The Italian Girl (16 page)

Who knows? Why had Flora, at that moment of all moments, lured me away like a demoness? If I had behaved differently to Flora, perhaps Elsa would not be dead. I felt that I had killed her, that we had all killed her, and I knew that Otto felt the same.

‘She can’t have suffered much, can she? Not after the first moment. Surely she can’t have suffered. She hardly knew.’ This also he had said.

‘She hardly knew. She was unconscious when I got back. She wasn’t conscious again. The doctor said –’ We were intoning the same things again and again.

‘Yet it took so long,’ said Otto. He spoke in a soft whine of misery quite unlike his usual voice. ‘She might have known. When they thought she was unconscious she might have been thinking. She might have been thinking of me, how I’d treated her –’

‘Stop it Otto. And do stop drinking.’ Otto had been drinking the champagne continuously. He had been grotesquely theoretical in his insistence that it was the only drink one could go on and on with. I could scarcely bear the sight of the bottles.

‘It’s incredible to me now that I could have done it,’ he said, ‘abandon her like that. I should have managed somehow. I should simply have loved her and found a way to go on loving her.’ Her death had made his love perfect. He saw now only the infinite requirement that one person can make upon another. He saw now that he could have attempted far more perfectly to meet all his obligations. And with the fearful strength which her death had given him it seemed to him now that he could have succeeded.

I sat on the table. We were like two men in a prison. There was that sense of there being no more possibilities, of there being only the here and the now and the this. We had inhabited the little room during the long terrible time of her unconsciousness. Now it was the hour of departure but we could not depart. I could see that Otto could no longer conceive of himself. I dreaded the task of taking him away.

‘Are you sure he’s still in there?’

‘Yes. I’d have seen him through the glass door. Do you want to talk to him?’

‘No,’ said Otto. His face still wore the grimace which I had seen upon it when I ran back from the wood. The mask had only loosened a little. He passed me lumbering to the wall. ‘You see him, Ed. Find out what he wants done with – Oh God.’

We had all been removed to some other plane of being. Otto was living in torment now what seemed to him, what perhaps was, the reality of his relation with Elsa. Something extreme, some truth too appalling to contemplate and yet arrestingly evident had thrust itself through the surface of our lives like a monstrous hump. And one result of this was that we were all isolated from each other, as if we had been shut into separate cells. Since the catastrophe Otto and David had treated each other with a gentleness, a tenderness almost, which in the midst of such extreme grief on both sides seemed a miracle of attention. There was a respect which resembled love, but no communication. We had each our own Elsa. With a devoted deference Otto had acknowledged David’s rights, rights which had seemed pathetically, dreadfully, like property rights, to be the first with Elsa. There had been the arrangements, the vigil, and now –

‘I’ll speak to him then,’ I said. ‘Shall I ask him to come back – home?’ It sounded odd.

‘Yes,’ said Otto. ‘But he won’t come.’ He lifted his head and for a moment the mask of pain was curiously cleared and a new Otto looked out, blank, resigned, dispossessed.

‘We must look after him.’

Otto shook his head. ‘We can’t.
We
can’t.’ The old grimace returned. He said, ‘Will we ever be the same again, Ed?’

I knew what he meant. It was not just what we had seen and heard in those moments: the blazing room, the screaming women, the handling of that seared flesh. We had seen too much suddenly, too much about mortality and chance, too much about the consequences of our actions, too much about the real nature of the world. I answered, ‘Yes, unfortunately.’

A figure passed quickly behind the glass panel of the door and I started up. ‘You’ll be all right, Otto? I’ll be back directly.’

‘Yes, go, go.’

David had already disappeared. I ran along a white corridor and down some stone steps by a lift shaft. I could hear running feet ahead of me. I began to run too.

I emerged in a long hallway with a vista towards a distant arch. The boy was far ahead, running like a deer. He turned towards the main entrance and was gone. I ran faster down the empty, clean, white hall. I passed between pillars and emerged into a busy street, a rainy summer evening. He was already crossing the road. I saw that he had a suitcase.

