Sufferance, page 14
I told my wife what had occurred, and we agreed that the sum asked was too high to pay. Unfortunately, because I had raised the issue of money, she said she had been thinking about the valuables the girl had brought from her house, and she believed we should sell them. I objected that it would be theft.
To my regret, my wife told our elder daughter about that conversation, and she supported her immediately and passionately.
I had to agree. So the next day I took some of the more portable items to the nearest street-market. I found that there were no buyers. There was, I was told again and again, no market for luxuries like that since so many people had already sold what precious items they possessed. A diamond ring could be bought for the price of a few kilos of cabbages.
* * *
Since it was possible that a member of the girl’s family had spotted the coded message I had fixed to the front door, we needed to start going to the Viennese café on Friday evenings.
So that Friday I took my wife and both my daughters and the girl to the café at five o’clock. We had to appear to be an ordinary family party—though I feared we looked too shabby to be typical of the customers there. The girl sat where she could see the door the whole time and watched eagerly every time it opened.
The proprietor was present, and he came over when the waiter had taken our order and greeted the girl by name. She began to introduce me, but I quickly interrupted her before she uttered my name and in order to disguise my intention, made a great performance of rising and shaking hands warmly with the man. When he asked my name I pretended not to hear him and talked rapidly to prevent the girl saying it. We chatted and he seemed perfectly friendly and asked the girl where the rest of her family were. She told him she was hoping they would arrive at any moment, but the last she had heard was that her brother was in a prisoner-of-war camp and her parents and other brother were staying with friends in what used to be the Western Zone. He shook his head in sympathy at that point, but the girl didn’t seem to notice.
We stayed until after six, and the girl made a fuss about leaving even as late as that.
* * *
Money was becoming more and more of a worry since prices were rising rapidly while my reduced salary remained the same. Even the visits to the café—which now became a regular weekly event—involved paying very high prices for ices and coffees.
The first time we went there I made a note of the bill in my pocket-book, and a moment later I realised that the girl was looking over my shoulder. She was in some ways observant and acute though in academic matters and anything abstract or intellectual, she was slow-witted. That apparent paradox had struck me, and I had worked out that she was very sharp in anything which directly concerned her and especially the gratification of her desires, but she had no curiosity about matters that seemed otherwise irrelevant. In this, she contrasted strikingly with my bright, inquisitive, younger daughter. And that characteristic—the obsession with money and the self-interestedness–was, I considered, very typical of her community
As we walked back to the tram-stop, the girl came alongside me and asked why I had written down the amount of the bill. I told her that because of my accountancy background, it was my habit to keep a note of all household expenses. She looked as if this answer had not satisfied her.
Later that evening she came into my study and questioned me about it again. Eventually I told her I was noting down what she was costing us for her food and so on. She took it badly. She said I was just trying to make money out of her. I was going to present her father with a grossly inflated bill. All we cared about was money.
This was so unfair and so ironic coming from her that I lost my temper. I told her she should be grateful that we had taken her in. I pointed out that she must have seen how many abandoned children there now were who had been reduced to begging in the streets. If we had not helped her she might well be in that situation. She answered that we had done it only to curry favour with her father, and she threw in my face the old canard about my hoping that he would reward me with a well-paid job. I said something quite harsh, and she ran into her room.
* * *
I stayed in the study for the next couple of hours. Because I was so worried about money I could not stop thinking about the safe in the girl’s house. If I could get some of the cash it contained, I could pay the bribe to have my former colleague regularise the girl’s relations with the authorities. It was in a sense the girl’s money, and so taking it in order to help her was morally justifiable.
Of course, even if the safe were still concealed and intact, I did not know the combination and therefore would not be able to open it unless the girl’s father had used one of the family’s birthdates as the combination. I found the sheet on which the girl had written them and copied out each of them using all the different formats I could think of: day, month, year; year month, day; each of those in reverse order; etc. Assuming I could get into the house, it would take me a long time to go through all of them.
However, merely establishing that the safe was still there, and had not been discovered and either removed or opened by the authorities, would be the first step. At the same time, there was no point in raising the girl’s hopes if nothing was going to come of it, so I was unwilling to ask her for the keys. I did not need to since I knew where she kept them.
On an impulse I decided to make the attempt that very night. I softly opened the door of the room in which the girls were sleeping and drew the keys out of the pocket of her coat hanging on the back of the door.
In the half-light from the door, I looked at the two children lying peacefully together in the big bed. When the girl was asleep the frown that had now become almost permanent during the day dissolved, and she looked younger than her years and completely innocent.
