In the Evil Day

14

…HAMBURG…

Light draining from the world, the coming winter on his skin, knee joints pleading, Anselm ran home, not stopping till he stood at his gate in the silent street, slumped in the shoulders, seeing his ragged breath in the air.

He was in the kitchen, about to drink bottled water, weak, unshowered, when the knocks sounded on the huge front door. He froze. There was a bell, it worked, someone chose to knock. Pause-again the hollow knocking.

He spoke to himself, calmed himself, and went down the cavernous passage into the hall, switched on the outside light. A shadow lay on the front door’s stained-glass window.

‘Who is it?’ he said

‘Alex Koenig.’

Anselm opened the door. She was formally dressed, a pinstriped suit, dark, a white shirt with a high collar, dark stockings. She looked severe and striking.

‘I came to apologise,’ she said. ‘I was wrong to come here uninvited and what I said was unforgivable.’

Anselm shook his head. ‘You don’t have to apologise. No one who deals with me ever has to apologise.’

‘You will accept my apology?’

‘Of course, but…’ ‘I won’t bother you again.’

She turned and went quickly down the path. He wanted to call after her, ask her to come back, come inside, show her that he was not the savage and unpleasant person he had presented to her.

But he did not. He was scared of her. Of what she knew about him.

Alex Koenig didn’t look back, the gate clicked behind her. A wait, then a car drove away, its sound lost in the murmuring city.

Anselm went back to the kitchen, down the flagstone passage so wide he could not touch the walls with outstretched arms. He put the bottle of water away, opened a beer and downed it in two long-throated drinks, the clean tawny smell filling his nasal cavities. He poured a glass of white wine, sat at the pine table. Just to sit there comforted him. The great, worn table in the kitchen always comforted him.

In Beirut, fighting against claustrophobia and pain and panic, his memories of the house on the canal, of the kitchen and the garden saved him. He had forced himself to think about the house and his childhood, his family: being woken by his brother in the middle of the night and seeing adults in the garden throwing snowballs; walking by the canal with his grandfather, autumn leaves underfoot; in the kitchen helping Fraulein Einspenner to shell peas, peel potatoes, knead dough. The kneading he had remembered most clearly: the feel of the dough, the life in it, the resistance building beneath his hands, the sensual, silky, breast-like resilience.

And he remembered the roses one summer-the ones the colour of burnt cream in the big pots on the terrace, the three or four shades of pink around the front gate, the dark satiny reds that smothered the boundary wall.

Later, after he had been beaten, after the panic when he began to discover the holes in his mind, the blank spaces, the lacunae, it began to gnaw at him that he didn’t know the names of so many things. For a long time, he could not distinguish between what he had never known and what he had forgotten. And when he thought he could, he was filled with an aching despair that he would die without knowing the names. In that hopeless space, always dark, the world was gone, the whole world of sky and earth and trees moving in a cold wind. Gone.

And with it the names.

Now, sitting at the table in the flagstoned room, he remembered clearly the ache to know the names, to be able to say them to himself.

The need to know names.

The names of so many things.

‘Do you know the names of any roses,’ he had asked.

‘What?’ Riccardi, a whisper.

‘Roses.’

‘Roses?’

‘Yes. Roses. Their names.’

And so it began. In that foetid hole, black, a shallow grave, two men lying so close together they could not be sure whose breath they smelled, whose body sounds they heard, whose heartbeat they felt- they began to name things. In three languages. Roses. Trees. Give me ten trees. Dogs, name twelve dogs. Fifteen saints. Twenty mountains. Flowers, stars, saints, rivers, seas, singers, capitals, wars, battles, writers, songs, generals, paintings, poets, poems, actors, kinds of pasta, ocean currents, deserts, books, trees, flowers, desserts, architectural periods, cars, American Presidents, parts of speech, characters in books, prime ministers, volcanoes, hurricanes, bands, waterfalls, sculptors, American states, meat dishes, actors, breads, wines, winds, women’s names from A to Z, men’s, towns, villages, statues, operas, kings, queens, the seven dwarves, engine parts, films, directors, diseases, biblical figures, boxers, names for the penis, for breasts, the vagina, for eating and shitting and pissing and kissing and fucking and pregnancy and telling lies.

But not words for dying.

No, not words for dying. They didn’t need words for dying. They were going to die.

The tape recorder was on the table. He went to the study and fetched the box of tapes. He went back and forth on the one with 2 written on it, circled.

You were talking about Kate yesterday.

Oh. Yes. Kate was a Jew.

Who’s Kate?

Our cousin’s wife. I’ll show you her photograph. Beautiful girl, lovely. A Jew.Nominally. Her family. Not in a religious sense. I don’t think they had any religion to speak of. We, of course, we thought of ourselves as Christians. But all we did was observe the traditions. We only went to church on Christmas day, to the Landeskirche, just a family tradition. And of course we had the most wonderful Christmas Eves, the Feuerzangbohle, the presents, my dear, the wonderful presents.

