The Enemy of the Good (25 page)

‘1964. The same year the twins were born.’ Marta was warmed by the memory of her
annus mirabilis
.

‘No, it must have been after this – when it is first published in Hebrew. It will sound foolish to you, but I felt that you were writing this book directly for me… for us. You were writing about a justice society. We were living in it. Or we were trying. For this we have given up so much. I am not now speaking of shekels. We have given up so many happy things of family life, because we thought we were building for the future.’

‘And I’m sure you were,’ Marta said. ‘I can’t speak from personal
experience
; I only made two brief visits to kibbutzim to lecture. But I spent years, all told, with the Hadza, who bring up their children communally. It allows them to bond with the whole tribe, not just their parents, and to grow up far more securely, free of all the neuroses we’ve been taught, post-Freud, to view as universal.’

‘Maybe you are right,’ Etta said. ‘But even if these values are still true for the Africans, they have been lost for us. Little by little the hope of the kibbutz, it has vanished. The new kibbutznik, they have new ideas.’

‘No, they do not have ideas,’ Chanan said, ‘they have demands… is this how you call it?’ Marta nodded. ‘For them the kibbutz is just a place to live; it is not a way of life.’

‘It is not a way to change life,’ Etta said.

‘No, it is most certainly not this,’ Chanan said. ‘They make quarrels with giving up their children… as if they think it has been easy for us. They make quarrels with the way we run our farm. They make us start new businesses to bring money, and it destroys our dream.’

‘And they do it with much cunning,’ Etta said. ‘They have a revolution of language. What is once individualism is becoming choice.’

‘Worse, my Etta, it is
consumer choice
. And we make ours by moving far away.’

‘I can see that it must have been heartbreaking,’ Marta said.

‘We have come to Tel Aviv,’ Chanan said. ‘Our friends from abroad, they tell us we must leave Israel. They have been watching while this country gives up its dream the same as the kibbutz. But we are too old. We have lost too much blood here. These are our people. This is our home.’

Marta recalled Shoana’s account of their daughter’s death in a bomb blast and marvelled at their equanimity. After securing their promise to visit Beckley on their next trip, she went indoors to say goodbye to Rivka and Shoana, who showed no signs of flagging either under the pressure of the present party or the prospect of repeating it in a different house but with the same guests, food and conversation, every night for the next two weeks. She returned to the hotel, where she tiptoed into the room to find Edwin snoring. Fumbling for her nightdress, she changed in the bathroom and slipped into bed.

She lay back on the pillow, but exhaustion failed to induce sleep. Chanan’s story of his father’s flight from Poland had stirred up memories of her parents’ similar disaffection with their native country, although, as disciples of Marx rather than Herzl, they believed it their duty to stay and establish the new order in Europe rather than in Palestine, even after Hitler’s aggression had put the entire continent at risk. Their convictions cost them dear when, as Jews, they were herded into the ghetto to share a foetid room with her aunt and, in the cruellest irony, her grandparents who, before the Occupation, had refused to so much as break bread in their non-kosher house. With a skill honed by twenty years in the print union, her father persuaded the guards to allow Marta and her aunt to work in a leather factory outside the ghetto. At twelve she was too young for the job but, overnight, he added three years to her age. Besides she was attractive. If the War taught her one thing, it was that even the most zealous official was prepared to bend the rules for a pretty face.

At the factory, her aunt put her father’s escape plan into practice. The Nazis were fanatical about hygiene, a fact which, in later years, Marta suspected had left their victims so vulnerable to the offer of showers. Three times a week they marched the entire workforce from the factory compound to the communal baths. After familiarising herself with both the route and the timetable, which the well-drilled guards never varied, her aunt outlined the initial steps. Once she had washed and dressed, Marta was to hide in the lavatories until her aunt knocked on the door. Then, when the guards turned their backs, they would dash across the courtyard to the laundry, waiting for the main contingent to move away before making their bid for safety.

