The Other Me (35 page)

Our house takes on the smell of sickness. It permeates the atmosphere. I smell it on myself, in my clothes and hair. My father shuts himself in the living room and plays loud opera, or he disappears into his shed. Weeks slip past. Having a sick person in the house has changed the way we live, draws us inwards, making us more secluded than usual. The household revolves around Ernst’s needs and routine. There is a hush and an activity different from normal life. A kind of reverence has descended; time slows and the world outside retreats. Oddly, it’s as I imagine it might be if there was a new baby in the house.

I don’t get a job. I tell myself I can’t leave Ernst, even though that’s not true, not in a practical sense, because Amoya takes care of everything. The house, with a dying man at its centre, exerts a hold over me, webbing me inside its slow days. We all walk with our heads bowed, as if the rooms themselves compress us.

When I’m not with Ernst, I’m managing to keep up with my dance practice, developing my two pieces of choreography for the audition. I don’t like going out; I’ve begun to shop at the Guptas’ to save having to brave the bright, busy confusion of the supermarket. Choice overwhelms me. I am unsteady amongst people. I hardly know how to negotiate crossing the road, or how to count money.

Walking home from a shopping trip, I notice pumpkin faces leering at me from behind curtains, on window ledges and tops of walls. Halloween. I’d forgotten. I stare at them: orange flesh split by roughly carved teeth, jagged eyes and holes for noses. Tonight they will flame with the light of tiny candles, lit from within as if feverish with some terrible illness.

A firework goes off with a bang in a garden nearby. I jump. I hear the rip and sizzle of falling sparks, but can’t see anything against the pale sky. Ordinary life is carrying on with all its rituals and seasonal markers. I am marooned from it, as if I’m watching through glass. I allow myself to think of Cosmo. It’s nearly November. Last year we were together on fireworks night. It had felt dangerous and exciting, up there on the slippery tiles with the drop below into hazy, acrid darkness. When I try and think of him in Rome, I can’t imagine anything except tourist snapshots of narrow streets, ancient houses and fountains. I can’t see him there. My mind offers nothing but uncharted emptiness, as if space washes against me. He’s lost inside it, spinning on another planet, a different star.

I wonder what mural he’s working on and I wish I could be wherever he is, standing in a dark corner, unobserved, just to see him painting. I love the focus in his body when he works: the intention of his movement, how energy flows through him and into the brush, like a dancer.

I miss Scarlett and the others too. I suppose that there’ll be someone else behind the bar now, and a new burlesque dancer.

Amoya has gone home for the evening. The kitchen is full of the sweet scent of carrot soup bubbling on the stove; I have a glass of wine on the go. The nights have drawn in; darkness laps against the windows. Every now and again I hear a rocket go off. The noise takes me by surprise. Halloween isn’t over yet and already people are letting off fireworks. Things slipping and sliding into each other.

I think of Ernst upstairs, the cancer eating him away. He seems to get weaker every day, and yet he holds on, almost as if he’s waiting for something. I’d asked Amoya how long she thought he had, feeling oddly furtive and disloyal about it. ‘He’s a fighter.’ She’d sounded protective, rolling her cushioned shoulders; and the watch pinned to her breast slipped to the side. ‘Could be days. Could be months. I’m afraid I can’t tell you. In this job, life and death surprise me all the time.’ She’d softened when she’d seen my expression. ‘My advice to relatives is always to treat each day as if it might be the patient’s last.’ She’d nodded. ‘We should do that with everyone, if only the good Lord would give us the strength.’

She is right, of course. I need to be kinder to my father, try to stop being angry with him all the time. He’s old. The doorbell chimes. I start, spilling a splash of wine. I push back my chair, sucking my fingers as I hurry to the door.

Two witches stand on the threshold, black cloaks hanging down, green hair sprouting under pointed hats. A sickly faced monster lurks behind, torn mouth bleeding. The witches raise sharp claws and screech, ‘Trick or Treat!’

I flinch, stepping away. One of the witches holds out a plastic bag and rustles it hopefully. ‘Any sweets, Miss?’

I smell the dank, smoke-laced air of Halloween. The night hums with excitement. I stare down the street. There are pumpkin faces flickering, small groups huddled in open doorways. Kids running down the street, cloaks flying behind them, hands clutching long plastic devil’s forks.

