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I think of my hair, nothing else. It fills my mind and closes me from actuality. I have a focus, something for me to control.

And that is how I survive Belsen. In that way, and also because I cannot see anymore. For first time—for the only time—I give thanks to be blind.

And then we are free. Allied soldiers give us uniforms to wear and food from their kitchen, putting us at the head of the queue. On the trains, we ride without paying if we show the conductor our camp tattoo. We stay in monasteries, where my friends say the sheets are the most white in their lives. I cross Europe, and eventually, at the end of summer, I take a boat and come to England.

*  *  *

The others were still there, of course, hived off into small groups—Herbert supposed that was typical of dinner parties, that the conversations would splinter once the food was eaten and therefore no longer the communal focus; he had been to so few dinner parties in recent years, it was hard for him to claim much authority on the matter—but every fiber of his attention was on Hannah.

He wondered how many other people Hannah had talked to about this. Not that many, he supposed. The luminosity in her expression suggested that this had been some form of catharsis, no matter how small and temporary.

“Now you know,” she said.

Actually, he thought, he knew very little. “No more than you know about me.”

“I know you are lonely.”

“Really?”

“Yes. Very, very lonely.”

It was a statement, not a question; stark in its bluntness, yet delivered with neither judgment nor care that it would cause offense. Above all, it was true. Why else would he have gone, on his birthday, to dinner with someone he had barely met, knowing even at the start of the day that he would have no better offers by nightfall?

Herbert supposed that he should have been cautious, as they were moving into areas he had barely explored himself, let alone shared with anybody else; but Hannah’s unerring accuracy reassured rather than concerned him, and if they had only known each other a few hours, then so what?

He had known his own mother all his life, and yet still he felt a sense of estrangement from her.

So Herbert told Hannah, and told her everything.

Yes, he was lonely; an intense isolation which nothing seemed to quench. Every day, he looked around and saw the ways in which others seemed to be happy with the most superficial relationships.

They passed the time of day, but never talked about what really mattered. They made noises and thought they were communicating; pulled faces and thought they understood.

He was looking for something more, something which was at the very least empathetic, perhaps veering
toward telepathic, to the point where his emotions began to merge with another person’s.

He found it very difficult when someone did not instinctively know what he was feeling, because then he had to explain himself to them, which he hated doing.

Conversely, of course, finding someone like Hannah who
did
seem to read his mind, was in itself unnerving.

At times when Herbert was speaking, some of the Hungarians would approach them, check that they had all the food and drink they needed, and then drift away again.

Herbert saw one man squeeze Hannah’s shoulder as he walked past the back of her chair; another bent to whisper something which made her smile.

Herbert wondered whether these men were, or had ever been, Hannah’s lovers, and had to bite back a swift swell of jealousy.

If they were, then it was nothing to do with him; though equally Hannah seemed too untrammeled to be any one person’s sole property.

So he kept talking, ushered forward by the ease of her manner, by the lack of eye contact, and perhaps by his assumption that, as a foreigner and a Jew, her cultural norms were slightly different from his.

He was an only child, with all that the unwanted status involved; a certain melancholy, tendencies toward introversion. When, as a child, he stayed apart from his schoolmates, they accused him of being aloof; but when he tried to make friends, he tried too hard, came on too strong, and they turned against him just the same.

Most people seemed to understand instinctively the balance between communality and self-sufficiency. Not Herbert. He felt like a novice pilot, constantly overcorrecting as he tried to steer a steady course.

He had a teddy bear with one eye, to whom he would talk for hours. In place of real friends, he had imaginary ones, loyal and inspiring.

He even had an invented him, one who was braver, cleverer, more lovable, more daring—more of all the things in which he was less. Herbert wanted to follow and imitate this hero, who took the paths he had eschewed and told him about them, just as Herbert told him what he had done, sharing the good and the bad as equally as the thrilling and the banal.