This was the world of the medieval woodcut, with salvation on one side of a cliff and damnation on the other. The path was steep and craggy but, as her aunt explained, it was all that they had. She urged her niece to be brave, an unnecessary injunction since, at least in retrospect, her sole thought was to outwit the oppressor. In the event, Fortune smiled – she refused to credit any higher deity – and they evaded capture. Somehow her aunt had passed word to one of her father’s ex-comrades, now active in the Resistance, who was waiting with money and papers to take them to a flat where, for the next two years, Marta lived as Christina. It helped that she not only looked the part but spoke it. Her parents’ rejection of their heritage meant that she had been brought up speaking Polish and lacked all trace of a Yiddish accent. Try as she might, she could not recollect how she had occupied the time, a regrettable lapse when telling the story, its tone subtly altered from horror to adventure, to the twins for whom boredom was a fate worse than death. Their string of questions as to what she ate, how she paid for it and whether she was searched, exposed further gaps to shake their faith in the narrative.

She never saw her parents or sister again. She knew that they were deported after the doomed uprising in the ghetto, although she didn’t discover where until much later. She too was deported, along with most of the population of Warsaw, after the equally abortive nationalist revolt the following year. If nothing else, she was glad that her parents had been spared the knowledge of their Soviet allies abandoning the city to its fate. With their Polish papers and Aryan looks, she and her aunt were sent to a work camp in Germany. They arrived in the autumn and she spent most of the winter shovelling snow in the biting cold. In the spring, with the war turning against them, the Nazis put their prisoners on trains to the Ruhr, which were heavily bombed by the RAF. Several years later, she learnt that Edwin had been a navigator on the raids. While aware that it was futile – even dangerous – to do so, she could not help wondering whether his had been one of the planes that had shot at her as she scrambled out of the burning train and ran for shelter in the woods. Later still, in the adventure story she made of her life, this was the point when Mark would yell out, more excited than appalled, ‘Daddy, you tried to kill Mummy!’ It was also the point when, as she buried her head in the hotel pillow, her eyes filled with tears.

The next morning they hiked to a nearby farm and, claiming to be refugees from the fighting, offered to work in exchange for food. The farmer’s wife, with a husband at the Front, could not afford to ask questions. She housed them in the barn and fed them on mealy porridge which, however
unpalatable
it might sound to her finicky children, was manna after the cabbage soup in the camp. They stayed there, milking cows and planting turnips, until the advent of the British troops. For the first time since their escape from the factory, Christina reverted to Marta. They were introduced to an intelligence officer, Squadron Leader Marks, who explained that he was on a mission to assist any surviving Jews. He pledged them his support and, with the help of an American refugee agency, set about finding them a home. This caused their greatest heartache since leaving the ghetto, for her aunt moved to
Amsterdam
to live with her one remaining cousin while agreeing with the Squadron Leader, soon to become Uncle Leon, that the best place for Marta to resume her education would be England.

Whenever she had told the tale to her children, she skimmed over the next three years since, impatient with their own schooldays let alone anyone else’s, they had no interest in her long struggle at the age of sixteen to make up for the lost years of study and, moreover, to do so in a foreign language. They were anxious for her to forge ahead to Oxford and their father, so that the story could reach its climax in them. Pondering it in private, however, she could not dispose of it so fast and, despite her exhaustion, she was transported back to the Southampton villa where, in the company of children from all over Europe, she had been taught English by a Hungarian professor with a horror-film accent. They were not encouraged to talk about their former lives, either their means of escape or their families’ annihilation. Most were grateful for this code of silence. They were still young enough to feel joy at being alive and eager to explore the new world in which they found themselves. The past was a closed book. It was only sixty years on that it had become her regular bedtime reading.

After she had been there several months, a middle-aged woman with plaits, wearing a felt suit and kid gloves – gloves which made a lasting impression on Marta – interviewed her about her future. Putting her respect for her dead father over her longing for independence, she expressed a wish to go to
university
. The woman promised to do all that she could to help. This turned out to be a mixed blessing when, to improve the mathematics that had been a
weakness
even in Warsaw, she had her placed in a class of eight-year-olds.

