A Small Person Far Away (11 page)

The first thing that struck her was how pretty the room was. It was full of light, with pastel-coloured walls and a big window which overlooked the park. There were flowered curtains, an armchair and a furry rug on the floor. Mama was lying in a neat white bed, untethered, without tubes, one hand tucked under the pillow, the other relaxed on the covers, as Anna had so often seen her in the Putney boarding house, and seemed to be peacefully asleep.

Max was already by the bed.

“Mama,” he said.

Mama’s eyelids fluttered, sank down again, and finally opened quite normally. For a moment she stared in confusion and then she recognized him.

“Max,” she whispered. “Oh, Max.” Her blue eyes, the same colour as his, smiled, half-closed, and then opened again full of tears. “I’m so sorry, Max,” she whispered. “Your holiday… I didn’t mean…” Her voice, too, was just as usual.

“That’s all right, Mama,” said Max. “Everything is all right now.”

Her hand moved across the bedclothes into his, and he held it.

“Max,” she murmured. “Dear Max…” Her eyelids sank down and she went back to sleep.

For a moment, Anna did not know what to do. Then she joined Max at the bed.

“Hello, Mama,” she said softly, her lips close to the pillow.

Mama, very sleepy now, hardly reacted. “Anna…” Her voice was barely audible. “Are you here too?”

“I’ve been here since Saturday,” said Anna, but Mama was too sleepy to hear her. Her eyes remained closed, and after a while Max disengaged his hand and they went out.

“Is she all right?” he asked. “Is this very different from the way she’s been?”

“She’s been in a coma for three days,” said Anna. “She only came out of it while I was with her last night.” She knew it was childish, but she felt put out by the fact that Mama seemed to remember nothing about it. “They told me to keep calling her, so I did, and finally she answered.”

“I’m sorry,” said Max. “Was it awful?”

“Yes, it was. Like one of those dreadful, corny films.”

He laughed a little. “I didn’t know they still did that – making you call her. I thought these days it was all done with pills. You may have saved her life.”

She was careful not to say so, but secretly she was sure that she had. “It was probably just the German instinct for drama,” she said. “I can’t imagine them doing it in England, can you? I mean, you wouldn’t be allowed into the ward for a start.”

They were walking back along the corridor and near the stairs they met the sour-faced nurse of the first day, carrying a bedpan. At the sight of them – or more probably of Max, thought Anna – her mouth relaxed into a smile.

“
Na
,” she said in satisfied tones, “
die Frau Mutter ist von den Schatten zurückgekehrt.
”

In English this meant, “So your lady mother has returned from the shadows,” and Anna, who had had time to get used to German phraseology, managed to keep a straight face, but, combined with the bedpan, it was too much for Max. He spluttered some kind of agreement and dived round the next corner, Anna following and hoping that the nurse would think he had been overcome with emotion.

“They all talk like that,” she giggled when she caught up with him. “Had you forgotten?”

He could only shake his head. “
Aus den Schatten zurückgekehrt…
How does Mama stand it?”

She looked at him and began to laugh as well. “
Die Frau Mutter…
” she gasped, and even though she knew it was not as funny as all that, it was difficult to stop. She leaned against the wall, clutching his arm for support, and when the nurse came back, without the bedpan this time, they were still laughing so much that they had to pretend to search for something in Anna’s bag until she had passed, only to explode again immediately afterwards.

“Oh, Max,” cried Anna at last without knowing exactly what she meant, “oh, Max, you’re the only one.”

It was something to do with their childhood, with having grown up speaking three different languages, with having had to worry so much about Mama and Papa and to cheer themselves up with trilingual jokes which nobody else could understand.

“There, there, little man,” said Max, patting her arm. “So are you.”

They were still laughing a little when they emerged into the entrance hall, even more crowded now. Konrad and the doctor were already talking together in a corner, and the nurse behind the desk smiled and pointed them out to Max, in case he had not seen them. But Konrad who must have been watching for them, came to meet them and clasped Max warmly by the hand.

