The County of Birches Page 9
Someone points us to a policeman in the station, but my parents instinctively recoil. Enforcement officials are suspect, even one unarmed and looking odd in a hat like a bell. Subtly my parents resist being led to an arm of any state. I see the reluctance in my father’s thick inertia, an assumed denseness of what is being asked of him. The policeman in the pointy hat is their last resort.
My mother ventures first, her voice halting and high-pitched. The policeman touches her arm, and we tense. He lifts a finger—wait. Our eyes follow his few steps to a stall brimming with wrapped merchandise. As he adeptly picks out a bag, I’m charmed by the beauty of his easy knowledge. He tears open the top, proffers the bag first to my sister then to me, then kindly prods my mother towards a booth. I work the sweet brown glob in my mouth, observe him lift a handle inside the little cabin and pass it to my mother. He dials. In a moment we hear her rushing voice in our language. There are nods and smiles all around. My father pumps the policeman’s hand; he thumps my father’s back, and leaves us with the candy.
The policeman has left us the whole bag of candy, such beneficence when he probably has children of his own. I suppose that such a kindly man must have children. Lili holds the bag awkwardly. So much all at once. There is a message here, a promise I take to heart. All that candy for us, Lili and me. I love the sure swing of the policeman’s long, black-clad legs as he walks away.
* * *
Lili and I know very well how the Jews of Europe died. Waking briefly from our heavy, child slumbers, we would hear the rising voice of our mother reliving its memories. Before we recognized all the words, we understood the sounds of grief. I’m under the impression I’m here to replace the dead children—my mother’s niece, Dana, and my father’s first daughter, whose name is my second one. Lili is called Liliana after both grandmothers. We learned our names through theirs, through their photographs and the stories told about them. We’re the attempt at life out of the ashes.
Laci-bácsi, my mother’s brother, got away to England before the labour service draft. He flew with the Royal Air Force and bombed strategic installations. Laci-bácsi free as a bird up in the air. I know how his parents and his sisters and their babies died while he flew above them, futilely flapping his wings. He will swoop down on us now, I hope, and whisk us to safety. He has made possible the papers and the passage.
We expect Laci-bácsi to meet us at London’s Victoria Station, but instead a trim Briton recognizes the petrified family group huddled around its baggage. We are an island in the sea of Victoria Station, immobile as it washes around us. A neat, light-boned man breaks from the current. My mother looks up sharply and we raise our noses to sniff, sensitive as animals to familial spore. In his long, controlled face, witty eyes take in our discomposure. We’re so obvious, it’s amusing. He comes towards us with his eyes laughing and his arms unfurling from his sides.
Through his eyes I see we’re comic. It makes my heart tighten even now. I resist thinking of us as lost, cast-up people. That it was me clinging to my father’s trouser leg. I struggle against believing we were ever foreign and unfortunate. My life has poised on conviction in my well-being. I have calculated my risks against my good fortune to be alive, well endowed, well raised, well educated, well off. I have so rooted myself in this notion of privilege, I succeed in overlooking that I started off buffeted and tossed by the wind. Sealed in my car, I drive by bus stops where families wait in the heat or in the cold, their babies bundled against them. We were once there, subject to endless, degrading delays. I was there, and now I am here whizzing by. I feel a vast distance like a sea between the worlds we have inhabited in one form or another and between the different selves we’ve invented. My father was once a solid tree trunk with his back braced against the driving winter sleet, his coat open to shelter me. It’s hard to accept that we were once so exposed to the elements.
My uncle, catching sight of us, can afford humour. We look so frightened when he knows there is no call to be. He knows where we are and that we’re safe. He knows he has it worked out for us. This knowledge is in his manner, his amused expression and easy grace.
Washed up: we’ve been washed away from our bearings and swept onto a foreign shore. That this might be humorous tilts me off balance. It will be the central riddle of my childhood. I will grow to see my parents as besieged people performing on the essentially comic stage of a safe world.
