He studied his
knuckles. They sat in rows curling around the steering wheel. Bent white hairs
sprouted out of them amidst the blotches that plagued his hands and up his arms
to his shoulders, and then over and down his hairy chest. He tried to move his
hands, to bring some life into them but they stayed still like an ancient
mountain range. His trousers had dried sticking to his skin. He could smell his
damp socks and the mud that had crept into his shoes was slowly crusting over.
His overcoat was frozen about him and the coarse collar scratched at his neck.
He attempted to twitch his thumbs and when they remained motionless as well he
decided that he would keep his hands where they were for fear he no longer had
the power to move them at all. They must be frozen.
He
had been cold since he had left England. Driving down to Dover and then across
France and Belgium and the Netherlands he had been cold. His hands especially
so as he had forgotten his gloves. His wife would never had forgotten and nor
would his daughter have. But neither of them were there when he packed. One
dead. One deceived. He had therefore packed slowly and contentedly and what
went into his case was really only a matter of process, the checking-off of
necessities that a lifetime had imprinted on his mind. It was the slow sorting
of essentials. He took no luxuries; there was nothing he wanted to have close
to him. He took only what he needed to get him through the trip, and everything
he put in his case he resented as another thing he was to be burdened with. He had
left his watch behind too.
Once
in the car he felt a surprising sensation of excitement that in seventy years
of driving he had never experienced. Not even at the beginning with those first
painful lessons as a young man that had commenced when his family had returned
to England, practising with his father who sat rigid and sweating, screaming
directions and expletives next to him. It had never got any better. Driving the family to Norfolk for summer
holidays had been the worst journeys of the year. On those trips he had been
the one sweating and shouting expletives while his wife fumbled with the map
and gave no directions at all. In a gnawing more tedious fashion, driving
around the little town they lived in had been as dreadful; drives to the
supermarket, to the post office, to the chemists. Driving along these streets
now, he was only five minutes in the car when he lost his delayed enthusiasm
for the car.
Apart from
suffering a little boredom interspersed with a little fear, the journey to
Dover had been no problem at all. Nevertheless when getting out of his car and
setting foot on the ferry he hurried away from the vehicle and up the narrow
white steps onto the first floor. He soon had to return to the car though as he
had forgotten his wallet. On the ferry he bought a coffee which he drank
quickly and then sat alone in a corner of a quiet canteen area. Once he got up
and went on deck but the wind was bitter and he could not find the joy in the
wind and the spray that the group of school children running about him did.
He had stayed in
a hotel in Ghent that night, where years before he and his wife had been
invited to, to celebrate a friend’s 50th. It had been a crisp autumn
weekend then but this time he work up the next day to a soggy January morning.
He left after a quick dry breakfast and drove under thickening clouds all day,
not stopping until he reached his hotel in Wilhelmshaven late that evening. His
German came out broken and awkward, like a schoolboy’s, as it had been when he
left. The girl behind reception answered him in sharp and clear English with a
heavy American twang. Taken aback and a little ashamed he continued in a
mumbling English, which he sensed she listened to with disdain. He went to bed
early that evening, rising early the next day to have a hurried breakfast. He
felt uncomfortable of exposing his trip to curious eyes of the hotel stuff,
polite strangers though they were, and was quick to leave into the weather
raging outside soon after he had eaten, without shaving.
With him in the
car he had taken only his coat and his wallet. He had the faint idea that he
would buy Krebbe in Brot. But the
shack was shut up, like everything else, and he thought that he probably
wouldn’t have bought anything even if it had been otherwise. At least, he
wouldn’t have enjoyed it if he had and that would have been worse than not
eating. The shack suffered against the wind and the rain as the car did, and
the other five or six cars did too, those that sat stationed about the bare car
park that had become a muddy plain of quivering grey puddles. He couldn’t see
anyone though he had passed a few wrapped up in coats and wearing big boots as
he had driven down the track towards the sea. Children and little people looking
the same, wrapped up and thinking of nothing but walking through the onslaught;
looking neither sideways or back, no attention paid to each other, babies
cradles in arms, and all heads bowed against the wind.