“It’s good to see you, Max,” he said. “I’m sorry we had to drag you away from Greece, but right until this morning it’s been touch and go with your mother.”

“Of course,” said Max. “Thank you for coping with it all.”

“
Nu
,” said Konrad in tones reminiscent of the Goldblatts, “at my age you learn to cope with everything.”

There was an awkwardness between them, and he turned to Anna with evident relief. “That’s quite a change of expression you’ve got there.”

“I told you Mama would be all right,” she said happily, and by this time they had reached the doctor, and Konrad introduced him to Max, and Max thanked him for all he had done for Mama.

“I believe you’ve had a long journey,” said the doctor, and Max told him a little about it, but quickly brought the conversation back to Mama.

“We were lucky,” said the doctor. “I told your sister—” he spread his fingers as he had done the previous day. “Fifty-fifty, didn’t I tell you?”

Anna nodded. It seemed a long time ago.

“Yes,” said the doctor. “Fifty-fifty. Of course in such a case one does not always know what a patient’s wishes would have been. But one has to assume… to hope…” He discovered his fingers, still in midair, and lowered them to his sides.

Behind him, Anna could see a very old lady walking carefully with a stick, and a small boy with his arm in a sling. She was aware of a woolly smell from Konrad’s coat, the warmth of a nearby radiator and the babble of German voices all around her, and she felt suddenly tired and remote. Mama is going to be all right, she thought, nothing else matters. For some reason, she remembered again how Mama had looked that time when she had cried in her blue hat with the veil. The veil had been quite wet and had got more and more wrinkled as Mama rubbed her eyes with her hand. When on earth was that? she wondered.

Konrad coughed and shifted his feet. “… can’t thank you enough…” said Max in his very good German, and Konrad nodded and said, “… deeply grateful…” “After a few days in the clinic to recover…” The doctor waved his hands and there seemed to be a question hanging in the air. Then Konrad said loudly and firmly, “Of course I shall be responsible for her.” She glanced at him quickly to see if he meant it. His face looked quite set.

The doctor was clearly relieved. So was Max who, she noticed, now looked rather pale and suddenly said, “I’ve eaten nothing since yesterday lunch time. D’you think I could possibly get breakfast anywhere?”

At this the group broke up.

They all thanked the doctor again, and then she and Max were following Konrad down the steps to his car and Konrad was saying, “You must remember to shake hands with the Germans, otherwise they think you despise them for having lost the War,” which seemed so eccentric that she thought she must have misheard until she caught Max’s eye and quickly looked away for fear of getting the giggles again.

She stared out of the window while Konrad drove and made various arrangements with Max – it was cold, but quite a nice day, she discovered – and did not really come to until she found herself sitting at a café table, with the smell of sausages and coffee all round her and Max saying, evidently for the second or third time, “Are you sure you don’t want anything to eat?”

He himself was polishing off a large plateful of frankfurters and fried potatoes, and there was a cup of coffee in front of her, so she drank some of that and smiled and shook her head.

“Konrad is going to ring the theatre from his office,” said Max, “so that they’ll be expecting us.”

“The theatre?”

“Where they’ve got the exhibition about Papa.”

“Of course.” She had forgotten all about it.

“It’s really over. Konrad thought they might even have begun to dismantle it. But the stuff should still be there, and Konrad it going to ring the caretaker to make sure he lets us in.”

He looked his normal self again, and she asked, “Are you feeling better now?”

He nodded, his mouth full of frankfurters. “Just reaction,” he said. “No food and not enough sleep.”

She felt very glad that they were going to see the exhibition together. Suddenly it seemed exactly the right thing to do. “It’ll be good to see something to do with Papa,” she said.

