All My Sins Remembered (65 page)

In the centre, in pride of place, was a sepia-tinted print of a straight-backed young couple. The girl was wearing a full-skirted dress and a laced bodice, and there were wreaths of flowers in her hands and in her long hair. The man wore an embroidered shirt, and held a broad-brimmed hat with flowers tucked into the band. It was the Wolfs’ wedding picture. Clio turned away and began to study the titles of the books ranged on their shelf instead. She was sitting on the cushioned bench, reading, when Rafael and his father came to find her.

At bedtime, carrying her candle for her, Herr Wolf himself escorted Clio up the stairs to her bedroom door. He opened it courteously, and put the candlestick down on the night table.

‘I am glad that Rafael brought you here,’ he said. ‘I see few people nowadays. I hope you will sleep comfortably, Miss Hirsh.’

‘I shall, in this quiet place.’

The room had been Grete’s. There was a wooden-framed bed, painted with flowers that had been almost rubbed away, and covered with a patchwork quilt. The sheets were linen, fragrant-smelling but worn thin with many years of use.

Clio lay down and listened to the sounds of the house. Beyond these bare walls Rafael was lying too, in his boyhood bedroom. As she drifted into sleep she thought of him, wrapped in the familiarity of the house as if in a quilt made of a patchwork of memories.

That night Clio dreamed of flowers and trees, and columns of marching men.

They stayed in Waltersroda for three days. They walked in the forest, following ancient footpaths through the huge groves of oak and beech, where the smallest rustle of a bird in the undergrowth was amplified in the cathedral silence and the thick felt of dead leaves muffled the sound of their footsteps. Rafael knew every path, and the glass-clear streams where they refilled their leather water bottle, and the names of the birds and the unambitious creeping plants of the forest floor.

They saw no one, except in the distance the foresters in their grey-green clothes.

Clio loved the great smooth grey pillars of the trees and the canopy of shifting green knitted over their heads. The sunlight slanted obliquely across their path, with the impatient heat filtered out of it, always directing her eyes to some different miniature landscape of moss and leaf. She felt calm and strong in the forest, as if some of its endurance had entered into her soul.

It also made her happy to see Rafael here. She began to understand how the quiet but implacable power of the place had shaped him, and had given him and Grete the distinction that she sensed when she saw them for the very first time in the Café Josef.

Once they came out into a swathe of open space where the woodsmen had cut a stand of trees. Clio turned her face up, closing her eyes in the sudden warmth and brightness. Then a shadow blocked the sun again and when she looked she saw that it was Rafael, standing close. He came closer still, putting his hands on the lapels of her jacket and drawing her against him. When he kissed her she felt a white shaft of happiness passing through her like the blade of a sword.

Clio said, ‘I love your woodlands.’

Rafael smiled at her and she was too dazzled to see the sadness in him. ‘Who could be happy for long anywhere it is not possible to enjoy the rest and comfort of trees?’

She saw then that the clearing was not empty. It had been replanted, and the saplings stood in neat, straight lines, reaching up to the sun. The little trees seemed to offer the most potent symbol of hope for the future.

‘All will be well again, some day,’ she whispered.

‘I hope so,’ was all he could offer her in return.

They walked on, out of the clearing and into the holy dimness of the forest once again.

At night, after they came home to Waltersroda, they would sit with Rafael’s father over a simple meal. Clio listened to the two men talking. Most of their talk was concerned with reminiscences, of Rafael’s boyhood and then farther back to Leopold’s own childhood, and the slow country rituals of another century. His voice lost its unused timbre as he told them about the harvests and wedding parties and festivals of fifty years ago, and he filled their glasses with more beer and the atmosphere in the little house became almost celebratory. Clio loved the stories. She took them away inside her head and used them to piece together her own picture of Rafael and the people he had come from. She felt closer to him, as if they fitted more nearly, than she had done in all their time in Berlin.

‘This is dull for you, miss,’ Leopold said once.

‘No. I want to hear everything,’ she answered.

The old man turned to Rafael. ‘You are lucky,’ he said. He lifted his glass to them both.

