All This by Chance Page 10

  ‘Part-time,’ Stephen said. ‘Mrs Stoddart works part-time.’

  ‘Today?’

  ‘Do you need to speak with her?’ How easily she irritated him.

  ‘Then she can keep an eye on this while we walk.’ She handed him the same shapeless bag she had been carrying that far back as well, as far as the ship drawing them all to what in time would be today, this minute, as she orders, ‘Give her this to guard.’ The quick drift of peppermint as she leaned closer to slide the bag across to him. She loosened the zip to set the Bible square. He glimpsed a hank of dull brown wool, the two stubby needles jabbed into its side.

  ‘My earthly belongings,’ she said, a surprising irony as Stephen lifted the bag to take it through to behind the shop. Almost as if having him on.

  ‘It will be safe enough here.’

  ‘As anywhere.’ Her eyes still holding him, unreadable. ‘Another planet, it might as well be,’ as he will write to Lisa, telling her of the unexpected visit, and what Miss McGovern will speak to him about. ‘What no one much would want deliberately to remember. That’s how distant she still seems to me.’

  ‘Ready for the road then?’ the old woman asked. Briskly, another unexpected word that came to him, the ease too of her movement beside him, for all the weight she carried. They crossed towards the house opposite where Doctor Satyanand’s family lived behind the surgery, and turned to the gentle sloping of West End Road down to the tidal flat of Cox’s Creek. Then as if they had spoken intimately for years, she began to tell him, in the harsh nasal accent that had always grated with him. Tell him of where he had always known she and Babcia had been together, and yet had no more spoken of till now than he had presumed to ask. ‘But we are going to talk about it now, Stephen, although you would rather be anywhere with anyone else, I’m aware of that, having to listen to me.’ A brief silence, the smell of mint on her breath, before she told him, matter-of-factly, ‘But you have to forget about disliking me. This is about Ruth.’ Her knowing as she began that her using his first name, even that, set his teeth on edge.

  She began to speak as fluently as if she read from a script, her talk clear and precise yet from time to time steeped in the language and images of her beliefs. The feeling too that it was for his sake alone that she spoke, and not her own. It was important that he attend to her. It was because he was the man whose home protected the one other human being who mattered unreservedly to her. All the rest who mattered to her as God intended, but Ruth for her sake alone. And so begins to tell him of the place he knew little of apart from what he had read of it, the listings of statistics and abuses that he knew all women who were confined there must have shared. A place David of course made it his business to know more about than the rest of them, David with that judgement of his father Stephen patiently bore.

  It was a small village until they were taken there, Miss McGovern said. Pretty in a way that brings tears to German eyes. There were—she supposed still were—black pines along the edge of a picture-book lake. The lies, she now repeated, the lies of the dark kingdom. They were almost the first to arrive, before it was even properly built, before it became the Gehenna which the world now knew it was. ‘A place at first to correct us rather than punish us. Before the criminals and the others were brought in with their differently coloured triangles so you would not mistake those from one group for those from any other. Before the gypsies and the communists and the Jews and then so many Poles, who were parts of those other groups as well, but not always. The more women who came, the more severe it got.’

  ‘I know all that,’ Stephen said. ‘I know that much.’

  She said how she and her sister and others who witnessed worked at first in the sandpits at the edge of the lake, and unloaded barges that brought materials to build the camp, and believe it or not in the beginning those called to Jehovah embarrassed them. Those who held them captive. ‘We were not political people like the communists and were not the unfortunates and the impure they rounded up or those they thought defiled by birth, who began to arrive soon after. They said to us, Sign this paper, cease to say what you say about the Führer, that he is the anti-Christ, and you are free to leave. But we refused to court damnation for so little a thing as release. We puzzled them and then they hated us even more. Then the more women who were brought for other reasons, the harder it became. There were more punishments. The guards became more severe. Evil for its own sake, but fortitude was still given us. We lived in barracks apart from the others but of course worked with them, stood next to them for hours in the Appellplatz when punishments occurred. You will know all that. Some fell and were beaten and some died and we prayed. The Lord was our citadel. And the hardest thing, I will tell you this Stephen, the greatest trial was to be hungry each minute of the day, the ravening beast it is. You think of that even more than fear of punishment. Hunger takes your mind as it does your body. Yet none of us would sign the paper. So of course they hated us. Some of the other women who suffered with us too. Some even of them. They hated us for being unbroken. But you know all that.’

  Stephen felt a quick shame that she still so irritated him. Bluntly, he again said to her, ‘Yes, I know that.’

