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The air in the flat was as thick as the fog outside, a blend of cigarette smoke and rich smells from the kitchen. Herbert felt a curious mixture of self-consciousness and relief; the former because he was so obviously the outsider in this group, and the latter because at least now he wouldn’t be left alone with Hannah, groping for conversation.

“It’s Shabbat,” Hannah said.

“You’re Jewish?”

“No, I just want to party on a Friday night.” She laughed, but without cruelty, and the sarcasm in her voice was instantly diffused. “Of course I’m Jewish. You never meet a Jew before?”

“Of course I have.” Herbert did not like to say where.

“Well, then. Now it’s Shabbat. Oh!” Hannah opened a drawer, brought out two candles, set them in candlesticks already on the table, and lit them. For a moment, Herbert was surprised by her dexterity, and then realized that perhaps it was not so difficult on home turf; he could probably have found most things in his flat blindfolded, too.

Herbert opened his mouth to inquire about the candles, and Hannah answered his unasked question. “For the start of Shabbat. Sunset, so I should have done it hours ago. You light them only when you can see three star in the sky, but people say the fog is bad, so we might have one week without Shabbat because we cannot see three star. For me, I
never
see three star. Or two star, or one star.” She laughed again, quite the happiest person he had met all day.

“You joke about being blind?” Herbert said.

Hannah looked at him as though he were the stupidest man on earth. “Of course. I joke, or I go mad. Being blind is better than being mad, no?”

Herbert thought back to the grim resolve that Hannah had shown in the Long Water that morning—that morning, was that all it was? It seemed they’d known each other much longer—and realized that her jokes about blindness were a veneer, genuine but thin, plastered over the deep vein of cripple’s anger within. She might laugh about her sightlessness to stop herself going mad, but laughter did not equal resignation. On the contrary, she channeled her rage, fueling the determination of her independence.

“You have a nice day?” she asked, lengthening the indefinite article slightly, so that it sounded more like
aw.

“Oh, you know. Got chased round Highgate by three guys. Hid in a cemetery. Had a fight with a Russian. The usual things you do on your birthday.”

It had slipped out, as though made word against his will. He hadn’t meant to tell her.

“Is your birthday?”

“Yes.”

“How many years?”

“Thirty-five.”

“Thirty-five is good age. Enough experience, enough energy.”

Herbert doubted both, sometimes.

He expected her to ask whether he had nothing better to do than dine with a stranger on his birthday, but instead she said simply, “All this, you do for the dead man, yes?”

“Yes.”

Hannah put her hands on the back of a chair and sat gracefully.

“What language are you speaking with those men?” Herbert asked, also sitting—though, he could not help feeling, with slightly less poise than she had exhibited.

“Hungarian.”

A plate of food appeared in front of him, smelling more delicious than anything he could remember eating. “You’re from Hungary?”

“Yes.”

“Your English is very good.”

“You lie, but thank you.”

“It’s not a lie.”

“My English is OK. I understand you, you understand me. I listen to language more than others perhaps, than people with sight. I hear vocabulary, grammar, accents. But I speak Hungarian translated to English, not English. You understand?”

Herbert nodded, a motion which for Hannah his silence gave away.

“Imagine me like radio,” she laughed. “On radio, you can’t see. So is no help, to nod or shake head.”

“Yes,” Herbert said, knowing, or at least hoping, that Hannah was laughing
with
him rather than
at
him. “I understand.”

Someone put a plate in front of her. Without a trace of self-consciousness, Hannah bent her face to the table and sniffed around the entire circumference, seeing—discovering, more accurately—what was where. Whoever had served her knew her needs, Herbert saw; the food was arranged as though on a clock face.

He looked at his own plate. There were mushroom pancakes, liver with figs, wild rice and mashed potatoes,
apricot chicken, and cabbage nut salad. To procure all this, with rationing still in force, Hannah, or her fellow Hungarians, must have been even more resourceful than he had thought.

“Let’s eat,” Hannah said. “For Shabbat dinner, everything can wait.”

