A Mind of Winter (39 page)

This time, though, in my mind’s eye, I allow the door to open.

Klauss’s hacking cough; all this time, I’ve been hearing it as we trod the pathway. No, it did not come before the creaking open of the door, but after. After we had both taken in the hellish scene, which would become even more hellish, and soon.

Old blood on the table, the floor, the walls, splattered up and around; the woman’s family members, whoever they were, whatever configuration of genders and generations, must have put up a struggle. Rotting foodstuffs too, on the table, by the sink, the overall stench of the place was putrid.

Sounds, coming from the far side of the room—soldiers, two of them, in uniforms like the one I’m wearing, sitting on a wooden palette. One is hunched over; he heaves, spews forth a dark stream. The other swigs from a bottle; he holds a gun, which points slackly toward the hearth. Momentarily, he swings the gun our way. Our uniforms, brown like his own: he laughs drunkenly, swings the gun back toward the hearth, where a woman sits rocking. “We were wondering what to do with her. We’ve had our fill.” The other, finished with his vomiting, lies back on the rough bed. He waves his arm.

“She’s yours,” he says wearily, hand on his own gun.

I look over toward the hearth. I can see that the woman has some kind of injury on her forehead. Perhaps she was banging her head, as she rocked, into the brick of the fireplace; the broad lesion looks like it could have been sustained this way.

“Robert, what is it?”

My name, the name given to me by my father and mother. I’d not heard it now in so many years, it came as a shock.

“Christine,” I said, “I did not choose to wear the uniform. I stripped it from a dead Nazi soldier. It’s what allowed me to escape.”

“What?” Disbelief in her voice.

“Christine, I’m a Jew. My mother and sister were murdered at Bergen-Belsen.”

She swayed a little and I thought that she might faint. Then, she looked at me with a kind of horror. There was no reason that she should believe me, and yet I’d assumed, simply, that she would. The stunned look melted, and then—for a moment I saw the old Christine, there, on the couch. Her eyes, her face, all of her—looking at me in that old way, giving herself, taking me in. I heard a sob and realized it was coming from me. Then Christine was at my side, kneeling on the floor, pressing her lips to my hand. No tears from her, though I could feel that my own cheeks were wet.

“Why didn’t you tell me? And what possessed you to save the armband?”

Klauss’s hacking cough. He walks over to the woman—slowly, wiping his nose on his sleeve. He rips open the woman’s dress and laughs.

“Look, Robert. Beautiful, no?”

He seizes her breasts and twists them, hard. He moves roughly, with deftness; only for me, his actions are in eternal slow motion. I see the gun at his side, in his halter. He needs no further show of force but nonetheless pulls his knife from its sheath and shows the woman its gleaming surface.

“For you, my darling,” Klauss says. I see him pulling from his trousers his erect member, pushing the woman against the brick, and falling on her; hear the laugh transposing to a grunt of animal greed.

Three guns in the room, none of them mine.

I cannot take my eyes from the hearth; she is still, beneath him; I hear the echo of the crack made by the back of her head against the stone.

Slowly, her head turns; the beam of her eye meets my own, the other is in shadow. An eye that is living, yet no longer has life.

The gun in the hand of the drunken soldier; I might leap at him, wrench it away. Turn it first on the other soldier, then on Klauss.

I’ve never fired a gun in my life; I don’t know how.

It’s over so fast: Klauss is buttoning his fly, again drags his sleeve across his nose, walks from the woman’s splayed form to the seated soldier who, grinning, hands him the bottle.

“She’s yours,” Klauss says, then takes a swig.

All eyes on me; I am frozen.

“Not good enough for you?” Klauss thrusts toward me, shoves me roughly in the direction of the hearth. “You want a virgin?” Rage in his eyes, red-hot, deadly. “She’s good enough for us,” he hisses, pushing again.

My body lurches forward with each shove, and then stops. I scan my eyes back and forth, from the woman to the soldiers. The three men are waiting, they’re enjoying the show. Both of them now holding their weapons.

I’ll grab both guns, I think, one in each hand. One of them is looking at me; I must wait for my moment.

Klauss is there, back at the hearth; he must have bounded. He has the woman, he is cradling her in his lap, pulling her head back by her hair, to show me her neck.

