The Restoration of Otto Laird (15 page)

Otto's sisters, kind-hearted girls with long black hair and large eyes, doted on their younger brother, often giving him their rations of cheese or bread. Their mother and father did the same, meaning there were certain days when Otto ate more than the rest of the family combined. This left him with feelings of intense guilt.

For obvious reasons, the most feared presence in the cellar was the large metal bucket that served as the family latrine. Its normal place of residence was a small recess in a corner. Once a day Otto's father carried it over to the door, from where it was lifted out to be emptied by a benign and unseen hand.

In order for Otto to use the latrine at night, he had to crawl across the mattresses of his sisters, then carefully edge past his sleeping parents. In winter, when temperatures dropped below freezing, using the bucket could be a most uncomfortable experience. In an attempt to avoid this depressing prospect, Otto tried to ignore the aching in his bladder that had woken him each time. Instead, he tried to focus on drifting back to sleep. Normally he failed, and so resigned himself to tackling the human obstacle course that lay between his resting place and his destination. As the disorientated Otto plunged and scrambled across the line of mattresses, his sisters would curse and groan, if they had been asleep, or sometimes giggle, if they were already awake. Yet this drama took place quietly, almost silently, as they all knew that to make any kind of loud noise would be dangerous.

Like the smell from the latrine, fear was a constant presence in the cellar, although the family became highly accomplished at disguising it from Otto, who was not yet of an age to fully comprehend the circumstances in which they found themselves. There were moments when he clearly sensed something. His mother's voice was naturally weak, but at times, when she sat at the table talking to his father, it became even more tremulous than usual. The occasional look that his father gave his mother also told Otto that mysterious issues were moving beneath the surface. His sisters, who were older and knew more than he, remained generally playful in his presence. But even they sometimes appeared a little pensive, as they gathered in a huddle on a mattress to whisper among themselves.

Despite the distraction of the daily lessons, life in the cellar was routine. Often the worst thing for the children was not so much the constant fear of discovery as the boredom of containment. For all of them, therefore, those hours away from studying were spent thinking of the courtyard above; awaiting the hour when they could go outside and stand once again in the fresh air.

Three sides of the courtyard were surrounded by the backs of tenement buildings – blank walls offering protection from prying eyes. The fourth side was overlooked by workshops that had once been used by local diamond-cutters, now replaced by unfamiliar faces. When these strangers had finished work for the day, the family would receive a special ‘knock from above', telling them that the coast was now clear.

Each day, as they awaited this signal, Otto would sit on his mattress and watch the blade-thin shafts of light – specks of dust swirling in their midst – penetrate down into the gloom through the hatch that was the portal to those few short hours of bliss. He would feel a surge of nervous excitement whenever the knock on the wooden hatch came: two firm blows from a hobnailed boot, and then three more at a faster rhythm. After waiting a few minutes, his father would go first, pushing up the cover and clambering out, before turning to help up the children in their turn. Their mother, a nervous woman, usually preferred to stay in the relative safety of the cellar rather than join the others outside, fretting until they returned safely to their hiding place.

During those hours outside in what seemed like the harsh light of the courtyard, Otto sometimes played with his sisters, who had developed between them a range of improvised games in which they didn't need to make a single sound. There were ‘clapping' games without any clapping, ‘singing' games that were extravagant mimes, and games of ‘catch' that involved no ball. At other times, Otto walked silently beside his father, who paced endlessly around the perimeter, his hands behind his back and his long head bowed. At every turn, almost without fail, his father's moustache would twitch; a restless antenna, transmitting to Otto his thoughts.

At other times, when Otto was in a more solitary mood, he would stand or sit in a corner, his back resting against the cool brown wall, and study the sky above him. Sometimes he would sketch the view in a notepad, but more often he would settle on contemplation. Only the narrowest of views was visible, of that famously wide Flemish sky, closed in above them between the encircling walls of the tenements. Yet month after month Otto studied in all weathers that small patch of sky: the soft cloud-brushes against the intense blue; the thick and glowing layers of grey; the flakes of snow that tumbled from on high in swirling, chaotic patterns – seeming to take an eternity to reach his face.

