Out of Such Darkness (2 page)

It’s not surprising that his brain is playing tricks. He isn’t being incinerated only because he didn’t catch his accustomed train. He owes this to the mistimed appearance of a gossip sheet that’s tucked inside the briefcase nestling against his leg. The
Buzz’s
pages are folded back at the interview and the photograph of the Halprin family chafes against the bag’s Italian leather divider. A separate article, a space-filler that earned scarcely a glance from Jay, completes the two page spread. It records the recent marriage of a man and a woman, both in their mid-eighties, in a White Plains retirement home. The bridegroom is described as a long-time Burford Lakes resident and ‘a survivor of a Holocaust death-camp’.

MY CABARET YEARS – IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF ISHERWOOD

A memoir by Cameron Mortimer.

Quentin Crisp’s American odyssey as ‘The Naked Civil Servant’ took off in the mid-1970s when his iconic television film was broadcast here. Am I being bitchy when I question whether its success prompted Christopher Isherwood to rush out his book ‘Christopher and his Kind’ in 1977? However it happened, I am content to admit that I would not be committing to paper this frank account of my life in Berlin were it not for these two ‘stately homos of England’ flouncing ahead of me in their open-toed sandals.

Like a deep-sea diver who surfaces in stages, I’m going to find it deleterious to my well-being if I go from this year, 1985, the full distance to 1932 in one step. So my story starts on 26 April 1950 and I hope it won’t confuse you too much if we go backwards from there.

In the early afternoon, as was my custom, I set my rocking chair in front of the window and read by the light of the sun. I had a little over an hour before it travelled too far west and the angle into the window was too acute. I had viewed the house on a summer’s afternoon and hadn’t realised that it was only the absence of buildings in Jay Park that afforded the sun a glimpse of what was to be my living-room. For the rest of the day my narrow brownstone lived in the shade of the taller buildings on the south side of East 77th Street.

I was forty-five years old and already feeling the twinges of the arthritis that would cripple my knees in later years. A signed and dedicated first edition of collected poems by W H Auden lay open on my lap. It was all I needed to spend my time in contemplative reminiscence. I recalled a fleeting liaison with dear Wystan when we worked together on a play that was never taken up.

He declared at the time that the work and the sex would have been more satisfying had I been Christopher Isherwood. We both recognised this as the catty prelude to schism and I forgave him. We kissed and vowed to stay platonic friends.

We didn’t, of course. We both still lived in Manhattan but Wystan’s circle rotated at a higher altitude than mine. In any event I would shortly move out of the city to a northern suburb and saw no reason for petty jealousy. Not to be vulgar, but my Dexter Parnes VC mysteries were far more remunerative than Wystan’s poems would ever be.

The rat-tat-tat on the front door came as I was succumbing cat-like to the warmth and I jerked straight, causing my chair to rock ferociously. I put out a hand to the sill and this gave me a pretext to lean forward and look down to the street. The man who had knocked on the door had evidently stepped back and was standing alongside a woman. She was hatless and not somebody I knew. The man looked mysterious with his face obscured by his hat which was set at a just-so angle – a jauntiness I recognised. The woman was carrying a baby. They presented a shabby group and I could sense desperation in their demeanour. Despite the attraction of the man, I wondered if they were beggars and resolved not to go down.

The man stepped out of view again and I leaned forward to regain sight of him. The rat-tat-tat sounded through the house. There was something in the way he moved. It confirmed in my mind that he was one of our tribe, but, this being the case, what was he doing in the company of a woman and a baby? Intrigued, I hoisted myself out of the chair and made my way down-stairs to the vestibule.

A mirror set into the hallstand gave me the opportunity to check my appearance. I smoothed down the front of my white shirt and re-tucked it into my ‘slouching’ brown cords. A gold chain peeked out at my open collar. That, and my white-gold pinkie ring, were the only signs of ostentation I allowed myself. I unbolted the door at top and bottom and opened it on the chain.

The man stepped into view and took off his hat. “Cameron?” he said.