  They were now at the corner where the road angled down to the tide slapping at the stone wall, the rise of the yellow clay banks and the overhang of sloped dark trees. It irked him that she spoke so directly and lucidly, and the fact that for all her ungainliness she walked firmly beside him, as little bothered by the exercise as himself. The unexpected discomfort of it too, that she continued to speak of the vileness of back there as calmly as if such things were normal, privations to be expected, confirmations of her faith. Her steady insistent voice now recalling for him the pointlessly grotesque punishments, the delight of those inflicting them, as they walked on past the solid ordinary houses, the wooden verandas, the careful curtains, the neatly unimaginative gardens. And then, bizarrely, she was speaking of rabbits. The big well-fed angoras it had been her sister Irma’s job to tend in their wood and wire hutches. Miss McGovern smiling at him, the absurdity of it striking her as well, the memory she said which was one of the few from the camp that filled her with joy as she thought of it, the one day when she walked to the hutches with her sister, and in a rare moment of their being unobserved, Irma handed her the warm placid weight of the creature she had picked up, for those few seconds, girls back on the farm together on the Stirling road. ‘Not that we had rabbits then,’ she said, ‘it was calves we doted on.’ At home before her sister married and chose to live in Germany with a man elected to spread their belief, and she had gone with her, they could not imagine life without each other, while yet another sister stayed at home until after the war. But the rabbit in that one fragment of time was passed between them, its long ears stroked, the quick pelt of its heart against her wrist, as they stood together in the blue smocks the prisoners wore, the white aprons, the violet triangles defining them.

  It was a privileged assignment, as everybody knew, to care for those big timid animals. Irma was chosen, Miss McGovern guessed, not so much for her gentleness but because she had worked in Hamburg for a veterinary doctor. Even more, because those who organised the camp in its thousand aspects knew these women with their spotless barracks and their ridiculous beliefs would no more steal even the mash that was fed to the cages than they would fornicate or strike a fellow prisoner or so easily write a signature that would open for them the camp gates. But her sister’s conscience defied the Beast in small things as in large. Even Miss McGovern had attempted to dissuade her. But no, Irma decided, the fur from her charges would become part of uniforms for the Reich. And so she refused the work that every other prisoner so envied her. It was February and the ice from the lake she was obliged to saw into blocks for punishment bit one hand so badly that two of her fingers were destroyed. She would be exhausted as she came back each evening but sang with the others because God was with us in the furnace. Sang without sound, as that was something they learned from the Poles,
who moved their lips but made no sound, yet even that shaping of silence was forbidden.

  Stephen interrupted her. He asked why it was important now for her to take him from the pharmacy, to speak this late of what for so long she had not thought he must know. ‘I’ve read in any case what you and Babcia and those other women endured. Why come back to that now?’

  They stopped at the white wooden railings of the zigzag that ascended from the footpath near the Sea Scout sheds. They turned and each held the iron rail above the slap of the tide against the sloped blue stones of the wall. The woman stood close enough for her shoulder to brush against his own as she faced out to the stretch of upper harbour and ignored his question. He thought, I might as well not be here, she is talking for herself. Yet later having to admit, no, it was not for her sake that she was telling him, not for some dark satisfaction in hauling at such memories, any more than she spoke to inform him for his own sake. Yet for the moment his impulse was to turn from her and walk back alone, to abandon her with her hands holding the metal bar where the narrowing creek mouth surged beneath them. But he knew too that she compelled him, that his resistance to hearing her out was by comparison a feeble thing.

  Miss McGovern picked up on his exasperation. Her hand touched briefly at his own. He moved his grasp further along the rail, away from her. She was speaking now, quietly still, but randomly, Stephen thought. About a Czech circus girl, a gypsy, who had defied as none other dared, who vaulted the wire and escaped and days later was brought back, thrashed and savaged by the dogs, no longer like a woman so much as a flayed carcass as she was flung in front of the assembled camp, the commandant shouting in his implacable rage at her presuming freedom was hers to choose. The prisoners had been herded together so quickly they stood with their different groupings mixed together, a jumble of triangles as one seldom saw. But rigid, not daring to move, each safe so long as the mutilated and barely moving woman absorbed the fury of a system provoked beyond endurance. For the first time Ruth stood next to Irma. After the Czech girl’s pulped and disfigured limbs had been dragged away, the entire camp was obliged to stand for several hours. Snow had begun to drift then fall thickly on them. Their shoulders, their heads, whitened. If a woman fell from exhaustion she was left to lie, and if she died, discipline had been maintained.

  Then Miss McGovern said, ‘There is point to all this. No one will tell you if I don’t. Even Ruth I think has forgotten the worst of it, her thoughts cleared of that at least.’ And without reprimand, without changing her tone, she said, ‘What you and Eva want to lie about to yourselves, that our darling’s mind is gone far more than you admit. I thank God for that.’ And then back to the day that remains so vivid for herself, and from now must become as much so for the man she tells. Telling him that when Irma fell the spread of snow around her brightened with the flow of blood not from the fall but the first sign of what she soon enough would die of, the haemorrhaging of her lungs. And again, the extraordinary fact so Stephen thinks of their standing in the utter ordinariness of a suburban street, above the grey-green harbour with its flecking from the slowly moving clouds, and the even tone in which she tells him of the day she wants him to know, speaking without distress or grief, for nothing now might change it by a jot. This was and is.

