East Into Upper East (48 page)

My days in the Hampstead flat were no longer as light-hearted as they had been. This was because of the change in my grandmother—
she
was no longer light-hearted: as with Max, there was a burden on her spirit, and in her case,
he
was the burden. When he was in his study, oppressive waves seemed to seep from under the door, so that, wanting to get as far away from him as possible, I gave up playing anywhere except in Lilo's sitting room at the other end of the flat. I also refused to accompany him to the coffee-lounge: since Netta regularly denied me my third round of pastries and we just sat on and on with nothing but glasses of water in front of us, I preferred to stay home with my grandmother. The first time I refused him he looked in such anguish at Lilo that she persuaded me to change my mind; but after that even she could no longer coax me—he of course never tried: it was not in his nature to coax anyone, he only knew to stand stricken till the other person's heart would melt of its own accord. But mine never melted toward him, not even when I watched him from the window—Lilo stood behind me, her hand on my shoulder—as he made his way with heavy steps toward the coffee-lounge, his proud head sunk low.

Ever since I had known them, my grandparents had slept in separate bedrooms. Max's was next to his study and Lilo's, which I shared when I stayed with them, adjoined her sitting room. But he had always come to say goodnight and stayed so long that I was usually asleep before he left. I had no interest in their conversation, which in any case was interspersed with long silences. These had once been soothing enough for me to fall asleep, with clear streams winding through the meadows of my dreams. But now all that changed, and though he still came to our room in his nightshirt and sat on the edge of the bed, there was a different silence between them; and when she took his hand, she did not tickle it as she used to but grasped it tight, either to comfort or hold on to him. Now I could not fall asleep, though I pretended to, while listening for anything they might say. This was often about Netta and her job—“She says she can't afford to give it up,” Max told Lilo. “She says she has no money.” “But that's ridiculous,” Lilo said, to which he replied, “Money is never ridiculous to those who don't have it.” “But
we
have it,” Lilo said. “Don't we? Enough for three?” “I don't
know,” he moaned, in despair. “You know I know nothing about money.”

“Listen,” Netta said to Lilo. “If you offered me a million pounds, I wouldn't do it.”

Lilo and I had come to visit Netta in the St. John's Wood flat. It was not until I saw her sitting side by side with Netta that I noticed how much my grandmother had changed. She had lately had to have many of her own teeth extracted and the new ones hurt her, so that she was mostly without them; and she continued to wear her beloved Kashmir shawl, though the fabric had split with age in several places. I'm sorry to say that she now looked not so much like a gypsy but like some old beggar woman—especially in comparison with Netta, who was in a silk blouse and tight velvet pants, her nails and hair both red. And it wasn't only Lilo's appearance: she seemed really to be begging for something that she wanted very much from Netta; and though Netta kept refusing her, it wasn't Lilo but Netta herself who burst into tears—loud sobs interspersed with broken sentences that made Lilo say, “Careful: the child.”

But I was busy exploring the flat, which had changed. It seemed somehow to have filled out, or rounded its contours, an impression that may have been due to additional items of furniture. Besides the tubular chairs Netta had brought from Germany, there were now low round upholstered little armchairs that people could actually sit in. And apparently people
had
been sitting in them; and they had stubbed out their cigarettes in the ashtrays that were scattered around on new little tables, and these also held glasses out of which guests had drunk wine. When I went into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator—which had always been depressingly empty—I found it stuffed with food like potato salad and roast chickens. There was also a tray of delicious little canapes, which I took back into the living room. “Can I have one?” I asked, but just then Netta was shouting, “A life! A whole lifetime I've given him!” so I had to say it again. “Of course you can, my darling,” Netta said, “you can have anything from me you want—” “Oh thank you, Netta,” I said and retreated politely back into the kitchen, so that they could say whatever they wanted without having to warn each other of my
presence. Anyway, Netta was shouting loudly enough to be heard throughout the flat—“That's what I'm here for, to give, always to give, but now I tell you it's my turn to take!”

Lilo's voice was low, conciliatory, which only made Netta's rise more: “Yes, I have my friends, that's not a crime I hope, to try and get a little bit of a life going of my own?” And again Lilo murmured, mild, protesting, and again Netta cried out, “So who asked him to come and sit there and disturb me in my work? He's welcome to come here to my home, I'd be glad to entertain him in my own place for a change, because I've had enough, up to here enough, of the dog's life he's made me lead in his.”

Whereas Netta's flat was now comfortable and lively, the Hampstead flat had changed in the opposite direction. It was as if not Lilo and Max were living there but the original Edwardian families for whom this ponderous structure had been built. It had become gloomy and oppressive—although the one person who had had this effect on me was usually absent. I no longer had to fear that Max's forbidding figure would appear in the door of his study, for he was now mostly with Netta, and not only in the coffee-lounge. Now I feared—not Lilo (I never feared
her
) but
for
Lilo: that, however cute I tried to be for her sake, I could hardly make her smile. We still went on our usual outings, no longer because she enjoyed them but because she thought I would: but how could I, when she didn't? Mrs. Lipchik heaved heavy sighs as she cleaned, and while she and Lilo still had their long coffee sessions in the kitchen, these were no longer full of German jokes but of secrets, problems. It was even worse when Max was there with us: Mrs. Lipchik's sighs were nothing compared with his, especially those he uttered like groans when he came to Lilo's bedroom at night. Sitting as before on the side of her bed, with me curled up beside her, he spoke to her in whispers: only to get up and pace around and then return and seize her hands and implore: “What shall I do? What
shall
I do?” And she withdrew her hands and didn't answer him.