They had to travel on the
U-Bahn
to get there, but Konrad had explained the route to Max, and he had also given him a map. If you stayed on the train too long, it took you right out of the Western Sector into the Russian Zone and Anna, who considered this a very real danger, watched the stations anxiously and was standing by the doors, ready to get off, when they reached the one they wanted.

“They warn you before you ever get near the Russian Zone,” said Max as they climbed up the stairs to the street. “They have big notices at the previous station and announcers and loudspeakers. You couldn’t possibly go across by mistake.”

She nodded, but did not really believe him. Once, a few months after escaping from Germany, they had changed trains in Basle on their way to Paris with Papa, and they had discovered only at the very last minute that it was the wrong train.

“Do you remember in Basle,” she said, “when we nearly got a train that was going to Germany? We didn’t even have time to get the luggage off, and you shouted until someone threw it out to us.”

“Did I?” said Max, pleased with his past activity, but, as usual, he had forgotten it.

The theatre was in a busy, unfamiliar street, but then all the streets except the few round her old home and school were unfamiliar to her, thought Anna. There was some heavy bomb damage nearby, but the building itself had either escaped or had been carefully repaired.

They went up some stone steps to the entrance, knocked and waited. For a long time nothing happened. Then, through a glass panel in the door, they could see an old man coming slowly towards them across the gloom of the foyer. A key ground in the lock, the door opened, and he became clearly visible in the light from the street – very old, very bent, and with a long, grey face that did not look as though it ever went out.

“
Kommen Sie rein, kommen Sie rein
,” he said impatiently, rather like the witch, thought Anna, beckoning Hansel and Gretel into the gingerbread house, and he led them slowly across the thick red carpet of the foyer towards a curving staircase.

As he tottered ahead of them, he talked unceasingly. “Can’t put the lights on,” he said in his heavy Berlin accent. “Not in the morning. Regulations don’t allow it.” He stopped suddenly and pointed to a chandelier above their heads. “Well, look at it. Set you back a bit to have that shining away, wouldn’t it? Real gold, that is.”

He tottered off again, muttering about the regulations which seemed to present a major problem, but resolved it to his satisfaction as, with infinite slowness, he climbed the stairs one step at a time. “Put the lights on
upstairs
,” he said. “Nothing in the regulations against that.”

On a small landing halfway up, he stopped again to get his breath. Anna caught Max’s eye, but there was nothing to be done and they had to wait alongside him.

“Used to check the tickets,” said the old man. “In the old days. Before it was all took over by them in brown.” He flashed a look at Max. “You know who I mean, don’t you?”

Max said, yes, he knew whom he meant.

The old man nodded, satisfied. “Used to stand down there at the entrance of the stalls, and see them all go in,” he said. “All the gentlemen in their dinner suits and the ladies in their dresses. Quite grand, they was.”

He sighed and started again on his slow climb, muttering to himself. A poster with Papa’s name and “Exhibition” appeared in the half-darkness. “The great writer and critic”, it said underneath.

“Used to see
him
,” said the old man, jabbing a finger in its direction. “Come quite often, he did.”

They looked at each other. “Did you?” said Anna.

He seemed to think that she was doubting him. “Well, of course I did,” he said. “Used to check his ticket. Middle of the third row, he used to sit, never nowhere else, so he could write his little piece in the paper next day. And the others, they used to be real frightened of what he’d put. Once I fetch him a taxi to go home in after the show, and the manager, he come out of the theatre just as he drives off and says to me, ‘Herr Klaube,’ he said, ‘that man can make or break the play.’ A real nice gentleman, I always thought, always thanked me and give me a tip.”

Anna saw Max’s face in the half-darkness. They both wanted the old man to go on talking about Papa at that time which they were too young to remember. She searched her mind for something to ask him.

“What –” she said, “what did he look like?”

He clearly thought it a stupid question. “Well,” he said, “he look like they all look in them days, didn’t he. He had one of them cloaks and a stick and a silk hat.” Perhaps he sensed her disappointment, for he added, “Anyway, there’s plenty of pictures of him in there.”