A Place Of Strangers

by Geoffrey Seed

  Bea does not want to hear this. She wants to believe Arie is a journalist in London. He cannot have misled her or told her a lie. But Francis says for Arie, London is simply a second front in the same war.

  ‘Arie knows the importance of being able to shoot, Bea.’

  ‘Meaning what, exactly?’

  ‘That intellectuals like him have to be willing and able to fight for the Jewish cause which is their own homeland.’

  She demands to know how he can be sure of any of this.

  ‘Arie confessed it to me himself.’

  The bonfire of slashed undergrowth crackles and smoke billows high into the pale yellow crowns of the autumn beeches around them. Far in the distance, a bluish bloom of mist clings to a fringe of trees.

  It unsettles Bea to think Arie is sharing confidences with Francis. Even worse, Francis says Arie was smuggling European Jews to Palestine from Prague before she met him – exactly as Peter Casserley suspected. She covers her ignorance by blaming all the blood letting in Palestine on Britain’s refusal to admit more Jewish settlers from the very death camps the Allies fought to liberate.

  ‘That maybe so, Bea, but if we let thousands of Jews from Russia settle in Palestine then the Soviets would infiltrate their spies amongst them and Palestine could quickly become a puppet state run from Moscow.’

  ‘If Bevin believes that then he’s more of a fool than I thought.’

  ‘Possibly, but there’s always a bigger picture to think about in diplomacy.’

  ‘Not nearly as big as six million people being murdered.’

  Bea walks away so he cannot see the anger in her face. She tips another wheelbarrow full of brambles onto the fire. Smoke swirls into her face so she retreats to Pigs’ Brook and sits on the bank with a handkerchief to her eyes. Francis puts his arm around her and says he is sorry. He remembers how she wept for days after seeing the newsreels from the concentration camps.

  ‘It’s always interesting, isn’t it?’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘Someone’s motivation... what makes a person take the line they do.’

  ‘What are you getting at, Francis?’

  ‘Finding the motive... find that and you’ve found the man.’

  ‘You’ve got to get inside his head, first.’

  Francis considers her as he always does, dog-like in his devotion to all that she is and all that she means to him. They walk back to where Francis’s dacha will be built. Bea thinks of what he has just said – and what he has not. Arie’s position is easily understood. But hers? She is not a Jew so why is she this upset about their plight? Francis would never ask, though. Yet what if he suspects? There is nothing in the flat anymore. There are no clues. She had taken all the rubbish out and thrown it away so who is to know what was ever there?

  Only Bea herself.

  Francis leaves to meet Arie at Ludlow Station. Bea listens to the Alvis bubbling down the lane till only silence and uncertainty remain. She tosses more brash on the fire and sees it blaze and die like obsession itself. How odd that such a friendship should develop between lover and cuckold.

  She thought she knew their hearts so well... these boys, lying in her arms all petit mort, hers for ever more. Yet she bears no sin, has no need of priests. Her way from Prague winds on and she alone is ordained to find it.

  But in her bones, she cannot be sure who is spying on whom.

  *

  Bea watches them digging the trenches for the brick pillars to support the dacha. Alf Bishop is the only one who really knows what to do. Francis has rolled up his sleeves and Arie’s taken off his shirt. He is really brown, not a spare ounce of fat on him. Francis looks a little pink and sweaty, very English.

  Bea saw them as they arrived home, talking intently. Arie did not even stop to say hello. They went straight to Francis’s study and she heard him make a trunk call. That can only have been to London.

  It was not until lunchtime that Arie spoke to her. She sensed how on edge he was. He said he had been to Palestine but not when or why.

  ‘Francis says the situation’s pretty grim out there.’

  ‘Yes, full of soldiers and secret agents to keep Mr Bevin’s police state going.’

  ‘It sounds awful, Arie. I’m so concerned but what can I do here?’

  ‘Nothing. It is as it is – and there’s worse to come.’

