Sufferance, page 16
In the end, we decided that our only remedy was to make a full and frank disclosure. I would go to the authorities and tell them the whole story: We had taken the girl in as an act of generosity to our daughter’s schoolfriend long before there was any question of that being illegal.
We wondered if they would believe us if we told them we had no idea that she belonged to the community, and we agreed that was so implausible it would weaken our case. So we would tell them the truth: we had misunderstood the regulation and failed to register her for the new identity-card because of her birthday falling between the two dates.
She asked: What do you think they will do?
I said: I suppose they’ll fine me. Perhaps a couple of weeks’ salary. Possibly a month’s.
She said: Will it harm your position at work?
Of course, I had kept from her the embarrassing incident with the file. I just said: It might, but I can’t see any other way to get out of the situation we’re in.
My wife said: What will happen to the girl?
I said: I imagine she will be sent to join her family, and so it will be to her advantage.
There was the irony: we were risking so much to keep the girl with us and yet, we thought, she herself would be better off if we revealed her presence to the authorities.
We had thirteen days before the concierge could demand to see the girl’s identity-card. It was far better to own up before we were caught. We agreed that we would allow ourselves a couple of days to think it over, and then I would go to the authorities on the third day.
* * *
It was lucky—at least from one point of view—that we did decide to wait. For the next day all that we had resolved was thrown into doubt. I was leaving the office building at lunchtime when my former colleague came hurrying across the road from a café where I assume he had been waiting to see me come out. He thrust something at me and said: Tell your friend about this. Then he hurried away before I could speak.
What he had given me was a page from a newspaper published in the former capital and mainly circulated there. It was dated a few days ago, and there was a story in it about a man who had ‘wilfully and in defiance of the laws on ethnic hygiene’ concealed a child, the son of friends, who was a member of the ‘protected community’. He had failed to register him and tried to pretend he was his own nephew. Fortunately a ‘public-spirited’ neighbour had informed the authorities. The paper reported that he had been fined a huge sum and sentenced to a year’s detention in a labour camp.
This changed everything. A sentence of that kind would mean ruin, utter ruin, for my family. Confessing to the authorities was now out of the question.
But there was something else I had to think about. Why had my former colleague shown me the newspaper? Was he being generous and warning me of the risk that I—or ‘my friend’—was running? Or was he trying to force me to pay for his help? Or just setting a price for keeping quiet? In that case if I failed to contact him would he, as another ‘public-spirited’ citizen, denounce me?
* * *
I could hardly wait for the girls to go to bed and leave my wife and myself alone that night. Eventually I was able to show the newspaper story to her. At first she was as horrified by it as I had been. But then she pointed out that its implications in relation to ourselves were not clear-cut. The man had been reported to the authorities whereas we were planning to come forward voluntarily. Moreover, the former capital—along with the rest of the Western Zone—was now constitutionally incorporated into the Enemy’s country. Clearly the laws of ethnic hygiene were being more rigorously applied there than here. In short, she could not see any alternative to what we had agreed to do: confess to the authorities.
Finally I had to tell her that I had kept something back. The situation was more serious than she knew because of the incident with the file which I now related to her. My previous ‘offence’ was in my record and would be used against me. This meant that, even taking into account the mitigating facts she had identified, I would certainly be dismissed at the very least.
She said she understood, but in that case, what could we do? In a few days the concierge would be able to bring the police down upon us.
I said we would have to conceal the girl’s presence in the apartment. She would stay in it day and night and be hidden from all visitors. My wife was horrified. There were many objections. If we took this step, we would be burdened with the girl for the foreseeable future. It would be hard to conceal from the neighbours that she was there. It would be unkind and even dangerous to the girl herself not to allow her any fresh air or daylight or exercise. It was unfair on our daughters to take the risk involved.
We grew heated but were having to conduct our argument in low voices since the girls were on the other side of the wall.
I conceded all those points but maintained that we had no alternative. There was no way to hand the girl in to the authorities without incriminating ourselves. We had already passed the point of no return, and from now on our fate was tied to hers. All we could do now was to wait for her parents to claim her.
How? my wife demanded. How would they find her?
She was making a valid point. The one tenuous thread that would lead the parents to their child was the card—or cards—from the café pinned to the door of their house. But that meant someone had to go to the café every Friday at five and wait for the parents to register their presence in some manner because they would not legally be allowed in.