  ‘It was done so quickly,’ she said. Ruth knelt to help her sister. She had taken a rag from her smock and held it against the pulsing mouth. The blood showed on her hand. A female guard, who had been a housewife and a hairdresser in the local village until twelve months before, shouted and ran at her and kicked her hand from where it held the other woman’s head. As Ruth lurched forward, spreading her hand to support her, the guard brought down the heel of her boot with such force, three, four times, the fingers buckling, the sound as if of snapped twigs, Miss McGovern said, like twigs, and silence oddly around all else apart from the shout, the stomping foot, the raking of the guard’s breath at the exertion. Ruth sitting back, holding her hand, Irma now on her knees, stretching towards the guard who swung her crop across her, across Ruth’s neck as well, and yelling now, the guard calling that she was being attacked, and one of the male guards who stood further back from the assembled women, their rifles at their shoulders, rushed to help, unslinging his rifle as he ran. By the time he arrived where the three women, the two prisoners and the guard with her long hair flaring back, her arm again upraised, grouped as if posing in some strange tableau, the guard’s rifle had been turned so the butt was brought down with the precision of a man trained for such provocations, against Ruth’s upper arm. Time and again. Her blood spreading almost black against the upper half of her blue smock.

  Miss McGovern said, ‘I stood with the others and watched her beaten and taken away to what was called the Block and some of us were told to take my sister back to our barracks. And Ruth I saw a week later, but her hand was wrecked and I became her friend. Irma was sent back to the ice. With her illness it could not be long. And somehow that we could not understand Ruth from time to time passed chunks of bread to one of our people that was brought back to Irma, who died that spring. After the linden trees at one end of the camp had broken into leaf, because she said that to me, that the cold would soon enough be past and we could walk where we would touch them as we had the year before.’

  They were back on the rise towards the Terminus shops. What usefully might Stephen say to her? He understood the depth of what bound her to Babcia, that at least had come of it. Yet why wait so long, so many years, to let him know even that? And now another last weird telling, as if it was of some significance that he should know this too. ‘There is an opera with a madwoman in it and there was a real madwoman among the politicals who sang that other woman’s song over and over. Finally no one could bear it and at last she was shot, but when Ruth was put in the Block she was in the cell with that woman to punish her. But Ruth was the only one who calmed her. Who could get her to stop singing. I should have told you that.’ And before they reached the corner back at Garnet Road, she had time to tell him that after her hand was broken Ruth could not return to the typing she had done in the transport block, work she so excelled at that the senior officer, a man more decent than the rest, now arranged for her to transfer to the clothing store where jobs were greatly prized. That she spoke German even better than Polish was in her favour. There was a place for her to go to because a woman who had been the lover of a guard who then reported her for theft had hanged herself. ‘Things like that were not uncommon.’

  The job she now went to was a simple one. When new prisoners arrived they handed across their clothes and were given those they would wear in the camp. Everything was orderly. What the women wore and what they might have carried with them was entered in a ledger and would be returned when they were freed. Even lockets, trinkets, religious things were entered too. The camps set great store on doing things the correct way. But of course there were things women did not admit to having, valuable things that they hid in the linings of jackets and sewed into hems—rolls of money, pieces of jewellery. Diamonds, even those. It was these that were searched for and it was Ruth’s job to call out what was found, to tell the woman who sat at a table and typed the list, and the valuables were placed in cartons where a guard kept watch and sealed them when each was full. But some of the depraved prisoners and the kapovas too at times lied about the necklaces and earrings and bracelets found in the clothing, ones that were stolen and could buy favours from the guards. Such things could lead to privileges but also to savage beatings. Even worse. In the camp no certainty was fixed from day to day, even punishments. There was nothing, Miss McGovern said, that was spared in the evil kingdom.

  Then silence, for the last few minutes of their walking back towards the Terminus, to the neat and almost toy-like row of shops, the bright advertising writing across the windows of Mr Cahill’s the grocer, Mr Caddy’s the butcher, the wooden toys in the shop on the corner. The big woman Stephen longed to be free of waited at the entrance to the shop while he entered, apolo
gised to Mrs Stoddart for his time away, and came back to her with her bag. His assistant had looked at him, taking in his tenseness, his so unlikely curtness as he pointed to the bag behind her and told her, ‘Give me that.’ And then, ‘You needn’t stay any longer,’ and waited until she had left, before going back to the woman who stood in the doorway, who moved aside but without greeting Mrs Stoddart as she passed.

  She said, ‘I will need to see you again.’

  He knew without her having to spell it out that she had not come to the end of what she needed to say to him, yet he felt again the certainty that he himself was incidental to whatever she might have in mind; that the telling, the end point of it, was more her concern than his. He nodded rather than answered her.

  ‘Next week, then,’ she told him. ‘I will telephone before I come,’ and crossed to the waiting bus on the other side of the road.

  From the shop he watched the trolley bus depart, heard the stir of the overhead wires. He laid his hands on the top of the counter. He resented so much about the fanatical woman’s visit, her raking over details he could see no point in imposing on him. Yet the distress at what must have been part of every day for Babcia. He hoped her friend was right at least about that, that so much had faded for the old lady he watched each day as she moved about the house, went about her routines in the kitchen, her sitting for hours with her good hand cradling the other in her lap, her laborious simple needlework, her speaking the handful of words Eva especially shared with her. But why that other woman speaking now of what she might have told him years before, yet had chosen not to? Details he hoped by now beyond the old woman’s seemingly inane contentment. Miss McGovern would be right, surely, about that?