Authors: Anna Funder
Afterwards, I take the bus to hydrotherapy. It is a kneeling bus, one which tilts its forecorner to the ground for the lame, like me. I ride it from the pink medical towers of Bondi Junction along the ridge above the water into town. Out the window a rosella feasts from a flame tree, sneakers hang-dance on an electric wire. Behind them the earth folds into hills that slope down to kiss that harbour, lazy and alive.
In danger of losing their sight
. I had very good eyes once. Though it’s another thing to say what I saw. In my experience, it is entirely possible to watch something happen and not to see it at all.
The hydrotherapy class is at the fancy new swimming pool in town. Like most things, hydrotherapy only works if you believe in it.
The water is warm, the temperature finely gauged so as not to upset the diabetics and heart fibrillators among us. I have a patch I stick on my chest each day. It sends an electrical current to my heart to spur it on if it flags. From previous, quietly death-defying experiments, I know it stays on underwater.
We are seven in the pool today, four women and three men. Two of the men are brought down the ramp into the water on wheelchairs, like the launching of ships. Their attendants hover around them, the wheels of the things ungainly in the water. I am at the back, behind a woman in an ancient yellow bathing cap with astonishing rubber flowers sprouting off it. We raise our hands obediently. I watch our swinging arm-flesh. The aging body seems to me to get a head start on decomposition, melting quietly inside its own casing.
‘Arms over heads–breathing in–now bringing them down–breathing out–pushing till they’re straight behind you–breathe IN!’
We need, apparently, to be reminded to inhale.
The young instructor on the pool edge has a crescent of spiky white hair around her head and a microphone coming down in front of her mouth. We look up to her as to someone saved. She is pleasant and respectful, but she is clearly an emissary bearing tidings–rather belatedly for us–that physical wellbeing may lead to eternal life.
I am trying to believe in hydrotherapy, though Lord knows I failed at believing in God. When I was young, during the First World War, my brother Oskar would hide a novel–
The Idiot
or
Buddenbrooks
–under the prayer book at synagogue so Father would not notice. Eventually I declared, with embarrassing thirteen-year-old certainty, ‘Forced love hurts God,’ and refused to go. Looking back on it I was, even then, arguing on His terms; how can you hurt something that doesn’t exist?
And now, eons later, if I am not careful I find myself thinking, Why did God save me and not all those other people? The believers? Deep down, my strength and luck only make sense if I am one of the Chosen People. Undeserving, but Chosen still; I am long-living proof of His irrationality. Neither God nor I, when you think about it, deserves to exist.
‘Now we’re concentrating on legs, so just use your arms as you like, for balance,’ the girl says. Jody? Mandy? My hearing aid is in the change rooms. I wonder if it is picking all this up, broadcasting it to the mothers wrestling their children out of wet costumes, to the mould and pubic hair and mysterious sods of unused toilet paper on the floor.
‘We’re putting the left one out, and turning circles from the knee.’
A siren sounds, bleating on and off. Over at the big pool, the waves are going to start. Children walk-run through the water with their hands up, keen to be at the front where the waves will be biggest. Teen girls subtly check that their bikini tops will hold; mothers hip their babies and walk in too, for the fun. A little boy with red goggles darts in up to his chin. Behind him a slight young woman with hair falling in a soft bob on her cheeks walks calmly forward, shoulderblades moving under her skin like intimations of wings. My heart lurches: Dora!
It is not her, of course–my cousin would be even older than me–but no matter. Almost every day, my mind finds some way to bring her to me. What would Professor Melnikoff have to say about that, I wonder?
The wave comes and goggle-boy slides up its side, tilting his mouth to the ceiling for air, but it swallows him entire. After it passes he’s nowhere. Then, further down the pool, he surfaces, gulping and ecstatic.
‘Dr Becker?’ The girl’s voice from above. ‘It’s time to leave.’
The others are already over near the steps, waiting for the wheelchair men to be positioned on the ramp. I look up at her and see she’s smiling. Perhaps that microphone gives her a direct line to God.
‘There’s ten minutes till the next class but,’ she says. ‘So no hurry.’
Someone is meting out time in unequal allotments. Why not choose a white-haired messenger, lisping and benign?