“Well then, we’re all done with her.”

But then I realize: it is already too late. He has already drawn the blade of his knife neatly, cleanly, across the white of her throat, which yawns open for a moment before the black-red gush. He flings the knife toward me—it lands a few feet away.

I leap back, leap away from the spurting blood.

Coughing, drunken shouts, the woman is dragged across the room, through the doors. Table knocked over, chair kicked aside. The other two supporting each other—high spirited—follow Klauss outside.

The rough, desperate room rings with emptiness. I lunge across the spreading slick, by the upturned table with its stiff legs thrust awkwardly sideways like a slaughtered beast. I cast my eye out the window: a sky with no moon, not even a sliver. I scan the black surface of the sky for some pinprick of light. Nothing—no star to hang a prayer on, no possibility of other worlds.

I am in this room, I look back at the spreading pool; it glints, fanning to a strange, amoeboid shape. The glint—no light in the heavens but here, this: a pinpoint signal from hell.

I skid, grab at the knife. Plunge it into my own arm—deep, deeper, until the wet, now twice-bloodied tip finds bone. Draw it across, yank it out, flinging the knife onto the hearth and flee, dripping hot, wet blood as I run.

And now, Christine—oh, so many years have passed—Christine, in my arms. And me holding her, breathing her in.

There was so much of the past there, in that odd room, where yesterday I met with her—my body ached with it: the phantomlimb pain of the amputee. Sitting there with her, I had the distinct feeling that there was nowhere further to go, that we had arrived, the two of us, at the end of the line.

For some time, neither of us spoke.

I was aware of how little we knew of the facts, of how these past years had played out for each of us, though it was entirely clear, I believe to Christine as much as to me, that there had, for each of us, been trouble.

“Have you been in touch with Barnaby?” I asked.

Christine peered at me soberly. “So he did contact you, then. Where you were living. In Long Island.”

“I’d say so. We were inseparable for a good many years.”

“No, I’ve not had word from him for some time.” She paused. “Though I’ve been meaning to contact him. To try to find some way to thank him.”

I knew there was weight behind her words; I waited for Christine to make her meaning clear.

“I don’t mean to sound melodramatic, but I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for Barnaby. I was ill, very ill; Barnaby nursed me back to health. Day and night, really, for more than a month. He took care of Ma Ling too. She was also unwell, though not on death’s door, as I was.”

“He’s a dark horse, Barnaby—and not of the usual stripe,” I said. “I always knew that behind all that bluster was a sense of what really matters.”

Christine rose, walked over to the window, pulled aside the gingham curtain, peered outside. Though I could not see it, I imagined a view across an alley where rubbish bins are kept, onto the back of a commercial building, with a smokedarkened façade and, on its rooftop, an unruly assortment of clay chimney pots.

Then she spoke: “There’s something I’ve wanted to tell you, these past years. Funny, isn’t it, what ends up preying on one’s mind. When I knew you …” She hesitated. “When I knew you, I was in the habit of, well, fabricating things. I’m not actually a deceitful person; I don’t understand it fully myself. I just made things up—to suit the moment. I suppose we all make up our lives as we go along—I thought it didn’t make much difference. It’s all just a kind of storytelling.

“It was only later that I realized the stories I told you were different.” Here, she turned and gave a sad little smile. “You see, in this case, the fabrications were on your behalf.” She let out a clipped sound that was half regretful laugh, half sigh.

“You can also see that I’ve given this matter a good deal of thought. It seems to me that it’s one thing to make oneself up for one’s own purposes, and quite another to play god for someone else. It was not for me to decide whether or not you could tolerate the truth of who I am.”

Christine’s words came at me like a blizzard which freezes and burns at the same time. Had she not been the one to silence me, now many years ago, at the very instant I was preparing to tell her everything of who I was? All the desperate, damning truths of my own sorry existence? I had not known that she had been silencing, also, herself.

“What I wanted to tell you is this. My own mother died a long time ago.” Christine was still looking out the window. “Of alcohol poisoning. In the little flat in Manchester where I grew up. Everything I told you about my mother, about my perfect family life: none of it was true. I never had a father, not one that I knew. I made it all up. I thought that’s what you wanted to hear, and I didn’t have the heart to tell you the truth—”

“The white dress with the eyelet collar … ?” I said, trying to keep the desperation out of my voice.