On their last morning in Waltersroda, Clio knew that the muffling silence was descending on the house again. It lay in the corners of the rooms whence their talk had driven it for a few hours.

Leopold came to the front door with them and opened it cautiously, but he did not step on to the path. He kissed Rafael, and took Clio’s hand between both of his. ‘You will come again,’ he told her, as a simple prediction.

‘Won’t you come to Berlin instead?’ she begged. ‘For their sake?’

He shook his head. ‘I am too old to go anywhere now,’ he answered.

They were going to catch the bus again from the village square. Rafael picked up their bag and hoisted it on to his shoulder, and his father stood in the doorway, half shielded by the door itself, to watch them go. As he had watched for their arrival, Clio remembered.

They stopped at the bend to wave, but he had already retreated into the cover of his house. She felt the silence, pressing inwards in her head. They waved in any case, feeling his eyes on them from behind the sun-streaked curtains.

‘Couldn’t you come home to him, then?’ she asked Rafael when they passed the house with the Buff Orpingtons, where his friend had once lived.

‘I am more use in Berlin,’ Rafael said quietly. ‘There are worse evils for Jews now than the solitude of old age.’

‘He is your
father
.’

Rafael looked at her, but he didn’t slacken his pace. ‘Do you think I don’t remember that?’

He was as implacable, she thought, as one of his forest oaks. There would be no dissuading him, once he had fixed his intention.

It was not until they were in the motorbus and on the winding road that he turned to her. ‘Don’t be angry with me,’ he said. ‘We still have two days.’

‘I’m not angry,’ Clio answered. She let her head rest against his shoulder. She was thinking about the healthy, strong people in Waltersroda and the warning, speak through a flower. ‘There is so much fear. Even in this beautiful place.’

‘There will be more, too. More than we can even begin to comprehend, before this is over.’

Her own happiness and the threat of what was to come seemed to shiver in the balance on an edge between light and dark.

‘What can we do?’

Rafael touched her cheek and her hair. ‘Be happy while we can. What else?’

He took her to the wooded ridge of mountains called the Thüringer Wald, rising steeply from Thuringia and then falling away in a series of gentle foothills towards Franconia. They stayed in a wooden-floored room in a quiet inn, with a brass bed and a feather mattress to envelop them.

Their three nights apart seemed a long time, now, when they reached for one another again.

Clio had never felt so greedy for him, even at the beginning of their time together. They made love over and over again, reaching and stretching to come closer, for the satisfaction of possessing one another more completely. She sat astride him under the whitewashed beams of the little bedroom, leaning down to kiss his mouth until her own felt bruised, like damaged fruit, and then twisting above him until he reached up to grip her waist, and held her, and drove up into her as she gasped and gave a sudden, sharp cry like one of the invisible animals in the wood.

Afterwards they lay hip to hip, silent except for the rasp of their own breath, looking into each other’s eyes as if they could climb into the depths inside and make them their own.

‘I love you,’ Clio said on the last night. ‘I want to stay with you for ever.’

‘I love you,’ he told her. ‘Take a day, and a night, and then the next day, and the night after that, if it should come. Don’t look any further than that, because it is impossible to see.’

She was comfortable in his arms, and already beginning to drift into sleep. She smiled, and he kissed the corner of her mouth.

‘I am happy just with tonight,’ she murmured.

In the morning they ate the last country breakfast at a table in the inn garden. There were eggs and brown bread and smoked sausage and cheese, honey and jam, set out on flat pieces of scoured white wood instead of plates. Afterwards they walked to the bus in the yellow sunlight. They caught the Berlin express from Blankenburg, and by the evening they were in Wilmersdorf again. When they turned into Clio’s street they saw that Hitler flags were hanging from the upper windows of the Klebers’ house.

Fear squeezed Clio’s heart, twisting it in her chest, and she knew that she was right to be afraid of this violent blush of Nazism that coloured Berlin with its insignia and shone in the bright faces of the villagers of Waltersroda.

‘Rafael, can’t we leave Berlin? Leave Germany? You could come to London, or to Oxford, and bring Grete and your father, while there is still time …’

As she had known he would, Rafael answered, ‘No. I am needed here. But perhaps you should go home, to your mother and father, where you will be safe.’

