A Mind of Winter (38 page)

Alone, free to wander unnoticed, the place deserted and locked for the night, I found it was not the paintings I wanted, but something else. I walked behind the librarian’s desk and struck a match. The matchstick-length life of the flame was just enough for me to identify the whereabouts, from the map pinned to a notice board, of the modern German literature collection. Two flights up, three rooms across: sufficiently simple for me to negotiate in the near darkness.

As I was taking the stairs, I heard the distant cat wail—the familiar beginning of the air-raid siren’s arc—muffled by the wall of books between where I was standing and the windows. I walked the length of the stack, feeling along with my hands, winding my way in solid darkness around rows of books, the siren outside rising to a screech.

I reached the window, peeled back a corner of the tarpaper just as the first missile found its target. But I saw nothing; only heard a padded thud, like a rock falling into snow. Then, the tremor rippling through air and steel and brick.

I crouched at the window, lifted the paper several inches, and beheld the spectacle—shooting stars in graceful arc, giant thrumming projectiles coursing blackly across the skies.

It didn’t last long. The horizon was bright with flames. Medical workers, salvage teams—I pictured everybody preparing to emerge from cellars like so many ground-dwelling night creatures. But for now, only the eerie fire-scape, elongated buds of oranges and yellows leaping and cowering, and everywhere wavering columns of grayish-blue smoke.

It was a strange and beautiful nexus—past, present, future, folding and unfolding into one another: history in the throes of being destroyed, the sudden appearance of empty space which would one day hold new constructions, all of it a smoldering of the present.

I let the tar cloth fall, stretched up from crouching position, my knees creaking painfully. There was no obvious source of light now, only slivers, here and there, filtering in through a glass door panel, a vent in the floor, a hidden skylight up near the rafters. But I had no trouble finding my way; I was suddenly once again a night creature myself. Not from the ground but of the air—an owl, perhaps, or a bat.

I passed by row upon row of books: the delicious proximity of abundance. Not for the taking, but for the destroying. Here I am, I remember thinking, among the flawless works of genius that had haunted my youth and haunted me still: leather-bound volumes of Novalis and Goethe, Schiller and Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. An intense longing: to do damage, real damage, to the weight of work around me, to the productions of a culture that had made me who I am and then turned murderous. A terrible image filled my senses: blood, everywhere blood, the blood of my family—
her blood too, the woman, rocking by the stone-cold hearth
—there, in the library, dripping down the dusty pages, dripping down, onto the great slabs of stone at my feet. An urge to set fire to it all—to cleanse it all away in a roaring blaze. The power of ritual destruction, the desire to enter the darkening calm, the holy hush of ancient sacrifice.

Around me, the smell of vaulted stone, the infusion, in air, of millions of pages in thousands of spines.

I plucked down a volume, gingerly at first, and then more clumsily, loading my arms. Carrying a small tower of books, I walked to the nearest study table and set them down.

I could not burn them but I determined that I might in some way perform an exorcism. Staring at the stack of books I felt, wildly, as if something ceremonial should be said. The only Jewish prayer I knew, taught to me by my friend Oskar (I say this again because I must: the real Oscar) when we were together at the Internment Center.
Shema Yisroel Adonoi Elehaynu Adonoi Echod
.
Baruch Shem K’vod Malchuso L’Olam Va’ed. Ve-Ahafta es Adonoi Elohecha
—

I stopped. What business had I with prayers? I remember thinking. And what business had they with me?

I looked at the books: dumb objects, already the life of them—once so aflame within me—extinguished, reduced to ash. I swept the books from the table; they crashed to the floor, filling the space with a single bright echo, godly and inanimate as a thunderclap.

That night, I slept where I sat, head on my arm, at the study table. Instinct woke me, snapping open my eyes. Not two minutes later, I heard the distant tapping of the morning guard’s shoes on the stone stairs. I cut across to the other side of the vast room and made my way down the back staircase.

Mercifully, the back exit could be opened from the inside and was unmanned. I pushed open the door and stepped quickly out into the gray London morning.