My parents will build a satisfactory life. They will have a home and a garden and respectable work. They will raise and educate their children. They will have dinner guests and enjoy them. This is what my approaching uncle banks on. He doesn’t expect to see the open graves of their hearts, but the possibility for renewal and pleasure. Renewal and pleasure and habitual pain will co-reside in my parents always. I will puzzle over the concurrence of these unmixable properties. They will cast in doubt the validity of my own petty trials. Against my parents’ tragedies, my concerns will seem trivial; against the misery that befell them, my troubles will be mild.
As my parents hold their children and their belongings tightly in the human surf of Victoria Station, they cannot share my uncle’s certainty that things will work out for the best. Nor will they share the confidence of their future neighbours in claiming contentment and stability. They won’t be sure of their footing because the comic platform will never fully bear the weight of their pasts. This faulty equation will unsettle me. The vertiginous imbalance of then against now.
I see Laci-bácsi approach us in London’s Victoria Station. We know it is Laci-bácsi by my mother’s heightened alertness. He separates from the crowd, a small, graceful man, Laci-bácsi my mother’s brother. When he greets us he is a pleasant Englishman who holds the future in his smile. “Call me Uncle Larry,” he says, mock-seriously shaking my diminutive hand.
We had expected Laci-bácsi, the brother who schooled his younger sisters in off-colour ditties. We had expected a longer moustache, not one so carefully clipped.
I play my uncle’s approach in my mind. The concise man breaking from the tide of station travellers. My uncle as he sees us bescarved and burdened with our metaphoric baggage. The little glint of humour in his eye. When do I notice he sheds something as he nears?
I see a small man emerge from the faceless sea that engulfs us. He is neat and sure and certain of where he is going. He is coming straight at us as if he knows who we are and what he can do for us. There is no trace of the central European about his tidy figure. His face is narrow, his nose straight. Somehow genetics have foretold his destination. Whatever past he brings with him through the tide of commuters, he discards at first sight of our huddled, fearful family. We are it, he has decided. We are the past, nothing fearsome, just typical greenhorn immigrants. I notice the lightening in his bearing, his jovial relief.
My mother will set him right, I’m sure. We love him in advance for his frailness and culpability. Poor Uncle Larry will have to pay for his failure to protect the lost ones. I see in his amusement what he doesn’t know. When my mother and her sisters were forced to work in a German munitions factory, it was the bombs of the English that killed one of them. The bombs of the English exploding around them so that soil and sky were one burning mass, soil and sky and human flesh merged and melted and flying under the bombs of the English, the bombs of all that the English chose not to know.
Laci-bácsi comes smilingly towards us in Victoria Station. Finally we will be claimed. We will be plucked from the limbo of transit and identified again. We will have our names back, and our voices. But what he sees is not who we are. He remembers something else, has not accounted for a breach that is silent, pending and still as the air between a warplane and the ground. He thinks we’re his past, but we are the remains. And he is not Laci-bácsi.
My overwrought mother falls into her brother’s arms. We watch them embrace, the slim man and the lushly proportioned woman. She weeps. He holds her. He holds her tightly. We see that, how he holds her, all of her against his body. He holds on
to her in this public place where we’re growing aware this isn’t done. People are looking. A reserved Englishman caught in a public display of emotion. The rhythm of her sobs enters him along his arms. We watch curiously as his hand creeps into her thick dark curls. He combs the locks searching, pulling.
“What have you done?” The Hungarian in his mouth is correct but rusty. “What have you done to it?” His hand tugs at the tendrils. “Why would you paint your blonde hair?”
They grew up together around the same mahogany table. They climbed the same tree, ran the same races in the fields. They pulled down their pants and thrust out their puny pelvises to prove who could pee the farthest. They shared a childhood but are so far apart this tidy man does not know, has not realized that her hair—because by the end the gassings were so hurried and so numerous they did not bother stenciling skin—the hair they’d shaved off is her tattoo.
My mother pulls away. We see she has stiffened with the other horrors he doesn’t know. She touches his face. My father passes her his handkerchief. Finally she kisses Uncle Larry.
