The Prosperous Thief (15 page)
Willi and Alice, still holding on to each other, turn around for one last look. He so determinedly solemn appears suddenly very young, while Alice is old with concentration as if she is seeking to brand this picture of her parents on memory. Later she will say she began mourning her parents when she stepped onto the platform, leaving them behind the barrier.
Renate holds tight to Martin. The last they see is Alice being separated from Willi and put in a carriage with girls, while Willi is ushered into a different carriage for boys. So much for Willi will look after you, so much for any promise made with certainty.
F
ifty-five years later, Alice Carter, née Lewin, stood at the entrance of Drayton House in Bloomsbury, London. Upstairs, in the Central British Fund archives, was the record of her arrival in this country, the record she had travelled from America to see, the record she already knew. Hers was a history without question mark. Mother died 1943, Auschwitz; father survived Westerbork then died 1945, Bergen-Belsen; his brother, Fritz, disappeared 1938, presumed dead; aunt and uncle, Dora and Erich Friedman, slave labour in Poland then death at Chelmno; their son, Willi, Israeli citizen, married to a sabra, father of three, grandfather of seven, killed in a boating accident last year. And Hannah and Jonathon Moser, to whom Alice owed her life, died comfortably in old age, Napa Valley, California.
Nothing to discover, but here all the same and, as she pressed the elevator button, too late to turn back.With the creak and clang of a machine much the same vintage as the rest of the building, Alice opted for the stairs. She had not expected the archive to be housed in quite such a place as this. It had an institutional feel, the grey-green walls and no-colour lino suggesting a hostel or community centre from the 1960s. In America, such buildings had either slipped into slums or been renovated to within an inch of their original lives. And while there was a leap into the present at the top of the stairs with the security system, it was no more sophisticated than the number pad on her building back home in San Francisco. The whole place with its decay and its barely perceptible nod to modernity struck her as very English. She had expected a more streamlined structure, she now realised, something more along the lines of a miniature Fort Knox.
Exactly on the hour Alice pressed the buzzer. She explained her business and was admitted, only to be informed by the receptionist that the archivist had been detained. Just a fifteen-minute delay, the woman said in strongly accented English, perhaps Mrs Carter would like some coffee while she waited?
Alice declined as the English coffee did not appeal, and besides, would only send her to the bathroom again. She sat where directed, on a small chair dwarfed by the high receptionist counter, and wrapped herself up tight. After a minute of self-conscious staring at the plastic veneer of the counter, she told the receptionist she would prefer to wait in the hall. With a ‘Suit yourself ’ barely audible above the noise of an ageing printer, Alice returned to the hall and the vinyl chair she had noticed there.
She sat stiff-backed in the dingy space. To her left was the door to reception, to her right the office containing the archive. Grimy windows, low-wattage lighting and marbled walls would have made reading impossible if she were not already too jittery to read.
She rummaged in her bag for her compact, checked her make-up which did not require checking, patted her hair which was lying neatly in its waves, smoothed her suit which was perfectly smooth, and finding she was her usual tidy self, capitulated to a fretful waiting. Only for her son would she be putting herself through this, only for her son.
Raphe had always hungered for more history than was ever available.
Tell me about my grandparents, he would ask as a young child. Tell me about Germany. Tell me about the war. Tell me how you and Uncle Willi escaped. At first she had been reluctant to respond. She had tried so hard to shut the lid on the past and was terrified of stirring up the old losses. At the same time she had never wanted to deprive Raphe of anything, this son who from his earliest years had borne an uncanny resemblance to her father. In Raphe it seemed her carefully packaged life was to be ripped apart.
Raphe had persisted with his questions, and eventually – he would have been eleven or twelve at the time – Alice had relented. She told him about Krefeld and the escape to Berlin, about the
Kindertransport
and arriving in England, and of course about her parents, although her memories of them were already muted. She had tried to concentrate the fading visions, would actually construct pictures in her mind, building them up bit by bit. But she knew they were not her memories, more a collage of other people’s pictures and stories. For the sad fact of it was the years prior to
Kristallnacht
had been lost. Until she started talking with her son, the most vivid picture she retained of her mother was of her hunched in a chair at the window of their Krefeld flat, thin and bedraggled and grieving for her own dead mother, and the main image of her father was the knot of shivering bones that had returned from Sachsenhausen. As for the two of them together, she could still see them standing behind the barriers at Anhalter Station in the middle of a freezing night, their poor faces tight and white as they sent their only child into an unknown future.
Talking with her son brought alive other visions, other memories, and soon she experienced an unexpected pleasure in revisiting the past. She would tell Raphe stories passed on to her by others, Willi in particular, who, being so much older, remembered her parents well. Indeed, if not for Willi her storehouse of family memories would be distressingly bare. Although Raphe, with an imagination which shunned all limits, showed himself adept at improvisation. If my grandparents had survived, he would say, I’m sure they would have come to America. And they would have lived with us and taught me German. And my grandfather would have become the most famous silk maker in the country, and my grandmother the most famous silk designer. The boy crafted story after story to the delight of both mother and son.
But as he grew, Raphe wanted more history than even imagination and borrowed memories could supply, so when he was old enough he flew to Israel to talk with Willi himself. Yet still he was not satisfied, for when he returned home and to college he swapped from law to literature and ultimately the newly formed Holocaust studies, and nothing his parents said would dissuade him.
