Hannah & Emil (32 page)

Down in the courtyard he heard their German guests, a youth hiking group, filling the courtyard, back from their walk, singing, laughing. German voices in the English countryside. He peered down at them through the open window as the boy jumped. Loud, tanned boys. White shirts, long shorts, bony knees. The quantity of food they put away reminded him of army days, when the cook dished up everything he had and it disappeared in seconds. The last three through the gate bellowed a song he remembered, a Christian folksong about the glory of spring. The boys stamped the mud off their boots on the paving stones. The leaves hanging over them were pale green and the cherry blossoms cast a pink light on their faces.

‘
Deutsche!
' Hans yelped and jumped off the bed, tumbled downstairs. Emil followed him down, heard him in the kitchen. ‘
Kuchen!
' he said. Hannah must have tea out for the German boys. ‘
Kann ich?
'

‘
In einem moment
,' he heard Hannah say, her voice stern. Please, don't annoy Ava, he thought. But then, more gently, in English: ‘Come, Hans, join the others at the table. The cake is for everyone.'

The following morning Hans rode on Emil's shoulders as they walked up through the narrow streets on the edge of town and into the countryside. The sun was hot and Ava had pinned a cloth around the boy's shoulders when he refused to wear a shirt. He had decided that he was a pirate on his bridge, commanding his vessel. Behind them Hannah walked with Ava. In the shady lanes the foliage grew dark and thick and the boy skimmed the leaves with his outstretched hands, shouting orders. Emil heard Hannah ask Ava about Duisburg, and the health of Emil's mother. He did not hear her answers over Hans's nonsense. Emil's chest wheezed with the weight of the boy on his shoulders, but he didn't put him down. He'd have all the time in the world to rest, later.

They emerged into sunlight at the end of a row of beeches, the fields spread out below them, yellow and green amid the farmhouses and the nearby village, and Ava took a camera from her leather satchel. ‘Be still, everyone. I will take your photograph.' Hannah stood close to him, squinting in the morning sun, while Ava adjusted the lens. He felt her grip his shirt at his hip with her strong little fingers. Ava, the bright fields behind her white hair, long brown legs, was at ease with the camera, relaxed with the little box between her and what she saw. She took the picture and then held out the camera to Hannah. ‘You can take one of us?' Hannah approached dutifully. ‘The settings are correct if you stand here,' Ava told her, pointing at the patch of ground under her own feet. Hannah's body radiated ill temper.

Pictures taken, the boy slithered down his back and ran off into a pea field with his arms in the air and his hair and clothes soon just little flashes in the green. Emil went in after him, amid the tall pea plants, listening for his voice. It was dark and cool and smelled fresh. If he could maintain the walls encircling him, he could preserve this happiness.

He heard the women at the edge of the field, beyond the hedgerow. He waited for a moment, Hans calling from further and further into the field. ‘He is a beautiful boy, Ava,' Hannah was saying. He listened to the tone of her voice. It sounded friendly. That was good. ‘You've done well with him. How does he manage, without a father?'

There was silence. He imagined Ava's coolness, her lids heavy. ‘Thank you, Hannah.' So strange to hear her speak English. ‘He is bad boy sometimes but he will have new father soon.'

‘Oh?'

‘Emil has not told you. But that is normal. I will marry again.'

The boy called, muffled, distant. Emil waited still. ‘Papa! Papa! You cannot find me!'

Hannah's voice: ‘He doesn't mind you coming here?'

‘He knows Hans must say goodbye.'

He stood among the bright greenery, unable to move. The boy's call sounded as though it was in another field now.

‘Perhaps I should not ask, but Emil can tell you I will always say what I am thinking. Is he a member of the party?'

‘I don't know this word, “Party”.'

‘The Nazis. The Nazi Party.'

Silence. Emil tried to breathe quietly.

‘And does Emil know this, Ava?'

‘He knows Karl. Everybody is a member now.'

‘Well,
you
must know, Emil never was.'

Ava sighed quickly. ‘No, of course not. He left.' After a few moments: ‘You wear no ring.'

‘No, I don't. We are not married.'

‘Not—
verlobt
?'

‘Oh well, yes, after a fashion. But Emil is stateless. I would become stateless too if we were to marry, and we should have no home at all.'

Be calm, Hannah, he thought. There was a rustling crash and it seemed the boy had made a loop and tumbled through a hedge and out of the field at the women's feet. Ava was hushing him, that cool disapproval at low frequency. Emil returned to himself, thrashed his way out of the field, found a gap in the hedgerow. He was breathing heavily. ‘Emil,' Hannah said. ‘You must stop running about like a mad thing. You will kill yourself.' There was an edge to her voice. He tried to catch her eye, but she was watching the boy race off again, a scowl making her seem older than she was, still not thirty.

