One Last Summer (2007) (35 page)
Sascha, who would have thought those drawing lessons you gave me in the tack room all those years ago would have led to a career and the means of supporting Claus, myself and Erich, until Erich left Oxford to take up a position in a West German law firm.
I am looking forward to making a new start in a country that holds no memories. Erich is married and successful in his chosen career, but there is no love left between us. He never forgave me for allowing Julian to put him in an English boarding school, or, once Claus returned, for remarrying when there was a possibility that his father was alive. I showed him the official notification that I received of Claus’s death together with his gold watch and other effects, but he still insisted that a wife ‘should have remained faithful and hoped’.
I saw Jeremy last month. He was in Germany on a walking holiday with friends. He still condemns me for leaving him when he was so young. He has decided on a career in the army and has already applied for a place at Sandhurst.
Both fathers have every right to be proud of their sons. They are carbon copies of the officers and gentlemen Claus and Julian were. And, if there should be another war between England and Germany, I am sure that they would be only too happy to shoot one another in the name of patriotism.
Erich and Jeremy were acutely embarrassed to see my photograph in the newspapers when I joined the anti-apartheid and anti-nuclear demonstrations. They cannot understand why I have become actively involved with so many organizations that are working towards a free and peaceful society, or how I see blind compliance with authority and political apathy the route to allowing another Hitler free rein to dictate to the world and wreck tragedy and destruction all over again.
Who would have thought that Wilhelm and Paul’s nephews could turn out to be such stuffed shirts?
WEDNESDAY, 28 MAY 1969
New Haven, Connecticut, America
I never thought it would happen, but in this book I can be truthful. There is another man in my life, an editor. He is not like you, Sascha, but no one could ever measure up to you. Anthony is kind and thoughtful. I met him at a publishing party in New York a year ago. His wife is in a psychiatric hospital in New Hampshire, but I would not marry him even if he were free. Two failed and unhappy marriages are enough for one lifetime and, in truth, I now like living alone.
You taught me what true love is, Sascha. Even if you didn’t love me and only used me to survive, you made me love you, and I now know that loving someone means wanting the best for them and forgiving them no matter what.
Anthony still loves his wife, although she doesn’t know who he is any more. In the absence of anything better we have settled for friendship, companionship and, for the sake of our respective children, discretion. So this is how my life is to end. In a new country, with work and new friends to fill my time.
Showered, stretched out on the bed in a pair of Mickey Mouse pyjamas Ahmed had hated, and which she’d packed on principle, Laura poured herself a vodka and took it and the book she’d bought in the hotel shop to the bed. She placed her drink within easy reach on the bedside cabinet and settled back on the pillows.
Considering she hadn’t opened
One Last Summer
in years, she was surprised to discover that she could recall the opening paragraph almost word for word.
When sleep fades and I stir into consciousness, the first emotion I feel is fear. What am I? Where am I? With recollection comes knowledge – and wonder. There is such a miracle as life. I am part of it and I touch the woman lying beside me, intensely thankful I am not alone.
I embrace her body as I embrace her soul. But the caress brings new fears. They linger like a hidden cancer that consumes the body below the outwardly healthy skin; silent, contaminating, defiling every moment that might have brought perfect happiness.
They corrupt every loving touch and smile. Fears that go beyond the dark primeval one of death that has spawned so many religions and mercenary priests.
She and I have accepted the inevitable slow process of decay and disintegration that comes to all living things. When that happens, as it must in the course of time, we will even welcome it, if we can share the same earth. We dream of a tall and beautiful tree, its roots reaching down into both our bodies, the only regeneration and resurrection I can bring myself to believe in. And, although she has her God, the dream is now hers as much as mine. The fears are of something far worse: of losing one another. But for now, I am grateful that we have been given another morning, another day. I try not to think beyond it.
Our bed is soft, clean and warm. The linen crisp, bleached by the sun and scented with forest air. Our cover light, stuffed with down and feathers. A clean bed is the ultimate luxury.
I kiss her lips. She returns my caress without breaking the rhythm of her sleep. Leaving the bed, I slip on my old green and white towelling robe and creep to the door. Treading softly over the gnarled floorboards, I look in on our children. The baby, lying in the cot I carved while he was still in his mother’s womb; his arms raised above his head, his fists curled loosely alongside his sleep-flushed face, his white-blond hair, the same shade as my own, plastered damply around his face. Close by, his two-year-old sister, a perfect miniature of her mother, is coiled like a cat beneath the covers on her tiny bed. Only her blonde curls can be seen above her eiderdown.
My flesh and blood, so small, so vulnerable. Fear returns. How can I protect them if I am no longer with them? Then I remember, I have been given this morning. For the moment they are safe. I am able to watch over and care for my family.
