News From Berlin (10 page)

Afterwards, he wondered whether he had said too much about himself. He had even told her about Dick, the brother who had left Holland years earlier, and whom he missed. His
nostalgia for the days when they formed an unassailable duo – something not even Kate was aware of. Two musketeers. Covered front and back, even the flanks were protected. And so they had borne the early loss of their father, and, in the confidence of their young years, had helped to raise their mother’s spirits. His brother was seventeen at the time, he a year older.

Oscar had shed his natural reserve, but he managed to avoid going into what he did for a living. Something at the Dutch legation, of no particular interest. His vagueness elicited a quizzical glance from Lara, but she had not pressed him. Why had he talked so freely with her for two entire days, why did he feel so helplessly, unconditionally attracted to her? Why indeed. It was not for you to crack the codes of your soul. Oscar had dismissed the question as soon as it presented itself.

“Would it be alright if I looked you up in Fribourg?” he had said as the train entered the station of Berne, to which she had nodded, tapping the leather box containing her binoculars: “I’ll be on the lookout for you.”

When he went down the platform while the train pulled away close beside him, he had seen her through the window, sitting very still, hugging the box to her chest, her eyes closed.

“The terminal, Senhor, this is the last stop.” Oscar alighted from the tram and ambled across Rossio Square. Even in the late afternoon the heat was heavy. He was lost, stood still and looked about him, felt in his pockets for a city map. Any direction would do, he reckoned.

The sound of a doorbell rang through the house. She didn’t recognise it at first. Her bell never rang. Then Kate realised she had to answer it. As she approached the front door, she heard a slight shuffle of feet and someone whistling softly.

“Hello Miss,” Matteous said. He sounded so timid, she felt herself melt. It was almost unbearable, that shyness of his every time he greeted her. He had actually come to her house! She had not thought he would act upon her invitation.

“Matteous! Do come in, how good to see you!” She did not wish to overwhelm him with enthusiasm, but was unable to hide her delight at his coming. She had explained how to get to Barkston Gardens, and had written the address and the telephone number on a slip of paper, just in case. The note was in his hand. He put it down in front of her and said: “I can’t read, Miss, or write,” as though confessing to a crime.

Kate moved it out of sight as quickly as she could, mortified by her thoughtlessness. It had never come up at the hospital, but of course he couldn’t read or write, what did she expect?
She found herself infected by his shyness, and for several minutes they strove to find a new balance.

“What I really want, Miss, is to be able to write a letter by myself. So I could send it to a newspaper, or a radio station. I have heard that people sometimes find their families that way.”

A black boy from an African wilderness, illiterate in a world steeped in the written word. It was enough to render anyone taciturn, timid, powerless.

It dawned on her that Matteous was asking her to teach him to write. A letter that would say what he had thought and lived through during all those years. A letter explaining his life, a letter home, to his mother, Kate imagined. Writing: arranging the words so that they would say what he wanted to tell his mother, although he could hardly expect her to be able to read his letter. But somebody could read it to her. And Kate pictured his mother listening to what he had written, a letter resembling a musical score, a Congolese dance, a prayer for rain, or a song for the dead. “She won’t be alive anymore, Miss, will she?” he had said the day before, making it sound halfway between a statement and a question.

Would he like something to eat or drink, she asked, for she was persuaded that he was always hungry or thirsty. She
could not resist making the offer, and he said yes so as not to have to say no. “No” was a word he said with difficulty, not wishing to sound disrespectful. He was wearing an old jumper of Oscar’s which she had given him, and black army trousers from the hospital. Matteous had approached her with great caution, his tread as soft as if he were stalking a wild animal. So he was asking her for help: teach me to write, then I can go back home.

Kate went to the kitchen, made tea, put some homemade biscuits on a plate and brought it all through on a tray to the balcony.

“Come, let’s sit outside.”

Two chairs and a small table were all the balcony could hold. Matteous stood waiting for Kate to take a seat, and did not sit down until she urged him to. After a while she said that, yes, she would be happy to teach him for as long as he liked, for as long as he stayed in England. Was that alright with him? And she promised him that the day would come when he would write that letter.