“There was no white cotton dress.”

“Then, what?”

Christine had left the curtain open; from where I sat I could see a gray wash of sky and the single branch of a tree creaking in the breeze. She seemed to be thinking something over. Her office was so plain—the walls bare but for a single watercolor of a nondescript English beach—and yet the room was alive with feeling. When she turned, I saw that she was assessing me.

“Well, there was heavy blue silk, and taffeta. And sometimes nylon stockings.” She spoke carefully, her eyes unreadable. “And my mother’s friends. Gentlemen friends.”

Christine must have seen something in my face, though I believe she misinterpreted what she saw, as she said: “Don’t feel badly for me. I’ve gone where I’ve wanted to go.”

I was not sure what she meant, but in her eyes there was a trace of the old passion—though less personal, somehow, and stripped of anguish.

“We’ll build a different kind of life for girls here,” she continued. “There are a lot of orphans in England who lost their parents in the war. We’re going to have a strong academic curriculum; we will be serious about preparing them for rewarding work. But, most of all, we hope to teach them to shape their own lives. Not to be at the mercy of their circumstances.”

Christine searched my face, uttered a self-mocking laugh. “I know, it all sounds terribly earnest. I’m afraid I’ve come to see life as rather an earnest business.”

How small she looked, and yet also less vulnerable than she had been, those many years ago.

“I’ve rather come around to that opinion myself,” I said, wanting to say more, not knowing where to begin, yet feeling, in that functional room, the office that Christine and Ma Ling shared, that perhaps we might begin anew.

“I’m sorry,” I said finally.

“Sorry?”

“About your mother. Her life. Her death.”

We both knew there was a lot more to be sorry about; but then again, perhaps we were talking also about everything else besides.

“Don’t be,” Christine responded, a shade of her former brightness touching her slightly wan features. “She lived her life as best she could. What more can any of us do?”

* * *

I do not know where things will go from here. I do not know what tomorrow will hold.

I wonder how Barnaby, Marilyn, and Simon felt about my handing the house over to them. I assume they do not believe the fiction of my death and that I therefore did not burden them with grief. Yes, I sent another postcard, this one to Marilyn. I know her well enough to be sure she understood it was from me.

I imagine Marilyn has no idea, however, just how painful, and also important, her famous photograph was to me, the picture of the little boy in the green jacket, standing in front of a pile of rubble that had, only the night before, been his home.

When I saw it on the cover of
Life
magazine, I felt a terrible bolt of recognition that was disorienting and also—this may sound strange—reassuring. I had long harbored the belief that through sheer will I could create a sustaining world, rich with nature and history and alive with pleasure. This was what I had been hoping to achieve with Ellis Park. Marilyn’s picture brought me face-to-face with myself in a way that nothing else had done (this may sound unconvincing, given what my life has been, but the psyche has its ways of protecting): face-to-face with the sheer force of desolation. Studying that picture, something died within me: the belief that it was possible to rebuild.

It was only much later—back in London, here in this room—that I realized Marilyn’s photograph of the little boy bore a relationship to hope. Seeing that boy, intuiting the windy bare habitat of his soul, I knew that, though I could no longer be a citizen of the arboreal world of the hopeful and unbereaved, I was neither mere tumbleweed—was not, in fact, doomed to eternal homelessness.

The details, the details aside: the sum of my life is a certain vision, and I have come, finally, to believe that if one has a mind of winter, the January sun, though cold, sheds light of a startling clarity: that what I behold is every bit as much a part of the world and, in the end, some sort of legitimate place within it.

The charitable trust has been set up in Wallace’s name, for obvious reasons. I run the organization, though Wallace does lend a hand. While the focus of the fund’s work is on providing aid to camp survivors, we have also begun to furnish monies to victims of bombings here, in London. I have in mind the idea of tracking down the boy in the green jacket—he’d be fifteen or sixteen by now—and others who were orphaned, as he was, in a blitz. I would also like to provide anonymous funding to Christine’s school.