Since it was too late for the trams, I walked all the way to the girl’s house and found my way round to the back of the garden. I managed to get over the low wall that surrounded it and cautiously advanced to the rear of the house. To my profound disappointment, the door was as securely boarded up as the front-door. It would take a long time with a hammer and crowbar to get through and the noise would alert the neighbours within a few minutes.
I immediately retraced my steps. I had more difficulty getting over the wall from the garden-side because the ground was lower and so the wall was higher. In scrabbling onto the top, I made some noise and saw—or thought I saw—a light come on above the coach-house. There must be a dwelling up there. Had someone heard me and turned on a light? I froze and waited. Nothing happened. I couldn’t even be sure of what I had seen, and it might have been the way the moon’s reflection caught a glass-pane. After a minute or two I lowered myself over the wall onto the path and crept back to the street.
I didn’t know if it was just my imagination, but as I walked home I kept thinking I heard footsteps behind me. When I stopped, they stopped. If I looked back I could not be sure the street behind me was empty because the inadequacy of the wartime street-lighting left it in darkness. Had someone followed me from the house? Had my climb over the wall awoken someone in the coach-house? Or was I hearing merely the echo of my own steps?
In bed an hour or so later and unable to get to sleep, I wondered if the girl had been lying and did in fact know the combination that would open the safe. She just did not trust me with its contents, and that’s why she had denied knowing it.
I decided I did not dare ask her if there was an apartment above the coach-house because I did not want her to know of my attempt to enter the house. Given her unnatural interest in money, she was quite capable of accusing me of trying to appropriate it for myself when the truth was that I had taken a huge risk in order to benefit her.
* * *
I slept late the next morning and then was awakened by my wife shaking me and telling me the girl was in a terrible state because her keys had vanished.
How could I have been so stupid? I who had always taken such pride in being meticulous about every detail? The truth was that I was so upset and exhausted when I came in that I had forgotten to replace the keys.
I dressed and hurried into the living-room. The girl instantly screamed at me: You took them, didn’t you? You thought you could get Daddy’s money.
I could think of nothing better to say than that I had found them last night on the floor in the hall and had put them in my pocket to give back to her. She snatched them from me and said: That’s a lie. They were in my pocket when I went to bed last night. I know you want to steal from Daddy. That’s why you asked me all those questions about the safe and the house. Then she ran into her room.
My daughters were furious with the girl and denounced her behaviour as ungrateful and malicious. Neither of them had any reason to suppose that I had indeed taken the keys.
I had now given up all hope of raising enough money for the bribe, but I still thought it might be possible to get the girl back into the system.
* * *
That evening something happened that seemed at the time to offer the possibility of a solution. I should explain that the only relatives either my wife or I had in the city were connections by marriage. They were my brother-in-law and his wife. I always called him my ‘brother-in-law’ for the sake of simplicity, but the truth is that he was my sister’s husband’s brother. My sister and her husband still lived in the former capital, where she and I had grown up, but my brother-in-law and his wife had come to the city five years earlier for the sake of his work as a doctor in a hospital, and the four of us had become quite good friends. His wife had been brought up in the city and in fact her mother—though not her father—was from the same community as the girl. They had two children of roughly the same age as our girls, and so we did family things together now and then.
When my brother-in-law ended his visit, I offered to accompany him to the tram-stop.
As we were going down the stairs, we met the joiner’s wife as she was letting herself into her apartment. She smiled and said: I saw your little girl and your wife’s niece earlier. They did make a sweet pair.
I said: We call her that but she’s not our niece exactly. She’s the daughter of a cousin of mine.
As we walked on down the stairs, my brother-in-law looked at me quizzically. We had told him the girl was just a friend of our daughter, and of course he knew she was not my cousin’s daughter since he had met that young woman several times.
On an impulse I decided to tell him the truth. For one thing I had an urge to share it with someone—and someone who was more or less a member of the family and therefore, I believed, completely trustworthy. Another motive was that, since his wife was half a member of the girl’s community, I thought he might be able to help me to get some assistance from it.
I told him the whole story very quietly as we walked slowly towards his tram-stop. He said little except for the strange remark that he wished I hadn’t told him. I asked him to tell nobody except his wife but to try to find out if there was any means by which responsibility for the girl could be lifted from our shoulders by her own community.
* * *
When we listened to the evening news the following night, all of us realised that things had become more serious. The authorities had announced yet another order relating to the aliens: the Enemy’s own laws on ‘ethnic hygiene’ which already applied in that country were being enacted in our nation and would be effective from exactly one week later.