She had not known it was possible to weep so noiselessly. It was not weeping in the usual sense, for his face was unchanged, there even seemed to be a hint of a smile. The tears spilled from his eyes as though following a logic of
their own. He did not try to check them, they ran down his cheeks in rivulets, his head held high, his hands on the armrests of his chair as he faced her. She returned his gaze, made no move to console him or take his hand. She made no gesture whatsoever that might discomfit him. She saw the young soldier, the boy in the forest, the man far from home, the wounded patient in bed. She saw the son of a mother who had disappeared.

Events he had only touched upon in the past now came out in the open, in fits and starts.

“Suddenly they were there, Miss, they stormed into the houses and killed everybody they could find. My father shouted for me to run away into the forest. ‘Don’t look back, Matteous, don’t look back,’ he said. I ran, but I also looked back, and then I saw him standing there, surrounded by men raising their axes against him.”

He had joined a band of children roaming the forest, in flight from their village and what had taken place there. He might have been seven years old. He had forgotten a lot, the worst had been washed away. He did not know how he had ended up in Élisabethville. Who had helped him, who gave him food, how he came out of that forest alive – it was all a great gap in his memory. He took huge leaps
across time: at one moment he was seven, at the next seventeen, now he was playing in his village, now in the dancing halls of the city. Élisabethville. The way he said the name gave it something equivocal: there was wistfulness, and also a hint of a shudder, at least to a sensitive ear. To Kate’s ear. She heard everything. He had never spoken in this way before. Between nostalgia and horror, in bits and pieces, a story that had neither end nor beginning. He floundered, broke off, began again. His childhood, his years in the copper mines of Elisabethville, the daylight that he only saw on Sundays. He had done what everybody did: kept his head down. They were years of hardening the heart, and of denial. Years of slow preparation for – well, for what? Matteous groped for the words. And what he had been unable to say yesterday now poured out of him all of its own. That saving the officer’s life had not been a question of courage, but more one of despair. He thought he would run into a knife, or a gun, or a bayonet, get killed in action. He had nobody left anyway, they were all dead and gone. And when the bullets hit him he had almost been glad. His time had come, all would be forgotten. Hoisting the officer over his shoulder had not been hard, he had carried the man as a father would his child. Run, Matteous, don’t look back, go
and hide in the impenetrable forest, in the darkness where nothing is.

But he had pulled through it all, willy-nilly. The Belgian officer, the strange white man with his gloves and his watch and his good shoes, had thanked him and vowed that his rescuer in turn should survive. Matteous had laid him carefully on the ground before collapsing at his side, overcome with pain. That was how they had been borne away, side by side on narrow stretchers, beyond the range of the enemy, beyond the range of death at any rate. He had not set eyes on the white man again.

He had been shipped to London for reasons he did not understand. The Belgian government-in-exile would take care of him, he was told. But that government was not his, it had nothing to do with him. He had drifted from Africa to Europe on tides of randomness, just as he had been sucked into the advance northwards, with an army of strangers set to fight another army of strangers.

Matteous lapsed at last into silence, his eyes fixed on Kate. She had not understood everything, but she had heard his story, told in the language unique to him, complete with gestures and stammerings and bits of words.

In the street beneath them life went on as usual with its
everyday sounds, with sunshine and the screech of gulls high above the buildings. He touched the sleeve of her cardigan, pressed her arm. Kate had a strange sensation of blankness in her head, could feel the blood rising to her cheeks. It was as if somewhere far away, in the unconscionable depths of her being, parcels were being unwrapped, mysterious envelopes torn open, stacks of papers riffled through. Why was it just as if Roy was sitting there, clasping her arm? Roy, who had been dead for so long, and buried in a bottomless pit. The Roy of all those mornings on their balcony in Rome, just off the Corso.