I walk to the head of the narrow wooden staircase, avoiding the most rickety and warped floorboards. All the woodwork in the cottage is dry, old and creaking. I stop to gaze at my wife’s paintings on the white-washed walls. Watercolours of the children and the countryside, painted with love and care. My favourite is an ink wash of a dacha. The building is small, little more than a summerhouse, yet it is exquisitely proportioned, Eastern European in style and architecture. I trace the lines of the single gable above the door with my finger. It is a simple rustic cottage and our home.
Laura sipped her drink, turned the page, and continued to read the author’s description of his house. It was either the lakeside summerhouse at Grunwaldsee or one exactly like it. Wondering, she followed the author’s progress as he walked up the lane that led to the stables of the ‘big house’ and harnessed a grey stallion. Was it a Datski grey? She read on.
I may not have been born to this, but the old proverb ‘scratch a Russian and find a peasant’ is true. It is good to ride in the fresh air early in the day, to look out over fields and see the work that has been done and note what needs doing. To smell the dew and pine needles in the forest. To run my hands through tilled earth and see the crops I planted grow and ripen for harvesting.
I linger by the lake, watching the mist rise through the trees that encircle the water. A pair of swans and a train of cygnets glide out from the bank. Boris whinnies. He knows it is time to return to the stable. But I continue to watch the rays of the rising sun play on the water, and the herons searching for fish.
Storks swoop low overhead, before landing on their nests on the roof of the big house. Boris stamps his hooves, and I finally turn back. After leaving Boris with his stable-mates I return home.
The cottage is half-hidden by the fruit bushes that hedge the garden. I hear my daughter’s chatter above the sound of clattering pans in the kitchen. The doors and windows have been flung wide and I see my wife, moving around the table in her faded blue cotton frock.
The table is covered with the everyday red and green embroidered tablecloth. The bread plate is full of steaming white milk rolls that have just been lifted from the oven. The scent of coffee, cheese and spicy sausage is strong in the air, and I realize I am hungry.
My daughter runs to greet me. My wife smiles. I kiss her as I pass her on my way to my chair at the head of the table.
Breakfast is my favourite meal of the day. I eat slowly, my daughter on my lap. Her blonde curls brush against my chin as I watch my wife feed our son. He falls asleep at her breast, and as she puts him in his basket I pour us third cups of coffee. We linger at the table, talking and laughing until it is time for work …
Laura followed the hero’s progress through a day in the fields. Not the lonely day of the modern farmer, working in isolation with his tractor, but a day spent wielding hand tools and harvesting in the company of scores of farmhands, women as well as men. A day when his wife worked alongside him, and his children slept and played at the edge of the fields within their sight.
At sunset all the workers and their families headed for the ballroom of the big house and the harvest supper that had been laid out there. Afterwards, there was music, dancing and drinking, but the author and his wife returned to the cottage with their children.
I lift my sleepy daughter on to my shoulders. My wife carries the baby in his basket. When we reach the lake, the little one insists on climbing from my shoulders, taking off her shoes and stockings, and jumping in the shallows. It is her last burst of energy before sleep. We go into the house, fill the tub and bathe the children.
While my wife dresses the children for bed, I go from room to room lighting the lamps. My wife carries our son to his cot and I chase our daughter up the stairs. The last ritual of our children’s day is story time. I sit at the foot of my daughter’s bed and tell them the tales that my father told me; tales passed on down through generations.
We stay with the children until their eyes close. Later, I wander into the garden while my wife plays the piano. The piece she has chosen is one I introduced her to. It mirrors our peaceful life here – the lake, the countryside, the fields, the woods. The sun inches slowly downwards and disappears into the lake, drizzling a red-gold path in its wake. The last glints of gold and red fade to purple, and darkness closes in.
The music has stopped. My wife is at my side. I embrace her, and for the first time I notice the swelling in her body – our third child …
Laura set the book aside and poured herself another drink. She walked to the window and looked out, but instead of seeing the lake as it was, splattered with modern yachts, she allowed her imagination free rein and recreated the unspoiled lake of
One Last Summer
.
The impersonal hotel room faded as the author’s description of the peace and beauty of his simple and quiet life transported her into that other time. Was it Grunwaldsee?
She envied the author’s perfect marriage and, for the first time, she realized that the problems that had plagued her own disastrous, fleeting affairs might well be her fault. Unlike the author and his wife, she had never even tried to understand any of her partners. For her, work had always come first. The men she had allowed, albeit temporarily, into her life had been diversions. Someone to spend time with, when she had nothing better to do; people to be left behind when a job took her hundreds of miles away to other countries and occasionally even other continents.
Was it impossible to build a perfect loving relationship with someone in the modern world? Could the kind of marriage of mind, body and soul depicted in One Last Summer exist only in the slow-moving world of rural life as it had been lived for centuries by peasants the world over?
