The Prosperous Thief (30 page)

It was easier with Henry’s things, there being so few. And the personal items, even the everyday ones like his watch and cufflinks somehow less attached to the person he was. His baking implements, however, were in quite a different category and Laura had wanted to keep these, not that she ever baked but they had revealed a side to her father that rarely surfaced in the rest of his life.

‘Here are my words,’ he used to say, indicating his cakes.‘Here are my words.’

‘Don’t you find it odd,’ Nell now said as she cleared a shelf for Henry’s baking implements,‘that your father should so assiduously remove every element of his Germanness?’

Laura shook her head. It was obvious to her that extreme circumstances demanded extreme responses. But with Etti’s cache of Holocaust horrors so fresh, she would prefer a change of topic, so decided not to elaborate.

‘To jettison an entire language,’ Nell persisted. And then a moment later:‘I wonder what language he dreamed in.’

Laura felt herself bristle: she didn’t want to talk about this.And besides, Nell’s comment showed that even after all these years there were things she would never understand.

‘So teach me,’ Nell said, responding to the exasperation on Laura’s face.‘I want to understand.’

Laura sighed. All she wanted was a few hours in the sunny present. And besides, there was nothing more to say; Nell already knew about Henry’s escape into Holland, his incarceration at Westerbork, the move to Belsen in 1944 where only pure luck had saved him from typhus. Peace, she found herself thinking, just give me a few hours peace. But Nell was waiting.

‘I can’t answer for his dreams,’ Laura said at last.‘As for the rest, you know all there is to know about him.’

‘And a wife?’ Nell said. ‘What about another wife? He was so much older than your mother. Was he married before? Were there any children?’

Nell, following her own interests in true Nell fashion, seemed totally oblivious to Laura’s mood. And now it was too late. A wife? Another family? How painfully incriminating were the questions Laura never thought to ask. Her father had never suggested another family, so the possibility had never occurred to her. He had been twenty-nine when war broke out, old enough to be married and certainly old enough for children. But how completely can one block out the past, even a person as thorough as her father? Surely not to the extent of another family?

There was a chorus in her brain pleading against a first family and in its wake an echoing doubt. With her guilt gathering strength, she assured Nell there had been neither wife nor children, not simply because the habit of protecting her parents was so deeply ingrained, but because it seemed such a mark of failure that this most basic of considerations had never figured in her own map of Henry. What else, Laura wondered, had she not asked him? And had he been aware of her omissions? Had he been hurt by them?

‘Are you sure?’ Nell said. ‘No wife? No children? Nothing stashed away behind that strong silent facade.’

Laura laughed although she really wanted to stifle. ‘I’m sure there was plenty, but not another a family.’

Nell finished stacking the baking implements.‘The last of their brilliant career,’ she said. And, Laura hoped, the last of Nell’s curiosity.

But it was not to be. Everything was packed away and a free afternoon stretched before them when Nell brought Etti’s special cache of memories back into the kitchen. Laura waved them away.

‘You can’t just ignore them,’ Nell said. And when Laura failed to make a move, Nell took out the items and again displayed them on the bench.

Laura stood back and watched.‘Mother’s memories,’ she said at last,‘and now my pellets of uranium.’

She forced herself to survey the things. Precious enough to keep close, yet profoundly uncomfortable, they posed a danger to the smooth conduct of her life. She wanted to preserve them, no question of that, but she didn’t want to be stumbling over them all the time. She recalled a cardboard gift box someone had given her, printed in a riot of flowers and sparkle which Etti would have loved. It would be perfect. She rummaged around until she found it, tossed aside the old bills it contained, packed up all Etti’s bits of a saved life, searched for some tape, sealed the box and put it at the back of the cupboard under the stairs to glow like uranium, with a half-life that given the modern memory was not long enough. The whole exercise took less than ten minutes. She felt much more her old self when she returned to the kitchen.

She walked over to the windows and looked out.‘How about a stroll along Merri Creek while the weather’s still fine.’

Then she saw the transcript in Nell’s hand.

‘What are you doing with that?’

‘I took it out of the box.’

Laura could not believe it. She had herself paused a moment over both the tape and transcript, but the possibility her mother had held something back from the family, perhaps the worst atrocity of all, had settled the issue, and she had quickly added both to the box. Then Nell had taken the transcript out. Laura simply couldn’t believe it.

Nell was now at her side, an arm around her shoulders. Laura tried to shake her off. But Nell was firm. ‘By all means store the tape,’ she said. ‘You’ll know when it’s time to hear your mother’s voice again. But the transcript is different. All these years since your mother’s death, and how many times have you said that silence never suited her? So here’s a fresh crop of her words, and nicely cushioned by print.’

Fresh or not, these were not the words Laura was wanting from her mother. She was furious with Nell. She had no right.

Nell insisted she was only thinking of Laura. ‘You can’t just pretend it doesn’t exist,’ she said.

She made a pot of coffee, talking gently and persuasively all the while. And continued to talk while they drank it.

‘If you’re unable to read it,’ she said at last, ‘let me.’ She leafed through the pages. ‘There’s quite a lot here about your father. Perhaps there’s something about the American woman.’

Laura didn’t know what to do. Such fear of what might happen, how sentences lead to corners, and around every corner unexpected dangers. Or, it suddenly occurred to her, perhaps unexpected surprises, not-unpleasant surprises. Perhaps even the knowledge there was in fact nothing to fear.

‘All right then,’ she said at last.‘And yes, you read it to me.’

They settled themselves into armchairs, one either side of the room. Laura curled her legs beneath her, and at the first words she closed her eyes. Nell read through the late afternoon. There were intermittent storms of a hard pelting rain followed by an almost blinding sun, and in that brief brightness steam would swirl off the wooden deck. And the clouds would roll in again and more rain. As Nell continued, Laura felt herself pulled back through the years to the desolation of postwar Europe, to hordes of bedraggled people hauling themselves over rough terrain, and among them her mother, no bigger than a child and pathetically alone.