The proprietor would recognise me from my three visits and, now that the screw was tightening, might be tempted to report me to the authorities because of my link with the girl. All of which meant I could not go. My wife had accompanied us only on the first occasion, and the chances were that the owner would not remember her. And so we agreed she would have to make those regular visits. She would have to recognise any one of the girl’s family who might appear at the door or the window just from her memory of the photograph that the girl had destroyed. And in order to avert the proprietor’s suspicion, she could not turn up only at five on Fridays but would have to drop in at other times during the week. (I thought with dismay of the expense. One cup of coffee there would pay for an entire family meal at home.)
This still left the problem that the concierge knew the girl was living with us and was waiting for the moment—only ten days away—when she could demand to look at her identity-card. Not only would she find that it was now invalid, but she would almost certainly recognise the surname as incriminating. We could not see how to get around that obstacle.
Moreover, at any moment my brother-in-law, under pressure and with his career at stake, might give in to the temptation to tell the authorities about us. There was nothing we could do about that. As my wife said, we just had to hope he would go through with the divorce and that would be the end of the matter. We decided not to get in touch with him but wait for him to tell us what was happening.
Unable to sleep that night, I found my thoughts going round and round the same scenes. And now it occurred to me that if a newspaper could cross the border, so could a letter. Had the parents written by now? I could not see any means of finding out if a letter to the girl had been delivered to her house. Although I was aware it would not serve any purpose, I decided I would walk past it in the next day or two.
The next day my head of section was arrested. When I heard it, I was terrified. I assumed the charge was stealing and embezzlement and was afraid I would somehow be sucked into the affair if the facts of what had been going on came to light. However, it emerged that he, like the director, had been ensnared by his own deputy’s machinations, and the offence was one that involved only himself.
I wasn’t sure whether to be pleased at the downfall of this brutal and corrupt man or horrified that life was now so irrational that even someone as ruthlessly self-serving as he was no longer safe.
* * *
The following evening on leaving work I took the tram out to the fashionable district and walked past the girl’s house on the opposite side of the street. I barely slowed as I reached it. Nothing seemed to have changed. The boards were still across the door and the cards from the café were still nailed to them—faded and tattered by the weather but still perfectly recognisable. I was quickening my pace when I saw the friendly maid from next door smiling at me. I crossed to speak to her.
She asked me if I knew the family at the house I was taking an interest in. It sounded like an innocent question with no hidden motives, but I hesitated. Why should she assume I was interested in that house? Was she trying to entrap me? I said I knew who the head of the family was but had never met him.
Then she told me that about four days ago, the authorities came and banged on the doors of all the neighbours and told them they were looking for the daughter of the family who had lived in that house. They could account for the rest of the household, they said, but the girl had gone missing.
I nodded as she spoke and tried to give the impression that this was a mildly interesting story of no personal concern to myself.
Nobody, the woman said, had any idea where the girl was, and nobody had seen her for several months.
That was both reassuring—the police had been told nothing that led to myself—and deeply alarming: they were after all making a strenuous effort to find her.
The woman said: The poor little mite. I wonder what has happened to her. Her parents are trapped in the capital with the little boy and her elder brother is in a prisoner-of-war camp somewhere.
I said: That’s a sad story. Have none of her relatives come looking for her?
She shook her head. She was beginning to look a little suspicious herself, and that encouraged me to trust her. If she feared I was trying to compromise her, that suggested she felt she could be entrapped, and that must be because her sympathies lay on the right side.
I smiled and said: I suppose you would know if any of them did come back?
She seemed to be reassured by my question and said: Oh yes, they’d be sure to come and ask me. I was always friendly with them—especially the little girl.
I felt a sense of relief. She had surely not noticed the girl getting out of the taxi on the last occasion I had brought her or she would have mentioned it.
She added: Of course, they wouldn’t be able to get in since it’s no longer their property.
I said: I pass this way now and then and this is such an engaging story that I’ll ask you what happens, if I see you. As I said, I just know who the family are because I go into their store occasionally.
She nodded and said: Do you think any of them will ever come back?
I shrugged and we parted. At least I now had a means of knowing if any of the family did return.
I became tormented by my uncertainty over what the authorities knew or could establish about the chain of links that associated us with the girl. I went through all the connections, hoping that each of them had been dissolved. I remembered it had only been a few months ago that the two girls had gone to school and come home together. But that had not lasted long. Would anybody at the school now remember their brief friendship?
* * *
At supper that evening, my elder daughter seemed bent on provoking an argument with myself and her mother. She started saying that the future lay in collaborating with the occupying power and not in pretending our national sovereignty was going to be miraculously restored to us. Who is going to fight for our freedom? she demanded sarcastically. We failed to do it for ourselves and now it’s too late. Any nation that conquered the Enemy would just replace one foreign regime with another and it would be a worse one. The Enemy has given us peace and security from attack and in allowing us a government of our own people—a privilege they have not granted to some other defeated countries—they have left us a large degree of freedom provided we do not overstep the mark. We should learn to be satisfied with that.