He wondered if
there were others waiting in those cars now, fearing to emerge to the world
that raged about them, clinging to their steering wheels like him, their
seatbelts strapped on. Or perhaps those cars sat empty, their former occupants
lost in the wind and rain, struggling somewhere on the beach unable to find
their way back. There were boulders strewn about the car park, once used, he
presumed, to designate parking spots. Parking bays the girl at the hotel had called them. Water rose about these
rocks like they were fallen pre-historic beasts devoid of the will to rise. The
trees that ringed this end of the car park swayed and creaked in the wind,
little branches snapping off and splattering into the puddles like brittle
little limbs. Over on the other side he could see the bushes that were littered
along the coast this side of the Uffer.
Down to the left there were the thicker trees leading into the wood that lined
the path all the way along to where the stone steps led down to the beach.
Directly in front of him, somewhere behind the crab shack, he knew there was
the fence cutting off the private part of the beach to his right with the
public part to his left.
He
cleared his throat of the mucus that had been forming there and the sound
brought him back to himself and the car. He felt a great sense of both solitude
and completeness. There were no other people, no lots of things, or Crebbe in Brott, to take from the full
existence that he occupied alone in that car. It was quiet, and it was a
joyless thinness, for as there was nothing to irritate or tug at him, there was
also nothing to comfort or distract him. It was all metallic, and soulless, and
hollow. His light breath was all that stirred in the car and even that seemed
to be failing under the weight of the muted space. The smell of car neither
grew nor dimmed, but hung suspended in the air around him. Without the
interference of people or food or time, and with the click of his throat when
it was cleared, he was aware of his complete existence, in the end, in a world
that was entirely his own. In this little capsule he had peace, suffocating and
fearful; it was as if, when one takes a leap off a rock or a jetty into the
water, when in the moment that one is suspended in the air between water and
sky, a metallic shell had closed in upon that person, holding them securely and
with a careless strength to consider, for once, and for eternity. Something was
coming, and much had been, but behind the ordered chaos and the hubbub, this is
how it always was. His breath, his hands, his heart – all else had only been
supplements to this quiet existence that he had occupied unaware since he first
came into the world. About him were the last possessions that one held
scattered about the table at the end of a long train journey. That which was
left after the trolley lady had been round, and after she had return to pick up
the debris, and then left the carriage until the end of the track.
He
unclenched his hands from the steering wall, undid his seat belt and thrust
them into the pockets of his jacket.
*
He
and Anya had often lain on this beach when it was fine weather, playing games
and swimming in the sea. They would walk Dana down the shoreline and run
through the wood as she chased and snapped at their heels. They would climb up
the trees and look down at her laughing as she barked and pawed the trunks.
Here on this beach Anya had taught him which shells were the rarest and he
showed her the best way to build a channel down to the sea. Once her father had
taken them out fishing on his boat. It had rained hard and after an hour the
children were soaked through and shivering while Anya’s father shouted out
instructions to them in Plattdeutsch. In the summer they had been down at the
beach most days; he grabbed at her ankle under water, she had screamed at him
when he flicked sand in her eye, and he had cried when the metal end of a spade
fell down on his toes. Here he had felt her lips against his when she had
kissed him, and he had felt the flesh under her dress amongst the trees.
Dana
always accompanied them to the beach. Anya would bring her to his house first,
her barks from down the lane heralding their approach. By the time they got to
his house he was outside in his cap and coat waiting for them. When Dana was a
puppy she was just a tangled mass of fluff, constantly thick with sand and
seaweed from the beach. She would look up with them with reproachful eyes as
they tried to wash the remnants of the beach. Despite their best efforts she
always smelt a little like a fishing boat, a scent that was constant in Anya’s
house.
‘I wish I was
like Dana,’ he had said to Anya. ‘So much energy. So few worries.’
‘She
has her fair share of worries.’
He didn’t
believe it.