‘Wait a minute,’ I tell them.

A few moments later I’m dropping a couple of apples and a banana into their bag. The monster removes his mask to stare balefully at the fruit. The witches look at me as if I’m mad. ‘Fanks,’ they mumble.

I watch them wander off down the street in search of richer pickings. I sigh, guessing that I’ll be answering the door a few more times before the evening is over. High over my head there’s a whine, then a crackling explosion.

I go upstairs to ask Ernst if he’d like any bread with his soup. The door opens and my father comes out, grim faced; he walks past as if he doesn’t see me. They must have had an argument.

I hurry in to see if Ernst is all right. He is lying against his pillow, and his skin is nicotine grey. He doesn’t look upset. His expression is still. For a horrible second, I think he is dead. I hold my breath, stepping closer. I see the rise and fall of his chest.

‘Supper time. Are you ready for some soup?’

He starts and turns to me.

‘It’s carrot and potato. Delicious,’ I exclaim heartily.

I flinch. I was too loud. I keep doing that, behaving like someone jolly and brisk. He must hate it.

‘Would you like bread?’ I ask in a quieter voice.

‘No, thank you,’ he smiles. ‘Just a little soup.’

I lean over him to straighten his blanket, relieved that he’s alive and accepting food. ‘I wish you and my father would sort out your differences,’ I say, thinking of Amoya’s words.

He grimaces. ‘We’ve chosen to live differently. It’s hard for him… that I’m an atheist.’

‘And what about my mother?’

He curls his fingers. ‘What about her?’

‘She had your medals. They were in one of her drawers. I don’t understand why she had them.’

‘I gave them to her, Klaudia.’ He sighs. ‘They meant nothing to me. But she said that it would be wrong to throw them away.’ He twists his head to one side so that he can see me properly. ‘She understood that your father would have found it difficult. You know of course… it was his ambition to fight… in the war.’

I wonder what my father has done with them. He must have found them after she died, going through her things. I guess he’s thrown them away. I don’t want Ernst to know. It will be another thing to come between them.

‘I’ll bring your soup up,’ I tell him, slipping out of the door.

Going past the sitting room, I make out a slumped shape in the room beyond. My father alone in the dark. When I switch on the light, he blinks.

‘It’s good,’ I tell him, ‘that you’re spending time with Ernst.’

I perch on the sofa, thinking of how to phrase what I want to say without sounding patronising, or making him angry. ‘You know, maybe you should use this time to make it up with him.’ I open my hands. ‘I know you had an argument, but he’s dying; shouldn’t you think about forgiving each other?’

‘We have talked of forgiveness,’ he says slowly.

I try to control the surprise in my face. ‘I didn’t know. I’m glad.’

As I stand at the stove, stirring the soup, I look out of the window. Ribbons of glitter shoot through the sky, arching over the dark contours of the shed. I turn off the heat and go out into the garden, my breath misting the air, and stand under the apple tree looking up, watching stars burn and flash between the steady arms of its branches.

Mum used to love fireworks, like a child. Thinking of her, I can almost smell lavender, hear the soft exhalation of her breath as she oohs and aahhs with each new explosion.

ERNST

Pain shoots into my bones, deep and hot and sharp as a blade. I lie still, as if by doing so I can fool the pain into leaving me alone. Like playing dead when a bear comes sniffing. I have tried curling into a ball: I have writhed and twisted, rolling and crawling from one end of the bed to the other. I wish I had one of my paintings here, something beautiful to centre me. At home I would pick one and sit in silence absorbing the lines and colours, the feelings pressing in behind the image. But even that wouldn’t help now. There is no escaping. Only morphine can help – blunting the edges, pulling me into muffled dreams. Amoya injects me with that sweet release. She can see when I’ve reached the brink of endurance. I like her firm, papery-skinned hands. I like the feel of them on my body. She knows how to handle me, the way I knew how to touch horses, how to soothe them when they startled. I long for her dark eyes holding mine as she finds the vein in my arm.

‘You rest now, Mr Meyer,’ she says.

I see trees picked out, dark against white, a landscape for me to fall into. I know this place. I don’t want to go. I kick out under the covers, clutching the sheet, trying to struggle back to the brink, back into the spare room. Pain is safer. It’s too late. The tangles of poppies have me, and I can’t get free.