While looking upwards, he thought of the skies he had seen in the great landscape paintings his father had shown to him; at one time, in leather-bound books in their Viennese apartment, nowadays by the light of candles in the cellar, in pages torn from old magazines. Some of those paintings were kept here in Belgium, in the fine-art museum in Brussels. His father had promised that one day, when it was safe to venture outside once again, he would take them all.

During summer, they spent two or three hours each evening in the courtyard, fewer in winter. As the afternoons advanced, Otto would watch the shadows from the surrounding tenements lengthen across the courtyard, submerging the light until only a small patch of it remained in a corner by a wall. His sisters would gather in that corner, where they stood and sunned themselves with arms outstretched, or played within the glowing circle, their movements increasingly curtailed by its gradual closing. Until suddenly, almost unnoticed, the scrap of light would be extinguished altogether, casting the last of the courtyard into dusk. Their father, stepping forward in the blueness, would signal with his hand that it was time for them to go, and they would gather in a silent group around the hatch.

At night, Otto lay staring at the red-brick ceiling. It flickered dimly in the candlelight from the corner, where his mother and father sat talking at the table. Their words were indecipherable from this distance, and so Otto would let the low comforting hum of their voices wash over him, his thoughts meandering far beyond the ceiling at which he gazed. Sometimes he would think back to Vienna, although his memories of the city were already hazy. He retained no specific incidents, only vague and abstract impressions, removed from any context. He remembered the clanging of a tram bell, the smell of horse manure and rooms with tall mirrors reflecting layers of chocolate cake. There was also the leather couch in his old home, mottled and smelling of antique books, with a texture that would sink softly against his face as he lay and listened to his mother read him stories. Otto liked to recreate that texture in his mind as he pressed his face into the rough hessian sack that acted as a pillow and often left chequerboard patterns on his cheek in the morning.

Sometimes he would think of Antwerp, which lay somewhere unseen beyond the roof of the cellar. The wide River Scheldt he could still picture, black and swaying hypnotically against the quays. And he could taste the pickled herrings that his mother bought at market, dropping them laughing into his mouth while he grunted and clapped his hands as if he were a seal pup. He also liked to think about the trip they had taken to see the tulip fields at Lisse in the Netherlands, back before the outbreak of war. He remembered riding between the long strips of flowers on the back of his father's bicycle. The individual heads had blurred into thick streaks of pigment, as pure as any squeezed from a paint tube. A long line of pink, and then a long line of red; yellow, orange, purple – each one in turn becoming Otto's favourite. Later, they climbed up to a platform on the edge of a field, and saw the bright colours run in thick bands toward the steeples on the horizon; a landscape as painted by a child.

If these thoughts failed to return Otto to sleep, he would raise himself slightly, his hands behind his head, and look across the narrow cellar, over the mattresses of his sleeping sisters to the far end of the room. There he could see his parents, hunched in conversation over the table. Many years later, when visiting the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, Otto had seen the painting
The Potato Eaters,
and found himself transported with a terrible immediacy back to that scene of his parents in the cellar. The drawn faces of the protagonists in the shadowy candlelit room made his heart contract in a spasm of recognition, forcing him to sit a moment on one of the benches lining the gallery. Later, in the café, he explained the memory to Anika and felt her fingers brush lightly against his face.

One night, some five months after the family had moved into the cellar, Otto was lying awake on his mattress and staring once more at the red-brick ceiling. He was having trouble getting to sleep. The rain was beating down heavily that night. He could hear it, faintly, on the other side of the ceiling above him, more clearly on the wooden hatch leading up to the courtyard. As he pressed his face into the rough surface of the sacking, and imagined once more the leather couch in their old apartment, he suddenly became aware that the hum of his parents' voices had risen in pitch and intensity. Unusually, too, he could now make out what they were saying, and it was clear that his mother in particular was upset. Her weak and trembling voice almost cracked with anger.