“I’ve sat down, Kate, come and join me.” The invariable invitation. Ten o’clock in the morning, church bells ringing out all around them, a fraction off synchrony. Always lovely weather, always together. In his arms, beneath him, on his knee, his hands in hers, his body in complete abandon. Nothing lasts, nothing stays the same, nothing is lost. Where had they been that last time? She thought it was the Caffè Greco, the café which had become too highly recommended in the guidebooks, but which was largely unspoilt in their day. They had stopped there on their walk to the railway station. He would be away for a couple of days, she would not accompany him. The café was all but deserted at this
early hour. They chose a two-seat banquette upholstered in purple velvet, the cardinal among café furniture. A clutter of small tables, mirrors, paintings, chairs, created an obstacle course for the waiters. Their evenings in Caffè Greco, when it was packed with people, all Italians, all discussions and laughter and gesticulations, how Roy and she loved going there.

The heat had been intense that morning, the ceiling fan whirring to little effect. They had sat there as though it were the train compartment in which Roy would soon depart, first class. Kate held both her hands clasped round his upper arm, as she often did. To him the most endearing of her gestures. They had said little, just stared into the heat, idly aware of the people trickling in. Roy had stroked her hair. There was nothing in the least unusual or untoward, they were in ample time for Roy’s train, just two days and he would be back with her again. From Rome to Milan and back. He was to address “a bunch of diggers” on recent developments at the Forum excavations, and he also had an appointment with a Dutch journalist whose name escaped him, but whom he would see in his hotel.

Thus their hour in the café had passed, after which they resumed their walk, holding hands probably, to the Stazione
Termini, where a porter had taken charge of his bag. Had she accompanied him down the platform? She thought not. She disliked waving goodbye on platforms. There had been no high-flown words on parting – why would there be? Just a kiss on her mouth.

Suddenly, Kate felt the pressure of his hand on her arm. Matteous.

They were flying at night, which was not normal practice. Neutral airlines flew during daylight hours, out in the open, so the Luftwaffe would not mistake them for the enemy. The sun was rising as they prepared for landing on the airfield at Bristol. Oscar was asleep. He was jolted awake as the wheels of the aircraft hit the tarmac. That had never happened to him on a plane before. His nerves jangled. First he would call Morton, he thought, then go to Kate’s flat. He wanted to surprise her.

Bristol, six a.m., Whitchurch Airport. The hands of the giant clock in the arrivals hall stood as stiffly to attention as the guards at Buckingham Palace. Oscar had plenty of time. He took the train to Paddington. Morton was expecting him, but there was no point in presenting himself at the ministry before nine. He did not really want to go there at all; he would ask Morton to meet him elsewhere. He closed the narrow door of his compartment. In England he always had the feeling of travelling on a private train, as if yours was the only compartment behind the engine. There was no corridor, no door to the adjoining compartment, no ticket collector. Ten people in a
plush-lined box, a chocolate box on wheels. The first train of the day was still fairly empty, and the only other person in the compartment was a young soldier sitting by the window. Beside him was a large kitbag with his army greatcoat draped over it. Oscar saw two closed eyes in a pale, unshaven face. A desolate sight. Everything was desolate: the dark roof of the station, the slow tread of the stationmaster, the blurred, metallic tannoy announcing departure. Oscar saw a few late-comers running along the platform and leaping onto the train.

Lately he had spent more time travelling on trains than ever before. Since their days in the mountains he had seen Lara several times, taking turns to meet at his home in Berne and at hers in Fribourg. The first time was a week after they had separated. He picked her up at the station in Berne. How were her binoculars, he wanted to know.

“Idle, sitting on their ledge by the window,” was her prompt reply.

To see her again – since their departure from the Oberland he had been able to think of very little else. In Berne, too, the snow was piled high in the streets, but it was nothing compared to their village up the mountain. Oscar took her to Della Casa, an inconspicuous restaurant in the Schauplatzgasse within walking distance of the station. He had lunch
there sometimes with Swiss contacts, it was “spy-proof”, and unknown to German agents, apparently. The proprietor was a “good” Swiss.