All This by Chance Page 6

  Mr Scherr handed her another photograph, the kind you might think had been taken for a passport, were it not for what the woman looking out at you wore. Unmarried, the man said, thirty-two at the time of the photograph, presumably resilient and in good health or this morning would not be taking place. Eva held it for no more than a few seconds and passed it on to Stephen, who gave it more attention. An ordinary-looking woman, he thought, with close-cropped hair, part of another world impossible to imagine, there was nothing one could think beyond that. And older, her looking so much older, than the official had said. There would be thousands, tens of thousands, of photographs not so dissimilar. A blank, guarded stare. A few seconds of one life. He wondered what Eva thought as she turned the cup on the saucer she held. She told him afterwards she was thinking still about the photo of herself, a plate of food blurred at its edge. It was not the same but very like the image her English mother had been given when the train brought their new daughter, when she and her husband decided on the girl’s new name, rather than accept the one the back of the photograph bore. The name which was wrong already, because of the confusion the man had just explained to them, her real father in another country rightly thinking a lie would serve her more than the truth, and called her what no one else had thought of, until that moment of losing her, saving her. The child named at birth as Lisabet and then renamed Gerda, which did not sound Jewish, and then Eva, as she has always thought herself to be. And how close she now was to the older woman who may have held her as a child, or perhaps did not, but was her mother’s sister, and wore a prison smock as she looked towards the camera in the other photograph the man returned to the file opened on his desk. The aunt whose name at least had remained the same from one life to another, and was on the front of the file, written in blue ink: Ruth Hannah Friedmann.

  ‘There are other names here,’ Mr Scherr said. ‘Relatives.’ Names he began to read. ‘Chaim. His wife, of course. Her sister Sarah.’ Others from the same address. ‘A German city at that stage, with its different name.’

  ‘What happened to those? The ones listed there?’

  He looked at the handsome woman who questioned him. The effort her calm cost her. ‘You know nothing of them?’

  ‘How could I?’

  ‘I can have a copy made of what we have. Date of transport. Destinations.’

  Stephen could not imagine what was coming in on Eva, dawning on her. He wanted to press her against him and tell her none of this was taking place. Deny that their lives already were somewhere else, where there was no going back from. He watched her fingers on one hand crush against the ring on the other, her stillness as she repeated, ‘Destinations?’

  ‘Camps,’ the man said.

  ‘The same place? They were together?’

  ‘So it seems. One did not arrive. One of the older ones.’

  Eva surprising her husband yet again. She stood abruptly, making it clear that nothing else Mr Scherr might say was essential to her. She said, ‘The one you brought us here for? Can we see her now?’

  They walked through to another part of the building, to a room meant to be more welcoming than an office. A bowl of flowers stood on a table against a wall, and a large reproduction of a painting hung above it. An English countryside with a tall-spired church and bunched-up clouds. Stephen looked at it while he and Eva waited for another door to open on the room’s other side, and thought how pictures and photos can be like what they represent, and yet there is always, even in the seemingly accurate, something that makes you say, No, this is not quite so. Life-like is not the same as life. He had no notion of what his wife might be thinking as they waited. How beautiful she was, just to look at as she sat there, her hands still in her lap, her profile against the big window onto the street. Eva. Those other names he had just heard that were hers as well.

  ‘From then on,’ as he would tell their daughter a long time ahead, at the back of the Westmere pharmacy. ‘From then on I suppose things were never quite as we had hoped.’ And what he did not say to her, but so searingly remembered, the first hint of how already their lives had begun to change that evening as he and Eva lay together without speaking, until his asking what was it that she was thinking and her telling him, ‘Nothing,’ repeating it when he said, ‘It’s this morning, then?’ And for the first time, her not seeming to mind whether he touched her or not. She turned towards him as he wanted her to do, but it was not the same.

  This morning when the door across from where they stood had opened and two women came in. The final thing the man had said to them as they left his office, ‘Some people find this part a challenge, Mrs Ross. This part.’ After his also saying it might encourage them to hear that a situation like this was what healing the past came down to. It was not uncommon, a situation like this.

  ‘It is for us,’ Eva had said.

  The door opening and a smart woman walking towards them, telling them her name was Mrs Bland. Her hair was arranged in a plait that crossed the top of her forehead. One hand held that of the older woman who followed a little behind her. She said, briskly and yet warmly, ‘This is a happy time,’ and spoke to the woman in what Stephen guessed was German. Then letting go the woman’s hand, she stepped aside, and Eva and the woman stood a few feet apart. ‘So here you are,’ Mrs Bland said. ‘It has been a long time.’