Bev has left me a small pot of shepherd’s pie in the fridge, covered tight in plastic wrap. It has a sprinkling of pepper on the mashedpotato topping, and it also has, in its perfectly measured single-serve isolation, a compulsory look about it. So I thaw a piece of frozen cheesecake for dinner–one of the advantages of living alone–then fizz a Berocca in a tall glass to make up for it. I’ll have to explain myself to Bev when she comes tomorrow.
In bed the cicadas outside keep me company–it’s still early. Their chorus coaxes the night into coming, as if without their encouragement it would not venture into this bright place.
What a ni-ight!
they seem to chirrup,
what a ni-ight!
And then we are quiet together.
Two quick knocks at the door–Clara and I maintain formalities because formalities are required between a man and a woman who work alone in a hotel room, as between a doctor and a patient in the most personal procedure. Our formalities transform this place of rumpled dreams–the sod-green curtains, the breakfast tray uncleared, the bed I hastily made–into a place of work.
‘Good morning.’ An open smile on her red-painted lips, lips that look suddenly intimate. It is the smile of a young woman whose flame is undiminished by racial exile; who has possibly been loved this morning.
‘Good morning, Clara.’
Today she wears an apricot faux-silk shirt with lavish sleeves and three-button cuffs–a cheap copy of luxury that lasts but a season and may just be the essence of democracy. ‘Peachy’, as they’d say here in America, although in English I can’t tell poetry from a pun. She brings with her morning air, new-minted for this day, the 16
th
of May 1939.
Clara looks around the room, assessing the damage of the night. She knows I do not sleep. Her gaze comes to rest on me, in the armchair. I’m fiddling with a tasselled cord. Its green and gold threads catch the light.
‘I’ll do it,’ she says, springing forward. She takes the cord and ties back the drapes.
But the cord is not from the drapes. It is from my wife Christiane’s dressing gown. When she left me, six weeks ago, I took it as a keepsake. Or an act of sabotage.
‘No mail?’
Clara collects it each day from the postbox on her way in.
‘No,’ she says, her face averted at the window. She takes a deep breath, turns, and walks purposefully to the table. Then she rummages in her bag, still standing, for her steno pad. ‘Shall we finish the letter to Mrs Roosevelt?’ she asks.
‘Not now. Maybe later.’
Today I have other plans. I reach over and pick up my autobiography from the table. My American publisher wants to bring it out in English. He thinks that after the success of my plays in Britain, and my American lecture tour, it should sell. He is trying, God love him, to help me, since I gave away all my money to the starving children of Spain.
I don’t need money any more, but I do need to set the record straight. As sure as I sit here today, Hitler will soon have his war. (Not that anyone in this country seems to care–his opening salvo, the invasion of Czechoslovakia just weeks ago, has slid down to page thirteen in the
New York Times
.) But what people don’t realise is that his war has been on against us for years. There have been casualties already. Someone needs to write their names.
Clara is staring out the window at Central Park, waiting for me to gather my thoughts. While her back is still turned I ask, ‘Have you read
I Was a German
?’
‘No. No, I haven’t.’ She swivels, placing a stray curl of dark hair behind her ear.
‘Good. Good, good.’
She laughs–Clara has a PhD from Frankfurt and a fine mind and can afford lavish self-deprecation. ‘It’s
not
good!’
‘No, it is.’
She tilts her face to me, the freckles strewn across it as random and perfect as a constellation.
‘Because I’m going to be making some changes.’
She waits.
‘It’s incomplete.’
‘I should hope so.’
‘No. Not updates. Someone I left out.’
My memoir is subtly, shamefully self-aggrandising. I put myself at the centre of everything; I never admitted any doubts or fear. (I was cunning, though, telling of isolated childhood cruelties and adult rashness, to give the illusion–not least to myself–of full disclosure.) I left my love out, and now she is nowhere. I want to see whether, at this late stage of the game, honesty is possible for me.
When I open the book in my lap its pages stand up like a fan, held tight to a midpoint. The National Socialists took my diaries–probably burnt them on their pyres as well. I must work from memory.
