Is There Anything You Want? (7 page)

But it hadn't occurred. She wondered sometimes if what she secretly yearned for was to be the wife of a famous man – but surely not, she was too shy, too diffident, for such a role. She would have hated to be in the limelight, having her clothes scrutinised and mocked. No, it wasn't fame she wanted for Harry. It was some other sort of importance, to do perhaps with his work, which others would not necessarily know about. It excited her to imagine being the wife of a scientist engaged in medical research, for example, on the edge of discovering a cure for cancer, say. She could see herself taking Harry's coat in the hall when he came home from spending hours and hours in the laboratory, weary with the weight of the work he was doing, exhausted with the strain. She could see herself soothing him,
settling him down to a nourishing meal, patiently listening to his account of what he was doing and the stage he was at (though she did, in this fantasy, have doubts about her ability to understand). He would say he didn't think he could go on and she would encourage him. Behind every successful man, the saying went, there was a woman, or something like that. She wanted to be that woman, she wanted to be a part of some great scheme, claiming no glory for herself but privately knowing she shared in it. It was, she supposed, a shameful longing but since she never gave voice to it, she avoided shame.

She wondered sometimes if she could even have settled for less than the fame. Maybe this irritating longing of hers would have been satisfied if Harry had become a mayor, or the chairman of some charity organisation, but then she would have had to appear in public, at his side, and it wasn't that sort of prominence she craved. It was ridiculous in any case to imagine Harry in any such position. He was the most modest and the least public-spirited of men, lacking in ambition and utterly uncompetitive. She'd known that before ever she married him. It had been part of his charm – he had charm – that he was not pushy or aggressive. She'd heard his mother complain about it (‘You've no ambition, Harry') as though it were a grievous fault. As far as Harry was concerned, helping his father to run his business suited him fine. He liked the product (greetings cards, mainly) and enjoyed selling it, and when his father retired, he was perfectly comfortable becoming head of the firm, following exactly the paths well marked out for him. He didn't talk about work. What was there to talk about, when it was so familiar? He never seemed to have any problems he wanted to discuss with her.

Edwina's book was still lying unopened on her lap as she stared at a robin perched on the stone urn in front of the conservatory doors. When the bird took off, she would start reading and sweep away these foolish meanderings of thought. Daydreaming, people called it. She'd always daydreamed. Harry was always snapping his fingers in front of her eyes and saying, hey, daydreamer. He used to be curious as to exactly what she was daydreaming about, but she was never able to tell him. She'd say something vague,
like holidays, or Christmas, and that satisfied him. He quite liked her dreaminess. He'd told her once how sweet she looked wearing what he called her ‘faraway' expression, her face so still, her eyes heavy-lidded. Like the Sleeping Beauty, he said, though she wasn't asleep. He never got impatient with her, the way her parents had done, constantly urging her to snap out of it, to pull herself together, for heaven's sake. It had made her feel guilty, Harry's tolerance of her daydreaming, because she knew he thought her head was full of fairy-tale imaginings. And it was not. It was more often full of dark thoughts and frustrations. Her sweet expression was a lie, it betrayed nothing.

The robin had gone. She opened her book. She didn't use bookmarks, or turn down the corners of pages. She always knew where she had got up to, always remembered the page number. This was an unusual book for her to have bought. It wasn't about a woman. It was about a man, about Primo Levi. He didn't fit in to what she thought of as her special interest and, in fact, she had never heard of him, though after she'd bought the book and seen who he was, she couldn't believe she had been so ignorant. What had attracted her was the size of the volume. It was vast, it would keep her going a long time. She'd read the jacket copy and when she saw that Primo Levi had been a survivor of Auschwitz, she'd bought the book immediately. Ever since she'd read Anne Frank's diary when she was at school she'd been drawn to Holocaust literature in a way that she worried wasn't healthy. It appalled and frightened her to read about Auschwitz and Belsen, and Ravensbrück and Treblinka – she knew all the names – but at the same time the horror of what had happened, of what had been endured, was something she could not keep away from. It was the fascination of knowing it had really happened, that nobody had made it up, it was not simply a terrible story, worse than any nightmare thriller. But what worried her was the fear that reading about the camps, and what had been done in them, was somehow disgusting, until, one day, she came across the phrase ‘bearing witness'. She read in a newspaper article that bearing witness to the sufferings of those who died in the Holocaust was right and proper and the only way of honouring their memories. It was wrong to suppress the truth,
wrong to argue that it should not be talked about because it was over, that it had happened a long time ago, and no good was done by dwelling on such atrocities. Edwina was relieved. Afterwards, when she sat reading and wincing and even weeping over a survivor's story, she said to herself that she too was bearing witness, and that she was not being masochistic by torturing herself with the images.