He could
remember them lying on that beach in the sun, him with his shirt off and her lying
in the crook of his arm enveloped in her hair. He thought perhaps that it had
not been one moment but many times, fragments of memories making up what seemed
to him now, almost seventy years later, one of the happiest moments of his
life. The clouds had blurred in and out of the thin blue sky above him, and as
he slipped deep into daydream his imaginations had coupled with the voices of
strangers about him to create weird fantasies. His skin had grown first warm
where their flesh touched and then cooled as their bodies grew accustomed
together. When they finally separated there was a light pull of their skin
where the sweat had dried.
The back of his
head had sunk into the sand and he could feel one thin pebble lying against his
temple. One arm had been above his head but he brought it down to lie next to
him when it began to ache, his fingers gently nosing the sand. Her fingers
gently played with the dark hair that sprouted across his chest. Carefully they
had tiptoed across his skin, occasionally a hair catching in her worn-down
nails and tugging. She hummed tunelessly, and it fell in and out of the sound
of her breathing. When his eyes were open, he could see in the corner of his
vision the eyes flicking up and down, at the sky and down to the peaceful Dana
whose wet nose he could feel at his feet. At one point she ran her whole palm
across his chest as if sliding across a stage. As he had had a hairy chest and
knuckles so she had little animal hands, wrinkled like a monkey’s.
He was
self-conscious of the hair that had emerged all over his body when he had only
just entered puberty. He remembered feeling the first spouts before seeing
their black heads spring up, peppering the white skin under his arms and at his
crotch. He had surveyed himself with horror in the mirror and stolen his
mother’s nail clippers to snip away at the most audacious of them. His legs were suddenly not the legs of a
child, and he remembered his grandmother coming to stay and remarking on just that,
tickling his calves. ‘I won’t be giving you
baths anymore,’ she had said. He didn’t look down at his legs but saw them
nevertheless; coarse and ungainly like a cockerel. And the hair kept coming
with renewed vigour as the weeks passed, and he would look around shamefully at
the smooth arms and legs of the other boys in his class.
Anya would
mercilessly tease him for it. It was worse coming from her and he would thunder
inside and flush. His father had hair all over his body too, with a great
neatly-trimmed beard and full dark locks.
‘That
is how you will turn out,’ she would say to him with a smile.
But
in this perfect memory – that which was all the more perfect for the myriad
other memories that sparked off from it - she was quiet, and they were still
save for her fingers that ballet-danced across his chest. Dana was still too,
which was rare. As rare as it was for Anya to be so quiet and it was like for a
moment, both of them had given up wit and games and were content to simply be
with him, lying there on the beach.
Most
Saturdays at the beach he had returned home and been surprised at the time. He
would always miss ‘Cocktail Hour’ – a sparse 45 minutes of one drink with a
soggy square of cucumber floating in it – which he was compelled to be at
despite not permitted to take part. Cocktail Hour had been a custom in his grandfather’s
house when his father was a boy, his many siblings and neighbours making up a
vibrant party. It was a custom his father had taken with him into the army and
practiced from Wiltshire to London to Germany. Now though, as his mother didn’t
drink, Cocktail Hour consisted of one weak gin and tonic and his father’s
fraught attempts to recreate a throng of gentlemen and ladies, laughter and
casual politics. His father would usually commence with some dry tale from work
which had made him recall so-and-so from some place. ‘You remember, dear?’ His
mother would feign recollection as she could rarely actually remember and his
father would know it, cutting her off in her protestations and continue his
story. The punch line came fast and flat and his mother always laughed too late
and too high and he would glare at wife and son with a thundering brow.
Dutifully and
with perseverance his mother had always done her best to make up for the
company they lacked in Wilhelmshaven. His father would grunt and make rebuttals
to the points she offered, scoffing at her as if they were in the Commons until
finally he would suddenly rise from his chair, curse the ‘tumbleweed house’ he
was living in, damn his moronic son and return to his study, his drink left
half full.
Only when his
father’s sister was staying with them would cocktail hour have any spark to it.
His father’s sister could bring the whole glittering London society to their
house in her long dresses, bubbling charm and amusing anecdotes that would make
his father chortle. His mother would be happy too, relieved of a duty that she
could never perform adequately and in bliss at seeing her husband so content.