What stopped me, that evening, from confessing everything to Christine? Surely, I might have removed her silencing finger and spoken the truth? Why did I choose, in the end, to keep it all in the dark? Was this my undoing?

I remember the line from Nietzsche that was popular among my classmates: that without illusions, man would die. But this is too generous; I am aware that it is a mere halftruth, and self-serving, as half-truths tend to be.

Though perhaps I am romanticizing matters. Perhaps we are all just—well—what we are.

Foolish theorizing, this. The simple fact is I want to see her. I want to see Christine.

Rather than unnerve her by simply appearing on her doorstep, now that I have tracked her down, I am planning first to send her a letter.

I’ve had a devil of a time drafting the thing; my wastebasket is heaped with failed attempts. I will turn to it again this evening. It seems silly, after all this time, to invest the wording of the letter with such importance.

Five years into it, and the idea of my new alias still jars. This time, however, I was faced with no choice: circumstance forced my hand. Though I took on Alfred’s name to honor him, I cringe at the thought that it is, in the end, a taint, for his memory to be linked in any way with my existence. It is too late, though; as much as any name can be for me, his name now is mine. I hope Christine will not think it forced.

I hope Christine will want to see me.

I don’t know what I was expecting. I can say that I was not expecting what I found.

The building in which Christine is hoping to establish her school is a simple affair. Having secured government funding for the project, she has rented a structure that more than a century ago lodged a poorhouse, long since stripped down inside to the bare walls. Small clean rooms have replaced the cavernous pit it once was; there is no embellishment, just plaster walls and low ceilings, the plainness broken by cheerful green gingham curtains that adorn the windows throughout.

When, after standing before the building some ten minutes, I finally mustered the courage to ring the bell, I was surprised by the serious face of the young Chinese woman who opened the door. She looked no more than seventeen or eighteen (later, Christine told me she is well into her twenties), and had about her an air of such clarity—a sense of being wide open to the forces of the world while also knowing deeply who she is and what she wants. Unusual, in a person of her youth.

I suppose I should not be surprised that this young woman—she introduced herself as Ma Ling—reminds me of Christine. Not the Christine I saw yesterday, but the Christine I knew some twelve years ago here, in London, before either of us set out on our respective escapes.

Ma Ling led me to the rear of the building to where I would find Christine—Christine, whom I’d not seen in so many years, whose beauty and troubled largesse and unwavering focus on
the search
were inscribed into my being; Christine, for whom I’d never stopped longing. Before opening the door, Ma Ling looked at me so openly that I was taken aback. It was a look that both took my measure and assuaged the deep anxiety I was feeling, a look that was at once deeply attentive and a clear-eyed challenge. Peerless Christine, I thought—elegant, alluring, anguished Christine, steeped in the pleasures of masquerade and at the same time defiantly authentic; perhaps in Ma Ling she had met her match.

Ma Ling opened the door, and there she was, Christine, seated in a wooden chair in the cold glare of a fluorescent light. Anger, grief, resignation: I saw them all in her face.

“I never thought I’d see you again,” she whispered.

I entered, closed the door, leaving Ma Ling in the hallway outside. I heard the sound of her footsteps heading away.

Christine was aged—I’d somehow not expected this—and seemed smaller, giving the impression that she’d lost several inches in height. In place of the brilliant smile was a muted warmth that gave a soft glow to her now more angular features. Her hair, having lost its strawberry sheen, was a common shade of blond, cut stylishly short. It suited her, as did the simple tailoring of her beige wool suit, which showed her narrower though still lovely figure. She was altered, yes, there was no denying it, though her beauty, for me, was in no way diminished. I was aware of something I’d not experienced in a very long time: a flutter, within, of joy.

“Christine.” It cost me some effort to utter her name aloud; I’d not done so in many years. She did not rise; I sat opposite her on a compact divan.

“I surprised myself,” she said.

“Oh?”

“I felt so very happy when I received your letter.”