‘You can't,' she was saying. ‘I won't let you do it. It's dangerous and irresponsible.'

Otto's father sounded less angry, but his deep and authoritative voice carried a barely concealed edge of feeling.

‘Irresponsible? What do you mean irresponsible? Europe is at war, Maria.'

Otto heard one of his sisters stirring, before readjusting the sacking on her mattress and settling back down to sleep.

‘You have four children – you have a family. Your duty lies with them.'

‘But there's nothing useful I can do here, can't you see?
I
can't protect them.
I
can't help them – not if they come for us. There's nothing I can do. And meanwhile all I do here is pace about, taking up what limited space there is in the cellar and using up valuable supplies of food.'

‘But what about their education?'

‘
You
are more than capable of taking care of that, as you have already shown.'

‘But it's a comfort for them to know that you are here. It is for all of us. You're their father.'

‘We've been here some months now, and the children are more than accustomed to this way of life.
They,
at least, appear calm and controlled about the situation.'

‘Meaning?'

‘Please, let's not argue any more. You know how I feel – we've spoken about this many times. I cannot continue to sit here, in a cellar, doing nothing, while people outside are fighting this evil. We hoped at first it would be for a few months only, but clearly it's going to last for some time yet. I cannot countenance years of sitting here passively, waiting for my wife and children to be plucked like chickens from a coop and slaughtered.
I have to do something.
'

‘Not so loud.'

The sound of his father's voice dropped slightly, but Otto could still decipher the sharp whispering from across the room.

‘This mission will last no more than a few weeks, as I've explained. My expertise will be invaluable. Indeed, it has been specifically requested by those concerned. Already we owe these people our lives. I cannot ignore such a request for assistance.'

A few days later, after the family had taken their usual turn in the courtyard, and finished their supper of bread and powdered milk, Otto's father asked to speak to the three sisters while Otto read on his mattress. They talked softly around the table, glancing over at him occasionally as they did so. Otto looked up, curiously, when one of his sisters appeared to gasp, but the voices dropped back down immediately and the conversation continued. A few minutes later, Otto was also called to the table and told that his father would be going away for a short while.

‘Is this the mission?' Otto asked, surprising everyone with his words.

When they said nothing, he continued, ‘I heard you talking last night while I was in bed. You said something about a mission.'

His father had recovered himself.

‘That's right,' he said. ‘It
is
a mission. And do you know what it is for?'

Otto shook his head.

‘I'm going to find us some books.'

Otto said nothing.

‘I think we need some more books for this apartment, don't you?'

He always called the cellar ‘the apartment' in front of the children.

‘Why, you've quite worn out the ones we have here, Otto, with all that reading you do. I'm going to go in search of some more.'

His father had tried to adopt a playful tone, which was among the least familiar in his repertoire. Otto did not really believe him, and realised that something was seriously amiss, but he also sensed that everyone in his family wanted him to believe his father's story. So he convinced himself, for their sakes, that he did.

That evening, Otto's father packed a holdall with some belongings, put on his overcoat and a warm leather cap, and went round to kiss each of the children in turn. Later on, when they were fast asleep, they were woken by the thumping of the hobnailed boot on the hatch above, in the same familiar pattern that always called them out to their early evening exercise. Otto, bleary and confused, looked across and saw the dark shape of his father, threading his way upwards through the hatch.

For many weeks they heard nothing. Otto could sense his mother's anguish, her body language and voice taking on an air of desperation. At night he sometimes heard her whimpering, a sound that would never quite leave him throughout his life. As the only male in the household, he tried his best to assume extra responsibilities. He insisted on climbing up first through the hatch during their daily trips outside. He also started lifting the bucket from its position in the recess to the door to the adjacent apartment, leaving it there for collection every day. Otto sensed that it was his role to be positive; to play the carefree child, in order to lessen his mother's burden. So he took on this happy-go-lucky role, almost convincing himself that it was real; while sensing, deep down, that some calamity was about to befall them.