I feel indignant. Why is he spared what we small children were not? He is a grown-up, bigger and stronger and smarter. He should be made to know if we do. Uncle Larry’s ignorance insulates him. If we don’t tell him the truth, we will have to shield the English too, presumably, through our politeness and discretion, from their failure to protect the Jews of Europe. My mother musn’t let Uncle Larry off scot-free.
She strokes the smooth face of her older brother, seeing in its vulnerability an obdurate denial of who and what has been lost. She has the power to change him. I wait for her justice. I expect it—the child who has been promised all that is good—I wait for a balancing, but my mother lets him go. She has opened her hands and released Uncle Larry like a bird. I see, as he shrugs his suit straight with a slight shudder, that the moment of danger for him has passed. Free again, he flutters aloft. We watch his wings catch the air and pull at it strongly. Uncle Larry beats hard, winging upward. Lili and my father lift in the current he has stirred. My mother’s hands on my shoulders tug at me gently. We will fly across land, then above sea and over the hurdles of time.
RAIN
The pane in the leaded glass window whorls with fog and wet. Endlessly streaming rain distorts my sister’s approach. She could be any of the girls on Monahan Avenue with bookbags on their backs and knees winking above wellingtons. Any of those similar shimmering shapes nearing our walk could be Lillian. But only one mounts the steps through the sloping rockery and comes into focus above the knotted tie, my sister Lili with eyes receding through round-rimmed spectacles.
Lili became Lillian when she started the first form in Purley. She wears a striped tie and a blazer with a crest that says Christ Church School. She was the first of us to become fluent in English. Along with her blazer and round-toed oxfords she donned British inflections and songs about Jesus. This doesn’t worry our parents. War losses honed their Jewishness; Lillian’s hymns are the least of it.
I wait for Lili in the long hour after infant-school. It seems to take forever. I blow on the glass, make trails with my fingers. In Hungary Lili was my companion. She sat and read me stories from picture books while Mummy queued up at the market for bread and eggs. I still look at those pictures sometimes, especially the one of the teddy bear under the green tree, with bright lightning snapping from a black thundercloud overhead. No one in the family reads me the Hungarian words here. I’m read to instead about a funny-looking boy called Noddy.
I don’t want to play with anyone but Lili. The children at infant-school are as removed from me as adults. They’re too fluent and adept at interpreting the codes of the English. I keep my mouth shut when I’m with them, to conceal my ignorance. But when Lili comes home I won’t be alone any more. I peer into the mist at the hurrying older children, longing for my sister’s arrival and the busy directives of her attention. But when she comes in dripping wet and dumping her bookbag on the rush mat, she pushes past me to the kitchen, breathlessly telling Mummy how Glenna left her at the corner and Richard Clark chased her all the way from there. I’m excited too by Richard Clark’s interest and want to share in her conquest, but she’s speaking too quickly while Mummy puts a pudding bowl in front of her, about strange names, times and arrangements I can’t follow.
“Lili,” I interrupt in Hungarian, “did Richard Clark catch you?”
“Can’t she leave me alone! Can’t I at least have friends to myself!”
What have I said to irk her so?
* * *
In the mornings, Lillian clutches my hand and walks me down Monahan Avenue. It’s her job to take me to nursery since I made such a fuss when Mummy used to do it. We turn at the bottom of the street, then cross some corners. Christ Church School is nearby. Lillian doesn’t have far to retrace her steps after dropping me off. Tugging my arm, she points with her other hand to the street she would take if she were walking straight to school. The morning light is dim, the air sodden. The street seems deserted as though we aren’t supposed to be here. I’m afraid a figure might emerge from the mist, demand to know why we’re walking the grey length of road without the accompanying authorization of an adult. The other little children arrive at school holding the hand of a grown-up lady.
When Lili prepares to leave me, I don’t cry. I depend too much on her good opinion to subject her to that humiliation. I let her jerk the jacket off my stiff arms and lead me to a place at the low table. I keep my tears from welling by staring at the clock, not daring a glimpse at my sister’s departing back.
