A Mind of Winter (33 page)

I continued to sleep in ditches by day, rising to walk endless cold hours through the night. Though the uniform made me less visible, I still felt I was a target.

Snatched from sleep—a rough shaking at the shoulder—a moment of panic as I saw that the man shaking me was wearing a brown uniform. A flash, and then I recalled that I was wearing a brown uniform too.

Why, then, the suspicion in his face? It was a square, blunted face, with eyes that were resentful and dull with ignorance. His name was Klauss, and we trudged alongside one another—I don’t know for how many miles. He was not given to much talk, which I welcomed. Now and then, I felt the sting of a sidelong glance filled with that same suspiciousness of his first regard.

Why he stopped at the moment he did, I do not know. He grabbed my shoulder with such force I felt a pain shoot down my arm.

“Drop them,” he said curtly.

“I beg your pardon?” I had no idea what he was talking about.

“Your pants. Drop them.”

I did what I was bidden, turning my face away while Klauss inspected my naked penis, which shrank toward my body at the cold breath of the wind.

He seemed disappointed at the sight of my intact foreskin. He issued his hacking cough and wiped his dripping nose on his sleeve.

“We’ll find a use for that,” he said crudely, indicating my private parts with a jerk of his head. He resumed the march, leaving me to fumble at two sets of flies—I’d been careful, in pulling the two trousers down in one swift movement, to make it seem I was wearing only the one pair. I saw that light was beginning to wash over the heavy black sky.

The previous night, which was our first together, I’d intended to steal away, make my escape from Klauss, the minute he fell asleep. I’d willed myself to stay awake but had failed, finding myself awoken again some hours later by his rough shaking. Now, I vowed to myself anew that when we next stopped to sleep, I would dig my nails into my legs, bite the inside of my lip, anything to keep exhaustion at bay so that I might free myself of Klauss’s unpleasant and dangerous company.

It was not, however, to be. Not until too late—until there would never, for the rest of my days, be any possibility of escaping Klauss.

I am, after all, to be arraigned. Remarkable, the way the manner of my late-night visitor, through everything, has remained professional; he treats me with no sign whatsoever of condemnation. After conveying the news, he took his leave for what we both knew would be the last time. After he was gone, I removed all the materials from my file drawers: ledgers and notebooks and numerous files of returned mail. I had not seen it all gathered together before and was surprised by the sheer volume. Useless, dead documents. The search over.

I hear the voice of my friend, Oskar. The
real
Oskar. My fellow refugee from the Internment Center next to whom I’d slept in the dormitory. Oskar, who had dressed the wound on my forearm—the blackened gash that might have become gangrenous but did not. I had willed the wound to go bad, fixated on this, as if losing my arm might relieve me also of the burden of my actions (and inactions); as if losing some of my capacity to reach out might serve as punishment, and permit me to go on as a free man.

But against all the odds, the arm healed. Oskar took this as a point of pride. “I should have been a nurse.” He said this drily. I’d turned away to hide my distress. And disgust at my own failure of courage: that in plunging the wet red tip of the knife into my arm when I did, that long-ago cold and distraught day, I’d not done myself a greater injury.

And how did I repay him? This friend who helped deprive me of the punishment I deserved?

I took his name. I should say stole, for it was not a name he freely gave or to which I had any right. I hear him now:
Over? How could the past ever be over?

I know it now: the dead do not die.

I shed the uniform as quickly, as effortlessly, as I have shed outer garb before and since. For this, I believe I have a singular talent. Two counts of good fortune: that it was terribly cold, and that the uniform was too large. Which made the wearing of my other clothes both possible and an advantage. Later, when I was finally able to break away, I could peel off the uniform and stash it in some bushes, and find I was still fully clothed.

It took me awhile to adjust to the loss of the layer—the cloth had been heavy and had served well against the wind.

Afterward I felt foolish recalling how, unthinkingly, I had folded the jacket and pants before shoving them into the hedge, which had materialized the instant I had need of it.

But I am leaving out one other detail. Before folding the jacket, I ripped the black and red armband from the sleeve, folded it into a tiny square, and stuffed it into one of the little pockets my mother had sewn inside the waist of my navy jacket.

The rest had gone without a hitch.