On such visits his aunt had graced them each equally with her time and
attention. She would feign to assist his mother in the kitchen and about the
house, looking at the cutlery and plates and pillows and pictures with an
indulgent curiosity. She would banter gaily in a playful German with the
shopkeepers and other customers, those that made his mother so anxious. And she
would inquire after his mother’s family as if they were also old friends of
hers and not people she had met no more times than she could count on one elegantly
gloved hand. With him she would come into his room and sit on the foot of his
bed, her chin rested on hand as she gazed into his flushed face and asked what
he did in his free time. She would ask how he found the town, and the people
there, and took a bubbling interest in Anya. She would smoke long cigarettes,
and offer him one, and tell him what devils she and her brothers had been when
they were his age.
In the evening,
her attention fell upon his father. He would recall glorious stories of his own
years past in London and narrate them with a colour he could never conjure at
other times; evenings out with other officers after a week on Salisbury plain,
stag nights and sneaking into the Savoy where one of his brothers worked. He
would look from his father to his aunt as they laughed together, and his father
refilled their drinks, and smoked her cigarettes and he wished for one night to
be in their company in their London of twenty years ago. His father would fall
back into the joviality of his youth, a mischievousness and love of life that
was utterly absent otherwise, his belly rolling not in toil but in mirth. His
cheeks grew ruddy again and his big black eyes shone in generous laughter which
welcomed them all in. This mood would sink away though the morning of his
sister’s departure, and cynicism and torpor, ever ready, took up their place
once more.
Cocktail
Hour without his aunt mercilessly exhibited how dreadful they were when she was
there. After one late afternoon at the beach too many, he entered the house to
a gruff cry from his father. ‘Ah!’ He emerged from the drawing room with an
empty glass and his cucumber knife in his hand. ‘So you have finally decided to
come and join us? Are you aware of how long we have been waiting?’
He joined them
in the sitting room and his father
proclaimed that he would ‘buy the boy a watch!’ so there need be no further
excuses of losing track of the time at ‘that infernal beach!’
The
next week he was called into his father’s study one evening and there sitting
on the desk was a crimson velvet box. With his eyes fixed on his son he
indicated for him to open the box. He opened the box to find inside a shining
silver wristwatch upon which his initials and the date were engraved. His
father had picked up is cup of tea and gazed into a picture above the door. He
didn’t think they spoke much at that meeting. He didn’t think his father had
then said to him, ‘That is a nice watch’. But on numerous other occasions, he
could remember him coming into a room his father was in, and if the watch was
visible it would inevitably draw a misty gaze from his father and which
reverently said, ‘That is a nice watch.’ But at this time when he gave his son
the watch, he had no misty gaze but stared hard into the picture on the wall.
He looked into his father’s face in silence until it finally jerked back down
to him with an expression of mixed reproach and embarrassment.
Another time his
father had called him into his office and presented him with first razor and
shaving kit. This would have been a few years before the evening of the watch,
but both instances appeared so similar in their sequence he wasn’t sure if once
again his memories had fallen upon each other and merged. All that really
distinguished the different times were the contents of the boxes laid on the
desk in between them, and that on the second occasion his father had taken him
upstairs and instructed him in the art of shaving. On both evenings he had been
wholly unimpressed by the gifts bestowed upon him. Both, however, he was to use
for the rest of his life.
There
was a third occasion he recalled being summoned to the study which stood
clearly apart from the previous two due to the relatively great amount his
father had spoken. His father had asked him the question commonly asked by
parents of their young – and the question he would in turn ask his children –
as to what he planned to do when he left school. After some mumbling and
hesitation he had answered his father that he wanted to go abroad.
‘Abroad?
Where to? England?’
‘England
first, perhaps. But then other places after. Europe of course, but also Africa,
and America.’
He
expected rebuttals and patronisation from his father on these words, and
sneering at the mention of America, but instead his father had turned to his
tea which he sipped for a few moments and then, looking above his son’s face to
the picture above the wall he had replied,
‘In
choosing to live abroad, a man sacrifices being near to his family and loved
ones. That is what you have to give up when you live abroad. Some can do it,
others cannot.’