  A few minutes before, as they waited on the other side of the door, she had joked to the older woman, ‘There. We must look the part,’ and lightly touched her lips with the tube in her hand, and rubbed at her cheeks. ‘She will be nervous too.’ She had raised her hand to touch the coil of her own wheat-coloured hair. And now, facing her niece, the woman said, ‘Ach, schön,’ at the instant Eva stepped towards her, and their faces touched, and their hands moved across each other’s arms, and Stephen’s strange thought that it was almost as if they were blind people he was watching, the flicker and movement of their hands confirming yes, this is what they were. And then for half an hour the three women and Stephen sat on leather chairs arranged in the middle of the room, an air of such unreality about it. That is what I was thinking, Eva would say later to her husband, it was as if somehow this was not happening even as it was, none of us knowing what was real and how much we acted parts we could not escape from. We had been free for the last time.

  Mrs Bland was the one everything had to pass through. The older woman rested her hand on the translator’s arm, as if claiming her. After their drawing apart from that long minute of holding and touching and bewilderment, she and Eva then sat as if in some sudden shyness, watching each other, each finding words inadequate, the simplest things lost to them as they were taken and put into another tongue. Eva took in the blunt broad nose, the frank grey eyes that watched her as though somehow expecting her to stand and leave the room, the distorted left hand partly concealed by a leather mitten. Her aunt and Mrs Bland again speaking in the language she and Stephen did not comprehend.

  ‘You remember her?’ Mrs Bland asked. ‘You remember Lisabet? The girl who was given your mother’s name?’

  ‘No,’ the woman said. ‘I remember there was a child a long time ago and I see this Englishwoman now and you tell me they are the same. So we hold each other and that is important. We are the same whether we think we are or not. Although I might be wrong. I might not have seen her before. I don’t remember that.’

  ‘You mustn’t think—’ Mrs Bland began to say, and Ruth cut across whatever it was she intended. ‘No,’ she said. ‘No. There is time for all that.’ She put the practical question. ‘How will we talk?’

  The older woman saying something close to her friend’s ear, and Mrs Bland, smiling as though there were something even amusing in what she passed on, ‘Why not begin again where you may have left off?’

  Eva too smiling slightly, the older woman relaxing for the first time. But Stephen saw the sharpness of what his wife then said, at the logic beyond its apparent lightness: ‘So I will be a child and my aunt young again and we will pretend nothi
ng much happened in between?’

  Mrs Bland did not translate. She said simply, ‘I understand you will be together because you feel you have no choice, no more than Ruth has, and that it’s asking a great deal. But anything you say to each other is better than nothing. And however you say it.’

  ‘But it will not be like adults speaking,’ Stephen said. Until now he had been silent.

  ‘No,’ Mrs Bland said. ‘But there is so much more to it than that.’ Her inviting this stiff distant couple to consider what she had hoped it would not be necessary for her to spell out, that distress and awkwardness and the unpleasant press of inevitability were small enough things, against what had gone before. ‘Nothing makes up for anything,’ she said, almost coldly. ‘But you decide to try, or you do not.’

  ‘We understand that,’ Eva said. ‘We are not avoiding what we know we have to do.’

  Yet the frankness seemed to add to the ease in the room. Stephen spoke again. ‘Names are a good place to begin,’ he said. He smiled at the drab older woman with her short grey hair, the heavy shoulders beneath her plain dark frock. He felt pity surge through him as a physical force, pity for his wife, for the woman, for everything that made this meeting what it was, with its reluctance and apprehension and fear, and the hope each knew they must have faith in, must persist with, or the darkness had taken them as well.

  There was almost levity as they moved from one to the other, now that the matter of names had been raised, and the older woman said it must be left to them, to the young ones, surely, what they felt at ease with? Stephen said remember this would be the name that in time their children would know their relative by, and Eva added it must be a word to bring and keep us together, the best word for that, and why not grandmother, why not that? For the sake of the children. Wouldn’t it be good if they knew her as that? For that is what she would be to them. Ruth said, Babcia, why not? What her own grandparents would have said, at another time, in Poland. And while Mrs Bland was there to advise with her directness and common sense, Stephen asked again about how they might talk together? ‘Neither of us knows another language and I doubt that we’d be much good at it. I know I wouldn’t be.’

  The young woman said Babcia—why not start with that at once?—Babcia and Eva would find a way, there was no point in being programmatic. Perhaps English lessons later on, but for the moment their being together was what mattered. But it made sense, German, at least for a start, for the old woman was telling them they had spoken little else at home but the language that would later oppress them, that their status, among their own people even, so depended on that. They were cultured. They were educated. Their father was a businessman. She will not say, or not for now, how that had so defined them, their preference for something other than what, a generation before, they so accepted without question, the Polish spoken so naturally with neighbours, the Yiddish among themselves at home, a time which Babcia’s mother so liked to insist was further back than that, oh so far back, while her father, with his socialism, his sense of humour, teased his wife was only round the corner after all, demanding as he touched her hair with affection, ‘What do you think we were back East? Berliners?’