  He and Francis then shouldered their spades down to Garth Woods. Alf Bishop was just back from the pub, full of goodwill and advice. He pegged out the site to get the levels and footings right. Work stopped just after four when Bea carried down a tray of tea and scones Alf’s wife had made.

  Then Mrs Bishop herself comes running towards them. Someone from Francis’s office is on the telephone. He glances at Arie and goes quickly to the house. Alf lights another Park Drive and disappears to relieve himself behind the trees. Bea takes Arie aside quickly and demands to know what is going on.

  ‘Nothing, nothing’s going on.’

  ‘Stop treating me like an idiot. The pair of you are up to something.’

  ‘Beatrice, please. Prague’s over.’

  ‘But I want to help. It’s me – remember?’

  Francis returns before she can press Arie further. The slightest of nods are exchanged between the two men. Bea asks Francis what his office wanted. He says it was something and nothing. Pen pushing never stops – even on a Saturday. Bea turns her back. They are hiding something from her and they had no right to.

  *

  Everyone drinks too much at supper. They eat fish – trout tickled near Ludford Weir by Alf Bishop. Arie’s mood darkens. Bea sometimes wondered if he might be jealous, seeing her and Francis as husband and wife. She had only ever viewed their little triangle from the apex – having two men love her to make up for the father who didn’t. But on this night, it is closeness of her lovers which seems to threatens her.

  They all move to the chairs around the fire which Francis stacks with logs. There is small talk but no conversation which matters, nothing to include her in their unspoken business. Yet she is damned if she is going to bed early to leave them alone with their secrets. She refills her glass with yet more Pinot Noir from the old judge’s cellar.

  ‘Come on, Arie – sing for your supper. Tell us what you’re really getting up to these days. Your life’s always been so full of excitement. Share it with us.’

  Arie does not reply immediately. He holds her gaze in a way almost alarms her. She sees again the man she had helped down from his crucifix in Prague, that woodcut etch of a face and its seer’s eyes which saw the suffering to come.

  ‘As you ask, Beatrice... I have been searching for something.’

  ‘And what might that be?’

  ‘It is the courage within myself to ask questions and then to listen to the answers.’

  Orange flames spread between the hearth of logs that pop and spit above its broken bricks. Arie looks into the fire as he speaks... into the fire wherein he sees the faces of those who have turned to flecks of ash.

  ‘I have been forcing myself to consciously find out what happened to my family.’

  It is too late for Bea to call back her words, to regret their selfish conceit. She must wait for Arie to break the silence.

  ‘They called it the small terror in the early days... just a few Jews beaten to death or a synagogue burnt down, nothing that the old hadn’t heard about in the pogroms of the past... nothing new. How could they know the future... how could anyone? But slowly, by degrees and by new laws, we were made outcasts, confined in traps like rats until the Nazis were ready to deal with us.’

  Arie pauses, takes a breath, sips his wine. Neither Bea nor Francis can take their eyes off him. A great hurt is being confronted.

  ‘No one truly understood the catastrophe we faced but the movement I joined never accepted that our enemies should think that if we Jews were beaten or killed, we wouldn’t be offended, just because we were used to it. Even before the war, we began to organise escape routes,
getting Jews out of Europe on little ships to Palestine. But the net was always getting tighter and I was ordered to travel to London by any means I could... and that meant leaving my wife and children in Vilna.’

  No one moves, no one speaks. The embers in the hearth glow red.

  ‘What chance did they have... sixty thousand people crammed in a ghetto of a few streets. No food, disease everywhere... despair, also. The Nazis were so cunning. They promised work for the people in a town called Kovno and all these Jews, thousands of them, piled into the train. But it didn’t go to Kovno. It turned off to a place called Ponar where the people went for picnics in happier times. When the train stopped, the Jews knew something was wrong and began to break out but the Nazis opened fire, shot them to pieces. Those who weren’t dead already were marched to some huge pits and shot. Word spread through the ghetto that Kovno was an illusion, a trick to get the Jews to go quietly to their slaughter so now they knew their fate and that afternoon, the clouds settled low over the ghetto and those inside felt so trapped and close to death... so ashamed of their helplessness.’