She was two-thirds of the way through the biography, the Auschwitz experience over (except she knew it never would be for Primo Levi). Surprisingly, the book was proving easy to read – she'd been afraid it might be too academic for her. The author's style was clear and direct, the sentences simple and short. She was reading about Primo Levi's wife, Lucia, and as she read on she began to feel there was something missing here. Lucia was surely more important than she was presented as being. This man had come back from Auschwitz and had had to rebuild his shattered life. He married Lucia (whom he had not known before) and she enabled him to do so. His real love, or the woman suspected of being his real love, had perished in the camp but Lucia was the one he married and with whom he had two children. Without her, would he have managed as well as he did? Edwina stopped reading, and frowned. She stared into the garden and wished there was more about Lucia. In spite of the photographs in the book, she couldn't see or hear the woman in her mind. Lucia was vague. She was (to Edwina) the all-important wife, but she was shadowy. Not enough consideration was being given to what it had been like for her to marry a man with 174517 branded on his arm.

Harry was Jewish. His paternal grandparents had originally come from Poland to Germany, and then to England, changing their name from Greneski to Green when they arrived. Their son, Harry's father, had married a Jewish girl, Rebecca Rubenstein, so Harry was indisputably Jewish, though he never went to the synagogue and observed none of the Jewish laws on holy days after he left home to get married. Edwina was blamed for this lapse by her mother-in-law, but it was not her fault. She would have been quite happy for Harry to practise the faith and observe the customs of his parents and grandparents, though she had
not sought to please them by converting and marrying into that faith. They had married, she and Harry, in a register office, and his parents, though upset and, in his mother's case, resentful, had attended. When Laura was born, Edwina had been glad she was a girl, which avoided any dispute over circumcision. Harry had been strangely emphatic: if he had a son, the child would not be circumcised, however much his parents pleaded. Why not? Edwina had asked and been told it was barbaric. It fascinated her that the mild-mannered, conventional Harry, always anxious to please, had in this one respect proved such an unlikely rebel. She'd wondered if this rejection of Jewishness was a kind of fear, but he said it wasn't. ‘Look,' he'd said, ‘you were brought up a Methodist and rejected Methodism and all religious belief. I'm no different. I don't believe in any of it, it's all a nonsense.' She'd said to him once, ‘Do you ever think about what would have happened to your family if you'd lived in Germany when Hitler came to power?' He'd said no, but then later admitted that he had thought about it but had stopped himself, because such speculation was morbid and sick. Edwina never mentioned the subject to him again. She thought about it often, though she hadn't confessed that to the impressionable Emma (who, unlike her dark-haired sister, was blonde, taking after her mother, and didn't look at all Jewish). She'd fantasised the knock on the door in the night, and the SS arriving and dragging Harry away. She'd shuddered as she imagined him crammed into an overcrowded cattle truck (she'd seen the films so her imagination hadn't had to work very hard). And then she'd tried to imagine him surviving and coming back to his family (who, miraculously, would in her fantasy have been on the last transport to England). At this point, her imagination had always failed. What would she have done, as his wife, greeting such a man after what had happened to him? It was a test she was overwhelmingly glad not to have had to face; but reading about Primo Levi, and thinking about Lucia, she saw it in a different way. The test would have been Harry's more than hers. It would have been up to him to dictate how his recent hellish past should be dealt with. And knowing Harry she knew what he would have decreed: forget it.