After so much solitude, so much prison life, I was confused by such a close crowding of faces. A little mild rain was falling. It touched my brow and my hair with a gentle incredulous touch. A yellow sunny light showed buildings vivid and near against a leaden sky. I pursued David across the road.

He was running again. Although he did not look back he seemed like a man pursued. I was checked by traffic at a side road and he receded. I could just see his head distant among many others, and the idea that he might now simply disappear and never be heard of any more filled me with a sudden anguish. I dodged across in front of a lorry and began to run along the edge of the pavement, springing into the road in the face of the slow, swarming, home-coming crowd.

‘David!’

I had almost caught him up when he turned abruptly into a red-brick courtyard and I saw we were at the railway station. There were fewer people now. I sprinted and caught his arm.

‘Oh, it’s you. I thought it was Otto.’ For a second he looked disappointed. Then he turned and we walked more slowly together into the hall of the station.

‘You shouldn’t have run like that. You’re not going away?’

‘Yes.’ He consulted a timetable on the wall. Then he went to the ticket guichet. I stood helplessly, almost shyly, behind him. He too had a new face.

He turned to me more gently now and seemed to expect me to accompany him. ‘Platform three. Twenty minutes to wait.’

We walked over the bridge in silence. He had wept so much that his whole profile was altered, his cheeks and nose shining and swollen. The mask of his expression was different too. The lines of the face were dislocated and incoherent as if the inner spring were broken which had used to wreathe his narrowed eyes with beaming wrinkles. He did not look older, but like a miserable child. My heart was sore for him. But I felt, like Otto, his privileged separateness.

‘David, I don’t want to trouble you now, but I must. Otto wanted to know – what you want done. Or have you already arranged something?’

‘No. Please let Otto arrange it. Forgive me for leaving it to you. You understand, I could not –’

‘Yes, yes. That’s all right. Have you any special wishes? A Jewish burial – ?’

‘Yes.’ He seemed a little startled. ‘Of course. If you will find the leader of the Jewish community he will arrange all, all.’ He looked already confused and far away. I saw that the tears were coming again and I looked down. I could not bear the mystery of his pain.

I said, ‘Will you be all right? We wanted you to come home.’

He put his suitcase down and put his two hands to his face as if to cool it. His fingers caressed the swollen disfigured cheeks.

‘Kind. But I must go. I shall be well.’

‘Don’t grieve,’ I said idiotically. I felt near to tears myself.

He sighed very deeply. ‘I knew she was a doomed child. I knew I should have to leave her behind.’

The solemnity of the words made me apprehend him as a child himself. ‘Where are you going David? Are you going back south to your people? Do not be alone.’

‘South?’ He looked confused for a moment. ‘No, no. I am going home. To the true north.’ He smiled a strained smile and rubbed his eyes.

His words puzzled me. ‘Where – ?’

‘I am going back to Leningrad.’

‘Back
–?’ I stared at him. ‘But I thought –’

‘You thought I was born in Golders Green and that my father was, I forget what, a fur merchant? No. Those were lies. We came from Leningrad like she said, just like she said.’

‘You mean everything, the whole story?’

‘The forest at night, and the searchlights, and my father’s hand – all true, every word true just like she said.’

I stared at his hot streaked face. ‘But why – ?’

‘Why did I lie. Well, why should I tell the truth,
such
a truth, to anyone who asks? Why should I wear such a story always round my neck and be such a figure to the world? And oh, there were worse things, worse than she said. I did not want to be a tragic man, to be the suffering one. I wanted to be light, to be new, to be free – ’ He spoke impatiently, gesturing with his hands as if he were catching the dark fancies that flocked about him.

It was impossible to doubt him now. And as it came to me that he had indeed not escaped his destiny of suffering, the significance of his earlier words came home to me ‘Leningrad? But, David, reflect –’

‘I want to see the Neva again,’ he said. ‘I want to touch those blocks of granite along the quays, to see the Admiralty spire in the sun –’

‘David, don’t be a perfect fool. You can’t go back there. You might be put in prison. Anything might happen to you.’