  Arie closes his eyes. His shoulders heave, his chin goes onto his chest. He seems on the point of breaking down and Bea wants to comfort him but Francis shakes his head.

  ‘The pits filled with more bodies and even the earth began to spring with blood. The riflemen weren’t Germans but Estonians and Ukrainians and our fellow Lithuanians, neighbours of ours once and now they complained that their shoulders ached from all the shooting they had to do. And so the Vilna ghetto was emptied but the Nazis needed to hide the evidence of their crimes so a group of Jews was chained together to excavate the pits and burn the corpses on pyres of logs...’

  Arie’s head is in his hands. His tapering fingers twist the coils of his greying hair.

  ‘...these prisoners were no longer human beings... how could they be? They in turn were killed... all but one who escaped and he is one I have now met. Out of all that horror, one image remains above all others for him... a woman who’d been with child when she faced her executioners. When the prisoners lay her on the logs, her womb splits open and the baby inside is seen to be on fire.’

  Arie’s last words come from the emptiness of his heart.

  ‘This man knew who she had been in life... she was Ruzhka, my little sister.’

  *

  Francis drives Arie back to London next morning. His visit should have lasted longer but it was clear over breakfast that no one drew any comfort from the presence of the others. It was a time for reflection, for measuring one’s life and purpose against what had been revealed the night before.

  Bea walks to the village shop and buys a Sunday Express. The bells of St Mary and All Angels peal through Garth Woods, over a gentle landscape that has not seen invaders for a thousand years.

  A late Stop Press paragraph catches her eye.

  Five men of Middle Eastern appearance arrested in London yesterday for entering Britain illegally will be deported on Monday morning.

  Chapter Twenty One

  Nothing Evie could say persuaded McCall to come out of his angry self and not cut short their week away.

  ‘Bea’s an old lady, Mac. You can’t confront her like some baddie you’re exposing on television.’

  ‘They’ve kept the truth from me. I haven’t the faintest idea why but they’ve lied.’

  ‘Maybe they’d very good reasons. You owe her the benefit of the doubt. Her husband is dying, McCall – the guy who helped to raise you. He’s dying.’

  ‘I still need Bea to give me some answers.’

  ‘Look, you’re too close to all this. Why don’t you let me talk to her?’

  ‘Because this is my life, Evie – my story.’

  They drove back to Garth that same morning. McCall did not say another word on the entire journey.

  *

  Bea was not feeling well, not from any definable ache or pain, more the shiver of a ageing tree as the gales of winter set in. Her three score years and ten were over so the future was unknowable and short. She released the catch to the bureau’s hidden compartment and removed a specific envelope from those inside – but with great care, so her fingers did not actually touch the armband next to it. It was as if the spores of some contagious disease were sewn into its emblem of evil and the silvered cloth threads of the word Schutzmann. Bea would have burnt it years ago but for the terrible fascination it held for her.

  The envelope contained four black and white photographs. Bea made for the wooden seat by Pigs’ Brook which always caught the late afternoon sun. She held the pictures like a hand of cards, remembering what she had been dealt, how she had gambled.

  In the first image, Arie stood alone on Westminster Bridge with Big Ben behind him. His hair was neatly cut for once, his businessman’s suit double-breasted bird’s eye with wide lapels. The second showed Bea in a short-sleeved striped dress with her hair piled high in the pin-up girl style of the late 1940s. How glamorous she looked then, how remote from the old body she now inhabited.

  She put the pictures side by side on the seat. Even apart like this, she and Arie could only be lovers. They’d had lunch with Francis that day. He got a bit tight because he had told the Foreign Office he would not accept a Moscow posting if it meant leaving Bea behind. What it was to be so adored...

