The Other Me (39 page)
Authors: Saskia Sarginson
We stop at a newsstand to buy postcards. I write one to Meg. It has a picture of the Empire State on the front, a pink sunset frothing behind the iconic building. It’s an echo of the one she sent me of the Eiffel Tower. Meg kept her promise; she came to see me in Croydon before Christmas. She never got to meet my father. Otto and Ernst died on the same day. I hardly recognised her when I answered the door. She seemed incongruous against the bleak, suburban street in all her newly acquired Parisian gloss. I looked at her black pumps, the elegant coat and her sleek haircut in admiration, feeling oddly shy.
‘I know,’ she laughed, and plucked at her coat. ‘Dead smart, aren’t I?’
She threw her arms around me, crushing my ribs in a bear hug. ‘Come here, you big soft creature. We’ll sort it together. Look, I’ve got us a bevvy.’ Even though it was four o’clock in the afternoon, she opened a bottle of red wine and poured us each a glass. After that she rolled up her sleeves and got on with practical jobs, helping me to contact estate agents – being Meg: flippant, sensible, big-hearted.
After landing at JFK, I went straight to a meeting with Ernst’s lawyers. Sitting in a sleek, glass office on the twentieth floor, I clutched a coffee like a talisman, while a fast-talking young man told me that Ernst had named my mother in his will. In the event of her death, he said, everything went to me. I was jet-lagged and confused. The information scrabbled at my brain. My fingers squeezed the cup and before I could understand the meaning of his words, the smell of coffee imprinted the moment on my memory. Knowing that Ernst had left me his fortune tripped so many different emotions: shock and sorrow and excitement clashing together. The one that came last, the one I’ll always feel, is gratitude. He’d sold his business when he became too ill to manage. His financial affairs had been neatly tied into trust funds in my name and bank accounts. He’d known he wouldn’t come back.
I was given the address of his apartment and the key. He’d left instructions to his housekeeper to keep it ready. Since he’d been away, flowers had been arranged in vases, dust swept, cushions plumped, windows cleaned. Walking in through the front door, it felt welcoming and lived-in, as if he was hiding in the next room, waiting to surprise me. Paintings were crowded onto every wall. Cosmo went straight to them, opening his hands in pleasure and amazement.
‘A Chagall,’ he breathed. ‘It’s not a reproduction.’ And stepping up to a small sketch and peering through the glass, ‘Look at this. Picasso. From his Blue Period.’ He turned to me. ‘Your father was a collector. This is incredible.’
It was too much to take in. The flat. The paintings. But I thought that when there was time, I’d choose one painting and sit in front of it, let myself get lost inside the lines and colours. I would look, knowing that Ernst had loved it, and that somewhere inside it he would be waiting.
The night that Otto was taken away in the ambulance, Cosmo came to the hospital with me. He was by my side when a doctor with a serious, tired face told me the news. At home, Cosmo held me as I cried and then he listened while I told him my story, as I explained who Ernst was, spilling all that I knew in a mixed-up gabble, stopping only to pull in air, and let out the judders and gasps of my sobbing.
It took all night. We moved through different rooms in the house while I talked, and he fed me glasses of wine, cups of tea, and sandwiches cut into tiny triangles, even though I didn’t want to eat. In my bedroom, exhausted, I finally stopped and we got into my single bed. We didn’t have sex. We just wrapped ourselves up in a tangle of limbs.
When I was silent, he stroked the hair from my hot forehead. ‘But, Klaudia, we’re not stamped with the deeds of our parents, or our grandparents.’ He sounded puzzled. ‘I just don’t believe that. Maybe we should learn from their mistakes, but we don’t have to repeat them.’ He kissed my head as if I was a child, or he was administering a blessing. ‘And you let this come between us?’
‘I made everything so complicated,’ I murmured.
‘Life is complicated,’ he said. I felt his considering frown. ‘But it’s not in the end, is it? It comes down to what you love. Who you love.’
