’
‘It’s true, all right. My father told me the same story, but in a different tone of voice. You know what I mean? A story told one way means one thing. Told another…’ She shook her head. ‘It’s all a matter of the person doing the telling.’
‘Tell me your way,’ he invited. ‘Let me judge for myself.’
‘Not here.’ She looked round then at the noisy restaurant and its potted palms and hanging plants. ‘Not here. I couldn’t bear it.’
‘I’ll take you home,’ he said, and lifted his hand to call for the check. ‘We can talk there.’
She hesitated, and looked at him, and he thought — oh, Christ, I’ve frightened her. She’s going to go off into one of those crazy moods of hers and I’ll never hear all this. I have to hear it, I have to. It’s the most important information I’ve collected yet. I need it so badly I can taste it. And I want to be with her even more than I want to know.
It was that realisation that startled him the most.
Eleven
‘It’ll be cold in here for a while,’ she said, as she pushed open the door to the room at the back of the house. ‘I’ll light the fire.’ It was indeed very cold, with a deadness that came from air that had not been disturbed for some time, and it made him uneasy. It was as though a corpse was in there somewhere, and he looked round almost warily.
A cluttered room, an old man’s room, full of the detritus of years of book-centred work. In every available space books were piled. The walls were lined with packed shelves, and he could see that they were stacked two deep; behind the smaller paperbacks at the front, taller hardcovers loomed. The floor was covered with faded carpet, though little of it could be seen between the books that were piled on the floor, too. Pathways had been left between them to reach the fireside, where she now crouched setting matches to the crumpled paper and rough sticks in the grate. The only surface that was not book-heaped was a rumpled old sofa covered in faded red velvet that faced the fireplace on the other side of an almost bald goatskin rug.
She sat back on her heels and looked at the result of her efforts. The flames lurked low in the heavy grate for a while, as though they too were dispirited by the place in which they found themselves, but then slowly strengthened and lifted, and the scent of newly burning wood moved across the deadness of the room as the sticks caught and began to crackle with an incongruous cheerfulness.
‘That should help,’ she said and stayed there crouched in front of the fire, staring at the flames as they climbed up the sticks and began to eat t
he logs set above them. The smell of the wood and the warmth made him relax and seemed to have the same effect on her, for she said suddenly, ‘I’d like another drink, I think. There’s some sherry in that corner — ’ and jerked her head a little, and obediently he went foraging. He found the decanter and the glasses perched a little precariously on the inevitable pile of books on a low table, poured the drinks and brought the glasses back to the fireplace.
She was sitting on a corner of the sofa now, her legs tucked up beneath her, still staring at the fire, which was settling nicely, and reached up one hand for a glass without shifting her gaze from the flames.
‘This is familiar,’ he said. ‘Comfortable,’ and sat down at the other end of the sofa. ‘I had a friend with a place in Connecticut — where else? — and they’d ask me up at Thanksgiving. We’d sit by a fire like this on a winter night — ’ And as he spoke he was seized with a sudden pang of homesickness that left him shaken by its intensity. What the hell was he doing sitting three thousand miles from home in this dank house in Oxford, with this graceless girl, who was about as enticing as a bad tempered cat that couldn’t be trusted not to spit if you attempted to stroke it?
‘Yes,’ she said, almost dreamily. ‘It was always comfortable and good in here.’ She sipped at her glass and then said, ‘When I laid that fire, Geoffrey was still alive. Odd, isn’t it?’
‘Odd?’
She shrugged. ‘If you don’t know what I mean, then there’s no point in explaining.’
‘If you mean the transience of experience — ’ he began and now she did look at him.
‘My word, aren’t we serious!’ she said mockingly. ‘Transience of experience — there’s some fancy language for you!’
He flushed. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said stiffly. ‘I just wanted to — well, it doesn’t matter.’
She said nothing and they sat in silence for a while and then she stirred and said, ‘How are you getting back to London tonight? I’m not sure what time the last train goes.’
‘I can stay over,’ he said. ‘I imagine there are hotels in the city that’ll manage one night.’
‘Extravagant, aren’t you? Or just rich — ’
‘Neither,’ he said sharply. ‘Just practical. I worked it out earlier that I’d have to stay over. It’s no big deal. I’m not going to the Hilton or wherever. Anywhere cheap’ll do for me.’
‘Well, hadn’t you better be sorting it all out? For all you know the town may be full and no hotel rooms available.’
‘Are you telling me to go? I thought you were going to tell me what happened to — ’
‘The moment’s passed,’ she said swiftly and uncoiled herself from the sofa and went across the room to refill her glass. There was a recklessness about her movements now that sent a couple of books tumbling to the floor.
‘Why?’
‘Because — oh, just because.’ She was still standing by the sherry decanter, looking at him over the rim of her glass, watchful and alert, and he tried a smile.
‘Not for me it hasn’t. You said you’d tell me.’
‘So I’ve changed my mind.’
‘Why?’
‘Oh, for Christ’s sake, why nag me? The moment’s past, I tell you.’
‘Why are you so frightened?’ He was genuinely curious. ‘What harm can I do you that you stand there looking like that? I haven’t bitten you yet, and I’m not likely to start now. For Christ’s sake, lady, cool it! Come and sit down and stop behaving like some sort of movie queen.’
He thought he’d gone too far for a moment but then her shoulders, which had tightened as he spoke, seemed to sag a little and she made a small grimace and came back to the sofa to sit in her corner again.
‘Damn you,’ she said, but there was no animus in her tone.
‘Damn you. You’re a bloody nuisance, you know that?’
‘Sure,’ he said equably, and went and refilled his own glass. The stuff was warm on his tongue but had an agreeable nuttiness about it and added to the claret he’d had at dinner was making him feel a little glittery. Watch it, a corner of his mind murmured. Remember what happened the other night, with Garten.