‘Give him time,’ Alice said to her husband, ‘I’m sure he’ll tire of it.’
Raphe didn’t, still he wanted more history than anyone could supply.
‘How much more do you want?’ Alice had asked. ‘Isn’t the Holocaust enough?’ But all-American boy she had raised, Raphe wanted his own personal narrative. And if that were not enough, he also wanted to ‘make connections’.
‘All I hear is death and more death,’ he said. ‘Let’s see who’s alive. Maybe a next-door neighbour, maybe the local butcher –’ ‘I’d have no idea of his name.’
‘Then the funny man in Düsseldorf, the restaurateur Katz. Let’s put a spark among all this dead history.’
Her son, now thirty-six years old, was an academic in Holocaust studies, with a passion for volcanoes.
‘My history,’ Alice said, ‘is hardly Mt Etna.’
And yet here she was at the archives searching for history. Raphe had wanted to accompany her, and while she still rarely refused him anything, she had refused him this; not knowing what she might find and unable to predict how she might react, she didn’t want her son watching. So they had parted not far from the British Museum, Raphe to wander the Charing Cross Road bookshops and Alice to head north through Bloomsbury to the archives.
At another time she would have enjoyed the walk through literary London, but today she was anxious, as had been the case ever since sending her letter of enquiry to the
Kindertransport
archives. Indeed, she had been so bound up in her anxiety as to be quite shocked at the simplicity of the procedure. After her initial contact she had forwarded birth certificate and proof of identity as requested, and they would have sent a copy of her file without further ado if she had wanted. She had told them to hold the mail, believing it preferable to be present in case there were any revelations. Better too, she thought, to be away from home for any surprises, without friends or family as witnesses, at a time known by her in advance. And even while she was making the arrangements to fly to London, she acknowledged the irony in what she was doing: that while there was no changing nor controlling any of the information in her file, she would do everything possible to take charge of the manner of revelation – rather like a drowning man who spends his last minutes deciding whether to die with his eyes open or closed.
While it might seem absurd to travel several thousand miles to see some papers that could easily have been sent, Alice had good reason. Several times during her adult years and absolutely without warning, images and events from the past had blasted in on her with the force of a cyclone. Shocking events, fearfully shocking, indeed any less shocking and she might have lived with them as she had so many of the horrors. Yet when you realise you have forgotten something so significant as your grandmother dying before your eyes, you are terrified at what else you might have blocked out. And the questions this raises about the type of person you are. For how could Alice have forgotten her grandmother climbing onto the table while the SS bashed her father to a pulp? Her grandmother standing with her arms raised high, large and stately and as motionless as a statue, then falling to the ground and the blistering crash as she hit the floor.
Forgotten, all forgotten for years, until one day when she and Phil, together with Raphe who was only a toddler at the time, had crossed the bridge into Sausalito for a picnic. After the meal, Phil and Raphe had fallen asleep and Alice had wandered off into the parklands. She was thinking how Sausalito was a nice place to visit but not a place to live when her attention was caught by an old, heavy-featured woman walking along the path, pushing a shopping cart heaped with junk. As Alice drew closer she saw the woman was more worn than old, closer still and she heard the woman’s muttering, was unnerved by the utterly closed-in focus of that incomprehensible speech. Suddenly the woman let go of her cart and mounted a pile of boulders to the side of the path, stood a moment at the summit, her arms raised to the sky, then leapt or fell to the ground. A fraction of a second, then she was on her feet again, moving down the path with her trolley and her muttering. But in that moment with the woman poised high on the rocks, Alice was filled with a fear so intemperate, so uninhabitable, that it left her crouched on the grass and gasping. Recognising a lightning strike from the past, she knew she should get up and resume her life before the event materialised and left her forever changed. Yet she did not – or could not. And there it was, returned after three decades, her grandmother in an act of courage that took her last breath, and her father a pile of bloodied, wrecked flesh on the floor.
There had been many instances over the years when Alice had learned that one forgets what is unbearable to live with. So if there were a possibility at the archive of being confronted with information so dreadful she had banished it from memory, she did not want witnesses, and certainly not her son.
While Raphe was the main reason she was here, he was not the only one. It was the passage of time – two years ago she had turned sixty – which enabled her to take the risk this visit ignited. It is one thing to say your parents and friends and most of your family were killed in the war, and quite another to believe it. Unequivocally believe it. Death leaves no room for hope. But as long as you don’t test the facts, it is possible, just possible you might be wrong.
And what abundant dreams have been inspired by that tiny nugget of doubt. So many joyful meetings to contrive and ever-after happinesses to imagine. Take for example, an exhibition of Chagall in New York, and you’re there not to work, just as a regular visitor with a couple of hours to spare. Through the rooms you stroll, bathing in the lightness of being that is Chagall’s unique touch, lingering in front of the two paintings you have worked on, savouring the pleasure which comes from knowing a painting down to its brush strokes and flares of colour. Then someone stops next to you, standing far too close and seemingly more interested in you than the painting. Finally you turn (in your dreams you always prolong this moment) and see a woman taller than you, and not unlike the women in Modigliani’s later work, a woman you recognise from memory. And –
It’s your mother! Can you believe it? Your mother, she’s alive and in New York City, and she’s not changed at all! You look again, she recognises you, her long-lost daughter for whom she has never stopped searching, has never given up hope she would find. Such a joyful reunion. You thought she was dead. She feared you were lost. And now the two of you together. Who would believe it!