Sufferance, page 21
* * *
I encountered her only briefly and rarely, however. All the rest of the next day and the next she stayed in the attic. Food was passed up to her just twice a day, and she was allowed to descend for a call of nature just twice. Whenever she did so, she badgered my wife or me, if I was at home, to allow her to stay down in the apartment. We had to tell her to be patient.
After she had spent three nights and two days up there, we were obliged to inform her that we were not allowing her to descend to the apartment until further notice. She went berserk and screamed that she was going to spend her whole life up there. The Occupation was never going to end. She would die up there. We were trying to kill her.
We had no choice. It seemed that the chauffeur had not reported us—but at any moment he might decide to. And there were other dangers: the concierge and my brother-in-law. Not to mention the mysterious stranger who might or might not be taking an interest in us. And our former domestic.
And yet we knew this could not go on indefinitely. Rationing and price-rises were reducing even further what my wife and I had to share with the girl to the point where we were both tired and listless most of the time and suffered from boils and mouth-ulcers. The girl needed very little since she was lying prone all day doing nothing, but at the same time, she was an adolescent and was growing.
Every night now, my wife and I would lie in bed talking very softly because we knew the girl was above us and just a few feet away. As the days had passed, she had grown increasingly disturbed and we had become more and more concerned about her behaviour.
* * *
We had other worries. My elder daughter was still keeping late hours with the concierge’s son. Then, on the evening of the fifth night the girl had spent in the attic, I had further reason to be alarmed about my daughter. She came running up the stairs very late and burst into the apartment in tears. I saw her in the hall, but she dashed into her room and would not open to my knocking or even her mother’s calls. I suspected that the concierge’s son had offended her, and I could guess how. I talked it over with my wife. She pointed out that we dared not have an open breach with the young thug and his mother since we were in such a vulnerable position. It was a delicate situation.
We managed to get our daughter alone the next morning, and she more or less confirmed that my surmise had been correct. She said the man had been hinting he knew the girl was still in the apartment, and he had said it as if to put pressure on her to comply with what he wanted. I told her to try to hold him at bay without actually offending him. She gave me and her mother a look that I will never forget.
Our younger daughter was causing us concern in other ways. She was now waking almost every night with screaming nightmares. And even during the day, whenever she heard a step on the stair she started as if she had been struck.
* * *
The girl had been hidden above our heads for two weeks when the concierge’s son stopped me as I was leaving for work and told me he needed to get into the attic. I asked why, and with an insolent smile he said he needed to do a routine check on the roof before the weather deteriorated. That was transparently spurious. Determined to show no alarm, I said he had never done a ‘routine check’ before, and I had occupied the apartment for many years. He grinned rudely and said that was all the more reason to do one now.
Then he asked in a meaningful manner if I had any objection?
I said I had none at all, but he would have to come at a time arranged in advance to suit my family’s convenience. We settled on the following evening at six. I told him he should bring a step-ladder since I did not have one.
As soon as I got home that evening I told my family we would have to hide the girl in the bathroom during the lout’s so-called inspection and we would have to conceal all traces of her presence in the attic.
We rose very early the next morning, and my wife and I got the girl down. I lowered into the apartment the wardrobe-door and everything else she had used, and tried to restore that part of the attic to its original state of filth. Then I hid the step-ladder in a cupboard in the kitchen. We would have to risk keeping the girl in the apartment all that day.
I managed to leave work a little early and was home by a quarter to six. The plan was that the girl would remain in the bathroom during the ‘inspection’, where my younger daughter would be noisily running a bath and splashing about. My elder daughter sulkily agreed to hang around and talk to the concierge’s son in order to distract his attention if that was needed.
He arrived a little before six, and it went almost to plan. When he saw the trap-door he said: You’ve made it flush with the ceiling and painted over it. Why is that?
I said: My wife thought it would look nicer.
He made a show of clambering up the ladder he had brought and then clumping about overhead. When he came down, he said: There are signs of leaks up there. Have you had any water-penetration down here? I assured him we had not. He asked if he could go round looking and, having anticipated that he might find some pretext for this, I readily agreed. We went solemnly from room to room, and nothing betrayed the presence of a third girl. My elder daughter was reading a magazine in the sitting-room and they began to chat. I left them and talked to my wife in the kitchen.
After a few minutes the young man left the sitting-room, and he and I resumed the search of the house. When we got to the bathroom he asked if he could wait until it was free. I said my younger daughter was often in there for hours. He said: She wouldn’t mind wrapping a towel around herself and letting us in for a moment, would she? After all, she’s just a kid.
I didn’t like that. I thought there was quite a nasty tone in his voice and a look in his eye that worried me.
I managed a chuckle as I said: She’d better not have heard you say that! But you’re very welcome to come back in an hour or so.
