All This by Chance Read online

  ‘This man?’ Stephen prompted her.

  ‘He was a political because his triangle told you that. He was taller than average height and fair and some of the women liked to look at him and at times he would come into where we worked because one of the female guards was a friend of his. The sister of the one who had been a hairdresser before we came. She was a stupid woman and she would sometimes give him things she had taken from the boxes where Ruth put what was found hidden in clothes when new intakes were brought in. Nothing was really secret in the camps. And once I saw him speak to Ruth as he passed and when she said nothing about it to me later I knew she must be afraid. But at other times the guard pretended not to notice as he passed the table Ruth stood at and would bend as though to ease his shoe or pick up something he had dropped and later she would share with me the chunk of bread he had placed on the floor beneath the table. Share it with me, or if one of the women in her barracks was ill, conceal it and take it back for her. But even to me she said only that she had known the man in his own town and he had lived with a Jew, which he must have kept secret, to be here as one of the favoured prisoners. She said his giving her food was to keep her from recognising him, but she was in fear of him as well. We all feared those the guards took as lovers.’

  ‘But why this now?’ Stephen asked. ‘Telling me about this now?’

  ‘She must never be reminded of it.’

  ‘She remembers next to nothing. You’ve told me that.’

  ‘Either of them. Hear talk of that.’

  ‘You mean Eva too?’

  ‘We must look after them.’

  Again, that surge of asperity as Stephen tells her, ‘As if we never have.’

  He moved his chair to distance himself from this soft watching woman. She put her hand on his sleeve to keep him still. She said, ‘There is a man, an American, who is writing a book about them. About the male camp. Why you need to know.’

  ‘A man who was there?’

  ‘A relative of one. Some of them become obsessed. A little like your David but much more so. He is one of those. He goes to different countries, wanting to speak with people. Tracking down. He has written to me. He knows of the man who drove the bread truck. Whose lover was a guard and who stole things, and the American says there was a woman, a Jew, he had a child with before the war. Other things he has found out. He knows where people are, the people he works for spend such money to find out. He is writing a history of the men’s camp and every story he says is important to him.’

  The point of it all at last, Stephen comprehends.

  ‘I lied to him when I wrote back. I said I have no idea who the woman is that he gave food to, that I didn’t know her name even.’

  ‘He will want to talk with her?’

  ‘With her. With Eva.’

  She took up her scarf and tied it again about her head, the distanced incomprehensible believer he had always known, and yet now returned as something else, the breadth of a life spreading behind her, beyond her, that he honoured her for, and yet now feared as well.

  ‘I’ll make sure,’ he said. ‘I’ll make sure that he doesn’t.’

  ‘I know that,’ Miss McGovern said. She was the first to stand from the table. There was nothing more to say, once she had said, ‘I would kill him first.’ The same fervour in her eyes as she told him that, the same iron conviction, as if he had challenged her certainty in Christ, and what she would do to assert it. To give proof.

  Some months later, after a summer’s lucent evening when she sat as she so liked to do under the canvas awning at the side of the house, sipping at the fruit mix whose recipe she had kept with her from childhood and passed on to the house that became for so long her home in Westmere, Babcia died in her sleep.

  David was more distressed than his parents. He flew up from his work in Wellington and was home by early afternoon. He had told his father when he phoned, ‘You cannot stop this at least. The way it must be done.’ His friend Rabbi Liebermann arranged the burial, the mourners who stood at the grave with the black-suited family, the few neighbours who were not of the faith standing respectfully back, Mr Cahill from the shop next to the pharmacy awkwardly holding his hat in front of him, moving its brim in circles, and Doctor Satyanand whom Stephen had called the morning before, after he entered the kitchen and for the first time had not seen his wife’s aunt already there at the bench, smiling, waiting for him, the kettle boiled, the eggs poaching in the pan.

