Sufferance, page 19
That afternoon I went back to the Old City and found, as I had feared, that the stream of people had dwindled to the point where the officials were once again able to scrutinise the papers of those entering.
As soon as I opened the door of the apartment, my wife greeted me with a smile of relief and said: She’s backed down at last. I’ve given her some lunch. She’s agreed to leave tonight.
I told her it was too late, and she almost wept with frustration. I went into the living-room and found the girl sitting at the table with an empty plate in front of her. She looked up at me and said: I’ve decided it will be better to go where nobody cares about me than to stay where everyone hates me.
I told her it was now too late. And I added that none of us hated her.
I wasn’t sure if it was true. There were times now when I found myself feeling more anger towards her than I had felt for anyone. And yet I knew that none of it was her fault. However, many of the things she said stung me and lingered in my thoughts. The claim that everyone hated her rankled, for example. We had bent over backwards to make her welcome and accommodate her whims and fads. There seemed to be no recognition in her of what her presence was costing us in money, in hunger for my wife and myself, and in danger for all four of us.
* * *
Until now at least there was the knowledge to sustain me that my wife and I had seen eye to eye on almost everything relating to the girl and that, apart from a few disagreements about how to deal with the situation, we had not argued. Unfortunately, this now began to change.
Perhaps because of the nervous exhaustion all these worries were causing me, I woke up the following Monday morning with a splitting headache and strong feelings of nausea. There was no question of my going to work.
My daughters went off to school and to work, and by twelve o’clock my wife had left for the orphanage. I was dozing and trying to read, and after about an hour there was a knock on the door and the girl came in. She was wearing a very short dress I had seen only once or twice and had put on lipstick.
With an expression of apparent solicitude she asked how I was feeling and if I needed anything. When I said I didn’t, she sat on my bed and began to tell me how her father used to get dreadful migraines and what were the various cures he had tried and whether they had been effective. I said I didn’t have a migraine but just a slight chill or something.
She said: Are you sure? Where does it hurt? She leaned forward and placed a cool hand on my brow. She said: I think you might have a fever.
She took her hand away and dropped it to my chest. While it rested there she drew her legs up on the bed in a sideways kneeling position. Her bare thighs were a few inches from my hands.
She said: You don’t mind me being here, do you? She said it with such an expression of innocent concern that I had to tell her I did not mind at all.
She put her head on my chest and murmured: I wish you were my daddy.
After that I must have dozed off because the next thing I remember is the door opening suddenly and my wife saying in an angry voice: I think you’d better go.
It seems that both the girl and I had fallen asleep and lain there for a couple of hours until my wife got back from the orphanage and woke us up.
The girl jumped off the bed and ran out of the room.
My wife was quite irrationally upset. She told me that I had behaved extremely improperly in permitting the girl ‘to sleep with me’. I protested that I had merely fallen asleep because of my ailing condition and had no idea she had been there. Probably because of the strain she had been under for so long, my wife refused to acquit me and said: That skimpy little skirt! The makeup! You should have ordered her out of the room immediately. You must have realised what she was trying to do.
We continued to argue, and to my astonishment my wife accused me of always having had an illegitimate interest in the girl from the very beginning. I was horrified and denied it. Had she really thought that? When had she started to believe it?
She brought up the private conversations I had had with the girl in my study when we were talking about a gift for my elder daughter, and then getting more worked up, she cited the period when I had been giving her lessons there.
Eventually I stopped defending the girl and conceded that she might have been trying to influence me, but I insisted that my conscience was clear: I had never thought of her as anything but a child like our younger daughter. My wife was clearly unconvinced.
I was off work for the next two days, and during that time my wife did not go to her orphanage. She said she wanted to stay at home and look after me, but I was afraid that was not her real motive.
Thinking about it afterwards, I began to recall how flirtatiously the girl had smiled at me and how knowingly she had allowed her short skirt to ride up her thighs when she drew her legs up on my bed. She was just fourteen, but she had a precocious grasp of how arousing that was for a man.
* * *
It was on my first day back that one of my colleagues told me someone had been looking for me. The stranger had been standing at the other entrance to our building—the one I never used because it was the longer way round—and asking people who went in and out if they knew me. My colleague had replied that he had never heard of me, for which I thanked him. In those difficult times, it was always safest to reveal nothing. I asked him to describe the man, and he said he was about forty, not well dressed, and from his manner and speech, not well educated. I speculated about it for some time. It was clearly neither the girl’s father nor her brother. My first thought was that it might be the man I was sure I had seen in the Viennese cafe and again in the café opposite our apartment. Yet that individual had been wearing a smart business-suit.