Primo Levi didn't want to forget it, he had had no intention of ever doing so even had it been possible. To forget would have been to betray those who had died, a victory for their murderers. But it occurred to Edwina as she took up the book again that Lucia might have wished he could, if not forget, at least not keep hammering home the memories over and over. The biographer related how Primo Levi always wore short-sleeved shirts, even in winter, and that the number 174517 tattooed on his skin stood out. It was intended to stand out. No one could avoid seeing it. Lucia certainly couldn't. She had to look at it all the time. She couldn't escape it, or its significance. During the most intimate moments of her relationship with her husband it was there. She saw it, she touched it, she felt it. The pity of it caught in Edwina's throat. She wondered if Lucia ever suggested that her husband should wear a sweater, it was cold, he would be warmer, might it not be a good idea . . . She wondered if Lucia hoped the ink would fade over the years, that given time and hundreds of baths and showers and dozens of bars of soap the colour would fade, the number at last become so faint, it would not call attention to itself and its meaning.

She admired Lucia Levi, much more than this biographer seemed to. She would like to have been her, providing her brave husband with the love and tenderness of which he had such need. But at this stage of the book Lucia seemed to be receding. She was off stage, coping with the children and her mother and her mother-in-law. Edwina read that people said the Levis seemed happy a lot of the time, but how could anyone know? She thought of how her own unhappiness was hidden, even from Harry. She was sure that people thought she and Harry were happy and on the surface they were. She had a sudden mad impulse to put the book down and go and write to Lucia Levi, to ask her if she had indeed been happy with her husband or whether throughout her marriage she'd been struggling to fight the great sadness engulfing it. The moment passed. She smiled slightly to herself at her own absurdity. She was, as Harry would put it, getting carried away, so immersed in the lives of others, and one of them dead, that her own life hardly existed. She herself was a background person, someone upon whom attention would
never focus. If it did, on the rare occasions she was noticed, it scared her – when that woman at the hospital, for example, that bossy Friend, caught hold of her she couldn't wait to escape and merge back into the crowd.
She didn't want to be noticed.

It suddenly struck her what an advantage that might have given her, if, like Primo Levi, she'd been taken to Auschwitz. It was good not to attract attention. She had no skills that might have saved her, as his knowledge of chemistry saved him, and no beauty that might have preserved her life as a sexual slave, but maybe she had other qualities which she had never recognised. Primo Levi, she read, said that years after he left Auschwitz he could still tell within the first five minutes of meeting someone new whether they would have survived in the camp. He'd said this without needing to know what talents people had – it was all based on a reading of character. Character was everything, character and personality, which had nothing to do with either physical strength or cleverness. Did she have it? Was there within her an innate toughness in spite of her reserve and shyness? Would it have been a life-saver, looked at through Auschwitz eyes, that she was usually quiet and rarely spoke up for herself and avoided confrontation unless provoked? Would all these traits she despised in herself actually have proved to be assets?

She read for another hour and then put the book aside. Harry would be home soon. When she'd brought the book home, he'd groaned and said couldn't she have picked something more cheerful. It's bad for you, he'd said, reading this kind of depressing stuff. But he was wrong. On the contrary, she knew it was proving good for her. Primo Levi's survival consoled her. It was making her more respectful of her own survival. What she had had to survive was as nothing compared to Primo Levi's prolonged ordeal, it was offensive to speak of her own ordeal in the same breath, but nevertheless she saw that by not collapsing or breaking down, but instead carrying on as normal, she had shown some small measure of courage. Bravery didn't have to come in dramatic form, it could emerge in tiny doses and be built on. She should give herself some credit. All those nights she'd lain awake sweating with terror, convinced that in spite of all the reassurances her disease was terminal, but she hadn't
woken Harry, she hadn't turned to the girls. She'd got up in the mornings and made breakfast and sent Harry off to work and the girls off to school, all with a smile. Didn't that count for something? She hoped so.