  Rabbi Liebermann had said the prayers of the Kaddish, some of which he repeated in English for the family, the words whose timelessness and resonance neither Eva the dead woman’s niece, nor the husband devoted to her, for all their affection comprehended as more than ritual respect. David had spoken briefly and with deep feeling, and quoted King Solomon, ‘Greater is the day of death than the day of birth,’ and took a shovel to begin the filling in of the grave. His parents left the opened scar of earth hand in hand, Stephen on the point of saying, then checking himself for what may have sounded trite, how the woman they had buried was a life they had seen like a shape through frosted glass, its reality quite other to what they saw. ‘Miss McGovern,’ Eva said as they reached the car, ‘I suppose was not allowed? By her church?’

  When the attending vehicles had turned and driven back, a bulky woman stepped from the side of the crematorium at some distance from the Jewish graves. She had made the journey from the city in the Henderson bus, and now, once the mourners were gone, she stood at the deep trench the two workmen were already filling. The men stood and walked back a little way until the woman in her dark scarf had looked down for several minutes. She placed a stone she took from her pocket at the foot of the grave. The earth already concealed the metal plaque that might have told her, ‘Ruth Hannah Friedmann, 1903-1976.’

  ‘A long wait till the next bus, lady,’ the older workman said, but the woman passed him without speaking. She walked towards the cemetery gates and the steep hill where she would wait for the returning bus. The men went back to their work. ‘Surly bitch.’

  The other told him, ‘Saw a woman once over that other section take her top off and start cutting herself with this broken shell thing.’

  The older man looked at his watch. ‘Two. Reckon that should do it. Two-twenty? Give or take?’’

  And the American did come, but not for some time. He had written to Eva a letter in which he said so many things had held up the book he wanted to write, but at last he had come to Australia, where several folk lived who could help with his research, and now would come on across to Mrs Ross’s country. He had heard so many fine things about it, he looked forward to his visit quite apart from his project. Need he say, he would be in her debt should she agree to see him? And his sincerest sympathy might he offer for the loss of her aunt some way back now, a woman he would greatly have liked to interview, but time was the constant enemy if history was your passion, as it was his. A Jehovah’s Witness woman who had been her aunt’s great friend and now lived in the hills out of Sydney, she had written to him saying there was no point in his getting in touch with Mrs Ross, there was nothing to remember, nothing to tell, that language had always been a barrier, and then her relative’s fading mind through several years. Yet even so, he repeated, he would be much in Mrs Ross’s debt. ‘Anything one retrieves about our people, we owe them that.’

  Eva had written back. She did not tell Stephen, who for all his kindness could be overprotective. Stifling. As if certain decisions were out of her hands. Her tendency to worry, he would say. To get a little down to things. To veer in her moods. The things she knew he talked about with Doctor Satyanand. There’s this and that, his friend would say, that might be worth thinking of? Some promising new medication? Eva always being able to joke about it when it was raised, so both men smiled back as she told them, ‘I don’t think so, Stephen,’ or, ‘No, I think we can put that on the back burner. Take a raincheck. Give it time to simmer down.’ Phrases that amused him. Or these last couple of years in any case, t
hat unexpected sense of lightening up. Just Babcia not being here, that of course she could never say, but the load that had lifted. The sense of freedom she was briefly reluctant to admit to herself, the elation of that. And yet a curious sense of being let down as well, all this freedom I had never expected to know, and yet what is there for me to do with it?

  The American arrived in a rental car he hired at the airport. He had booked in at a hotel and then came straight to see her. ‘I know, I know,’ he said, raising both hands towards her, confessing to his obsession as she opened the front door to him. ‘That’s what we become,’ meaning a little off-beam, a touch too hyped, as his forefinger twirled beside his temple. She liked him because he was so open, so boyish, though she guessed he could not be that much younger than herself. He showed her photos of his mother, his family, the twin boys wearing kippahs. Josh looked at the photo himself before returning it to his wallet. ‘A big day, that,’ he said. He explained his uncle had been in several camps, but mostly in the one he now researched. It was forgotten by most people that men had been there too. Or right next to it. His uncle had written an account and talked about this other man he had thought a friend and who had done some kind of deal then disappeared just before the Russians arrived and the liberation. ‘I just want to know what kind of man he was.’ And then he said, ‘It is a matter of regret to me your aunt has passed away.’