I knew she was trying to justify her relationship with the thuggish son of the concierge, and I felt she was trying to convince herself as much as us. My wife and I failed to rise to the bait and the younger girls showed no interest in the conversation. But it was worrying—particularly in the light of what we were about to announce—that my daughter appeared to be falling under the influence of the concierge’s son and his friends. In the last few days she had often stopped in the hallway for long periods to chat and joke with them.
When my wife and I were alone I told her what I had learned from the friendly maid: that the girl’s parents and younger brother were still trapped in the former capital. I wondered if we should tell her that. (I did not say I had no reason to suppose the maid was correct.)
My wife said: Yes, of course. It will cheer her up. It’s cheered me up to know they are safe and might soon return to take her off our hands.
I said: I don’t think it’s as straightforward as that. The Enemy has a grudge against that community and wants to squeeze as much of their wealth out of them as possible. It might not be such good news.
She accepted that and so we decided to keep this piece of information from the girl–though it meant leaving her in a state of uncertainty, which carried its own risks.
Our elder daughter came home the next evening and told us she had been dismissed. What had happened was this: While the owner was out of the shop, the other girl who worked there, the ‘favourite’, had been even ruder and more overbearing than usual and my daughter had defended herself. There had been an argument and in the middle of it, the owner had come back and, without listening to my daughter’s side of it, had sacked her on the spot.
* * *
The War was getting closer. The Enemy was losing and its population was suffering heavy air-raids which was encouraging, but that meant conditions were worsening for us as well. As the regulations about rationing became increasingly stringent, we grew hungrier and hungrier. Sometimes a fleet of aircraft passed overhead on their way to drop bombs on other cities. Now and then one fell on ours, and I saw it as a foretaste of what was to come. Civil society was breaking down under the arbitrary arrests, the bullying of the auxiliary police, and the forced conscription of young men into the armed services of the Enemy. In our city alone, there must have been hundreds if not thousands of people hiding with their families or in empty apartments or abandoned warehouses.
The square in front of the cathedral where the public-executions took place often had five or six bodies hanging from lamp-posts. I avoided the place but the first time I saw a body, it had a placard around its neck: He hid an enemy of our people.
Stray dogs had become a serious problem—even a danger. So many people had left suddenly and for one reason or another had neither taken their dogs with them nor had them destroyed, that there were thousands of them roaming the streets looking for food. They often formed packs and those could be very dangerous.
* * *
My wife and I had agreed we had to inform the three youngsters of what we had decided about hiding the girl. We had to tell them everything so they would understand how little choice we had and how important it was that nobody found out she was in the apartment. So after supper the next evening we stayed sitting round the table, and I outlined the plight we were now in.
There were a few things I didn’t tell them: how severely the man in the capital had been punished for hiding a child, my problems at work over the file, and my worries about both my former colleague and my brother-in-law. I explained the difficulty now was that the girl could neither leave since she had nowhere to go nor stay since the concierge knew she was in the apartment, and even if she was not seen, the nasty old creature would sooner or later inform the authorities.
It was my younger daughter—the bright little thing—who came up with an idea. Her act of impersonation at the police-station had prompted it, she explained. What we should do was to stage a performance to make the concierge believe the girl had gone. She herself would pretend to be her and, since they were the same height and build, it had a good chance of success. Just before the deception, she would cut her own dark hair as short as the girl’s and dye it the same shade of blonde.
We all objected that the concierge would not be taken in. She had seen and talked to both girls often enough to be able to distinguish them.
My daughter had taken account of that and said we needed to find a time when she would not be there.
I asked: In that case, why would she believe that the girl had left?
Because, my daughter explained, we would stage a scene that would be witnessed by neighbours who would tell her that they had seen the girl depart. Why would it occur to her that they were mistaken?
I think none of the three adults were confident it would succeed, but it seemed to be our best chance. The two younger girls saw it as a game and were excited at the prospect.
We now had to find out if the concierge went out at the same time every day or—less conveniently—every week so her absence could be predicted. Each of us had noticed her getting into or out of a taxi a few times, and we all tried to remember whether it was on the same day. We felt it was always at the end of the week—a Thursday or a Friday—and in the afternoon. I had a vague memory that on at least one of the Fridays I had been to the Viennese café, I had noticed her coming home in a taxi just as I was arriving back.
My wife set the girl to watch at the window all day. By sitting close to the glass and peering down it was possible to see someone leaving the building, provided they moved far enough away from it across the pavement. So she sat there hour after hour listening to the wireless with her nose pressed to the pane.