He
could definitely do it, he thought to himself. He had always dreamed of
travelling the world and would map out his marvellous future to Anya as they
threw rocks into the sea.
However
when it became clear that it was impossible for his family to stay in Germany
he felt no excitement at all but just a heavy weight in leaving a world that he
would never return to, and could never be recreated again. This feeling was
intensified by the spirits of his parents. The possibility that they would have
to leave Germany and return home and been growing for months. His parents both appeared
frightened by the prospect of returning to England again, and this unexpected
fear sent his father into more frequent outbursts and his mother down to a
severer depth of anxiety than that which she commonly lived in. However as
their affairs began to settle on both sides of the channel, his parents
returned to their former states and then to his surprise, accelerated past
these to a light giddy existence that he had never witnessed before. They made
plans about who they would go and visit first and who they would have to stay.
‘And
you will see London, my boy!’ his father had said to him.
‘I
have already seen London.’
‘But
not properly! Not in the way that a
countryman sees it!’
Once packed up and on the ship the
two of them had flittered about their cabin as if they were on their honeymoon
again. His father had suggested that they all go up on deck so they could see
when England approached. They were in such an excitable flurry as they made
their way down the corridor that his father tripped and fell with a thud into a
cabin door. His mother squealed and started away around the corner. His father,
chuckling guilty, made a tip-toed run behind her and their son was left to face
the indignant face that presently appeared at the door.
Up
on deck the drizzle and cold billowing air checked them a little.
His father said,
‘A fair wind behind us. The engine can run smoothly. No rocking. No
disturbance. It will be an easy passage.’
A couple of
weeks or so after arriving in England he had received a letter from Anya.
Writing little of herself or her family or the acceleration of her country
towards war, she had instead written principally of Dana.
‘I worry about her as much as I do the rest. She is
really quite deaf now. I say ‘Dana’ to her and she won’t respond. ‘Walkies’
‘Ball’ and she won’t turn. Only when I get up and touch her on the behind does
she turn with a surprised, and I fear, scared expression. The other day on the
walk with Mattheus she stopped suddenly and leant against his legs, unable to
go on. She is so restless too. Even when under the stairs I can see her anxious
face looking out of the darkness at me. She knows what is to come for it has
already come to her. I don’t know what I will do when she is gone.’
*
Calmly
telling his daughter over toast and tea that he was to return to Germany she
brought up the thousand-and-one reasons why it was simply a ridiculous idea. He
sipped the Earl Grey calmly as she outlined each of her points, stopping only
to bite another chunk out of her toast, lathering another with Lurpak and
Marmite and then resumed again with renewed vigour. He was practised in letting
her shrill voice fall over him and listened instead to the sound of her sons
upturning furniture in the next room. He looked at her but not at her face. Another
of her hands dived into the jaffa cake box and he watched the bare flabby
shoulder where her malformed tattoo wiggled morosely like a fat child being
pulled up. He tried to see her as beautiful as she had been at nineteen years
old, when she barely spoke to them at all, and sitting around that same table he
and his wife had interrogated her on the tattoo. Why had she consciously
assaulted her body like that?
‘What
about in twenty years’ time when you still have to look at that thing each day
in the mirror?’
Her answer was
confusing to him and he saw that it was utterly incomprehensible to his wife.
‘Then each day I
will never forget how I felt that night.’
She had left him
that day with the stipulation that he would ring her before he made any rash decisions
to book flights.
‘Actually I plan
to drive.’
She let out an
exasperated cry and ushered her boys out of the front door. ‘Just ring me, Dad,
OK? Or speak to John.’
He hadn’t spoken
to John but instead thought about going down to the local pub. He hadn't been
in years. He and his wife had used to go there for half a pint on New Year’s
Eve or on the Jubilee, but never otherwise. Only once had he gone there after
marriage without his wife, and that was to meet his friend Mike, who lived in
the same town, unmarried, no children, and was as regular at the pub as he was
absent. That night was soon after the doctor had recommended that his wife
should no longer drive. It was a diagnosis that his wife was willing to hear,
and tied the two of them closer in the daily nuisance of chores and little
excursions.