‘I’ve been talking to some odd people,’ he said then, as he came back and sat down in his own corner. ‘You’re the least of it.’
‘How odd? Crazy odd or just English and, therefore, odd to you? To a lot of people in this country you’re about as odd as Dick’s hatband — and no, don’t look at me that way. I’m not going to explain.’
He grinned. ‘So don’t. I’ll tell you how odd — all mixed up.’ And he launched into an account of the man Garten, dressing it up a little to make the encounter sound even more interesting than it had been; she listened and then laughed, and he thought, I’m getting closer again. And then said carefully, ‘Then, of course, there was Cyril Etting. He wasn’t odd. He was plain heart-breaking.
He knew he was taking a chance, edging her back to the subject he wanted to talk about. They shouldn’t have left the restaurant, he was thinking. I should have got it out of her there and then, while the mood was on her. Now I have to recreate it all over again, goddamn it.
Oh?’ She sounded genuinely interested, relaxed and quite without the tension that had filled her so short a time before. The most unpredictable person I’ve ever met, he thought. Weird.
He told her of Cyril Etting and the deep loneliness of his life, painting as vivid a picture as he could of the old man sitting in his cold house, and then sharing Chinese food with him, and she sat and stared at him, showing no reaction. The gleam of interest that had been there seemed to have faded, leaving just a blank listening gaze.
‘I have others to see,’ he said then. ‘A man who lives in — where is it? Streatham. In south London — ’
‘It’s pronounced Stret’am,’ she said. ‘Not Street-ham.’
‘Oh!’ He was taken aback. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘No need. I don’t give a damn but some people do. They’ll just laugh. As if it mattered.’
‘I dare say it does to some.’ Then he said daringly, ‘Like eating scampi from a basket?’
Now she did laugh and relaxed even more and he thought, now. Now, while I’ve got her.
‘Tell me, Miriam,’ he said. ‘Tell me the story and three quarters. You said you would.’
‘The story and three quarters,’ she echoed, and then sighed and set her glass down on the floor at her feet. ‘If that’s the only way I can get you out of here — all right. But don’t interrupt me Don’t ask silly questions — ’
‘I’ll try not to. What’ll happen if I do? Will it all turn into dead leaves?’
She managed a crooked little smile. ‘This isn’t fairy gold, believe me. It’s — oh, hell. Just listen.’
‘Yes,’ he said softly and put down his glass and folded his arms, and looked at her. ‘Yes, I’ll listen.’
‘All right. Where did I get to? Ah, yes. What happened afterwards? Well, the war was over, right? And the Russians came. People in the camps had an idea they were coming — the word got round, God knows how, and they were ready. And when they opened the camps people just came out. Pouring out, some of them. Others were too frightened to pass the gates and just stayed there. Nowhere to go and no strength to get there. But David, he had to get out to find his family. He didn’t know who had lived and who had died. He’d done well enough in the camp hospital, even had reasonable food. He was pretty fit, considering. But he had to find the family. So he went to the women’s section and started asking and found out. His wife, five of the children, all dead. Only Basia living. Where’s Basia? Gone — ’
She stopped and he opened his mouth to speak and then, catching her glance, closed it again. And she nodded in satisfaction.
‘Well done you. So, there’s only Basia left. But he doesn’t know where she is because she got out as soon as the Russians arrived. Swept away somewhere, he doesn’t know where. But he reckons he can find her. He just has to go to the various places the people from
the camps go to — displaced persons’ camps. So he starts. The first camp, near Treblinka, it’s like a madhouse, Basia said. An absolute madhouse. Hundreds and hundreds of people all milling round and doctors and nurses from the Russian forces and from the other allies, too, eventually, and the Red Cross and God knows who. She was in one of them, but they’d moved her on by the time David got there. And she didn’t know where he was, didn’t think he was alive even. Why should she? Her mother and the other children were all dead. How could she know her father wasn’t dead too? She didn’t think to ask, she said. So, she goes off to a camp for children that’s been set up in Northern Italy. No, I don’t know why so far away. They were all over Europe, these camps. They had to get people sorted out as best they could and wherever they found a place they could use for displaced persons, I suppose they used it no matter where the persons were displaced from. And so there she is in a camp near Cuneo in Italy and her father wants to find her.’
Again she stopped, and then went on with a sort of jeer in her voice. ‘And as though it wasn’t ridiculous enough to try to find one child in all the mess that was in Europe in ’forty-five, he decides he’s got to find her in time to get her ready to be batmitzvah! The boys are all dead so none of them will ever be barmitzvah, he says, and he has to have one child of the law. What else did so many Jews die for? One of his children has to go through the experience of being called to the law, and if it has to be a girl, well, there it is. They were part of the reform synagogues anyway in the days when there had been such synagogues in Poland and Germany. So he gets it hard in his head that’s what he wants, a batmitzvah daughter. And Barbara was born in 1933, so he hasn’t much time, has he? Not if she’s to be batmitzvah when she’s thirteen, the proper age. Mad, isn’t it? To put a time limit on such a search. Barbara said he was mad, but she was so proud of his madness.’
‘It’s understandable,’ he ventured, but she ignored him.
‘He walked, that stupid bastard, he walked. Sometimes he got rides, sometimes he managed to get money to buy a train ticket, but mostly he walked. She wasn’t in any of the camps near Treblinka. No one knew where she was but they told him other places children were sent to. So there he goes, walking around the madhouse that’s Europe, and looking. And every camp he gets to they say very brightly, “Sorry, no child called Basia Novak here, sorry, try there, try somewhere else, try anywhere, only go away.”’
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