“Wolf?” I closed the door, slid back the chain and swung the door wide. “Wolf!” Tears filled my eyes, obscuring the face that had changed so much but at the same time held the essence of the boy I had loved unreservedly in Berlin. “Wolf! I never thought I’d see you again!”

To mitigate the crassness of this remark I can only say that it is at times of highest emotion we resort to the commonest cliché.

Now we’ll go back to the morning of 2nd July 1934 when I was also awoken by banging on my door.

“Herr Mortimer! Herr Mortimer!” It was Frau Guttchen’s voice, shrill and urgent.

I scrabbled around on the bedside table for my watch. The luminous hands told me it was not yet six o’clock. I groaned. Whenever my head hurt, I regretted not spending a few more marks on better quality red wine. “What is it?”

“Herr Mortimer!” There was more banging.

I had to raise my voice for the noise to stop. “Yes! Frau Guttchen, I can hear you.” After two years in Berlin, my German was nigh on perfect and idiomatic. “I’m coming.”

Wrapping a sheet around my bare torso, I twisted myself up and out of bed. I paused by the door leading to the communal hallway and cocked my head. The knock was civilised this time. “What is it? This had better be good. What time do you call this?”

“Herr Mortimer, you have a visitor. It is your young friend Mr Koehler. He seems to be very distressed. I have made him wait downstairs because of the hour. Herr Mortimer?”

“Yes, I’m listening.” I tried to imagine why Wolf should be in Berlin. He was meant to be in Munich with his Hitlerjugend troop. “Did he say what he wanted?”

“He is in trouble, he says, and desperately needs to see you.”

I turned the key in the lock and opened the door. Frau Guttchen’s matronly figure was trussed into a tartan dressing gown with a faux sheepskin collar. What remained of her crimson hair was twisted into wraps of tissue paper arranged to reveal criss-crossing lanes of shiny scalp. I stifled a giggle and composed my face. “Would you be so kind as to send him up? Then, perhaps, you can go back to bed. I am so sorry you have been disturbed.”

Frau Guttchen scurried away.

My befogged mind tried to unravel what was happening. Wolf was in trouble but what would its nature be? It had become increasingly difficult to be a foreigner living in Berlin and how might the authorities react if Wolf’s problem implicated me? Whatever the danger, Wolf was my friend and I decided I would have to take the consequences.

I reached this conclusion as Wolf’s booted feet sounded on the stairs. He appeared round the corner, his face flushed. His uniform shirt was dishevelled and its tails untucked. The mud on his shorts made it look as if he had endured a ghastly juvenile accident. His feet were bare inside his boots. “You have to help me, Cammie,” he cried.

I stepped back and he brushed past me. The stale smell of him assaulted my senses and I had to force myself to cover the yard or so between us, arms outstretched.

“There, there, Wolf. Come to Cammie.”

He threw himself into my arms like a wounded four-year-old. “It was horrible!” he cried, his eyes pumping tears and a bubble of snot beneath his nose.

I looked over his shoulder towards the bed. I hoped he wasn’t going to ask to sleep, not in this state. “What’s happened, lover? Why aren’t you in Munich? Your weekend?”

He jerked down his arms and stepped back. “I feel as if I have walked the whole way. I couldn’t risk using the train. They’ll be looking for me.”

“Who?”

“The Schutzstaffel – the men from the SS. They burst into our dormitory and started shooting. They were killing everybody – anybody.”

“Hitlerjugend?”

He looked down at his boots and, as if he noticed his disarray for the first time, tucked in his shirt. “It wasn’t a Hitler Youth weekend. I fibbed. It was with the Sturmabteilung – the Brownshirts.”

My heart ached at the way he looked so miserable, so lost. I had nothing but compassion for my poor boy. “Come here, Wolf. You must have a bath. I’ll make some coffee. You must tell me all about it but first let’s clean you up.”

The train is pulling out of Woodlawn when they make the announcement. ‘There has been an accident in the city. A passenger plane has crash-landed near the World Trade Center and there are a number of fatalities. The authorities are stopping all transport into and out of the city. This service is diverted to New Canaan and passengers are to make their own arrangements from there. This service is now non-stop to New Canaan.’