When they had caught up with Hans they sat under a broad-spreading oak in a field which lay fallow and grassy, and Ava conjured and unstoppered two bottles of lemonade she had made with her son that morning. All around them were the smells of the country: grass, cow manure, earth. Clouds of little insects floated around them. The boy climbed the tree, hanging like a monkey upside down above their heads. Ava lay in the shaded grass, eyes closed, forehead smooth, eyelashes resting on her cheeks without a tremor as the boy swung back and forth above her head calling: ‘Mama, Mama!' Her hands lay on her flat stomach. Hannah was watching her. Her temper had not lifted. She caught Emil's eye, reddened and turned away, steadying her gaze on the blurred horizon.

The boy was sleeping, as he used to, in a stretcher beside his mother's bed. Ava sat next to Emil, closer than necessary, on the bigger bed. The window in the roof was open to the warm night. The river ran beneath them. They spoke in German now that Hannah was not present, though the air was filled with the possibility of her listening on the other side of the wall. ‘You told me she was your wife. You insisted I divorce you so that you could marry her.'

‘That's what I want, but we cannot marry. She would lose her citizenship.' He looked at the sleeping boy, smiling at something in his dreams. He looked again at Ava. He had never been able to tell what thoughts lay beyond her eyes. ‘Ava, you cannot go back. You must stay. There is room here for you. You are safe.'

She laughed briefly, gestured at the wall. ‘And she would tolerate this?'

He paused. ‘Yes. She would. She knows what will happen when you go back.'

‘Does she? Perhaps she could tell me.'

‘Germany will go to war, you know this. And if the war lasts long enough, he will go. Before that, they will make him a Nazi. They will poison his mind. He will become—'

‘We are German. We live in Germany. If we stay here, we are stateless, like you. You think your girlfriend will support us all forever?'

‘Hannah would surprise you. You don't know her. You can help with the hostel. Hannah cannot cook or sew. She does her translations. You would be useful, practical. It's perfect—we have so much room.'

If he knew what to say, he would say it, though he could only imagine the difficulty it would bring. If he could just keep Hans here, everything else could be arranged.

She spoke loudly, not quite shouting. ‘If you are not married, then you can come back. You could prevent me from marrying Karl. It is right, it is decent, for the parents of a child to remain together.' She dropped her voice, glancing at the boy. ‘We could be a family, live in the country, if this is what you like, the quiet life.'

He looked down. Her hand was on his thigh. He stared at it for a moment. ‘You're mad. How can you say this?'

‘She is a clever little woman. They are like that. You like her brains. But you will tire of that. I think perhaps you already do.'

‘
Who
is like that? I will not believe you mean such things. I would marry her in a heartbeat. If I return to Germany, they'll shoot me on sight. Have you forgotten?'

‘That was a mistake, what happened to your father. Karl knows people. He said they were no good, those men. They were drunk. It was a tragedy. They have been disciplined. Life is much more orderly now. Those early days, it's true they were chaotic.'

He removed her hand from his leg. ‘Ava, please. Please. If you return, there's nothing I can do for him. And Karl, he has decency I know, but he will do what he needs to do.'

Her eyes dulled. She looked away. ‘I think it's time to sleep. Perhaps you shouldn't be in here, so late at night.' She gestured towards the wall with her chin. There were lines at the edge of her mouth he had not seen before. He brought his hands to his face, rubbed his forehead, his cheeks. He could not look at the boy, sleeping in the lamplight. He left without another word, descended the stairs, and the second set, down to the millrace, sat beside the dark rushing water, letting the sound flood every corner of his mind.

A deep bounce at the foot of the bed woke him. He could not open his eyes straightaway. The image of the wolves on the table, ready to descend on something below—it took a moment to shake off. In the bright room the boy was jumping, grinning, watching their faces for the moment they would at last acknowledge him. He laughed as Emil stirred. The sun cast small squares of light on the bouncing boy, the white bed, Hannah, sighing. He smiled, closed his eyes again on the twitching pillow, the mattress reverberating with the weight of the boy flinging himself towards the low, sloping ceiling. ‘Good Lord,' Hannah murmured, eyes still closed. ‘It's like living with a chimpanzee.'

Emil reached up and grabbed the boy, bringing him down mid-jump. The boy giggled and snorted with the effort of trying to contain his laughter. Hot limbs flailed. Hannah edged out of bed. ‘I'll make tea,' she said, tying her dressing gown over her nightdress, patched at the elbows. She was off, heavily, down the stairs with the boy careering after her. Emil was left in the quiet on the sunlit pillows. His heart beat quickly, as though he were the one who had been jumping up and down on the bed.

Down in the common room, he saw that two of the German boys had risen early and filled the enormous china pot with tea. The day before, they had asked Hannah to show them how to do it, having never drunk tea before. ‘Really,' she said, ‘what could there be to learn? You put in the tea, and then you put in the water.' She went through the ritual with them. The warming of the pot, the proportion of tea to water, the length of time needed for it to brew. You would have thought she had been packing an opium pipe for the attention they paid, but he saw that their interest charmed her, and now they had repaid her attention by making the tea for her before she came down.