Could it be some messenger from the girl’s family trying to contact me? On reflection, that seemed highly unlikely. I could see no way anyone could have connected the girl with my place of work—unless I had at some point been recognised without realising it.
The most obvious means for the girl’s family to find her was still through the café, and so that afternoon I took the risk of going in there and having a coffee and asking the proprietor if anyone had been asking about ‘the girl who used to come here with her family on Friday afternoons’. He said not.
Then I passed the house once again and saw that the cards advertising the café were still there and were just about legible.
I continued to use my usual entrance to the building in which I worked, but a few times I made a point of walking past the other one on the opposite side of the street. I never saw anyone hanging about near it. In fact, anyone doing that would have been shooed away by the building’s porters if he could not give a good account of himself.
* * *
That week I overheard people at work complaining that the Old City was a hazard to public health because of the over-crowding and the breakdown of services like water and sewerage. I heard rumours about what was happening there: riots, acts of violence, the spread of sickness, and widespread starvation. At the end of the week, the authorities announced that it posed a threat to public health and would be closed down within a short period and its occupants ‘processed for relocation’.
That Saturday evening my elder daughter arrived home late, and I happened to be in the kitchen when she came in for a glass of water. She sat down at the table with me and we talked. She told me that ‘friends in the auxiliary police’—a distressing term!—had started work in the Old City. They were selecting people in certain categories—the old, the unwell, those who were mentally or physically handicapped—for relocation. I asked where they were being relocated, and she said vaguely ‘somewhere in the East’. That was puzzling since our city was almost as far to the East as it was possible to go and still be inside the country. Beyond was the country that the Enemy had more recently invaded and conquered in the face of fierce opposition and which it was ruling in an even more brutal manner than ours.
I said: The fact that they are sending the sick and elderly off first suggests that those who are able-bodied are going to be relocated to somewhere where they can maintain themselves by work.
My daughter made no response, and I had the impression that she knew more than she was prepared to reveal.
This was the moment for a serious conversation with her about what concealing the girl was doing to her mother and sister. I told her I had decided that one way or another the girl had to go.
She said: Of course. This apartment isn’t big enough for five people. Not even for four. It would suit a couple with a child but that’s all.
I was surprised by that way of putting it. But I went to bed convinced I had to find a way to get the girl out of our lives by any means necessary, and that I had the full support of my elder daughter.
The next night as my wife and I were preparing for bed at about ten-thirty, we heard the sound of several cars screeching to a halt outside our building. We looked at each other in horror. Then we heard doors banging and shouts and people running up the stairs and realised it was happening in the building next door. After a few minutes the sounds started up again. We dared not look out of the window, but from down in the street we heard screams and blows and then car-doors slamming and the vehicles accelerating away.
Neither of us slept much that night.
* * *
When I got home the next evening I found my wife in a terrible state. It wasn’t until the three girls had gone to bed that she was able to tell me why she was so upset. She had been told by one of our neighbours that the night before, a couple living in the next building had been arrested with their two children for the serious offence of hiding a young man who was a member of the girl’s community.
She became more and more agitated as she talked about the danger to our daughters. She kept saying: She has to go. You must get rid of her. She will be the ruin of all of us.
I tried to point out that if we simply pushed her out she would be forced to wander the streets homeless and hungry. Inevitably, she would be arrested and then she would lead the authorities straight back to us.
She almost shouted: You’re making up excuses. You care more about that girl than our own children. You’re going to kill us all for her sake. It’s unnatural, perverse. Then she physically attacked me, pummelling my chest with her fists until I grabbed her arms.
What most upset me was the absurd allegation that my interest in the girl was unnatural.
The only way I could calm her down was to promise to try to make contact with some underground organisation—of whose existence I had heard only the vaguest rumours—that helped people from her community to hide.
* * *
Everyone was afraid to talk about such matters, and so I knew it would be hard to find out what I wanted. I had already discovered how very difficult it was to approach any topic that implied unease with the current situation, even when I was with my closest friends. I realised it would be even more risky to attempt it with colleagues at work. Even if one of them appeared to go along with me, I could not be sure he was not trying to lead me into a trap. I selected one of my workmates who I thought might be trustworthy and began to hint at the issue. However, as soon as he realised what I was starting to imply, he changed the topic in the most abrupt manner.
Then I happened to overhear a man in another department saying quite loudly that some new regulation was ‘inimical to our national interests’. I made a point of sitting beside him in the canteen the next day and, when we were alone, brought the conversation round to the political situation. We talked about it in guarded terms, but I had the impression he was prepared to be franker. Over the next few days I set out to win his confidence. Eventually, he began to talk fairly unguardedly about his hatred of the Enemy and his anger at the plight of our nation. After about a week I was becoming more and more confident about raising the question of getting help for the girl. But then to my dismay he said: The one good thing they have done for us is to start getting rid of those damned leeches who’ve been sucking our country’s blood for centuries.