The passengers buzz like wasps in a sugar-trap. Some are translating the message for others. Jay will have to wait at New Canaan and Rachel will pick him up. He tries her number. Engaged. He wonders how many New Yorkers’ lives have been disrupted and how many millions of people are trying to make a telephone call at the same time.

He pictures the Trade Center floor plans. If his office is below where the plane hit his colleagues will be safe. He imagines them labouring down the flights of stairs. How long does it take – 95 floors? Yes, they’ll be traumatised but they’ll survive.

What if Straub, DuCheyne’s office is above where the plane burst in? (He remembers how the announcement had called it a ‘crash-landing’. Why did they describe it this way?) There must be an evacuation procedure. They’ll climb to the roof. There will be helicopters – an airlift.

Unwelcome thoughts press in on him. What would abrupt and immediate obliteration feel like? It’s as if he’s picking at a scab in his brain. I would have been there if I hadn’t been so vain, he thinks. Vanity of vanities, all is vanity. Where did that come from? He feels a presence behind him – a spectre of his imagining. If he could turn round quickly enough he would see who it is.

Still the questions come as if this ‘other’ is interrogating him. They snap at him like unruly hounds. Would
you
have died bravely in the maelstrom of flame? What will
you
make of your second-chance life? He tries to quell the negativity rising within him. A song reverberates inside his head:
Who let the dogs out? Who? Who?
He shivers and murmurs to himself that somebody has walked on his grave.

Rachel! He straightens in his seat. She knows. She’ll be watching news bulletins. What is she thinking? Does she know which floor was hit? Is she assuming he was below the impact and safe? Above it and waiting for rescue? In it – and dead?

He presses the ‘home’ button on his mobile phone and puts it to his ear. Engaged. He looks round the carriage. Many of the other passengers are doing the same thing. Pressing buttons, putting mobile phones to their ears. Shaking them. Inspecting the screens. The networks must be overwhelmed. He will have to sit tight and wait for New Canaan. Jay starts chewing the skin around the thumbnail on his right hand. He shifts on the seat and the damp patch on his back cools in the air-conditioning, a sensation that is soon overwhelmed by the heat from his adrenalin-pumped heart.

When the train approaches the terminus he moves to stand by the door. There is a sweat-perfumed scrum waiting as the carriage glides alongside the platform but Jay is aware of an unspoken understanding by the brown-skinned people: they will defer to his Anglo-Saxon height. As soon as the doors are open he runs towards the exit where he spies a bank of payphones. There’s already a line formed at each one. The train, the swarming crowd, the misery of the lines, a newsreel image from the Holocaust springs unbidden into Jay’s mind and he shakes his head to send it spinning away. ‘Where did that come from?’ he asks himself as he sizes up the lines.

Having decided on the shortest queue, Jay delights in elbowing others aside so he can join it. He shifts his weight from foot to foot and jiggles coins in his hand. He strains to overhear the woman making her call. Can he tell from her tone whether she’s reaching the end of her conversation? He counts the bodies in front. Four. He turns round. There are already three people behind.

The other lines are at least seven or eight deep. He will have to wait his turn. The tension of frustrated communication clings to him like a Boston fog. The woman uses a clawed finger to click off the connection and leaves the handset dangling. Jay watches it spin on the twisted chord like a ghetto corpse strung from a wire and he has to shake his head again to detach himself from the image. The woman pushes her way through, pressing close by, weeping. Jay turns to the front and curses as the next man fumbles his coins, drops one and scratches around on the floor before finally fingering it into the slot.

By the time he reaches the booth, Jay has observed the previous callers and memorised the process for getting a connection. With the sweaty instrument snapped to his ear, he listens for the ringing tone. He notices dregs of spittle in the mouthpiece.

‘Hello?’ The voice on the other end is unknown to him and cautious.

He thinks that in his panic he has he pressed the buttons in the wrong order. ‘Who’s that?’

‘This is the Halprin house. Who
is
this?’ The woman who’s answering sounds scared.

‘Where’s Rachel? Who’s
that
?’ He looks up at a woman in a fuchsia-pink jacket who stands behind. She’s listening and tutting at his lack of progress.