Mechanization and speed had replaced horse-drawn ploughs and scythes, and infiltrated every aspect of people’s lives. How would the author have felt if his wife had woken up alongside him that morning, and said, ‘Your turn to have the kids today, sweetheart. I have to fly to Australia to make a documentary on the exploitation of crocodiles in National Parks.’
She smiled, then opened the book again.
She is everything to me, this woman I love. The air I breathe, the earth beneath my feet, food, drink – all pale into insignificance when set beside my need for her. She clings to me for a moment, we kiss silently. Everything that needs to be said between us has long been said. Arm in arm, we wander back through the garden into the house. She walks up the stairs. I blow out the lamps in the downstairs rooms, close the doors, then follow her. I step into the children’s room and look at them sleeping peacefully in their beds before going into our bedroom.
The windows are open and the white cotton drapes flutter in the breeze. She sits at her dressing table. I stand behind her chair. Taking the brush from her hand, I loosen the braid in her hair and run my fingers through it before combing it out.
In bed I reacquaint myself with her body, which I know as well as my own. Our flesh fuses into one and later, much later, we lie happy and exhausted in one another’s arms. I watch her face intently as she drifts into sleep. I try to fight, but it is impossible.
Holding her, terrified that she will dissolve into the shadows, my eyelids grow heavy. I cannot stop them from closing. The pain begins.
Knowing what was to come, and having read a little of what followed, Laura closed her eyes for a moment. When she opened them, she went out on to the balcony. The night was warm, the air soft. She switched on the outside light, sat at the table and continued reading.
My body is pierced by insufferable cold; it penetrates my bones, paralyses my limbs and freezes my blood. The last thing I want to do is move. But the clang of a hammer striking metal jerks me into the nightmare world. And I know that if I don’t stir myself I will be killed. Nothingness is a seductive prospect but a selfish one. If I succumb to temptation, I will never be able to return to my wife and children again.
I lift my hands. The stench of them makes me retch. But a man with an empty stomach cannot vomit. My knuckles are stiff, the stink emanates from the sores that weep pus every time I raise my fingers. The stinging is worse than mosquito bites. Tears start in my eyes, burning behind my glued eyelids. I rub at the crusts that bind my lashes with my thumbs. It is hard to open them. When I succeed I stare at my hands. Despite the pain I feel as though I am looking at a part of someone else’s body. Then I glance past my fingers.
The log-built shelter is rotted with damp and age, but in winter the damp turns to ice, gilding the walls with a sheet of silver that might look pretty somewhere else. The hut cannot protect us from heat in summer or cold in winter. My work party cuts logs in the forest and every day we scrounge wood for the stove, but the stove is make-shift, and without constant care it soon goes out.
The only heat we can rely on is generated by the packed layers of reeking bodies around us. The shelf I am lying on is hard, the straw that lines it scant, and what little there is moves, alive with lice and bugs that fight with those that have already laid claim to a space within my rotting clothes and body. Can they think, these lice and bugs? Are they aware that if they don’t fight for an unoccupied nook or cranny in my flesh they will freeze to death?
I swing my legs down and icy air cuts through my rags like a blade. I am wrapped in all the clothes I possess: a pullover more hole than wool; a jacket; a cap; and what is left of my army uniform. I have lost count of the years that have passed since I first put the trousers on. The shredded cloth is stiff with dirt, the holes rub my skin raw, opening old sores and creating new ones, but I dare not remove a layer, not between the onset of winter and the spring thaw. It would be stolen in seconds and I would never find another to replace it.
The air is foul with something worse than the usual excrement and unwashed bodies. I hear a cry.
‘Nikolai is dead.’
His team leader growls, ‘Hide him.’
No one objects to keeping Nikolai’s body in the hut. We are accustomed to living with corpses. The way we look and smell, none of us is far from death and it holds no terror for us.
Those who can move the quickest, flock around Nikolai. A piece of bread, black from age and the dirt in Nikolai’s pocket, disappears down someone’s gullet. I see Nikolai’s hat bobbing on one man’s head, his coat on another’s back. I don’t join the scavengers. Not because I have any scruples, but because sickness has slowed me. Even if I grabbed something, in my present weakened state it would soon be taken from me.
Nikolai’s body is pushed beneath a bunk and logs heaped in front of it. That way, his team leader can continue to claim his rations until the guards eventually discover what is left of his corpse. In winter, that can take a week, sometimes two.
My team leader shouts the roll-call command. I pull the blanket from my bunk and wrap it around my shoulders. Only idiots and newcomers leave them to be stolen. The floor is compacted earth, ice-encrusted and bitterly cold to bare feet. I join the men who swarm on the heap of felt boots behind the door. Most are split and don’t keep out the snow, but there is always the chance of exchanging your pair for something better. But pick carefully. The size must be the same, but the owner weaker than you. Disregard those rules and you may not live to wear them.