I’d become a true night creature. I had the map Alfred had given me, though no need to consult it, as it was long since committed to memory. When I reached Marseilles, I found my way easily to the dock. The barge was where Alfred said it would be: not a day or a week earlier, or a day or a week later, but right when I needed the boat to be there. I gave no thought to the serendipity of this; I was beyond such musings and besides, there had already been too many dark turnings of Fate for me to have any real regard for her occasional glitterings of gold (fool’s gold, only, after all).

On the practical side of things, I was, however, in possession of real coin; when I approached the helmsman of the barge, who eyed me coldly, the two gold coins I offered glinted in the oily moonlight. The helmsman examined them briefly, nodded his yellowish face, and blinked slowly once, twice, a hooded reptilian gesture that drew attention to his alert eyes. Raising his soiled shirt, he slipped the heavy coins into a pouch strapped to his waist. I approached the trapdoor in the middle of the deck, kept slightly ajar by a stump of wood, and caught a glimpse of what awaited me in the hold: a wedge of pure darkness.

It was a relief to be below deck, away from the wind, which had made light work of my clothing. I inched along the wall until I could feel the contours of the fourth bin, a rough hardwood box long enough for a man to lie stretched out and tall enough to crouch. Holding up the lid of the crate, I climbed in. Numerous holes the size of large coins had been bored into the side; I hunkered down in the boxed-in darkness.

Sounds filtered in from the upper deck: voices speaking French, comings and goings, objects dragged from here to there. Then the stir of engines, distant and near as one’s own internal organs, and soon I felt the grinding pull away from the dock. I breathed in the soot that coated the inside of the coal bin and trained my ears on the darkness. The arcing motions of the barge steadied to a slow gliding. The sounds from above deck waned.

But then, the beat of a single set of footsteps. Moving down the iron ladder, across the old boards of the belowdeck, toward my bin and right up to the side of it. The lid to my crate was raised, and in the pulpy light of a small kerosene lamp, I saw the helmsman’s bulbous forehead and thin cheeks. He dropped in a heavy loaf, which bounced off my shoulder and thudded to the wooden floor of the box. The helmsman reached up and handed me a tinful of watery soup: various lumps and agglutinations floating in a thin, brown liquid. The lid above me was replaced. Again, the footsteps, this time leading away.

Sitting cross-legged, I broke off a piece of bread and chewed. I remember the gritty taste of the dark rye; I washed it down with a mouthful of liquid, which was faintly flavored with garlic. My meal over, I repositioned myself from the crouch to the lying-down-on-my-side position and stayed that way for some time, listening to my own breath—time and space reduced to numbness and bottomless, damp cold. After the nightmare weeks of endless marching, the constant threat of being seen
,
the coal bin encased me like a sanctuary. I gave myself over to a dreamless sleep.

* * *

I took two names—a first and a last, but only Oscar feels stolen. The name Harcourt, that of my mentor and now mine these last six years, was freely given, and also, somehow, my right.

A monochrome day, the London sky even flatter than usual, the light wan and diffuse. I remember my ill-fitting hand-medown shoes rubbing against my feet as I hurried along the thoroughfare. My suit, also given to me upon my arrival at the Internment Center, was a size too small; the knees rode high and there was a crease at the ankle where the fabric had been let down. (My own clothes, irremediably infested, had been immediately burned.) The ache in my bones, from two months of night trekking, the days spent sleeping in ditches.

Every so often, a house reminded me of home; I pushed this from my mind. London, I kept saying to myself—and in English (
practice, practice
)—London on its own terms.

The streets got wider, the houses more grand. Here and there a rupture in the neat array: a house or two in ruins. A skeletal stairway or slab of wall presiding over mounds of brick and the entrails of a family’s life—broken crockery, pieces of metal twisted to beautiful shapes, partly burned items of furniture. I paused to examine one such ruin—a slim pillar of wall, the ghost of each story evident in panels of discolored wallpaper: rose chintz at the bottom, green velvet above, then embossed blue, and finally, at the top, capped in a remnant of red roof tile, the serviceable gray of what had probably been the attic. A fragment of floorboard jutted between the upper two patches of wallpaper; absurdly, a china teapot balanced on this tiny ledge.