  It was messy from the start, Stephen will always believe. There was hardly a way it could not have been, messy and never really to be resolved, and the life they believed they would have grew instead into the one they found themselves with. A fact which one of their children will understand, and the other be too angry to accept, until the story had gone on for so much longer and by then had become another story. But for now they are on the journey back home, as Stephen naturally calls it, to what Eva also already calls it, for ‘home’, that is the word that has come to stand for everything she hopes for, rather than what she knows. While Babcia calls it nothing, it is so far distant and so long a journey to get there, it cannot mean anything other than a place to arrive at that will be different from anything she had known or thought of. And in the meantime she and her new family, her old family, begin to find and use the words that in fact will never run to more than a few hundred, and even less than that, if one means words used with precision or certainty or ease. David, who will not be born for another six years, one day will write, ‘Talk for us at home, if “us” means anything like the five people who lived in the same house, was not much more than a way of pointing. And we expected it to do so much. The jumble of words we tried to use, which were never enough.’ It bothers his sister Lisa far less, whose view of life is more generous.

  Lisa, which will be short for Lisabet, once her mother’s name for a short time, and her great-grandmother’s for a lifetime. Unlike her brother, she will have the gift of standing a little to the side of almost everything, not by choice, but because the centre, if such a thing exists, is not so easy to locate as most assume. And she will be the one to understand as well how her parents did not take in, as they might have done, the warning already there when the man with his file and copies of documents and the papers that linked them into a story as defining as closing the door on a cell, said, ‘Your aunt perhaps is not so clear-minded as a woman of her age might be. There’s no wonder of course at that. But her contentment comes at a price. At a certain loss.’

  They sailed from Southampton in late summer, the weather as placid and clear as the day of Stephen’s arrival almost two years before had been one of murk and rain. To save on the fares, Eva and her aunt shared a cabin, while Stephen was with three other men a deck lower down. His memory of the voyage will fade to a general mêlée of women and young children, brides moving to the world’s far side, men who it seemed preferred for the most part not to talk more than they were obliged, the evenings in the lounge when a pianist played and stewards delivered glasses to the tables, the languor of the last days before the harbour with its scatter of islands, its low rim of hills. There were times at the beginning of the voyage when he and Eva would go below and have the women’s cabin to themselves, but there now seemed such awkwardness in doing so, while their relative sat on deck in a canvas chair and looked out to the sea, that neither suggested it as eagerly as they might have done a month before. And whatever the advice Mrs Bland with her corn-coloured hair may have given them, Eva repeated the German words for ‘blue’ and ‘yellow’ and ‘ship’ which Babcia taught her, and the old lady attempted to return the English words she smiled at, rather than remembered, or cared to use. ‘The old lady’ as the married couple always thought of her, who a week before the end of the voyage would turn forty-five.

  The extraordinary event, as Stephen will always think of it, on their second day on open sea, the land already dropped beyond the hard dark line one now looked out to, is an overweight woman with her confining scarf, her shapeless dress, her shoes heavy as a man’s, approaching Stephen as he sits in the ship’s small library while Eva and Babcia walk arm in arm on the deck, their crossing between the thick window in front of him and the ship’s rail across the narrow stretch of white-scrubbed wood, and five minutes later their passing again, in the opposite direction.

  The stolid woman announcing simply, ‘I am Miss McGovern.’ A harsh, grating accent Stephen tried to place from those he had sometimes heard in the shop. Irish of some sort. Scottish, even. Yet for all her severity and squatness and the curt pulling-back of her hair beneath the tight brown scarf, there is an oppressive warmth he instinctively dislikes. A too-blunt intrusion.

  ‘Your friend out there,’ the woman called Miss McGovern told him. ‘The older one. I know her.’

  Eva and Babcia for a moment at the window, and then past, and only the stiff lines of the railing, the grey stretch of sea.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Stephen said. He did not offer his name in return for the woman’s.

  ‘She does not speak English?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘May I ask where she is from, sir?’ That last word so raising his irritation.

  ‘That’s something I don’t know.’

  ‘I would like to speak with her. To as
k her.’

  ‘I don’t think you know her.’ He is sharply aware of his own rudeness, but does not regret it. He guesses that the book she carries is a religious work of some kind, the edges of the pages a dull shiny old, a thin red ribbon attached to it as a bookmark. ‘No, there is no way you could have known her.’

  Miss McGovern smiled at him, amused even, was it, as though she can do nothing about his ignorance? She knows he does not like her, but she continues to stand in front of him, to demand that he look at her. Later he will know that whatever this grating woman means by God surrounds everything she knows or does or thinks, that she might no more be diverted from where she believes her certainty lies than the ship they are on is likely to change course. Yet he will never hear her say the word, or invoke his name. She does not need to.

  Stephen silent as he watches her, as she too watches him, a disconcerting quiver, a jitter almost in her eyes, and her lips moving slightly, as though she were about to speak. He took in the hair which was neither brown nor not yet grey, from what he can see of the wisps worked free at the scarf’s edge, the unattractive massing of her cheeks, her flesh the colour of dough. They both then look through the long deep window as the women pass, still arm in arm, as compelled to be together as though actually shackled. Then Miss McGovern explains that the Purser had told her his name was Mr Ross, and the tall handsome woman was his wife, but he had told her no more than that. She was certain, however, so the name was not the point. Certain she knew the woman whose arm his wife now held.