My dreams ceased to feature pellucid streams in meadows; instead—if they were dreams—they resounded with the echo of his voice, through which the word fate struck repeatedly like hammer
blows. Fate! It was the great theme of his later books. Here Fate is the main character and human beings are depicted as struggling helplessly in the grip of its iron claw. But although he witnessed the upheaval of his whole continent and the destruction of his generation, he goes beyond the epoch in which he happened to be living to embrace the entire epoch of Man: Man in the abstract, from birth to death. And this is what astonished him and made him suffer—the suffering of Man, and all he has to endure in the course of a lifetime of inevitable decline; and also the swiftness of that decline, the inexorable swiftness with which a young man becomes an old one. It is no doubt a great theme, but how could I take it seriously when I identified its author with my grandfather whom I saw suffer because I made a noise playing outside his study door, or because his girl friend flirted with her dentist. In his last book there is a sort of dance of death in a landscape of night and barren rock where men and women join hands and revolve in a circle, their faces raised to the moon so that its craters appear to be reflected in the hollow sockets of their eyes. This might for others be a powerful metaphor for the macabre dance of our lives; but for me it is only a reminder of a birthday party we attended.

It was Max's birthday—his last, as it turned out—and, like all our celebrations during this year, the party was held in Netta's flat. For by then Max was spending all his days in St. John's Wood—even his desk had been moved there—though he still showed up in the Hampstead flat for the sort of nocturnal visits I have described. Netta also came quite often, not with him but alone. I witnessed several scenes between her and my grandmother, only now it was always Netta who was pleading while Lilo remained stubborn and silent. This made Netta desperate and she stopped pleading and was angry, or pretended to be: “My God, think of me all these years, in
your
house, and putting up with it—yes, gladly! Laughing and pretending to be happy, so that everyone could be happy! And you can't come even once, for
one
afternoon, for his sake?” For a long time my grandmother remained impervious, so that Netta might as well have been addressing someone blind and deaf. But gradually, over the years—for no particular reason, or perhaps because it didn't matter any longer, or that other things mattered more—anyway, we did go to Netta's flat, to her more important parties like when it was her birthday, or Max's, or even Lilo's: everything was celebrated there.

It was always the same guests who had been invited, and they were all Netta's friends, from the social circle she had formed around herself. They included people we vaguely knew, like Dr. Erdmund from Dortmund and some of the other elderly gentlemen whom I remembered from the coffee-lounge. They were mostly German refugees who, like Max and Lilo and Netta, had had their youthful heyday during the time of the Weimar Republic. In fact, they might have been the embodiment of the big painting in Netta's flat of the German café scene, with geometrically shaped faces crowding each other around a café table. Now those triangles and cones had been realigned into the masks of old age, and the expression of nervous restlessness had frozen into the smile of the tenacious survivor. Their clothes were elegant—Netta insisted on glamorous attire for her parties—and they still held a wine-glass in one hand and a cigarette in the other, some with a long silver or ivory holder; and they were still animated by a kind of frenetic energy, a consumptive eagerness. There was dancing too—Netta rolled up her bear-rug and put on some of her old dance-records, and when the music started, she stretched herself up by her clenched arms and said, “Oh my God,” and laughed at whatever it was that she remembered. They were all pretty good dancers—mostly fox-trots, with some very intricate footwork. Netta's favorite was the tango, and it suited her—inside her tight silk metallic dress she made movements as sinuous as those of a young siren; and the expression on her face no doubt reflected the sensations in her heart, which were those of her siren years. Her partners did their best to keep up with her, pretending they were not out of breath; but she discarded them one by one when they began to fail, and imperiously snatched up a fresh old gentleman.

The only person who refused her was Max: he would not dance, he could not, never had done, which was why Lilo had given it up too, long ago. So the two of them were always onlookers—except on that last birthday party when everyone had drunk a lot of champagne and excitement burned through the air like holes made by a forgotten cigarette. In fact, Netta was scattering dangerous sparks from the cigarette held between her fingers; and her eyes too sent out glints of fire and so did her red hair and her metallic dress. Discarding her last breathless partner, she turned to Max: he shook his head, he smiled, no, he would not. But for once she insisted and
she grasped his hand and pulled him up; and at last, to please her, he let himself be dragged on to the dance floor and tried to imitate her steps. But he could not, and to help him, she pressed herself as close to him as possible to lead him and make his hips rotate along with hers. But still he stumbled and could not; at first he laughed at his own ineptitude, but when others too began to laugh, he tried to extricate himself from Netta's close embrace. She would not let him go, and perhaps to drown his angry words, she called to someone to turn up the record; and then, when it was really loud, she called out, “Come on, everybody, what are you waiting for—New Year?” and soon they were all jigging up and down, with Max and Netta in their center. The more he struggled the tighter she held on to him, so that he appeared to be entangled in the embrace of an octopus or some other creature with long tentacles. His situation made them all laugh—even I did, till I saw how Lilo had hidden her face in her hands, and not because she was laughing. Suddenly she snatched at me in the same way as Netta had done to Max and made me get up with her. Although neither of us knew how, we tried to join the dance—and that made all of them turn from Max and look and laugh at us, at grandmother and granddaughter hopping and slipping on the polished floor. Although Lilo was getting out of breath, we stuck it out till the music stopped, and then she and I thanked Netta for the party and went home.