The Lily Hand and Other Stories (16 page)

When he turned his head cautiously and looked at her as she sewed, he saw now her face had aged. The look of stillness which she wore had descended on her then, when he had asked her to come back to England with them.

He remembered the occasion as if it had been yesterday. She had just come back from Olšany, from lighting the lamp on his father's grave. He had not been with her, but he knew from many such nights how the long plateau of the cemeteries would look with all its faint, steady, guarded lights holding off the perilous night and affirming the permanence of the spirit, its blaze of flower stalls along the grey stone wall, its sighing trees. In the triangle of the graves of the murdered, before the gates at Terezín, the lights would be burning, too, a little stray draught in the hinge of the lantern making the flame dance over young Oto's photograph, waking him to the old irresistible laughter. Her mind must have been full of these two as her last son spoke to her of himself and his future. For her Olšany and Terezín were stems of the future, too. It was possible that at first she did not even understand what he was trying to say. Then the veil of silence and reserve came down upon her face, and though she made no protest, and asked only a few clarifying questions, he began to talk volubly as if she had argued against his plans.

‘Hilda's family are there, and she hasn't even thought of leaving them. For me it's easier. I've had to pull up my roots already. I've got a job there. The prospects are good. After all, things have changed. We've had to make a life where we could, and now I belong as much there as anywhere. And for you, Mother – it'll be better for you there. You'd always have a home with us. And you'd like it there, it's a good country—'

She did not say a word against him, but only looked at him with that remote and silent and guarded look.

‘She married me when I had no country,' he said feverishly, ‘and let me share hers. I have to consider my wife, haven't I?'

‘Yes,' said Slava quietly, staring at him with the large, commanding eyes which were exactly on a level with his own. She was tall, and had been beautiful, and until then she had seemed to him proudly, immovably young. ‘Yes, of course you must consider your wife.'

‘I know you thought I should come back and settle down here again, like before. I thought so, too. But you can't just pick up again after so many years. You change – things happen to you in that time. You have to go on from where you stand – there's nothing else to be done. It isn't something I can help,' he had cried, putting out his hands to her in protest against what she had neither said nor implied.

‘I know,' she said, and took his hands. But she looked over her shoulder towards the cemeteries of Olšany, for one brief instant asking advice from the other half of her being, before she relinquished all counsel but her own.

‘Mother, I can't leave you here alone. Mother, come with us.'

She had come with them; she was here. She sat now sewing the buttons firmly on to his coat, so that he should not lose any on his way to the New World. ‘Mother, come with us!' To the ends of the world, silently, without protest, she was coming. Why did he still want to argue with her, to answer what she had never said? Why did he turn on her uncomplaining silences, accusing her of not wanting him to have his best chance in the world?

If the baby had lived it might have been different, she might have made herself content then. But it had lived only to be hastily baptized on the eighth day, and then flickered out like a pallid little candle, and was buried in the new annexe of the parish churchyard, up on the windy and treeless hill, where the neglected graves never ceased to offend Slava's sense of family, and no one ever displayed neat framed photographs of the dead, or lit lamps for them to testify to their immortality. Sometimes she walked up there and trimmed the rough grass, and took flowers to put into the little vase, because the baby had been, for however short a time, a member of her family, and therefore his place in it was permanent and assured, and his resurrection past doubt. Hilda did not think like that. She had lost the baby, he was an incident closed now, and best forgotten. She did not think of him as having existence any longer, all her hopes were fixed on other sons.

‘Mrs Nash wants us to go in to them for breakfast in the morning,' said Hilda, spreading her fair round arms along the makeshift table. ‘It'll make things a lot easier. We can return the stove tonight, and there won't be a thing left to do tomorrow except get ourselves and the hand luggage down to the bus. Tom Shane's going to take the key in for us, so you won't have that to do.'

‘I wish it was the morning,' he said.

‘You've no call to, it will be, soon enough. What are you so nervy about, all at once? Everything's gone fine. We didn't even have so long to wait as we expected, thanks to your uncle. You take it easy! There's nothing to worry about now.'

She saw his quick, involuntary glance in his mother's direction, and shut her hand over his with a reassuring pressure. ‘I tell you, it's all right! Everything's going to be all right.'

But the hours hung upon his heart with an intolerable reluctant slowness, as if time had stopped; and when his strung nerves searched for the origin of his unrest he was aware of it as proceeding from his mother. She wanted time to stop; she wanted the morning never to come. If he accused her of it, there would be no denial, only the slight stiffening of her body, the lift of her head, the steady silence of her hollow, unquiet eyes upon him. She wanted the morning never to come, because it would take them away westward, while her mind and spirit leaned always back towards the east, towards the little flat in Malĕsice, half suburb and half village, to the living room with its green-tiled stove and its heavy lace curtains; towards the irrevocable centre of her life, where she had lived happily with his father, and raised her sons to their divided destinies.

Since it was natural that this should remain for her always the pivot of her life, why could he not accept that, and be content to know that for him it was different? Why must he hide from her thoughts and feelings, as if she had spent these few years in England only in reproaching him, she who had never uttered one word of accusation? They were two generations, their paths could not be identical. But he turned his face away from her, and could not bear his awareness of her antagonism.

All the afternoon and until after dusk he made for himself needless errands about the camp, returning the last borrowed things, saying goodbye to some who would be away to work early next day, making a round of feverish visits, anything which would keep him out of Slava's presence. So few hours were left now, surely they must pass, and at last he would be safe.

Hilda did not understand. She thought he was suffering from reaction after too much excitement, and that he needed only to be left alone, and not agitated further. After all, he was a foreigner, with a foreign temperament. He smiled, a little wryly, when this thought came to him, but he knew that was how she saw him. It was true, she loved him as fully as her nature made love possible; you can love even exotic little dogs, they also have the charm of novelty.