* * *
In the big house called High Banks where Apu looks after the grounds, Lillian and I share a bedroom that feels cavernous. It has a high ceiling and what appears to me a vast expanse of floor between our two beds. When she turns and tosses, the wolf lopes over to rest his heavy paws on her sleeping form. His great pink tongue hangs from a panting maw, and long teeth frame a savage smile. I see him clearly, but am too frightened to move lest he lunge at me and breathe his moist meaty breath on my neck. My sister’s stupid obliviousness is both reassuring and alarming. She’s a perfect decoy, but what if the wolf eats her?
“Push off,” she brushes past me in the morning when I try to warn her of the danger, “you’re just dreaming.”
Dreaming? Is everyone in this house senseless? This very morning the beast preceded us down the narrow winding stairs to the pantry. Its grey bristly coat and ragged tail slunk around the corner just ahead of my mother.
“Look, Mummy. The wolf. See before he gets away.”
“Wolves now, in the house no less. Don’t expect me to start setting a place at the table for it, too.”
She is referring dismissively as usual to my friend George, who has become my constant companion.
“George doesn’t eat peas, they make him throw up. Don’t give us any peas. George says I wouldn’t like them.”
I don’t see how anyone can eat peas as the English do. I watch how my sister tries to eat them the proper way, guiding them with her knife up the humped back of her fork. Usually they roll off and fall into her lap as she lifts the fork shakily to her lips. She works at this painstakingly. I’m doomed to fail before I try.
“I don’t care if George doesn’t eat anything! George is not you. The only George around here is the dog next door! So eat.”
But the peas remain on my plate as they do on my imaginary friend’s after I’ve cleared everything else off both.
“George says he won’t go to bed until Lili does. He’s a big boy. He can stay up as long as Lili.”
“If I hear from George one more time today I will shut him in the larder!”
But George and I stay up and watch how Lili’s hands are tied together to keep her from sucking her thumb and making all her teeth stick out. She succeeds in holding her book up regardless and continues to read while George and I drift off to sleep. I suck my thumb too, but not for much longer. George thinks it would be clever to drop the habi
t before Lili does. He insists that my hands get tied down too. Mummy and Apu are very pleased with me. They say I’m a big girl. What’s all Lili’s fuss? Her dark locks fall into her scowling face as she kicks the bedstead. George was right. I don’t miss my thumb at all. George tells me how much nicer my teeth will look than Lili’s.
* * *
Lillian was first among us to acquire the English language, but no sooner than she did, she retreated with it like a treasure she hoards between the covers of books. More often than not she’s slumped over a novel in the half-dark of a room curtained to protect the furniture—or, I suspect, some secret she keeps to herself. Her absorption is infuriating. She locks me out of her world, shares none of its enticements. I run along the corridors of High Banks shouting, “Lili, where are you?”
“With her nose in a book, probably. Is it a wonder her eyes are weak, she doesn’t get any exercise. Lili, can’t you go out to play like a normal child!” Mummy shouts from the kitchen.
Listening to Mummy, you’d think Lillian wasn’t normal. She needs spectacles for her eyes. She needs braces for her teeth. She walks pigeon-toed and goes to the doctor to straighten her feet.
“Lili, come play ball with me!”
“That’ll be the day, when your sister goes outside like a normal child.”
* * *
I run through the big house, opening doors and calling, “Lili, telephone. Glenna wants you.” The downstairs is still. The dining room and sitting room pose inert, as for a portrait. I race up the big staircase in the centre hall, pulling myself by the banister. “Lili, where are you?” She isn’t in our bedroom nor our parents’. The other rooms aren’t lived in. I throw open the doors on their awful emptiness. “Lili!” I feel stifled suddenly, breath stolen by her appalling absence. When I push open a remote door I see first the fangs. A frightful tawniness leaps at me, huge teeth bared, perpetually ferocious. My breath comes out in a scream. Lillian’s head jerks around from where she’s helping Mummy shake the dust from an old tiger rug.