That she was Hungarian was in itself unremarkable enough, Herbert thought. Britain had been a repository for refugees since the war. Poles, Czechs, Greek Cypriots, and Spaniards had all made their way there to escape persecution and worse, and now were being joined by the first waves from the colonies of which Britain was divesting itself with some haste.

Not everyone approved, of course. No boarding-house seemed complete without a sign on the door proclaiming:
No Blacks, No Irish, No Dogs.

Herbert wondered how many of Hannah’s friends he had watched, questioned, or otherwise checked up on during his years in Five. The service as a whole had interviewed almost a quarter of a million Eastern European refugees in the past couple of years, of which three thousand were earmarked for immediate internment should there be war with the Soviet Union.

Perhaps some of them were working with MI6, too. It was an open secret in the intelligence community that Six were spiriting Hungarian dissidents across the border into the British zone of Austria, where they were giving them resistance training in preparation for a future uprising against the Soviet occupation.

“You ever have matzo?” Hannah asked.

“Never.”

“Here.” She handed Herbert a piece of what looked like rough biscuit. “The first time I ever have it, a rabbi
on a park bench give it to me. You know what I ask him? ‘Who write this rubbish?’”

She laughed again, loud and infectious. If Herbert could have bottled even a fraction of her joie de vivre, he felt, he could have cured half the capital’s ailments in a stroke.

It took him a moment to get the joke, and then he was laughing with her.

He wondered, too, whether this type of joke against her blindness was, in addition to what he had noticed before, some sort of defense mechanism against unwanted sympathy, or perhaps Hannah’s way of testing people out and seeing what they were made of when it came to sensibilities and sensitivities.

Herbert ate fast, ravenous for such amazing food and unable to follow the conversation which babbled around him. Hannah, in contrast, lingered over each mouthful, smelling it on her fork, holding it in her mouth, chewing copiously before swallowing.

“Hannah Mortimer isn’t a very Jewish name,” Herbert said when she had finished.

“Is not my birth name. I was born Hannah Moses.”

“Why did you change?”

“Why does anyone change their name? To seem less foreign.” She rolled the
r
slightly at the back of her tongue. “To change their luck, if the old name brings bad chance. Jews always change their names.”

“They do?”

“Always. Asher becomes Archer; David Davies; Jacob Jackson; Levi Lewis…”

Herbert had stopped listening, because he was still thinking of what she had said a couple of sentences before, about the destiny of misfortune.

With a leap of muscular induction, he knew—at least, he could make a good guess—when she had come to Britain, and why. If he was right, he knew what she must have been through in her life.

“I was at Belsen,” he said.

The British soldiers arrived in Belsen on 15th April 1945, a date Herbert could no more forget than his own birthday. If they had ever doubted the justness of the cause against Nazism, then with one look at Belsen, they doubted no more.

They had expected to hear shouting from a mile off: “The Allies are coming! The Allies are coming!”—but when they drove through the gates, it was in complete silence. And at funeral pace, too. They had to keep stopping, because the inmates were too weak to get out of the way of their tanks.

There had been no food or water for the five days before their entry. Outside the huts was an almost unbroken carpet of shit, filth, and corpses. Some of the bodies had been dismembered and the flesh ripped from their bones; yet there were no animals which could have done this.

Everywhere was typhus and starvation, the dead and the dying indistinguishable. People collapsed as they walked; upright one moment, then dead before they hit the ground. Or they crawled to the sunshine to die there.

The British doctors marked red crosses on the foreheads of those they thought had a chance of making it. They were never in danger of running out of ink.

Everything Herbert had known about suffering was turned on its head. He and his fellow soldiers had spent
months existing on army rations and whatever food they had found during the German retreat. They were filthy with sweat and diarrhea and the general stink of war. But compared to the inmates of Belsen, they looked as though they had been holed up at the Ritz.

Their khaki uniforms, mixed and matched from inadequate equipment stores, could have been regal robes when set next to the rags of the deportees. Even with their various ailments, the British soldiers were the picture of ruddy-cheeked, well-fed health among the tenuous, skeletal silhouettes who tried to touch and finger them, as if the eddies of their passing were the waters of life itself.