He shook his head ungraciously and, to our relief, left.
As soon as he’d gone, we reversed everything: we put back the ladder and the wardrobe door, and the girl returned to the attic.
* * *
Ironically, the conversation our daughter had with the concierge’s son while he was in the apartment seemed to have had the effect of healing the breach in their relationship. For the following evening she was out with him again and returned as before, very late and fairly tipsy. I talked to her about it the next morning, and she said: I can’t have what I want and he and his friends are amusing enough and have plenty of money to splash around. I might as well throw myself away on them since there is nothing else available.
* * *
That afternoon when I reached our building I was struck by the sight of a man standing on the opposite side of the street gazing up at it. He looked to me like an official out of uniform, and I even wondered if he was the stranger I believed I had seen watching me weeks ago.
* * *
About ten days after we had begun to conceal the girl in the attic, my wife and I agreed that our elder daughter had become quite surly and ungracious towards us. We challenged her about it, and she said she resented the fact that despite our ‘snobbish contempt for the concierge’s son’, we were prepared to get her to ‘lead him on’ in order to protect ourselves and the girl.
We tried to persuade her that we were not in any sense asking her to do anything shameful but merely to keep him from avenging himself against her by doing something that would cause serious harm to all of us. She said he would soon turn nasty if he didn’t ‘get what he was after’. The bluntness of her language upset both of us.
After that she virtually stopped speaking to us except when it was absolutely necessary. But she also gave up going out in the evenings. She would sit reading while the three of us chatted or listened to the news on the wireless and talked about it. Or she would spend the whole evening alone in her room.
* * *
I was no more immune from the effects of what we were doing than the others. Now I jumped at my own shadow on the wall of the close. I started in the street if I thought I heard my name called. I found myself staring at strangers as they approached along the pavement, terrified they would accost me with some new horror. But I knew it was taking an even heavier toll on my wife, and I saw worrying signs of a return of the problems she had had three years earlier. I was sleeping badly, but I knew she was suffering worse insomnia because whenever I woke during the night, I found her already awake.
* * *
Just a few days later, what my wife and I had dreaded seemed to take place. That night our daughter went out and did not come back to the apartment. By midnight we were in despair. I hardly slept and was woken by her trying to sneak in quietly at six-thirty. My wife and I decided to say nothing about it to her.
* * *
It was the next day that the air-raid siren went off. There had been practices once a week at six on Sunday evenings for several months, but this was nine o’clock on a Wednesday evening. It was clearly for real and not a test, though we hoped it was a false-alarm. I had worked out what our procedure would be, and everyone did what they were supposed to do. My wife and I had agreed that if there was an air-raid, we would have to let the girl come down. She would be in a state of terror alone up there, and the attic was the most exposed part of the house if a bomb should explode nearby. So I ran to get the ladder, and I raced up it and opened the trap-door and told the girl to come down.
Then the three of us joined the other two crouched under the table in the living-room. The siren had changed from the sound meaning ‘attack imminent’ to the terrifying shriek which meant ‘attack in progress’, and after a minute or two our worst fears were realised when we heard a muffled crumping sound like a huge pancake being dropped. There was another and another and they were becoming more frequent and getting louder and louder.
I honestly believed I was going to die in the next few minutes. Now we could feel a slight juddering a moment after each explosion. We were all in tears by now—myself included—hugging each other and telling each other how much we loved each other. My wife and both daughters embraced the girl who was laughing and crying in the strangest way and babbling that we were her family and she loved us all. I heard my wife telling her how sorry, how desperately sorry she was, for what we had had to make her go through, and I joined in, telling her we loved her as much as our own daughters and we had banished her to her dark hiding-place because it was the only way to save her life. She didn’t seem to know what we were talking about and just kept saying: From now on I’ll be with you always, Mummy. Kiss me, Daddy. You’re never going to leave me again, are you. She was clutching the nearly shapeless object that had once been the oriental doll and kissing it and repeating: We’ll always be together. I’ll never let you leave me again. I kissed her and I kissed the girls and my wife. Everything we had argued about in the last months seemed utterly trivial.
My younger daughter was telling the girl she didn’t mind about the made-up stories and she didn’t hate her for telling lies or having lovely dresses and expensive dolls.
The bangs reached a terrible climax when there was one that was so loud it hurt our ears and the building shook so that our knees bounced on the floor and I was sure the whole thing was going to collapse. But it didn’t. The bomb had fallen a hundred metres away, we found out later. It had brought down one of the neighbouring apartment-buildings and killed fifteen people. When the thuds had faded into the distance and the siren had switched to the ‘all clear’, we crawled out from under the table and were astonished, I think, to find that everything was the same. Outside we could hear alarms going off and bells ringing and people shouting as the emergency services dealt with the direct hit. But inside the apartment there was a calmness like the sea after a storm. (Of course that first bombing-raid was just a mild foretaste of what was to come, though we had no idea of that at the time.)