What about Kate?

Moritz was abominable. Isn’t that a lovely word? Abominable. English is a lovely language. Stuart used to call all kinds of things abominable. Do you know about the creature of the snows? In the Himalayas? Where do you place the stress in that? I’ve never been comfortable with the word.

About Kate? Moritz?

Moritz said we should put the Sturmer sign on the entrances to the family businesses. Such a stupid and dreadful thing to say… What sign?

Oh, you know, Juden sind hier nicht erwunscht. He was talking about how Germany needed to be cleansed of Jews, it was a matter of hygiene, nonsense like that, he had obviously been drinking.

Kate heard that?

Your great-grandfather didn’t like that kind of talk. We dealt with many Jews.He was an old-fashioned person. Well, he was old. Not that old, I suppose…as old as I am now, I suppose. Good heavens. I would need to work that out. How old he was. One forgets.

This was just before the war?

You looked like Moritz when you were a boy, do you know that? A little bigger, he was thin. But your eyes and the hair and the chin.

No. Did many people you knew feel the way Moritz did?

About Jews? People said things. But the Nazis, we had contempt for their rubbish. We all did. The people we mixed with. The old merchant families. We had all travelled, you see, we were…worldly, I suppose that’s the word. ‘That Man’, that’s what we called Hitler. That Man. A vulgar person.They were all vulgar, the women were all…well, I shouldn’t. He was Austrian too, not German.

Moritz. What happened to him?

I remember when you came to this house the first time. Lucas was quiet, he didn’t move from your mother and you just ran around madly and Einspenner was so taken with you, she took you into the kitchen and showed you the cellar… Before he went to bed, Anselm made a cheese omelette, ate it with toasted five-day-old bread. He wasn’t hungry, just a duty the mind owed the body. In the study, he saw the American Defense Secretary on television. He was behind a desk, Michael Denoon, a hard-faced man, boxer’s scars on his jaw and right cheekbone. Through the pancake, the lights caught them, thin lines where skin and flesh had been jammed against bone and split open. But his nose was straight, no one had got through to his nose.

A CNN woman came on, lots of hair, eyes wide open, and a big cone-shaped mouth. She said:

Pressure on US Defense Secretary Michael Denoon to enter the presidential race intensified today when Newsweek reported that an informal poll showed 155 of 222 Republican members of the House of Representatives would support Denoon’s candidacy.

Republican Senator Robert Gurner is thought to be unelectable since the disclosure three days ago of his two-year homosexual relationship with New York actor Lawrence Wellman.

Denoon again. He put his head to one side, ran a hand across his hair, modest, straightened, looked at the camera.

Of course I’m deeply honoured by this expression of confidence by people who speak for millions of ordinary Americans. I’m humbled too. This nation bears deep wounds from the great sacrifices it has made in faraway places to fight evil and promote freedom and democracy. Now we need calm, peace and prosperity. We need to renew ourselves, to put America first, to see clearly our place in the world. But whether I am fit to take up this great challenge is a matter for long and careful thought.

Anselm went to bed and thought about America. He tried to remember what it had been like to feel wholly American, to look at the world as an American. He knew he had once but he could not recapture it. Over the years, moving from war to war, horror to horror, his nationality had been bled from him. The more he saw of the world’s conflicts, of people dead, wounded, mutilated, raped, dispossessed of what little they had, the more unreal America seemed, the more the cruel naivete of America embarrassed him. That was partly why he was drawn to Kaskis. Kaskis didn’t expect America to behave sensibly and so he wasn’t disappointed when it didn’t. He remembered sitting in a dark bar in San Francisco with Kaskis. It was the mid-1980s. He was about to go to Pakistan and Afghanistan, Kaskis had just come back.

‘The CIA wants to fight this one to the last dead Afghan,’ Kaskis said. ‘More CIA in Islamabad than in fucking Langley. Bill Casey’s got this hick from Texas, he’s the point in Congress. The prick’s been up in the hills hanging out with the mojahedin. He thinks we give them the right stuff we can do a reverse Vietnam. And for nickels and dimes. This time we stay at home and our proxies kill Russians. Lots of Russians. Fifty-eight thousand would be a nice number.’

Kaskis had stubbed out his cigarette, fished for another. ‘I weep for my fucking country,’ he said. ‘Everywhere we go we sow dragon’s teeth.’

On the long slope towards sleep, he saw Kaskis, saw his face as he was taken away, the look back, the lift of his dark-stubbled chin, the wink. Anselm tried to shake the image away, dislodge it, but it clung, tenacious.

The dark eyes of Kaskis, the flash of his teeth. In all of it, Kaskis had never shown a sign of fear.

Before dawn, Anselm woke in a foetal clutch, straightened his body and lay on his back, stretched his arms and legs. I haven’t woken myself by crying out loud for a while, he thought. I haven’t woken wet with sweat to find tears on my face.