Kindergarten (5 page)

They were like some miniature religious procession as they moved into the room, advancing towards the altar for some service of memorial. As formally as she had made her little speech in the sun lounge, Lilli kissed each of them in turn as they stood around the table in the candlelight.

“This year we sit at the table and think of the members of our family who are not with us,” she said quietly. Corrie glanced at Jo. They stood in silence for a moment with their heads bowed, and then sat down.

Meissen china plates—Corrie had seen them only once before—lined the centre of the table, filled with fruit, nuts and raisins, sweets, ribbons, tiny richly decorated spiced biscuits in ornate moulded shapes, hearts and diamonds, candied lemon and orange, iced stars with cherries, all beautifully arranged, and, as the centrepiece of the whole table, there was an elaborate and minutely detailed “Hansel and Gretel” gingerbread house, shaped just like the night-light Jo had in his bedroom. Steep-roofed, tiled with little twisted biscuits covered in Hundreds and Thousands, icing like snow dripping down from the overhanging eaves, its door partly open, it stood beneath the candles like the cottage beneath the trees in the heart of the forest, waiting for the approach of the abandoned children.

“‘Beside a dark pathless forest there lived a poor wood-cutter with his second wife and his two children, a little boy and a little girl,’” Corrie said, looking at the gingerbread house.

“‘The boy was called Hansel, and the girl …’” Lilli paused, looking at Matthias.

“Gretel!” Matthias shouted. He looked across at Corrie. “I do feel hungry now. It’s lovely, Lilli. It’s lovely. I’m going to eat
everything!
”

He took his eating very seriously. You could take Baskerville’s bowl away from him when he was eating, and he would only look very sad and miserable but make no objection. Matthias bashed people with his spoon.

Jo started to speak, Lilli smiled, and then everyone was talking, and the muted solemnity of the beginning—an Easter mood, a Good Friday mood—became animated and lively, and Lilli, after talking with them, went out of the room towards the kitchen, to bring in the first course of the Christmas meal.

A
S THE
meal continued, the unfamiliar weight of the silver cutlery in his hands, Corrie became convinced that Lilli, with her German Christmas, was not re-creating something she had herself once experienced, an expatriate, after many years, feeding the nostalgia for a ceremony in which she had once taken part. The speech in the sun lounge had not been her words: she had been quoting something she had read, and all he saw around him, carefully and beautifully contrived, was as novel to her as it was to them, possibly inaccurate, a creation from books and research, not from memory. Christmas was a feast she would never have kept when she was in Germany, because Christmas was not a Jewish festival.

He had a secret, sort of, about himself.

Like Nickolaus Mittler and his big brother, like Leon Werth and his family, he was Jewish, and he had not known it until two years ago. As Lilli was Jewish, then, by the rulings of Germany in the 1930s, he himself—Gentile and uncircumcised—was also Jewish, a
Mischling
, Second Degree, a child with one Jewish grandparent, descent through the female line being Jewish Law. It was something inside himself, something in his blood.

It had been Christmas two years ago when he had found out about Lilli Danielsohn. The name had been a strange one to him, an unfamiliar disguise in someone he had known all his life. To him, his grandmother had always been Lilli, and, sometimes, when he wrote to her to thank her for presents at Christmas or on his birthday, she was Mrs. Meeuwissen—his father’s mother—when he addressed the envelope, someone with the same surname as himself. Her German accent was just the way she spoke.

Lilli, like the girl bound to silence in “The Six Swans,” had never spoken a word about her past, her life in Germany, her family; her books and paintings had remained locked away, from herself, and from everyone else. Four years ago, Grandpa Michael had died, and Lilli had left the house where the two of them had lived in Dorset, and moved to London. In London, living alone, her husband dead, she had begun to look at the paintings again for the first time in forty years.

When she had been there for two years, they had gone from Southwold to see her. She had changed—become very quiet and introspective, not the seemingly stern and commanding woman he had always known—and the little London house had seemed bare, a place without memories, as if she had no past she could place around her; but on the evening of the first Sunday of their stay, when they were talking around the fire, he had found out about Lilli Danielsohn. The things she had not spoken about for all those years were said—a decision she had come to before they arrived. It was something she had wanted to talk about.