* * *
I don’t know if it was because of the arrests next door, but from this moment my wife stopped going to the orphanage three afternoons a week, and so she was no longer getting a meal there. She was increasingly reluctant now to leave the apartment at all. She and the girl—cooped up together all day—squabbled and bickered ferociously.
The girl had become obsessed with the doll whose face had been smashed. She would sit in a corner holding it and repeating: I still love you. I love you more than I ever did. We’ll always be together. You and me and Mummy and Daddy.
We all found that maddening—especially my elder daughter. She talked of the girl as evil, and said the doll was a talisman she was using to cast an evil spell on us. I didn’t believe that, but I was worried her mere presence was endangering us.
Her consumption of a share of our food was threatening our health. As the rationing tightened, I saw its effects on the others. My younger daughter developed boils—perhaps because of some deficiency in her diet or a reaction to the foodstuffs we now had to eat: turnips, swedes, the fattest and most gristly parts of pigs and cows. I suspected my wife was starving herself to help her children and me. She became thinner and thinner. We had a set of scales in the bathroom, but one day it disappeared. I found it at the back of the cupboard on the landing and decided to leave it there. We were all losing weight, and I realised my wife was right that there was no point in measuring our loss.
The only one of us who was not driven mad by the girl’s endless conversation with the doll was my younger daughter. She would often sit beside her and talk as the girl caressed the doll. I felt that the girl was exploiting my younger child’s sweet nature by making her fond of her and therefore ensuring she would be her advocate when her own future was being discussed. And my daughter was paying a high price. One night she woke us with her screams, and when we rushed into her room we found she was waking from a nightmare. In tears, she told us she had dreamed that we—her mother and father—had become menacing and hostile towards her and had advanced on her with knives as if intending to attack her.
* * *
One evening about a week after I had gone back to work, there was a knock at the door. When I was sure the girl had run to her bedroom, I opened it. There was a stranger standing there. He was a burly man of about forty. He spoke my name and when I confirmed it, said: Can I come in, sir? His accent was that of an uneducated man brought up locally.
I said: Might I ask what this is about?
He said: I’m a chauffeur, sir. At least, I am when I’m in employment. Then he lowered his voice and mentioned the name of his last employer, and it was the girl’s father. I stared at him, calculating rapidly. I was strongly tempted to shut the door in his face. But then I reflected that if he had found his way to me, he must know something, and if I slammed the door on him, he might go straight to the authorities.
I said: I can’t imagine what business you can have with me, but you’d better come in.
I led him into my study and asked him to take a seat. Then, shutting the door behind me, I popped into the living-room and whispered to my wife to make sure the girl stayed in her room until our visitor had gone. I went back and asked him why he had come.
He embarked on a long rambling account which was often hard to follow. The gist was this: He had driven the parents of the girl and her little brother to what was then the capital. There they had been caught by the invasion and found themselves unable to return when that part of the country became the Western Zone. They were staying in the expensive hotel the girl had mentioned—he himself lodging in a cheap place nearby—and after a while the authorities came and invited the parents and their child to a reception-centre where they would be entertained at no expense. He said that with a sort of smirk, and I asked him what he thought a ‘reception-centre’ meant. He said with a look of wide-eyed innocence: I have no idea, sir. I don’t know why they were offered that accommodation or where they were taken.
He said he got back to his employer’s house only very recently, when he managed to get across what was now the national frontier between what had been the Western and Eastern Zones of our poor country, and he found that the house had been sealed by the authorities. There was nobody there since both the girl and the servant were missing.
His wife, who also worked for the family as a cleaner and occasional cook, told him that the servant at the house had mentioned to her (before she vanished with the things she had stolen) that the girl had gone to stay with the family of a man about whom she was able to tell him only what the servant had told her: his daughter attended the same school as the girl and they were close friends.
I answered that he had been misinformed and my daughter had hardly known the girl, and none of us had any idea what had happened to her after she had stopped coming to school.
He ignored that and maundered on about how he was worried about the girl and that was why he had come to ask me about her. He talked of his and his wife’s affection for the child and his concern for her.
I was pretty sure that he was at the very least leaving out many things, and most probably simply lying.
I recalled my colleague telling me that a stranger had been asking for me at work, but I did not dare ask the man if it was he since I did not want to reveal where I worked, in case he did not already know it.
The chauffeur said he wondered if he should report to the authorities that the girl had gone missing.