I’m here again, moving through the tall, stark forest with the others, our guns at the ready, picking our feet in and out of deep snow. Sweat prickles my back. The Russian civilian prisoner comes with us, stumbling, hands tied. His bruised and defeated face leads us on. I watch the trees either side, alert for signs of ambush, listening to the creak of branches straining under weighty drifts, the snap of frozen wood and crunch of boots through ice.

The Russian stops and gestures with his chin. The SS
Hauptmann
leading the hunt holds up his gloved hand. His long leather coat swings at his boots.

I can make out a slight rise in the snow, and underneath a lip of darkness. We approach, and a soldier steps forward, kneeling; a grenade rolls like a nut through the slit; I hear the rattle, and then an explosion. Smoke gushes out. I sniff. Burning flesh. Scorched earth. The sound of frantic scuffling and a second concealed entrance is flung open, the stolen barn door falling back, scattering snow.

There are four of them left alive. They are bundled together, and their weapons removed. The
Hauptmann
looks pleased. ‘Jewish partisans. A real rat’s nest.’

Two others are dead inside the dugout. The ones that live are thin, dark creatures wrapped in rags, limping, wounded. The
Hauptmann
chooses his man for interrogation: the oldest, his face resigned. The remaining three he lines up, and he turns to us and clicks his fingers. ‘You, you and you. Get rid of them.’

I don’t want to look too closely. I don’t want to notice that one is just a whimpering boy. There is a girl too and I pray she won’t be mine. When we step forwards, rifles up, she is there in my sights.

She wears a man’s jacket, done up with twine. She has no shoes. Her feet are wrapped in old bits of cloth. I think of German trains blown up. Men killed. Supplies lost. I think of friends I’ve known, stabbed in the back, tortured by people like these. The thoughts won’t stick, won’t spark into the right emotions. There is nothing for it then, but to aim straight. I brace myself, and hold the gun steady.

I see only the dwindling pupils of her eyes, the way she stares down the barrel of my gun as if she is the one with her finger on the trigger.

The butt kicks against my shoulder. The shot tears through the breast pocket of her jacket. I blink; lick salt from my lips. She is a bundle dropped in the snow.

We follow our tracks back without the Russian guide. The
Hauptmann
put a bullet through his head. Darkness webs over us, hangs between pointed branches; it is the ground that holds the light. It glows. I drag my heavy boots, head down, face stretched tight as a howl. I want to be numb, like my frozen feet.

It’s evening. There are bangs and screams outside. I have never liked fireworks. I put up my hand to press the skin on my face, thin and bumpy around my eye socket. Old wounds. The morphine is receding, the world floating back with its textures and shapes: the pain duller, but nagging at me, a gnawing inside my bones.

The door opens. Otto. He rarely visits. He comes closer and stands stiffly by my bed.

‘I’ll be dead soon,’ I reassure him.

He grunts. Not even the flicker of a smile.

‘I want to make sure… you won’t tell Klaudia,’ he says. ‘You mustn’t tell her.’

‘Not tell her that I’m her father?’ I breathe carefully, skimming past the pain.

He nods tightly. ‘Not for me. For her. Think what it would do to the memory of her mother.’

No gun this time. Just emotional blackmail. But I can see what this is costing him. The effort of it is written into his expression.

‘I haven’t come for that, Otto,’ I say gently.

The boy I used to know is somewhere there, my brother hovering below this old man’s armour, anxious and ambitious, still unformed, raw with possibilities. I don’t want us to be enemies. Dying erases nearly everything. It distils life. Only grit remains. A few true things.

‘Then what have you come for?’ He is gruff with fear.

‘To say goodbye. And I wanted to tell you… I have news that concerns you too.’

‘What news?’ Otto is suspicious. He’s moved further away, leaning against the closed door. I wish he wouldn’t. I can’t see him properly now.

‘I hired a private detective to… help me track down what happened to the Baumanns.’ I cough, a rough tearing inside.

He says nothing; but I feel his tension.

‘Mrs Baumann died of typhus in the Lublin Reservation. The others were transported in spring 1942 to the Belzec extermination camp. Sarah and Daniel… they were murdered there. Gassed.’