‘This is, Katy from next door. Is this … Jay?’

‘Katy. Where’s Rachel? It’s Jay.’ There’s a scream at the other end. ‘Jay? Mr Halprin?’

‘Yes.’

‘Rachel! Rachel! Here, quickly! It’s him. It’s your husband.’ He hears a scraping noise. Rachel says something indistinct in the background, then Jay hears Katy more clearly: ‘Thank God! Quickly, Rachel. It’s him.’

Rachel’s voice is a monotone. Is it the shock of his resurrection? ‘Where are you? Your mobile’s dead. Why haven’t you called?’

‘I’ve been on a train, Rache. I saw it. I saw it fly in.’ He’s choking the words out. The woman in pink looks away. ‘I saw it and ran.’ This is only part of the burden weighing him down – his survival adds so much more.

‘We thought you were dead. I’ve been waiting for somebody to tell me. Katy’s come to sit with me.’ She’s weeping and the sound of it makes Jay’s throat constrict.

‘I would have been.’ Something within him dredges up the notion that perhaps he was always going to miss the train. He dismisses it and says, ‘Can you come and get me? I’m at New Canaan station.’

Rachel sniffs. He pictures her taking a grip of herself. ‘Why New Canaan?’

‘I’ll explain when you’re here.’

‘Okay, I’m on my way.’

‘Thanks, Rache.’ He replaces the handset on its rest and the woman in pink steps forward. He looks at her eye to eye. It’s no matter to either of them that there are tears tracking down his cheeks.

He spies a Starbucks across the road. The backs of jackets and blouses are pressed flat against the windows and people are crowding round the door. The rest of the town is deserted. When he reaches the doorway, he sees that someone has rigged up a television. Nobody is serving or drinking coffee. A gaggle of women in T-shirts and jeans detach themselves from the interior and come out shaking their heads, their chins in their chests. They have smudges of mascara under their red-rimmed eyes.

The group round the door eases and Jay is inside. The onion-bitterness of body odour makes it smell like a cheap hamburger joint. All eyes are fixed on the screen.

‘How bad is it?’ Jay asks nobody in particular. ‘I’ve just got off the train.’

The man in front of him, who’s wearing UPS brown overalls, answers from the side of his mouth, cocking his head so that he doesn’t miss anything. ‘Poor souls have been jumping.’

He tries to interpret what this means. Where from? Why? ‘I’ve missed it. I only know about the accident – the plane, the tower.’

The man turns to him. ‘Two of ’em. Two planes. Look. They’ve got both towers – that’s both towers burning. Motherfuckers!’

Nobody in the room reacts to the profanity. Plumes of white smoke are curling up from both buildings. He shakes his head. ‘They’ll get them off with helicopters, right?’

‘It’s too hot. They got no chance – those poor fuckers on the roof. If they were above it they’re–’

Toast!
Jay jerks his head back in reaction to the word that sprung out from his brain. He thanks God he didn’t say it aloud. But he can’t stop his mind throwing this stuff at him.

They’re toast, Jay. And you’re down here instead of up there with them.

Jay feels the people around him tense. There’s an explosion in the South Tower. It shudders and a cloud of smoke and dust erupts from the top floors. The twist of debris spirals into the sky but it’s not the building growing. Seconds pass as they try to resolve the image. Then it becomes clear; the building is disappearing. It sinks and settles on its haunches like a stricken zebra resigned to a lion’s final throat-ripping snarl. A collective groan sounds its death-cry.

‘What the fu–’ UPS-man says.

The commentator screams that the building is collapsing and the view cuts away to street level where people are running, running, looking over their shoulders as a monster clad in a billowing cloak of white chases them down the street.

‘I don’t understand,’ Jay says. ‘What’s happening?’

The voice – this new unwanted voice – speaks.
It
’s death. Death is loose on the streets of Manhattan.

A woman answers this time. ‘They say there are twenty planes in the sky unaccounted for. They’re bombing us with our own planes.’

‘Who?’

She sounds tired. ‘They don’t know. Terrorists? They hit the Pentagon with another one. But the World Trade Center – well you just saw it.’