It was heart-breaking to have to tell the girl to go back up. She stared at us uncomprehendingly. The raid seemed to have destroyed her reason, and she appeared not to understand where she was or who we were. We led her to the trap-door, and then she started screaming and trying to get away. We all had to hold onto her, but she fought back, kicking and biting but somehow still clasping the doll. I had to grip her from behind, pinning her arms so she was in pain if she tried to move. I shouted to my wife to get a towel and then told her to wrap it round the girl’s head so it would go into her mouth, letting her breathe through her nose. We managed to do that, and it was horrible, but it was the only way to stop her screaming.
It was already too late. Someone knocked on the door, and I sent my elder daughter with instructions to use the chain to see who it was but to let nobody in under any circumstances. She came back to say that it was the nasty old man from the joiner’s family, and he was complaining about the noise and asking who was making it. I told her to say that her younger sister had become hysterical because of the bombing and then to shut the door immediately.
Something occurred to me later: Why would someone be bothered by screams when there had been loud explosions and when there was still uproar outside? Did the old man suspect something?
By now the girl was exhausted from her struggling and screaming. She went limp and was in a sort of trance of exhaustion. With great difficulty we three adults managed to get her through the trap-door and lay her on the wardrobe door.
An hour later the girl must have come round because she started screaming and hammering on the trap-door which, luckily, she could not open from that side.
After just a few minutes I had to go up the ladder and stop her. The noise was being heard at least on the floor below and probably in the neighbouring top flats. I had no alternative. I had to grab her and then lie on top of her holding her arms with my weight and with one hand, and using the other to gag her. After god alone knew how long, but it might have been the best part of an hour, she stopped thrashing about and again fell into a sort of sleep.
I came down and talked alone with my wife. We agreed we would have to start putting ground-up sleeping-pills in her food to keep her sedated. And I would try to make a sort of strait-jacket out of an old sleeping-bag our elder daughter had used when she went camping.
* * *
We could not risk another such episode for fear that the police would be summoned by our neighbours. And I was terrified of such a fit of hysteria happening while I was out of the apartment because my wife was not big and strong enough to do what I had had to do.
Because of our fear that we had aroused the suspicions of neighbours, over and above the concierge and her son, a new and even stricter regime now had to be introduced. We had to put a chamber-pot up in the attic and have her hand it down when we passed up food. And that was now done just once a day instead of twice.
One consequence of all of this was that we had to keep our younger daughter at home in order to maintain the pretence that it was she who was creating the noise.
My wife and I made a decision: we would stop talking about the girl in the presence of our daughters unless it was unavoidable. It was a problem that we and not they had created, and as far as possible we should shoulder the burden alone. Both our children had already made sacrifices for the girl and were continuing to do so.
Therefore, when my kind-hearted younger daughter asked that morning if she could sit in the utility room under the trap-door and talk to the girl and do things she could share like listen to the wireless, we refused permission saying that it was too risky since a neighbour might hear. This was true, but the real reason was we wanted her to forget, as far as was possible, that the girl existed.
After the bout of hysteria, the girl was calm for the rest of that day and the next. We assumed that was the effect of the sleeping-pills my wife had ground up and put in her food. After only one more day, however, she complained that there was a nasty taste in the food and stopped eating it.
When she had consumed nothing for two days except water, my wife and I discussed what to do. We agreed to stop putting the drugs into the food and take the risk of her becoming violent again. However, she still refused to eat and muttered sullenly that we were trying to poison her.
At the end of the third day, my wife said she would keep on offering her food once a day, and if she chose not to eat it, that was, after all, her decision.
There were times when we sat together as a family listening to a concert on the wireless and were able to forget about the girl, even though I was aware she was lying a couple of metres above us in the darkness.
On the fourth evening the wireless announced that the cleansing of the Old City had been completed, and it was now being fumigated before being opened to allow members of the national population to move in.
It had become clear to me that one or other of the people who knew about the girl was going to go to the authorities—if they were not already alerted. My family was facing disaster.
It was about now that my elder daughter talked to me in private and said: Mother can’t take any more of this. You’ve got to do something. The family has to come first.
* * *
On the fifth day after the girl had virtually stopped eating, there was a knock at the door while we were having supper. When I opened it, using the chain, I saw it was the chauffeur, and he was grinning. I led him straight into my study and closed the door. He started a rambling account of his unsuccessful attempts to find employment. I hardly paid him any attention since I was trying to work out what I should do and was also listening in case the girl realised we had a visitor and started—god help us!—calling out to be rescued or something like that.