June 1945 and a burning sun and Etti is still walking. After Paul’s farm, after the hideous return to Lodz, after the first of the assembly points, Etti is moving westwards. As absurd as it may seem, Germany is safer than Poland for a Jew.

She knows yet cannot believe that everyone she loves is dead. It makes no sense that she, an ordinary girl after all, would be the only one spared. Although that sentiment sparks of God and she’s jettisoned him; cows are more reliable, more useful too.

As she walks through the dusty heat and insect haze, she is entirely alone. In the mornings the sun blazes hot against her back, in the afternoons it glares whitely in her eyes. Her feet burn no matter what the time of day. Members of the
Bricha
, the Jewish underground, are hard at work gathering up Jews and escorting them to safety. Or if she’s to believe the rumours, the
Bricha
, comprised of hardline Zionists, will only pretend to guide you to one of the DP camps and spirit you to Palestine instead. Etti, so vague about what she wants, knows she does not want Palestine. It is, as far as she is concerned, just another Jewish ghetto despite its orchards and olive groves. She doesn’t want the
Bricha’s
help, she doesn’t want anyone to tell her where to go or what to do, so she makes up an American relative, an aunt in New York, and if the
Bricha
, or anyone else for that matter, questions her destination, she will say she is heading towards the Americans in Germany and from there she hopes to join her aunt in America.

Etti wouldn’t know where to find America on a map.

Death is everywhere, death has been a constant ever since she and her family moved into the ghetto. At first there was a stream of deaths, then with the disease and starvation and the decay of too many people in far too small a space, a torrent. And a distinctive smell, a putrid, throat-stopping, sweet-and-sour smell. And now on the move at the end of the war the death smell is everywhere, a stinking rot that clings like a damp blanket. Her own skin becomes death-wrapped; where she goes, goes death.

Etti gathers the shell of herself and for the next month, on foot, by lorry, by train, she crosses Poland down into Czechoslovakia and on to Germany. Advice is thick in the air, facts are thin on the ground. Some say go here, others say go there, and Etti decides she’ll go wherever people dispense soup and care and ask no questions. As she approaches the German border she hears that Germany has been occupied not just by the Americans and British but by the Russians and French as well. Each country has set up its own camps. To choose between the four is like being presented with four different types of potato.

As it happens there is no choice. She and her group are shepherded off a train not far from Munich and taken to a nearby camp. It is July and hot and Etti and her fellow travellers hesitant with heat and exhaustion. The camp is large without trees or grass and rimmed with barbed wire – just like the concentration camps, someone says, but as far as Etti is concerned it’s just another blatantly temporary place for people who are prey to the temporary. The camp is run by Americans, and a proud lot they are. They won the war and they want gratitude. Their memories are not so much short as poorly sourced, for they seem not to know what the Jews have suffered.

In this camp Jews are not only outnumbered ten to one, they are the dregs. The Americans far prefer the Poles and Balts, so much neater, cleaner and tidier than the Jews, and more obliging and courteous as well. But even more desirable and certainly more helpful are the Germans. Etti is horrified. Germans have been given positions of responsibility in this camp. So despite all that’s happened, Germans are still ordering Jews around. The Americans don’t seem to understand. One day a crust of bread separates you from death, one day herded into showers and killed, one day hounded by Germans and Poles and Ukrainians, and the next day the war is over, there’s food for all, the showers don’t kill and you’re expected to live among your murderers. Etti is not surprised to find Jews pushing themselves forward for food, or reluctant to enter the showers, or failing to obey orders given by their recent persecutors. Even with her limited education and guardedly shut off from the world, Etti has no trouble understanding the situation. But not so her keepers.

Old enemies are everywhere. In Etti’s barracks there are four Jews and the rest are Poles. These Americans group DPs according to nationality not persecution. The hatred is so thick you couldn’t cut it with a sharp knife. Etti hates the Poles even more than she hates the Germans – because of the betrayal, because a long time ago before living memory she had Polish friends, because they so strenuously denied her when her need for them surpassed the threat of death. A cupboard, a corner, the dark beneath a bed, she would have crouched anywhere if it were offered. But until she met the farmer it was not. ‘You want to kill us?’ her former friends would say.‘You want our blood on your hands?’

And what of the blood on Polish hands? she wonders.What of that invisible stain?

There’s no leaving this camp and no place to hide. Etti passes the mornings wandering the perimeter of the area, avoiding the faces of her enemies. In the early afternoon when most of the people are elsewhere, she returns to her space in the long Nissen hut, wraps herself in a blanket like she did with the quilt in Paul’s barn and transports herself into her imaginings. One day she observes a Jewish woman stealing food from the possessions of one of the Poles. Etti deliberately makes a sound. The woman whips around but when she sees it is Etti visibly relaxes. ‘If they had stolen only food from me,’ she says,‘I wouldn’t be stealing from them now.’

Etti hears the situation is no better in the British camps.Why can’t people understand what they’ve been through? But far from understanding, these Americans actually want gratitude. For what? Why should any seventeen year old be grateful to be alive? Seventeen year olds expect to be alive. And where’s the gratitude in having survived everyone and everything you’ve ever held dear only to find yourself still at the bottom of the pile? Easy for the Poles and Balts and Germans to be grateful, they’ve chosen their displacement, but no one wants the Jews, not even when there are so few left. Although one of the Americans, his hands roving through Etti’s blonde hair and over the soft skin of her neck, tells her she’ll have no trouble.‘You don’t look Jewish,’ he says.