  *

  Francis does not just love Bea, he worships her. He displays her on the London diplomatic circuit like some rare creature he has captured but cannot entirely tame. That is her attraction. The lustful eyes of others follow her every move, watch her toy and flirt with whichever foreign official Francis has chosen for grooming and await their own turn. Bea causes men to be indiscreet. Her husband basks in the envy of those who would bed the woman who sleeps at his side each night. She is his and always will be. Francis indulges her, delights in her and would deny her nothing... and forgive her anything. Francis cannot conceive of life without Bea. She is aware of this. So is Arie.

  ‘Do you think he suspects us?’

  ‘I couldn’t swear he doesn’t.’

  Francis has gone back to his office after their long lunch. She and Arie are in his apartment, naked on the rough blankets of his iron-framed bed. The room is airless and hot.

  ‘I don’t understand your Francis. Why does he not move against us?’

  ‘Because he loves me. By doing nothing, he is showing just how much he loves me.’

  ‘You mean he forgives you all this... our liaison?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Most men would come after me with a gun.’

  ‘But Francis knows he would then lose us both, wouldn’t he?’

  Some nights, she would not arrive back till after midnight. Her excuses wore thinner each time. But affairs induce blind recklessness. She would never deliberately humiliate Francis but could not function without Arie – not when he was in London.

  Bea attends Francis’s tedious diplomatic parties, smiling coquettishly before slipping away into the night. Sometimes, before she edges ever closer to the door, she would catch him looking across a room at her... maybe pretending he did not know he was sharing her just as he had pretended he wasn’t terrified on all those bombing raids he somehow survived.

  To articulate fear is to make it real, to make it happen so Francis keeps quiet. Besides, nothing is forever. Everyone knows that.

  She draws Arie back inside her again and cries out as the moment comes and they fall from the heights together... down, down onto the bed below where they cling one to the other until the light is gone.

  *

  It is just before ten, two days later. Bea is at Victoria Station exactly as Arie had instructed – but without saying why. The concourse heaves with people pushing and waving farewell in shafts of dusty sunshine. It is like Prague again but without danger. She sees a man coming towards her who looks like Arie but cannot be. This man is carrying a suitcase so it seems as if he is going away. But it is Arie. He takes her to a cafeteria and buys her a coffee she does no
t want.

  ‘What’s happening, Arie? Where are you going?’

  Arie does not reply. She remembers a different morning – the one when Peter Casserley took him from her and she never saw him for years. He lights another of his French cigarettes then answers, straight and blunt.

  ‘I’m going to Jerusalem.’

  ‘Jerusalem? No, Arie... please... not that. Don’t leave me again. I can’t bear it.’

  ‘I’m sorry but I have to. I’m more use there, now.’

  ‘But you’ve got all your writing work here – your journalism.’

  ‘Yes but I have other work I must do, too.’

  ‘What other work?’

  ‘I’ve been told that if I set up as a freelance out there, the BBC will use me.’

  ‘But if you’ve known this, why didn’t you tell me before? Why must you always be so damned secretive with me?’

  ‘And spoil everything?’

  ‘So it’s not spoilt now – me waving you off once more till God knows when? Christ, Arie, don’t you understand how you’re twisting me inside out like this?’

  Bea is angry and tearful, the child denied once more. She deliberately knocks her coffee into his lap then hurries onto the platform so her crying is lost in the noise of engines and station announcers and the feet of those who are running late. Arie holds her and she knows there is not enough time to change his plan.

  She thinks of telling him about Liad, their son. But that would take a degree of courage she has yet to find.

  ‘Beatrice, come on. Be strong like you’ve always been.’

  ‘You’ve done this on purpose – tricked me here.’

  ‘It’s best this way. It has to be done – and quickly.’

  ‘For you, maybe.’

  ‘And for Francis. Think of him, Beatrice.’

  ‘That’s a bit steep – ’

  ‘No, there’s a bond between us all. And I am coming back, Beatrice. I really am.’