We lay face to face in the half-light of dawn, completely still, holding each other’s gaze. Inside that quiet moment, between the air entering and leaving my body, I felt myself running to him. And he caught me.
There is a box filled with Christmas cards in Ernst’s bedroom. Flicking them open, my heart squeezes tight as I realise that every single one is from my mother. She never wrote anything personal. Just a couple of lines with news of us:
Klaudia lost her first tooth. Otto has a new job as caretaker of a local school.
Next to his bed is a book held together with ribbon. It’s badly burnt, the torn pages charred at the edges. Cosmo picks it up carefully. ‘Einstein,’ he reads. ‘
Relativity
.’ He rubs his fingers together and sniffs. ‘Wonder what happened. It’s old, but I can still smell the ashes.’
Across from the apartment, resigned horses stand in a line, harnessed into their carriages, their heads lowered, snuffling into feedbags. I’m already approaching one of them.
‘You want to do this?’ Cosmo gives me a sideways glance, eyebrows raised. His expression adds – the most cheesy of tourist activities? But he doesn’t say it.
I shake my head. ‘Just want to say hello.’
We’ve reached the first horse. Cosmo steps around the dappled grey rump cautiously. He’s as ignorant about horses as me. Ernst told me he used to carry carrots in his pockets to feed these horses. He said he always patted them, keeping their smell on his fingers for the rest of the day.
I reach up tentatively to touch the horse’s sleek neck, feeling the curve of muscle, the power of the animal. I feel sorry for it, standing day after day in the noise and traffic fumes. The cabbie is wearing a top hat. Sprays of plastic flowers stick up either side of his seat. He leans forward hopefully. ‘Come along folks. Step up behind.’
Cosmo gives an apologetic smile. ‘Not today.’
Not tomorrow either. We’re leaving for London. There are things to do at home. I’m hoping there will be a letter waiting for me from the Laban Centre. The house in Croydon is on the market. I’ve already moved Mum’s urn to the chapel. I don’t want strangers stamping across the grass, ignorant of what lies beneath their feet. Otto rests beside her.
Beloved Husband
.
‘Shanks’ pony, then?’ Cosmo waits for me, hands in his pockets.
We stroll along sweeping tree-lined avenues, watching people going about their lives. Elderly people sit on park benches gossiping or reading papers. There are cyclists and roller-skaters. People walking their dogs. I look at them all, wondering about their stories. I can almost hear them: the clamouring of the past streaming behind us like so many ghosts.
Out of the park and back onto the busy street, buildings soar above us; traffic lights blink; the air hums with constantly sounding horns. We don’t talk. I like that we can be together in comfortable silence. Both of us are too busy pulling in the sights, storing up images. I know he’ll be doing it differently from me. He looks at everything as an artist does. He has a sketchpad in his pocket, and he’ll nonchalantly take it out whenever he feels the desire and with a few deft marks, he’ll capture an old man pushing a grocery trolley laden with junk, or a swirl of pigeons around a hot dog vendor. Sometimes he sketches me. I’m not embarrassed anymore. I’ve come to find it comforting to sit inside the intensity of his gaze; it holds me steady. I daydream while I listen to the quick slide and brush of his pencil against paper.
We turn down another street, passing Barnes & Noble, a Jewish deli, an art gallery. Cosmo tightens his grip on my fingers. ‘Look,’ he says urgently.
I turn my head and peer at a building site on the other side of the road. Men in hard hats and fluorescent jackets cluster around a truck; a pneumatic drill screams inside a cloud of steam. A new building is going up in the middle of the city. I stand, absorbing the purposeful movements of men and machinery; they’re in the process of making something solid, where now there’s just a wounded space: a dank hole in the flattened ground, piles of rubble and the jagged edges of a snarling wall. Cosmo nudges me, and I see it, the logo picked out in blue and yellow: Meyer Construction. A name you can trust.