He was coming back in the twilight of the early November night, when he remembered for the first time what day it was. On this Sunday of All Souls all the lamps would be lit in Olšany, all the mysterious groves of quietness full of little sheltered flames; and before Terezín the great triangle of white gravestones, themselves lambent in the dusk, would glow and scintillate with thousands of points of light, soundless and strange under that level northern sky. Slava must have been thinking of this all day long, though she had said no word. He thought he would go to her, and say something warm and affectionate and not about himself, something to remind her that he was also her son, and had not forgotten his duty; but when he went into the bare room Hilda was sitting alone.

‘She went out,' said Hilda, seeing how he looked for Slava. ‘Only for a little walk,' she said. ‘She hasn't been out all day. I was glad for her to go.'

He looked at her sharply, and asked: ‘Didn't she say where she was going?'

‘No, why should she?' She came and shook him rallyingly by the shoulder, a slight shadow of impatience touching her face. ‘What are you so jumpy about? She's all right, I keep telling you. She's been quiet about going, I know – she feels it, naturally, going so far to start afresh at her age. What do you expect? But she knows what she's doing, and she took on to go with her eyes open. She's
your
mother! Have
I
got to tell you she knows her own mind?'

‘It's the way she looks,' he said. ‘Sometimes she's made me afraid. If anything should go wrong now because of her—'

‘Nothing will go wrong – at least, not because of her. You ought to know she doesn't go back on her decisions, especially when they mean as much to you as this does. It's
you
who scare me, not her—'

It was something he did not want to hear, and he broke away from her to avoid the look which searched him through as she said it. ‘She never wanted it. She holds it against me. What is there here for us, I'd like to know?' He flung away to the window, and stared out at the twilit desolation of the camp, but none of the few moving figures was Slava returning.

An hour passed, and he grew afraid, though he did not know why. She was a woman in the full possession of strong and determined faculties, who never gave way to fate. What unnatural weakness could drive her to harm now? But when the second hour was passing, and still no sign of her, he could not bear it any longer. He seized his coat, and went to the door.

‘Where are you going?' asked Hilda, in the quiet, forbearing voice she used to him only when his foreignness was borne back upon her by some alien act to which she could not adjust her understanding.

‘To look for her. There's something queer – why should she stay out so long now?'

Hilda got up and followed him, leaving the door unfastened, for what was there now to steal. Feeling her at his shoulder, he went on saying laboriously, as if he were trying to convince himself: ‘At her age, women sometimes do strange things.' But Hilda's patient, wary silence only asserted unmistakably: Not your mother. They did not talk any more. In silence they walked to the margin of the camp, where the cement-coloured road curved away pallidly in the dark towards the village. The old man with the game leg was just limping home from the pub, but he had not seen Slava. They did not meet her on the road. Josef was frightened, and did not know what he feared. He quickened his pace until they came to the edges of the village, and the low stone wall of the churchyard with its vague, dappled pallor of gravestones inside, and its occasional darker night of yews.

Suddenly he stopped, for he knew where his mother was. Far up the churchyard, small as the glimmer of a cigarette in the night, but pale gold as a star, there was a little light burning, the tiny, sheltered candle of his baby's soul. Flickering a little in the small wind, Slava's ceremonial farewell to the child they were abandoning burned bravely in the vast and quiet darkness, an assertion of permanence and immortality where everything was apparent change and loss.

He stood gazing at the distant point of flame, and it seemed to grow into a field of fire, all the seasonal fires of Olšany in one infinitesimal gleam. He was almost startled when he felt Hilda stir beside him. He did not want her there. She knew nothing of the traditions of life and death among his people, she would not understand. He spread his hand forbiddingly along her arm.

‘Go back to the hut. I'll bring her – she'll come with me. You go! It's all right now, leave her to me.'

She went without any protest beyond a shrug, for she knew that Slava needed neither man nor woman, and there was no need to cross him in this mood. Tomorrow the crisis would be past, and they would all stop looking behind them, and begin to crane ahead, into a new era already begun. She went away and left him; and when he was sure that she was gone he went in by the lych gate, and threaded a slow and hesitant way between the graves to where Slava stood, looking down at the candle. She had set it on a flat stone, under a broken tumbler which at once sheltered it from the wind and allowed air to feed it. She was gazing at it quietly, and when he said: ‘Mother!' she turned her head with no surprise, arching her fine neck at him and showing him, in the candle's wavering light, a face of assured and appeased calm. He trembled at its large tranquillity, as at the sudden meeting with a mirror.

She began to smile, and then she saw his eyes. They lifted from the tiny grave to her face, and clung there desperately. He wanted to say to her: ‘Mother, I know you don't want to go, I know you think I've been wrong to do this, but what is there for me here?' But before the first words had formed in his lips he knew that he was arguing only with himself. He knew what she had always known, what she had tried with her silence and her stillness to hide from him. He knew why the child had not cared to live, born as it had been without heritage or identity. He knew that there was nothing for him here, nothing in America, nothing in the barren other places to which he would thrust onwards in his pointless agony hereafter. The things which were for him had been left behind already, no journey round the world would ever bring him to where he could claim them again.

Before her brimming, compassionate eyes he began to tremble with the revelation. The candle was the last lighthouse glimmering for a few miles across the sea of his banishment, for, wherever he went searching, he would never find what he wanted again. Others might find it. The forcibly uprooted may light on it upon any kindly coast, name it in any language, possess it even by the roadside while they are nomads. But the self-exiled have had it and chosen to be rid of it. He had not even sold it, he had only thrown it away.