When the soldiers ran to answer a command, or climbed a ladder, they would sometimes stop dead not knowing where to look, for in the inmates’ wide-eyed gazes they saw an unpalatable knowledge: that such movements, so natural and easy for the soldiers, would have killed the inmates as surely as a bullet in the temple.

How did Herbert know this? Because they
did
kill some of them, that was how.

The soldiers gave away their rations—dried milk powder, oatmeal, sugar, salt, and tinned meat—and within hours hundreds of those who had eaten were dead, the food too rich for systems starved partway to death.

How in the name of God could oatmeal and tinned meat be too rich?

The initial admission, that he had been at Belsen, had come out of Herbert’s mouth without thinking, and as he told his story, his guts lurched with the possibility that he had spoken out of turn, that at best he was
wrong, or if he had been right then the reminder would be unwelcome, and she would ask him, perhaps politely, perhaps with anger ablaze, to leave, to trudge back through the fog to a flat even emptier and colder than before. For before there had been neither Hannah, nor the chatter of her friends—which was no less comforting for its incomprehensibility—nor the textures of her food.

Reactions flitted across Hannah’s face like clouds in front of the moon. Her mouth dropped slightly; surprise more than dismay, Herbert hoped. He saw the slight quiver of her cheeks as she battled the silt of dormant memories suddenly stirred.

Finally, as she resolved the manner in which she would handle this, she narrowed her eyes and turned to him.

“Then you understand,” she said.

I come from Pécs, a small town several hour from Budapest in the car. My mother was a teacher, my father worked for Ford. American cars were popular in Hungary before the war.

In 1944, springtime, the Germans arrive, and suddenly comes order after order: wear a Star of David, yellow; obey curfew; prohibit to travel; searching the homes; people in prison; seize stores and businesses.

And then they take us to Auschwitz.

It is May. I remember barbed wire between pylons, green tar-paper covering the barracks. Striped clothes for prisoners. Everything before is now gone.

When I think of Pécs, it is like life on another planet.

Auschwitz was … No need to tell you, you can guess. I was there until beginning 1945. The Red Army is almost at the gates when the guards evacuate us. We march through the
snow; frostbite and exhaustion. People lose fingers, toes, arms, legs. Dancers don’t dance anymore, pianists don’t play.

You stop, they shoot you. We drag those who don’t walk.

I am fifteen. I should be in school, kissing boys behind classrooms and quarreling with my mama. Instead, I march through snow without seeing. Twenty thousand of us left Auschwitz; less than ten thousand reached Wandsbeck, the labor camp in Hamburg. Only two thousand arrive in Belsen.

Belsen was the terminal, in every way. Never before is reflected so purely man’s darkness, his sadism and brutality. I try to describe with words what I remember from it, but there is no language on earth to express such horror, even to imagine it.

It is so horrible because no longer the Germans are in charge. The guards have nothing to do—Death does everything for them. Death keeps us so hungry and so crowded that we cannot move, not even when our lives depend on it. Death stands guard on the walls, Death keeps all the food and water for itself. Death makes sure we have no work, no order. Death leaves us on a giant heap of rubbish.

I arrived in Belsen on 7th March, so I spend five week there. The rest of my life, whether I die tomorrow or in next century, will never be as long as those five week. Difference is this: in Auschwitz, we do things, we work, we have reasons. In Belsen, we exist. No more.

One day, I ask a guard:
“Warum?”
“Why?”

And he reply:
“Hier ist kein warum.”
“Here, there is no why.”

After first few days, I never think of death. Death all around, so why think of it? Like to thinking why grass is green or sky blue. Neither I think of the Germans very much. Yes, I like to defy. Just to be alive is enough. My hatred against them increases my desire to live; it keeps me alive in actuality, perhaps.

Truth is this: you think too much of what happens, you go crazy. After few day, I decide to think of my hair only. I think of when I can wash it, or way to comb it with my finger, or way to tie it on my head, off my face. I think of how to stop guards cutting all my hair, and how to stay away from lice. Lice everywhere in camp.