1997, London
May
The house is sold. Cosmo and I are sorting through my parents’ possessions, sending bags of clothes and kitchen equipment to the Oxfam shop, offering larger pieces of furniture to friends and neighbours. I wander through the familiar rooms, trying to decide which things I want to keep. The floors are cluttered with packing cases and rolls of paper. Cosmo is clearing out the garden shed. I can see him from the window in the spare room; he’s hauling out Otto’s workbench, sorting through the tools, laying them neatly on the grass under swags of pale blossom. I look around me at the bare walls and dusty corners of Ernst’s old room. There’s not much to do in here. Amoya has already stripped his bed; she’s left the sheets and blankets folded neatly on the bare mattress. I lean over to touch the pillow and my toe nudges something hard. I squat down to find Ernst’s small brown leather suitcase. Amoya must have packed it after he died.
I slide it onto the mattress. My fingers move to the catch. It takes one click to open. My insides contract when I see how little it contains. There’s a pile of neatly folded clothes and a small wash-bag. It’s as if he’d shrugged off all his possessions when he came here: leaving behind the lofty apartment with the collection of beautiful ornaments and paintings like some ornate and palatial shell. I touch a folded shirt, and the sour scent of illness rises from the fabric. But there’s something else: a narrow book slotted down the side. I lift it out and open it. When I see his handwriting, my blood begins to beat faster. I read the beginning of the first page:
1931, Germany
Beneath the cow’s belly my thumb and fingers are busy squeezing and pulling. I lean against her warm flank. This is work I’ve done since I can remember…
My heart is pounding now with excitement. I can hear his voice in my head, the lilt and expression of his mixed accent. With shaky fingers, I flick back to the flyleaf:
Darling Klaudia,
This is my story, and so it belongs to you. My daughter. The best way of explaining my life to you, the choices I made, is to write it all down. (I hope you can read my terrible handwriting.) Some things may shock you. I am sorry. Know that, despite what you read here, I always tried to do what I thought was right. The weakness of my human heart and the horror of war are not excuses for the mistakes I made. I take full responsibility for everything. Please forgive me if you can. I wish more than anything that I could have been a father to you.
I trace the swoop and line of his letters as if I could reach through the flow of ink to feel the pen, touching his battered fingers curled around it. My chest is tight. I look through pages covered in his messy scrawl. There are dates at the top of some. I calculate numbers in my head. He’s written down memories stretching back to his childhood, and on through the war until he came here to London, to see Mum and me. It is all here, how his life began and how it ended. Outside I hear the muted sounds of a radio and the bangs and clinks of Cosmo sorting through the shed. Birds move among the petals of the apple tree, calling to each other. I take the book over to the window and settle in a chair. Morning light falls onto the first page.
I’d like to thank my editor, Emma Beswetherick, and my agent, Eve White: two inspiring women who have given me unwavering support and encouragement.
Also many thanks to Jack Ramm, and the wonderful team at Piatkus and Little, Brown.
I’m grateful to those who took the time and care to read drafts of the manuscript: Sara Sarre, Alex Marengo and Ana Sarginson; and my thanks to Viv Graveson, Cecilia Ekback, Laura McClelland and Mary Chamberlain for workshopping extracts.
Thank you to Lindel O’Neil for his knowledge of Brixton in the 1990s, and most of all for sharing his love of dance and dance philosophy with me. Scarlett’s words of wisdom come from him. Thank you to Pandora Money for giving me an insight into the world of mural painting; to Dr Andrew Low for words on music and physics; and to Peter Padfield for his guidance on useful books on the Second World War.
The following books were particularly helpful in my research:
The Forgotten Soldier
by Guy Sajer (Cassell, 1999).
The Holocaust
by Martin Gilbert (Fontana Press, 1987).
Soldaten
by Sonke Neitzel and Harald Welzer (Simon & Schuster, 2011).
In Deadly Combat
by Gottlob Herbert Bidermann (University Press of Kansas, 2000).
The Perfect Nazi
by Martin Davidson (Viking, 2010).
I watched many documentaries on the subject of Hitler Youth, including the excellent
Hitler’s Children
by Maya Productions Ltd.
Any mistakes are solely my own.