He had left his
wife telling her that Mike was in a bad state and he needed to see him. He
found Mike as he expected, red-nosed and spry as always. Mike had a tan that
hadn’t left him since his hedonistic days living in Hong Kong where he had
worked in the wine trade and went by the name of Michael, or Loki, to his
closer friends. The return to England after ‘the Handover’ was only satiable to
Mike, he said, as he would be able to see more of ‘that nice Tony.’ He was
friends with everyone in the pub and received hails from people in the street.
‘Tell me what
marriage is worth?’ Mike has asked him. ‘A lifetime or a tribute to a few
moments of utter bliss? An eternal promise or a mark of respect to the joy felt
at the wedding ceremony? The joy felt in the early days’
‘Don’t ask me
that.’
‘C’mon?’ Mike
moved to reach his hands but he withdrew them from the table.
‘Don’t ask me
that.’
Then his friends
started dying and soon England was shrouded in death. Life which had seemed to
move so slowly for so long was suddenly speeding up towards the end. He came to
look upon his wife not as someone he loved but as someone he needed. The two of
them would sit at the breakfast table and the news of another friend dead would
reach them. She would let out a small sad ‘O’ and he would lose his appetite.
He would feel his ribcage tighten about his lungs and the feeling that a
necktie had grown up inside his throat. He would look to her and be irritated
that she was able to go on at her cereal and warm Ribena with gusto, after
dropping her sad made-up eyes for only a moment.
They were grey
moments, physically uncomfortable moments which took longer to subside with
each new blow. The weight of the news would fall to join the mass of veil upon
veil of the memories of ghosts. A grey fog that rose up in a slow bluster each
time another dropped, then settled, thick at the bed, at the bottom of his
stomach, as the latest lay down amongst the powdered lake. When he lay down at
night they stirred again, flooding his memory with times lost, friendships
sundered, love now unrequited. The shadows would rage and swoop about his head
till he finally fell asleep. The dreams were over in the morning. The morning
was just cold, and still, and very much absent of all that had been special.
Quiet moments with his wife occasionally were a warm breeze in all this turmoil.
In the evenings they would sit together on the sofa watching the television and
he would take her hand and forget the ashen mass in his bowels. And then when
she died there was nothing to stop the reek of death suffocating him. Not even
the smell of Ribena.
That first Christmas he hadn’t wanted to go to
either of his children but to stay at home. He had ended up meeting Mike in the
pub on Christmas Eve. It was when walking there that evening that he had
decided he would return to Germany.
‘And you will
never come back,’ Mike said.
*
Had they
believed it would last forever? He didn’t think they had ever really thought of
‘forever.’ Making his own family had been his forever. He had only started thinking
of time when he knew that there wasn’t much of it left. And now, at the end of
all things, he had returned to a place that had never paid heed to time, but
simply lay sprawled across the landscape as it always had displaying few of the
wounds that marked the assault of time. His eyes flowed over trees and bushes
and rocks that young hands had with an unconscious bliss brushed up against and
held on to for almost two decades. It was he who had turned his back on
happiness. The beach welcomed him indifferently, saying only, OK, have me again, but know that I have not
missed love as you have while you have been away.
What had he
expected? Just to be there? To be closer? To reassure himself that he had once
been young, that he had once not worried, and in knowing that, he could live
the rest of his life peacefully in the knowledge that it would be so again for
others? Had they believed it would last forever? He supposed not.
The rain
continued to splatter against the car. The wind whipped the windows clean as
fast as it attacked them. The rage of the weather had grown to take the role of
silence, like a muffler over life. It blew
around the car in its own vortex, as concentrated as the eye of a storm. The
car sat deeper in the mud, resigned to its fate. It had reached the end of the
road, and its engine was not to start up again.
Bertie Digby Alexander
Berlin 2014