She had spoken of places and events from history books, enclosed within dates—(1933-1945)—like the life of someone famous who had died, or the duration of a war that had ended long ago. But these historical events, these dates, had been a part of her life. She had lived through them. She had been there. When she married Grandpa Meeuwissen in 1939, she had been a refugee from Germany: his parents had known this much, though he and Jo had not. When she had left the country in 1938, to arrive alone and unknown in England, she had been famous throughout Germany as an artist. Her first book,
Kinderstimmen
, a series of illustrations for German poems about childhood, had been published in Berlin by Ullstein in 1924, in the same week as
When We Were Very Young
was first published in London. Her work had met with increasing success in the late 1920s and early 1930s, until, in 1933, the Nazis had come to power. Copies of her books had been burned by the Nazis in Berlin in 1933, in Unter den Linden, between the Opera House and the University. The children’s stories had gone up in flames, like Erich Kästner’s books, with the works of Freud, Marx, Mann, Heine, and all the others, because she and her family were Jewish. She had been unable to publish any more of her work.

That evening, hesitant and shy, she had taken her paintings out of the drawer in the roll-top desk where she had kept them locked up all those years, unglazed, loose in cardboard folders, and shown them. His parents had never known that she had been an artist. Since she left Germany, she had not painted again.

He would never forget that evening, and his first sight of the paintings he now knew so well, all around him on the walls of the dining-room. She had given each of them one of her original water-colours for a Grimm’s fairy-story as a Christmas present. His was the illustration for “Hansel and Gretel,” the painting beside his bed that he studied each evening. It was the first of her paintings that he had seen, and he thought it very beautiful. It was the loveliest present he had ever been given.

She had embraced them all when they left to return to Southwold.

They visited her again in the summer, and she had seemed a lot older.

He saw her one evening, thinking she was unobserved, walking about the small garden like the personification of Sorrow in a morality play, bent over, walking up and down as the light began to fail. He was afraid to approach, shrinking away from her deep and private source of grief, her numbed face that looked as if it had been exposed to intense and prolonged cold. Seeing her like this, he thought of someone carrying and shielding a flickering candle in a wind-swept corridor. Thoughts in her head, like candles on a child’s birthday cake, dipped and bent, but never flickered out into darkness. The small intense flames were always there. Her eyes had the blind unfocused stare of someone who had gazed too intently into the candle flame, and who carried a dark shadow impressed deep inside the eye.

Several months later, she had suffered her stroke, and after some time in hospital, Dad had brought her from London to live next door to them, with the connecting door between the two houses, and the months of recovery and teaching had started, and he had come to know someone new, a Lilli who was not the woman in the bare house or the dark garden.

I
N NOVELS
, particularly in Victorian novels, the author invented a complete family history for his characters, and, as the reader, one could know more about the histories of these fictitious families than one knew about one’s own family history: this, Corrie supposed, was part of the pleasure of fiction. It had struck him as slightly wrong that the characters always seemed to possess an awareness of every detail of their family history—unless a startling discovery were a major part of the plot—feeling themselves firmly placed in a structured and predictable family tree. His life had been lived with blanks and absences, emptinesses that he had been too uninformed or too reticent to explore.

Discovering his Jewishness—it couldn’t be denied, could it?—he felt as though he had opened some forbidden door, made some shocking discovery which overturned all the certainties in his life. He felt as though he had suddenly discovered that he’d been adopted, and that all his assumptions about his parentage, all his beliefs about who he was, were completely false. He had no concrete dogma to hold on to, no self-protecting litany to chant like the song of the bird in “The Juniper Tree.” It had sounded so odd when Lilli had spoken about “marrying an Englishman”—Grandpa Michael—and “becoming a Christian.” He knew hardly anything about the Jewish religion, had never even spoken with anyone about it. Once, in the summer holidays, he had gone with Cato Levi, his friend at school, to a demonstration outside the Soviet Embassy against the treatment of a Jewish dissident, but he had felt quite separate from all those angry young people, who seemed sure of who they were and what they wanted. He had been a little bit frightened.