And then, it was upon me.
47 Park Street.
Miraculously intact. An impressive entryway, flanked by four columns, was set back a little from the street. A brass knocker in the shape of a leopard was affixed to the carved door. I shivered in my thin suit. A faint cry, no more than a whimper, echoed in my mind: for an instant, the feel of my sister Else’s cheek on my lips. I reached for the leopard and gave two firm raps.

The maid looked at me oddly when she opened the door, and quickly ushered me into an opulent foyer, unmarked by wartime scarcity. I waited until the maid returned, followed by a handsome middle-aged woman dressed in a gray velvet dress, her brown hair swept up off her face.

“Mrs. Harcourt,” the maid announced.

There was a strange look in the woman’s face.

I tried to quell the panic that had arisen on hearing her name—not the name I was anticipating, not the last name of the uncle of Else’s school friend.

“It is a Mr. Pettigrew I am looking for. Edgar Pettigrew,” I stammered.

“I’m so sorry,” Mrs. Harcourt said, the peculiar look still on her face. “He lived at number 13. Our neighbor. But he passed away in the spring. I understand his widow has retired to their Yorkshire estate. Their house has been closed for months.”

Harcourt
. The wrong address. Not the uncle of Else’s old schoolmate: that would have been number 43 Park Street. Mr. Pettigrew gone these six months, the widow in seclusion up north.

And me standing there speechless, the worn scrap of paper dangling from my hand.

“I’m so sorry,” Mrs. Harcourt repeated. Yet she seemed strangely exalted. “Come. We’d be more comfortable in the parlor.”

She turned toward the hallway. Hatless, I followed, taking in the faces of Harcourt ancestry floating on the wall in hunting gear, morning suits, frothy gowns. Sharp faces, angular and fine-boned, the same blue eyes in different configurations, wider or rounder, with more humor or less, or a hint of timidity; and in more than one portrait, a potent gleam of intelligence. All of them gazing out from the past, neither curious nor accusing. A sense that these painted forms were awaiting something—the breaking of a spell?—so that they might resume what they were doing, get on with things. I paused before a life-sized portrait of a man, youthful but prematurely gray, dressed in military attire from a long-past era, astride a palomino. Something in his hand—a parchment covered in writing; in the background, a battlefield, still smoking from the fire of cannons. There was a sober expression on his face: not victory, not defeat, but something uncannily modern.

Mrs. Harcourt pushed open curved mahogany doors to reveal an elegant parlor: plush chairs, velvet walls, heavy curtains in different shades of hunter-green, and here and there a shiny, well-cared-for wooden piece—a rolltop desk, a sideboard inlaid with mother-of-pearl, a small oval table with clawed metal feet. My eyes flew to the framed photographs arranged on the marble mantelpiece, and to one in particular: a portrait of a youth in uniform, touched up with watercolors. The youth had pale eyes, the same hue of the ancestors hanging on the hall.

“Andrew Harcourt. My son,” she said simply. “He was killed early on, shot down over France.” She fell silent.

We stood there together in that opulent room, strangers from such separate worlds, worlds which had no business colliding as they had astoundingly, absurdly, against all the odds done. Joined now, without any sense or reason, by an impossible
coincidence
—though of course this word, now that I think it, rings hollow and nonsensical. And yet, I can find no other.

“It’s remarkable, isn’t it,” Mrs. Harcourt breathed after a while. I looked again at the photograph. I knew I should be amazed: to be here at the wrong address, as it turned out, peering into the face of a felled English soldier who, on the basis of physical likeness, might well have been my brother, almost a twin. And yet, I found myself looking into those touched-up eyes—fierce beneath their surface gentleness—with an uncanny sense of inevitability. The wrong house, the Harcourts’ son no longer alive; all these years, a boy growing up in London, bearing such a close resemblance to me. And why not? My own mother not who she was, me not who I’d thought myself to be, all of it pieces of colored glass that tumbled and shifted into vivid, random arrangement.

Mrs. Harcourt was staring at me with a disturbing mixture of disbelief and joy. I stood, in my worn suit, which had most likely once belonged to another young man killed in battle, shredding the scrap of paper with Else’s faded schoolgirl script.