The TV cuts away to a camera on Staten Island. There is an absence, the imagined outline of a space filled with sky. ‘Did they get out?’ someone whispers.

‘Who knows?’ It’s somebody else. ‘You have to pray …’

A ticker tape at the bottom of the screen mentions a man called Usama Bin Laden. His terrorist organisation has been boasting of making an attack like this. Jay looks at the North Tower, still standing. He tries to count floors from the top but there is so much smoke and the angle switches too often. Is his office above or below?

They continue to watch as the pictures switch between views of the tower in Manhattan and the hole in the ground alongside the Pentagon. Jay turns to the window from time to time to see whether Rachel has arrived.

By the time he sees the gold 4×4 draw up, Jay has assimilated what has happened but he still doesn’t know how bad it has been for Straub, DuCheyne. He leaves the coffee shop and crosses the road. There’s a delay while Rachel unbuckles her belt and grapples with the door before she jumps down from the driver’s side and runs round. She throws herself at him, sobbing. ‘I thought you were dead.’ Her voice is distorted and if she had said anything else he wouldn’t have understood.

He holds her close. Her fists beat against his back. He pulls away and uses his thumbs to wipe the tears from her cheeks. She looks up at him, her eyes brimming and her top lip crumples. ‘Oh, Jay. It’s your floor. They flew into your floor. None of them can have lived through that. We have to go home – to England. Can we go home?’

Rachel’s driving along Route 22. Jay’s sitting in the passenger seat. The silence invites the presence in Jay’s mind to intensify his torment.
Choose a scene
, it suggests.
Which one makes you shudder most?

The camera is following a woman as she falls. Her hands are tight to her sides to stop her skirt from billowing. She’s concerned for her modesty even as she plunges to her death. Jay looks closer at her right hand. She holds it awkwardly and he can make out a pair of shoes with high heels.

Did she think she was going to need them when she reached the ground?

Jay tries to remember the formula for computing the speed of a falling object. The phrase ‘32 feet per second per second’ surfaces from the swamp of his grammar school education. What does it mean? The building has a hundred floors. So, 15 feet per floor, that is 1500 feet. How long does it take to fall 1500 feet? At 32 feet per second, rounded down, it’s 50 seconds. Nearly a minute? It can’t be right. The rate of fall: per second per second. It means there’s acceleration but it doesn’t answer the question, how long?

He plays back the woman’s jump in his mind and counts to ten before the camera pans away as the ground looms up to meet her. Ten seconds.

Enough for her to anticipate the instant she hits the ground and becomes no more than a mess of butcher’s slops on the sidewalk. When did she lose consciousness? What did it feel like in the moment of impact when Nancy’s thighbones speared into her brain?

Jay shudders. What’s got into him? Is he torturing himself because he should have been there? Is this how his life is going to be?

He groans and presses his hands to his face. Rachel reaches across and squeezes his knee.

Route 22 takes them past chic estates with high walls and robust electric gates. Trees lean out from either side and join arms overhead. The effect is of the 4×4 shooting along a tunnel like a hover car in
Blade Runner
. Jay wants it to stop. He doesn’t know how to act when they get to the house. The neighbours are going to congratulate him on his good fortune but how can he smile when all his work colleagues have disintegrated into dust particles that drift across the East River?

There’s a lurch in his chest. ‘Ben! What about Ben? Does he know?’

Rachel is upright in the driver’s seat with her knuckles white on the steering wheel. Her lips are pressed thin. There’s a blue-veined tic in her pale temple. Her voice checks as if she is trying to swallow down bad words. ‘He knows you’re safe. Katy went to collect him and Tyler. He’s home now. The school has closed.’

‘What about others … neighbours?’

‘It’s too early – who knows?’

Jay takes a deep breath and his body tenses. ‘You said it hit our floor – SDC. Have you heard anything from anybody?’

There are spasms in Rachel’s neck. She puts a knuckle to her mouth as if she’s holding back sickness. ‘You’ve only been there – how long is it?’

‘Six weeks.’

‘Six weeks.’ Her voice is cold and flat. ‘They don’t know you. Nobody will think to call us. They have their own problems. Were any not in today?’