“Should you not have been?” Christine looked at me squarely. “You must know why I left. After all these years, surely you worked it out.”

I shrugged. It was a gesture entirely inappropriate to the situation, but I found it was the only one I had.

Christine leaned forward. Suffering and hatred—I saw them, visible forcefields in the back of her eyes.

But then, a growing look of astonishment in her face.

“You don’t know, do you,” she uttered, her voice an echo of disbelief. A long pause. Too long, uncomfortable. When finally she spoke, her voice was a whisper. “I discovered the truth. About your
past
.” She breathed this last word with discernible distaste.

“My past,” I repeated idiotically.

The fact is, I was confused. I didn’t know which past Christine meant.

“I’m sorry, Christine. I don’t understand.”

She strode to the window, the old agitation evident in her taut movements. She stood there for a moment, her back toward me, peering out.

“It’s strange not to be able to use your name when addressing you. I want to say Robert, but then I know you stopped calling yourself that long ago. And now—” She turned to face me. Her cheeks were streaked with tears. “You took it all away. All of it. Smashed it to bits. Don’t you see?”

“What are you talking about, Christine? I have no idea—”

“No idea? Of how you took my one chance for happiness and killed it?” There it was again, hatred, through the tears, only this time it was very clearly directed toward me. “Just one more death to you, no doubt. In a string of how many?”

Just the wrong thing, a terrible thing; for some unfathomable reason, I did it again—that peculiar, helpless shrug.

“Such things cannot be shrugged away,” she said in a strangled voice.

It was all pointless. I knew this in that moment. My coming here. My hopes that—what? That Christine and I could make some sort of life together? Salvage something from all this wreckage?

The truth is there
had
been a string of deaths. Though how could Christine have known about any of it?

“What did you discover, Christine?” I said quietly.

“That night—you went to your dressing room to change.”

“Yes.” Of course I knew exactly what she was talking about; I’d been over the moment so many times in my own mind. Clearly, she had relived it too.

“You didn’t lock your desk.” Christine’s tears were coming faster. I’d never before seen her cry. I felt a pang of tender concern. “You always locked your rolltop desk, but that night—we had kissed, you seemed distracted, as though you had something to tell me. You fled the room, forgetting to lock your desk.”

It was coming at me, some inchoate realization, though Christine’s meaning was not yet clear.

“As it happens, I was planning to tell you something myself that day, words I had never uttered to anyone in my life. It was too difficult for me, so I decided to write you a note and leave it for you in your desk where you would find it later, when you were alone.”

My desk, I scrabbled in my mind for
the thing.

Yes, I now saw what she knew—or thought she knew.

The past, yes. The past.

Another mistaken identity.

Christine had fled the wrong man. My own story: a fleeing of her flight.

Though I suppose there was more to it.

There’s always more to it, isn’t there?

“You followed me, sometimes, didn’t you,” I said, curiously calm now, waiting for this scene to play itself out.

Christine nodded. “I never found out what you were up to, but once I found the armband, the details no longer mattered.”

Silence. A minute. Maybe two.

“All these years, I was waiting for news that you’d been captured. Turned over. I expected to see it in the papers.”

“Why did you send me that postcard?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she whispered, misery in her voice. “I suppose I just couldn’t bear it.”

“What, Christine? What couldn’t you bear?”

“Believing it was true. Losing you so completely.”

I saw no reason to tell her the whole truth—that truth I’d been readying to tell her many years ago, on that evening I apparently neglected to lock my rolltop desk. It was too late now, for that. It was not that the passage of time had made my crime worse. But it had made my crime clear, at least to me. Perhaps back then I thought that love could change things. That a sharing of hearts could relieve the burden—perhaps commute the charge to a lesser offense.

I know now that nothing can change what is done.

I know now that the past is never over.

Again I am treading the path to the door. Again I hear the crunch of loose stones beneath my boots. Again I am staring at that battered door—the patches of faded color, the rough weathered surface of it. I am used to the sight, now, used to the sounds; they will be with me always.