The invented him lived Herbert’s life the way he would have chosen, if only Herbert had possessed the gumption; for one became the person one chose to be, didn’t one? He was a second chance, a confidant, a mirror image, a mentor, a guardian angel, a counselor, a guide.

He was everything. And of course he never existed.

Then Herbert had won a scholarship to Cambridge, where he felt like a fraud from start to finish, neither one thing nor the other; too posh for the children at home, too common for the Etonians and Harrovians.

There was a coal miner there, Jimmy Lees. He told Burgess, “You’ll get a First, because your energies aren’t exhausted by life, because of the class prejudice of the examiners, and because you got here easily and aren’t frightened by it all. I don’t have the brilliance of ignorance. I’ll do ten times as much work as you, and get a good Second.”

And that’s exactly how it happened, for Herbert as much as for Jimmy.

One could interest oneself in truth or brilliance; one could write essays or epigrams. Herbert chose the former.

No. He
did
the former, because he could not do the latter. He had no choice.

Then came the war, and then came Belsen. There were plenty of soldiers there with him, the happy-go-lucky ones, who managed to put away the horror and get on with their lives. Perhaps Herbert had less far to go than they; because, for him, Belsen took a world already negative and skewed it into darkness, a murk he had to face alone.

There was no one he could talk to. Those who hadn’t been there wouldn’t understand; those who had been there simply wanted to forget about it.

Belsen showed him that life delivers little but bad news: disaster, disease, disorder, distress, disgrace, divorce, and of course death, inescapable and inevitable, because even if nothing else went wrong, one was still going to die.

What Herbert already had inside him, Belsen had exacerbated, and then Maclean and de Vere Green took it still further, till he could hardly tell where cause began and effect finished, or vice versa.

In Belsen, Hannah, you said you had existed, no more.

That’s what Herbert feared above all: being absent from his work, from other people, even from himself. In such circumstances, nothing would matter, neither humor nor love, sadness nor anger, let alone pain. And surely there could be nothing worse than feeling so desolate that even the tears would not come.

“Well,” Hannah said, “no one say that life is a bowl of cherries.”

No, Herbert agreed; they did not.

“You play piano?” she asked.

“A little.”

“You ever hear ‘Life’s a Bowl of Cherries’ in five-quarter time?”

“It’s in four-quarter time, isn’t it?”

Hannah put on a flawless Cockney accent. “Life’s/a bowl/of fuckin’/cherries,” she sang, and in spite of himself Herbert burst out laughing.

There was an upsurge of chatter at Hannah’s singing, which he understood to be calls for her to play the piano. She demurred, at first through concern for Herbert, and then with mocking halfheartedness after he assured her he was fine, and that he had monopolized her enough for one evening.

When she stood, everyone cheered, and cleared a path to a piano in the corner which he had not even noticed. Usually it took him a couple of seconds at most to fix the layout and furniture of a room in his head.
Must be slipping
, Herbert thought.

He had never heard the tunes Hannah was playing—they must have been Hungarian folk songs, judging by the enthusiasm with which the others started singing—but it hardly mattered. Her playing was exquisite. She could have been a concert pianist, if she had put her mind to it.

Diver, cook, musician; Herbert wondered if there was anything she could not do.

He looked at his wristwatch for the first time since arriving in Frith Street, and was amazed to find that it had gone midnight.

Now that the spell between Hannah and him had been broken, Herbert felt somewhat flayed. He had never exposed so much of himself.

Once more at the edge of a group, once more on the outside looking in, he slipped quietly through the door and out into the fog.

The stillness was so complete as to be incredible. A disaster could have taken place, leaving Herbert the last man on earth, and he would not have known the difference.

Every city, especially one as big as London, has its own hum, its own cadence, even in the small hours, because cities never truly sleep.

But that night, there was absolutely nothing. No people, no traffic, no distant shouts, no industrial whirring. The fog concealed anything which Herbert would otherwise have seen, and silenced everything he would otherwise have heard.