He spread his hands in a way which made me see that he was Jewish indeed. ‘Who knows? I believe I would be well, I believe I would be let be. Why should they not let me be? And I am prepared to run the risk of things being otherwise. And even if it were otherwise? It is my own place and one must suffer in one’s own place.’

‘You are an idiotic little fool,’ I said. I wanted to impress him, to shake him out of this moment of fantasy. ‘You are in a completely insane state of mind, an extreme state of mind, at the moment. You want to die too. You simply must not make an irrevocable decision now. You must wait.’

He shook his head. ‘Now is the time, exactly the time, to decide. Do you not realize that we know the truth about ourselves
now
? A truth that will fade.’

It was what I had just said myself in answer to Otto’s question. It will fade. But I answered him. ‘Please don’t go.’

‘It is the only place where I am real. They speak the language of my heart.’

‘They may break your heart. Don’t be romantic about it.’

‘I am in the truth now. And this is a moment for following the truth into whatever folly.’

‘It will be a very long folly, David.’

‘Well, so. But I am useless here. You may not understand, but nothing
means
anything to me outside Russia. Your language is dry, dry in my mouth. Here I am a non-man, I should become here a clown, a nothing, some man’s toy, as I might have been your brother’s toy if he had wished it. I would rather die than be a meaningless man.’

‘Don’t be a lunatic. You may feel this. But think about freedom. You said you wanted to be free, to be light, to be new. Freedom is that one necessary thing. And there, whatever else you have, you will not have that.’ I looked at my watch. I had ten minutes in which to raise the whole theory of the matter, ten minutes in which to persuade him.

He gave a kind of smile, pushing his full mouth against the misery of his face. ‘There is no arguing with the bottom of one’s heart. Not everyone can have that thing, freedom, and not be ruined by it. It is only one way of life – ’

‘Idiot! Reflect, reflect! What will you
do
in Leningrad? Imagine, imagine! What about your painting? You spoke to me of that – ’

‘I burnt those paintings. I am glad you did not see them. I have no talent. And there are things more important.’

‘That could be so. But for
you
–? The question is not what life is best but what life can
you
best live. You
must
consider your own needs, and not just for your own sake either.’ How to explain
that
to him in ten minutes?

‘I have no such needs. Only the ones I spoke of. To be back there. The poet says, “Russia shines in my heart”. I did not want to leave. One cannot escape from the suffering of the world.’

‘One need not court it. You remember what you said to me about there being two kinds of Jew – ’

‘I never really believed it, not for myself. I knew that I would be caught in the end, through her –’

‘Have you any family out there?’

‘A sister.’

‘Ah, another sister. What does she do?’

He smiled the painful dragging smile again. ‘She is a successful person, an engineer.’

‘I see. Perhaps she has escaped her Jewish destiny.’

‘Perhaps I am her Jewish destiny.’

‘You are leaping into the fire.’

‘It is in our family to do so.’

The grimness of the wit shocked me with a terrible sense of his earnestness. I saw him there full of the despair of the very young, the beautiful absoluteness which can drive on towards a lifelong shipwreck. ‘Do not go, David. Please think for a while anyway. Wait a month or two without deciding. Let me see you again and talk with you. Come and stay at my house and rest and think these things over. Please let me look after you.’

He gave me a full stare from wide-open blood-shot eyes. ‘And what do you think would be the consequence of that? No, no. It is better to do the wrong thing for the right reasons than the right thing for the wrong reasons. Ah, you don’t understand – ’

I did however understand very well. I could have wrung my hands over the tangled mess of human destiny: those half-grasped intimations of right and wrong that drive us out along twilit roads where there is no return.

I said to him harshly, ‘You can’t afford the fare.’

He smiled, this time more freely, and I was reminded of Otto’s look when the mask seemed to fall from him. ‘Yes. I have these.’

He groped in his pocket and brought out his closed hand. He turned it and opened the palm. There were four diamond rings.

With a shock of mingled horror and pain I recognized them. ‘So that part of the story was true too.’

‘I told you it was all true. My father was a provident man. And she – she would not mind –’

‘Your father might. He got those rings to help you to get out, not to return.’