  ‘To be honest, we never talked of it. So much was lost. I mean from back then. And we knew so little. My son is the one in the family most interested, but most of that is from what he read. Or picked up from her friend, not from her. We are not close to it all in the way you are. I think I told you that when I wrote. My own background. My being English.’

  She had no doubt the man talking to her would have disapproved, and was too kind to say so. Instead, he said, ‘That Scottish woman who refused to see me. How odd all that is.’

  Eva smiled. ‘If you believe as someone like that believes there is nothing strange about anything.’

  Josh opened his folder to take copied pages from a magazine. A student photo of some kind, he said, before any of the young people had any notion of what would happen in a few years’ time. He pointed to the man in the second row. His hand on the shoulder of a girl in a white dress sitting in front of him. How carefree they looked, Eva thought, these young people, as Josh told her, ‘Your aunt’s sister, the clever one, which makes me think she could have told me something about him. All these young people. Socialists. Idealists. Jews among them as if that didn’t matter. Leading them, even. These are the committee. They wrote in German but some published in Polish as well, to spread what they believed.’

  ‘What was it called?’ Eva asked him. ‘Their magazine?’

  ‘Die Epoche. Others too, of course. There was so much going on.’

  The girl in white sat with her hands clasped on her knees, looking directly ahead. The man behind was turning slightly to the man next to him, his hair lifting in what must have been the moment’s breeze. He looked nice, Eva thought. He looked nice. There were other photos, one of him in prison clothes, one standing in what looked like a fairground, a group of young men fooling about, arms round each other’s shoulders, one holding the kind of toy bear to be won in a shooting gallery. ‘Different names,’ Josh said, ‘different names at different times, but the one at the camp no doubt the right one. Fromm. Albrecht Fromm. But who knows now of course what was true and what was not? Journalists often used names all over the place.’

  ‘But that photograph is early?’

  ‘No names on the photograph you’ll notice. It is meant to tell you not who is who but what fine young people communists could be! You could swap it with pictures in a right-wing student magazine and who would know? Cover the armbands and you’d never tell. Not now. All of them just one message really. This is us!’

  ‘My aunt’s family. Her family were hardly communists.’

  ‘But her sister in Berlin. The one not traced anywhere.’

  ‘They would hardly have known back home about her beliefs. One of the few things we do know is my grandfather was a businessman. Well off, we do know that.’

  The American said again, ‘I so regret I was not here earlier.’

  Eva watched his fingers carefully return the papers to their clear folders, and snap them closed in his briefcase. She wished he would go. Her feeling towards him had swung within minutes. She disliked his so obvious disappointment, his loss of interest in her now his obsessive hunt had taken him no further. I can do nothing for him, and so I do not exist. He placed a card for her on the hallway table. ‘Should anything occur.’

  ‘Occur?’

  ‘Come back to you. Something she may have said that escapes you now.’ And condescendingly, oh there was even that, Eva thought, as he turned at the front door she held open for him, and he repeated to her, ‘There is no such thing as an unimportant fact.’

  She held the door until she heard the car reach the top of the slope and turn at the corner. She tore the card and placed its pieces in the kitchen bin, then went back to sit in the cool dim room. The goldfish Babcia so enjoyed watching glinting in their green corner behind the magnifying curve of the aquarium. The house creaked in the silence it now seemed steeped in. ‘Stretching its bones,’ her English mother used to say in the big wooden house where she grew up, when the small girl would ask, What’s that, is that someone here? The kind quiet woman, who so often seemed unsure of what to say, but loved her, and told her how proud they were to have her. Strange, her now suddenly being so intensely there, and the thought which had not come back to Eva for an age, the sitting room with its horse brasses on leather strips, the shining copper pots with ferns so delicate you touched them and you scarcely felt their brushing. Mummy telling her how her other mother loved her just as much, but had died in another country when she was so little of course she’d not remember, and so it was her English father now who taught her to read, and this was Home. Good people in that other country had made sure she would get here safely where they expected her, she and Daddy waited for her.