Among other stipulations, it meant that all members of the ‘protected community’ of all ages were required to wear a prominent badge in public. To accompany that, there would be a considerable increase in the number of random checks on identity-cards in the street, and anyone found without a badge carrying an identity-card that indicated the bearer was required to have one, would be arrested. The authorities claimed that the community had been a parasitic presence in our nation for many centuries and was allowed to live among us only on sufferance and that the patient forbearance of our people was coming to an end.
My wife and I exchanged a look. If the girl was stopped in the street, the surname on her identity-card would betray her membership of the community and reveal that she had not registered, and of course she would not be wearing the badge.
We said nothing until the girls were in bed. My wife then told me how worried she was that we were breaking the law. I told her that once the girl’s parents had returned to the city, they would take over responsibility for her, and it would be their task to get the girl back into the system.
The girl did not look very typical of her community, but my wife was worried she might be detected by a random check. I said we’d keep her at home for the first few days and see how many such inspections were being made in our part of the town.
My wife was afraid that if she was caught by one, we might have to pay a fine for not having registered her and wondered if her parents would pay it for us. I tried to reassure her on that point and said that anyway, there was no reason to suppose the authorities were even aware of the girl’s existence and if they were, they had no reason to suppose she was not with her parents.
But would the parents ever return? I thought about the fact that the laws on ‘ethnic hygiene’ had already been applied in the occupying power’s own territory. This meant that the parents, in what was the capital during the invasion, had been subject to them as soon as the Western Zone was annexed. In our country we were at the beginning of a process which was either well advanced or even completed in the Enemy’s own territory.
* * *
That Friday afternoon I took the girl to the café alone in order to save money. Again, she was watching the door like a pointer all the time and was unwilling to leave at six. I did not see the proprietor this time.
Perhaps because I was so nervous, I noticed that among the numerous groups of people—mostly couples or families with children—who were sitting at the tables around us, there was a man seated alone who appeared to be taking an interest in myself and the girl. Whenever my gaze fell on him his head was turned towards us, and then he would look away.
* * *
A week after the announcement, the laws on ‘ethnic hygiene’ came into force. We kept the girl at home for three days—three days of boredom and short temper on her part. During that time I walked around the city and took long tram-rides on unfamiliar routes. What I discovered was that while the normal police and the auxiliary police were examining the identity-cards of people in the centre—both those wearing badges and those without—there seemed to be no or very few checks outside that area. I saw none at all in our neighbourhood.
* * *
The day after the regulations took effect, my brother-in-law called on us late in the evening. He told me he had asked his wife to use her connections with the girl’s community to find out about her family and see if anyone would take responsibility for her. He had very discouraging news and said: Because of who her father is and what he has done, nobody wants to get involved with her.
I was astonished and said: They hate the father so much that they won’t help his child?
He said: No, it’s not that. They are sorry for the girl but they are literally frightened to help her.
I pressed him about the reasons for that attitude, and he told me precisely what his wife had learned, and we went over the words again and again to see what meaning we could extract from them. All she had been told was that the father cheated the wrong people over the store. He said people were frightened to tell her any more than that.
His visit left me in a state of deep alarm. Why should anyone be afraid to help the girl? And did it mean that by taking her in I had brought on myself and my family a further danger in addition to the one that I knew about?
I felt I had run out of options. And now it came to me that in my panic-stricken haste to find a solution, I had failed to think ahead. Even if I had managed to get the girl back into the system, where would she go now that her house was sealed, she had no other relatives, and her own community was unwilling to help her?
* * *
I kept thinking about what my brother-in-law had told me: the father cheated the wrong people over the store.
Everything came together. All the things I had tried not to notice. The man had made powerful enemies inside his community. He had come from outside the city and had obtained ownership or part-ownership of its biggest department store. In doing so he had presumably used dubious methods—perhaps fraud, or perhaps intimidation. I knew there were gangsters inside the Old City who practised protection rackets and controlled prostitution and gambling. These men, believing that he owed them money or convinced that he had cheated them, might have threatened to kidnap or otherwise harm the girl. This would explain why it was not thought to be safe for anyone to shelter her.
The thug I had spoken to at the store was not an employee of the girl’s father but one of the men who had seized control of the business from him. Everyone knew he was ruined and that was why they were calling in loans. The fact that he was bankrupt was why he was not sending his daughter to an expensive school. And the reason why the other girls from her community shunned her at school was that they all knew about her father.
Everything I had hoped for was illusory: the prospect of a job, even of being reimbursed for my expenses. That was what I now assumed. At this point I gave up keeping the schedule of costs incurred on the girl’s behalf.
* * *
By the fourth day it seemed safe to let the girl go to neighbouring shops, cafés, and parks, and so my wife took her out that morning.