In Lilli’s house in London, amongst her many books, there was a copy of
The Children’s Haggadah
, a book published in 1937, which he had looked at, curious and confused, in the days after that Sunday evening, to try and learn something about the Jewish religion, feeling as though he were reading about an invented religion in a mythical land called Rousseau, a Middle Earth, a Narnia, an Earthsea. The book read from back to front, and on the back cover was a picture of a small child in a skull-cap lying asleep in bed, clutching the book in his arms. Inside, little pieces of card could be pulled from side to side to make the pictures move: the baby Moses floated down the Nile in his basket, the Egyptian army sank beneath the sea.
On the evening before the eve of Passover, the father of the family goes into every room of his house to see whether all leavened food has been cleared away. It is customary to place small pieces of bread in every room, and the father collects them carefully by the light of a candle. These are burned on the following morning soon after breakfast.

If he had discovered that he were a Roman Catholic, and had not known it, he would have felt the same suffocating approach of things of which he knew little: candles, rosaries, rich vestments, and confessions of one’s most secret thoughts to an unknown man. But he had at least been in a Catholic church. He had never been inside a synagogue. He had seen one once, from a car, and it had seemed an intensely enclosed and private place, a windowless façade, inward-looking, a place to which no strangers could ever be admitted.

T
HE LIGHTS
began to dim, like a coal fire settling. Candles began to gutter and go out, one by one, as the meal came to an end. When the candles were all out, they would start to unwrap their presents, opening gifts in the evening, with the birth, not waiting until the following morning, after the child had been born. He looked around at the shifting luminescence of the many candles. Wasn’t there a Jewish festival called the Feast of Lights? Was it a feast of rejoicing, or a mourning for the dead? All the candles, flickering across the glass of the water-colours, the figures indistinct in the blurred air, were like the memorial candles one lit in churches on the continent.

If there was any self-portrait in Lilli’s illustrations showing her as he had seen her that Christmas two years ago, it was the illustration of the mother in “The Wilful Child,” the shortest story she had ever illustrated, only a third of a page long. It was the final illustration in the last book she had published in Germany, at the very beginning of 1933.

The mother, a young woman in her early thirties, bent over the grave of her child, looking with great intentness at the child’s arm, which stretched upwards out of the soil, refusing to be buried. In her hand the mother was holding a branch, with which she was attempting to strike at the arm, so that the child would withdraw its arm beneath the ground, and lie at peace. The expression on this mother’s face he had seen on Lilli’s. The curious ambiguous mixture of anguish and determination was the expression of a woman trying to will herself to creep up and smother a much-loved child who was dying painfully of a lingering illness.

T
HE MAIN
frontage of Southwold School filled the south side of Dunwich Green, the southernmost of all the Greens in Southwold, and in Lilli’s dining-room the sound of the school clock from the tower was clear and distinct as it struck seven o’clock. A short while later, the mechanical bells of the clock above the restaurant on the side of the Green opposite the school struck the hour, followed by the chiming of the music for the folk-song “Long A-Growing.”

They moved away from the table to group around the fire. They sat in the dimming light, a cave of chiaroscuro, like Lilli’s illustration for “Snow White,” the little girl kneeling on the chair in the country cottage, reaching up towards the open window where a hand appeared, holding out half an apple to her. On the table nearest to Corrie was an oddly shaped parcel, labelled “To Baskerville, with love from Jo.” He signed his name “Jo,” with a small “j,” and a smiling face—two dots and a curve—inside a very large “O.” There was a separate table for each person’s presents.

Until the candles burned fully down, before the presents could be opened, they were to read, play music, and recite poems they had newly learned by heart. Lilli had asked if they would do this, a week before Christmas, after Dad had left to drive to Heathrow airport, the same day the terrorists had entered the Berlin school. Corrie and Jo were both used to performing, particularly music. Corrie had started an Elizabethan consort in school, the Elizabethan World Picture, and Dad, Mum, he, and Jo had regularly played together, for friends and relations, or by themselves, a family in a quiet room, absorbed in a piece of music together. Their instruments were ready, set out for them by Lilli. They had practised their pieces in the music rooms.