Lying in the pitch-black bedroom, Marta could feel the blush suffusing her cheeks as she recalled her unwitting response to a simple arithmetical problem. ‘If one train leaves the station at 9.30 a.m. travelling at 60 miles an hour with 45 people on board, and another train leaves the station at 9.45 a.m. travelling at 80 miles an hour with 30 people on board, how many miles will the whole group have travelled by 10.15?’ As her fellow pupils chewed their pencils, she struggled to choke back her tears. Her neighbour, a girl ten years her junior, tried to comfort her. ‘It’s not hard,’ she said, ‘I’ll show you.’ But the figures were far starker when the passengers she pictured were travelling in cattle trucks without food or water or sanitation, and the destination to which they were heading was death.

She matriculated at nineteen and gained a place at Oxford, where she
confronted
the full force of the English class system. As a foreigner, she had some measure of protection. People found her hard to pin down. With her exotic accent and murdered family, she might have been the granddaughter of the Tsar. She made no secret of being Jewish, but her friends made no mention of it either, any more than they would have done a harelip or a strawberry mark. She was invited to spend the weekend in country houses where
grammar-school
girls would never have been allowed through the door. She discovered the limits of toleration when talking to the grandmother of one of her friends.

‘Since the War, life has become so distressing,’ the old lady said.

‘What is it that most upsets you?’ she asked solicitously.

‘Hearing about refugee children.’

‘I agree. We must do everything in our power to find them homes.’

‘No, dear, you’ve missed the point. It’s not the children that upset me; it’s hearing about them.’

Although her memories of Oxford were defined by love affairs and sherry parties, she had spent the majority of her time in the library. She was far too conscious of the quirk of fate that had saved her from the camps to neglect her work. She gained a reputation for brilliance to add to her aura of suffering, a combination which proved to be irresistible to everyone from beaglers at Christ Church and poets at Magdalen to socialists at Balliol and rugby blues at Teddy Hall. It was not until Edwin, however, that she met a man whose intellectual quest matched, while never mirroring, her own. His gentleness, his passion and his military record enhanced the attraction of his rangy body and piercing eyes. Behind the cricket and crumpets and choral evensong, there was a touch of the ancient woodland about him, a primal energy that she was eager to tap. The irony was that she found herself allied to a family who were just as clannish as any of her weekend hosts. Edwin was destined for the church, a career (they never thought of it as a vocation) his parents had
considered
eminently suitable for a younger son but which, to their fury, he had refused to renounce after his brother’s ship was torpedoed in the North Sea.

They waited ten years to marry, during which Edwin served as a curate in Clapham, a vicar in Barnes and a chaplain at Oriel, while she travelled back and forth to the Hadza and wrote her first book, another bone of
contention
for her future parents-in-law, who held that the only acceptable work for women was motherhood for the upper classes, teaching for the middle, and domestic service for the lower. In age-old fashion, they mellowed once she gave birth to the twins, becoming the most doting of grandparents. With Edwin’s blessing, she determined not to deceive the children as to her family’s fate. Her pride in telling the story so as to honour the loss without dwelling on the horror faltered only when she woke one morning to find Susannah inking a number on her arm. ‘I’m doing it for you,’ she protested. ‘We had a film at school and Julia said you weren’t a real refugee because you didn’t have a tattoo.’

The memory dispelled sleep still further and she lay back on the pillow, prey to morbid conjecture. The same inauthenticity that her nine-year-old
daughter
had identified in her life, others had identified in her work, maintaining that to locate Eden in a remote Stone Age tribe was a sign not of inspiration but of despair. Thrashing about in the heavy sheets, restless in mind and body, she feared that they might be right. Was her belief in childhood innocence the result of her early exposure to adult depravity? Had she misled generations of children, not least her own, by her insistence on human perfectibility, driving Mark to his death and leaving Clement and Shoana helpless against disease and indoctrination? Craving reassurance, she crept to the bathroom, but the splash of cold water failed to drown the accusatory voices in her head. So she slipped back into bed and, shrinking from Edwin’s warmth for fear of waking him, turned on her side and tried to sleep.