The girl sits down at the table, side-on to me. Clara Bergdorf has been working with me for five weeks. She is a rare soul, with whom silences of whole minutes are calm. The time is neither empty, nor full of anticipatory pressure. It expands. It makes room for things to return, to fill my empty heart.
I light a cigar and leave it smoking in the ashtray. ‘We’ll start with the introduction. Add this dedication at the end.’ I clear my throat. ‘I call to mind a woman, to whose courageous act I owe the saving of these manuscripts.’ I breathe deeply and look out at the sky, today a soft, undecided colour.
‘When in January, 1933, the Dictator of Braunau was given power against the German People, Dora Fabian, whose life has ended—’
And then I break off. Clara thinks I am paralysed by grief, but it is not so. I simply do not know how to describe that ending. In the park the wind toys with the trees, shifting leaves and branches a fraction every which way–as if the music has stopped but they cannot, for the sheer life of them, keep absolutely still. Clara risks a glance in my direction. She is relieved to see I am not weeping. (I have form in that department.)
‘Sorry.’ I turn back to her. ‘Where was I?’
‘“Dora Fabian,”’ she reads back, ‘“whose life has ended.”’
‘Thank you.’ I look out again and find my word. ‘Sorrowfully,’ I say, which is the plainest truth there is. ‘Whose life has ended sorrowfully in exile, went to my flat and brought away to safety two trunk-loads of manuscripts.’
Clara doesn’t look up. Her hand moves steadily across the page, coming to rest only moments after I stop speaking.
‘The police got to know of what she had done and sent her to prison. She said that the papers had been destroyed. After she was released from prison she fled from Germany, and, shortly before her death, she got the papers out of Germany with the assistance of a disillusioned Nazi. Full stop.’
Clara puts down her pencil.
That is all? I close my eyes.
Dora’s editorial trace is all over my book: the sharp focus, the humour. At the end of our lives it is our loves we remember most, because they are what shaped us. We have grown to be who we are around them, as around a stake.
And when the stake is gone?
‘All right, then?’ Clara asks softly after a few minutes. She thinks I’ve drifted off, taken advantage of her sweet presence and gone to sleep. She touches the edges of the pad in front of her.
‘Yes, yes.’ I sit up properly again.
I will tell it all. I will bring Dora back, and I will make her live in this room.
The doorbell is ringing.
I ignore it. Without opening my eyes, I can tell it’s morning.
Ring ring ring ring ring ring ring
…
Verdammtes
bell. Fuh-ken bell, as they say here. The thing has aged along with me and it sticks. I move my bad leg with the other one over the side of the bed, and slide my feet, gnarled as mallee roots, into the sheepskin shoes–one built up, the other plastic-soled. I leave my wig on the dresser.
Ring ring
…
I open the door. The van speeds off–I can just make out, in purple writing on its side, ‘The World on Time’. It’s seven o’clock in the morning! A tad
early
, if you ask me.
A FedEx package on the mat. I stoop to get it with my stiff leg sticking out–I am a bald giraffe in an unreliable dressing gown and I feel sorry for any passers-by who might see me, mangy-minged and inglorious. This gives me a wicked thrill, till I imagine they might include children, whom I have, in general, no desire to horrify.
I move into the front room, my favourite room. It smells of furniture wax–Bev must have done it while I was out yesterday. She uses the wax–along with her Vicks VapoRub and her copper bracelets–as part of an arsenal against decay and time, suffocating the world with a layer of polyvinyls to make it shiny and preserve it forever like the plastic food in Japanese restaurant windows. She sprays the glass-fronted bookcases, the wooden arms of the chairs, even–I have witnessed this–the leaves of the rubber plant. One day I will sit too long and she will spray me as well, preserving me for all time as an exhibit: ‘European Refugee from Mid-Twentieth Century’. Not that I need preserving.
Unkraut vergeht nicht
, my mother used to say: you can’t kill a weed.
The other side of the package reads ‘Columbia University New York, Department of Germanic Languages’. Here in Sydney, the events of the world wash up later as story, smoothed and blurred as fragments of glass on the sand. And now?
Dear Dr Becker,
We refer to previous correspondence in this matter. As you are aware, the Mayflower Hotel is to be demolished at the end of 2001. The building is being emptied in preparation for this.