‘I can’t leave you,’ Clio said.

Rafael was still looking up at the flags, hanging limp against the dusty glass.

Two nights after their return Clio was sitting alone at the wobbly table in her room writing about Waltersroda when Frau Kleber called up the stairs to her.

‘Fräulein Hirsh? You are at home? There is a visitor here to see you.’

She stopped typing at once. She pushed her chair back and ran to open the door, smiling with the anticipation of seeing Rafael. She had not been expecting him, but his appearances were often unpredictable. The stairs outside her room were dark and descended steeply, but Rafael knew the way. She leant happily on the smooth wooden rail of the banister, looking down for the first sight of his blond head as he climbed up to her. But there was no one there.

‘Fräulein Hirsh!’ Frau Kleber was not particularly patient. She must be waiting down by the street door.

Clio clicked on the landing light. It was harsh and bright under a white glass shade. She ran down the angle of the stairs, from where she would be able to see Frau Kleber in the hallway with her visitor.

She swung around the corner, still smiling, looking forward to seeing who it could be.

At the first glimpse, Miles’s upturned face was so familiar that she felt no surprise. It was only a minute afterwards that shock spread up from her stomach, cold and clammy like a sickness.

He was wearing his greenish tweed coat, as if he had just stepped out to the Fitzroy, but there was a portmanteau beside him that she did not recognize.

Clio began to shake. As she descended towards him she wondered if her knees would support her. She was aware of Frau Kleber’s eyes, sharp with malicious curiosity.

‘Hello, darling,’ Miles said, using his boyishly charming manner that now seemed as false as the female impersonator in the Balalaika. ‘There was some confusion with your landlady here, who insisted that she didn’t know any Mrs Lennox. You don’t look very happy to see me, by the way.’

‘Miles.’

He kissed her, and she had to fight the impulse to break away from him and run away into the street.

‘Frau Kleber, this is my husband.’

‘I did not know you were a married lady, Frau Hirsh.’ Clio did not like the Frau’s expression.

‘No.’ She turned to Miles and said in English, ‘I suppose you had better come up, now you are here.’

As they climbed the stairs Frau Kleber called after her. ‘This is a house for single ladies, Frau Hirsh. That is how Herr Kleber prefers it. Gentlemen visitors once in a while he perhaps does not notice, but we cannot have husbands taking residence.’

Clio said in a cold voice, ‘That is quite all right. He is only making a short call.’

When they reached her room she closed the door and leant against it, as if she could keep the malign effect of her husband contained within four walls. The sight of Miles in his green coat brought back the memory of Gower Street, his chair with the ashtray on the arm, the spread-out manuscript pages, their table and bed and all the accretions of their married life together. The flat had been sold and her own possessions packed and stored – kind and capable Tabby had overseen that for her – but Miles’s presence carried the unhappy images of those years like a penetrating smell.

He had put down his bag in the middle of her floor, and now he hung his coat over the back of a chair and coolly examined the room. He flicked the sheet of paper rolled into the typewriter, and cocked his head to read the titles of the handful of books on the shelf.

‘Quite the artist’s garret.’ He could not resist sneering at her.

‘What do you want, Miles?’

‘I’ve seen some of your stuff in
The Times
. It’s quite good.’

‘How did you find me?’

Miles was grinning. ‘What did the old bat downstairs say? Gentlemen callers, was it? Is that what’s keeping you here in Berlin?’

She hadn’t known he understood so much German. Clio found the steel to confront him. ‘So what if it is?’

He retreated then, lifting one hand in a warding-off gesture. ‘Just a question. I met Partridge in Old Compton Street, and he gave me Pilgrim’s forwarding address.’ Partridge was Pilgrim’s London agent. ‘When I got off the train I called in at that studio of his. Pilgrim was busy daubing at some filthy canvas, and he was happy to send me on here.’

That sounded like Pilgrim.

‘And so what do you want?’ Clio asked again.

‘Do you have anything to drink?’

‘No. Or yes, there’s some beer.’ She gave it to him and sat down at the table, waiting. Miles perched on the edge of her bed, rolling the glass between his hands, and then he began to talk.