When he held out his hand in front of him, he lost sight of his own fingers, and wondered if his own body was disappearing. Even the streetlights had been reduced to the faintest of glows.

One step into the hanging mist, and perhaps the fog would swallow him whole, spitting him out only in another dimension of space and time.

It did not, of course; but it might as well have done. Seconds later, Herbert was lost. From Hannah’s flat to his was no distance—less than a mile, even going the long way via Shaftesbury Avenue and Piccadilly—but from the very first turning he took, he had absolutely no idea where he was, or even which way he was going.

Every place looked the same, for he could see nothing: no landmarks, no street signs. When he paused at a street corner to get his bearings, he could no longer remember from which direction he had come.

It was akin to being buried in an avalanche, when one was so disorientated that one had no idea which way was up. At least in such situations one could use gravity to find out; clear a space round one’s mouth and let saliva flow. But he had no such resources here.

He kept walking, knowing that he was as likely to be making things worse as better, but having no idea what else to do. And he had to keep warm, too; to stop was to freeze, and to freeze was to die. He could have been right outside his front door without knowing it, or he could have been halfway to Bethnal Green. He would have stopped a passerby or flagged down a car to ask where he was, but he saw neither. At times he fancied he recognized a patch of pavement or the particular orientation of a corner, but in the very next stride everything seemed alien again.

The air around him was thick and resistant, as though full of mushed-up bread. It seemed to be setting like glue into a strange, viscous stiffness. Fear snatched at him, a mild gnawing below his diaphragm which quickly escalated into a swarming, crawling beast.

Herbert thought of the moment when one slipped and the earth rushed up to meet one, and realized that that was how he felt, but a sensation that usually lasted a fraction of a second persisted interminably, as if he were anticipating a terror beyond dread but never receiving the release of actually experiencing it.

He tried to run, but within moments his lungs were burning from all the filth in the air, and he had all but turned his ankle on a sharp piece of curb.

He stopped. It was below zero, and he was sweating heavily.

At that very moment, Hannah’s voice came to him
softly through the fog, calling in a lilting song as though he were a sailor and she a Siren.

Herbert marveled at the power of his imagination.

Then, with a start, he realized that the voice was becoming louder.

She was coming toward him. No; he was walking toward her.

And there she was, standing by her front door, her hand outstretched for his and her lips fluttering in a smile.

“I knew you would come back,” she said.

He had walked, unknowingly, in a vast circle. It was what people did when they were lost, Hannah said; something to do with gyroscopy and homing instinct. When the Hungarians had left—they didn’t live there, after all, did they?—they had told her how thick the fog was, and so she had waited for his return.

“But how did you know it was me?” Herbert asked.

“Your scent. And your footsteps.”

“My
scent?
I’m not an animal.”

“Everyone smell different.”

“Well, I can’t smell anything through all the chemicals in the air, and I certainly couldn’t hear anything. You must have amazing senses.”

“Not at all. I use them more than you, I believe. Blind people hear better? It’s just a myth. Many myth concerning blind people.”

“What are the others?”

“A hundred myth. Let’s see … Oh, yes. Blind people, their spirit is more pure. Blindness makes us saints.” Hannah laughed. “Complete lie.”

She found Herbert blankets and a pillow, and he lay down on the sofa. When she went through into her
bedroom, she left the door ajar. But before Herbert could decide what, if anything, she had meant by that, he heard the unmistakable sounds of someone going to sleep: a rustling of bed linen as she found a comfortable position, a couple of rapid snorts, and then a long, lazy rhythm of slow breathing.

Hannah was asleep in minutes. Herbert lay awake in the darkness for hours.

T
he radio was already on when Herbert woke, giving him the fleeting sensation of being at home. The sight of Hannah preparing coffee more than erased the slight dislocation he felt when he remembered where he was. Even in this prosaic, workaday aspect of her being, hair disheveled and with the sleeves of her dressing gown rolled up as she did last night’s dishes, she almost frightened him with her beauty.