  Eva took a carton from the hallway cupboard. She had been meaning to do this for months. She placed it on Babcia’s bed and cleared the card table of the little gifts and trinkets Miss McGovern over the years had given her. When one layer was complete, she laid sheets of tissue across them and began on the next, and so they were packed away, the miniature blue-and-white Dutch windmills, a brass Eiffel Tower, a small celluloid doll in Māori costume, the random chess pieces gifted one by one, a Viking knight, a pink soapstone queen, a bishop whose pointy hat was chipped before its mould was taken, the gifts the purer perhaps for her aunt’s having no notion of the game they came from, the mystery of its pieces. A glass paperweight that flickered snow, a beetle caught in pale entombing gum, a little statuette of a flying horse. Once the table was cleared Eva swept her hand across the green velvet top, folded its narrow legs to slide behind the headboard of the bed. She then took the photographs from the bedside table and added them to the cardboard box, the gallery of the children in their school clothes, on the beach at Karekare even before Stephen had bought the bach out on the coast he loved and Eva, even on brilliant days, found oppressive, but for his sake, and the children’s who loved it too, had never said so. The curious picture with the tear across it, beside the enlargement Stephen had the Kodak man make of it. A photo of Babcia and her friend on the deck of the Rangitata, the day they sailed into Auckland, to what each of them would refer to always as ‘here’ but not as ‘home’. Two drab woman against a bulkhead. Eva had taken it with the box Brownie Stephen bought her the day before they sailed.

  She carried the carton and returned it to the low shelf above the gumboots, the tennis shoes, the folded lolly-striped summer umbrella, the raincoats and what only she referred to as a mackintosh. On the floor there was a box of Lisa’s textbooks from Dunedin that she had promised she would one day take with her. There was a cricket bat David used for one season and so hate
d the game he had never touched again but insisted that too be kept. There was a blue clear plastic coat that felt clammy against your skin if you put it on, and was used only if it rained when potatoes needed to be dug from the garden or the marrows lifted. For as long as she remembered she had intended tossing it out. But time for everything, she thought now, walking back to the sitting room. There was only so much you could do to fill in time. A week until Easter. Even until then.

  1978

  Most nights in London, in her room with its sloping ceiling, its third-floor window facing the brick side of a neighbouring house, above the upper branches of a tree she never learned the name for, Lisa listened to classical music on Radio Three as she worked at her desk. She was aware of the music only when she paused or stood to make herself a cup of instant coffee, or at the end of the evening, after she went to the shared bathroom on the floor beneath her and then lay in bed. At times as she sat working with her books spread in front of her, occasionally making notes in one of the small black-covered notebooks that would fit into the pocket of her smock at the hospital, she glanced up to her reflection in the window. Even in winter, she preferred seeing the reflection of her room ghosting behind her, rather than drawing the curtains patterned with their big sunflowers.

  Against the wall a gas heater she fed with shillings and florins purred when the weather turned. Her room up here, beneath the gabled roof, was cosier than those of the two girls who rented below her. Often it was enough to sit with a blanket across her legs, the way the heater went through coins. As she wrote back home, ‘If it’s too warm I’m likely to nod off and get less done, so it’s not as though I’m a stoic.’ There was something of an irony in it, wasn’t there, she wrote, her specialising in tropical medicine, with ice sometimes blurring the window panes as she woke. At times as she looked up from her reading she saw herself as though she were praying, her elbows on the desk, her hands clasped beneath her chin, the dark glint in her hair reflected back at her from the glass.