Sufferance, page 22
Then I became aware that the chauffeur had brought the topic round to a conversation he had recently had with a neighbour ‘just round the corner’ from where he and his wife were living in the coach-house. This woman knew various things about the girl’s family, he said. I realised with horror that he was talking about the friendly maid-servant in the house next door to the girl’s.
The man rambled on, and it emerged that this woman had told him the authorities wanted to find the girl and they had offered a reward. He named the sum, and as he did so he looked at me with a speculative gaze. He explained it was so large because the authorities were convinced the girl was in possession of various bonds and bank-notes that she had removed from the house when she went into hiding.
I said: This is all very interesting. I’m not sure why you think it concerns me, however.
With an insolent smile he answered: Well, that’s the thing, you see, sir. This woman told me something that struck me as very significant. One day a few months back a gentleman came to the house next door and asked a lot of questions about the family that had lived there. He had been there a few weeks earlier. She told him all about the servant who had made off with lots of valuables from the house and he seemed very inquisitive considering he said he was just passing by. While they were talking she noticed a taxi about thirty metres along the road. At one point she looked at it and saw a girl getting out who looked very like the missing kid. She quickly got back in again as if she knew she wasn’t supposed to be seen. The man went off and the woman watched out of the window and though he went off in one direction, a few minutes later he came back from the other direction and got into the taxi and it drove off. Isn’t that a curious story, sir?
After that it was clear he was threatening me. However, I kept up the fiction that I wanted to help him out with a loan. I went and found the cash I had been collecting in a drawer in our bedroom and gave all of it to him. It was about half the bounty being offered for the girl. I knew he would keep coming back for more and more, and when he had extorted from me a sum several times larger than the reward and I had no more to give him, he would report me to the authorities and claim the bounty.
When he had gone, I went back to the study. I sat there for some time and went over and over what had happened and how I had got into this position. At one point my wife tried to come in, but I asked her to give me more time. I told myself that if I had not helped the girl for the past few months, she would be dead by now. My family and I had made huge sacrifices and taken enormous risks for her and had received in return nothing but spite, ingratitude, and threats. It was she who had brought this on herself. She had disobeyed my instructions by getting out of the taxi and by doing that, she had made it inevitable that the link between her and myself would become known.
I called my wife into the study. She asked if I had had to give the chauffeur money, and I said that I had. I told her the man had shown me that I had to find a permanent resolution to the issue, and I was going ahead with it. Our anxieties would be over very soon. When she asked what I meant, I told her to trust me and to ask no questions.
* * *
That night I encouraged the rest of the family to go to bed at ten. Then I went into the kitchen and ground up about twenty sleeping-pills and put the powder inside a small piece of meat and rolled it up and secured it with strips of bacon. (It was the family’s entire meat ration for the week.)
There was an interval of about an hour between the time the concierge usually closed her hatch—about ten o’clock—and the eleven o’clock curfew, and since it was now winter, it would be dark.
I left the apartment shortly after ten-fifteen. I took off my wristwatch and put it in my pocket.
I walked around until I found one of the stray dogs that had become more and more of a nuisance as the War had gone on. It swallowed the meat in one gulp. I stayed with it and followed it around as its pace slowed and fifteen minutes later it stumbled and collapsed on the ground whimpering. I took off my coat and picked up the animal and, hiding it in my arms, I hurried towards the canal. I stopped to pick up a loose brick. There was a road-bridge over the canal not far from my apartment, and under it, where it was very dark, there were steps down from the towpath. I descended them and knelt on the lowest step and, dropping the coat on the ground, thrust the unconscious dog under the freezing water. By some reflex it began to struggle. I had anticipated that and holding its body with my left hand, brought the brick down as hard as I could on its head. It stopped moving and I held it under the surface for several minutes. Then I let go, and the corpse sank slowly out of sight into the oily black water.
When I got home I washed and went into our bedroom. My wife was in bed but awake. As I undressed I said to her: Don’t even speak to me, please.
* * *
In the morning while my daughters were making ready to depart, I took my wife aside and told her to put the strongest drug possible into the girl’s food if she took any sustenance.
All that day at work I went over and over what I had to do that night.
I hardly ate a mouthful at supper that evening. We were all very subdued. It was as if the others knew that we were close to a terminal point.
My wife told me the girl had refused everything except water. Just before ten I told my daughters to go to their rooms and stay there until the morning. They made no protest. Then I asked my wife to do the same, and she obeyed without even speaking.
I went up the ladder and opened the trap-door. I told the girl I was going to take her to someone who would smuggle her out of the city and take her to her parents.
There was silence, and then at last she answered in a low unsteady voice and seemed to be saying she would come with me. She was so weak that I had to climb up and virtually carry her down the ladder. She was clutching the doll.
I led her into the hall and wrapped her in a spare overcoat belonging to my younger child. When I opened the front-door she said she wanted to say goodbye to my wife and daughters and to thank them for all they had done for her. I told her they were already asleep and it was very late.
When we had almost reached the ground floor, I told her in a whisper that I was going to carry her past the concierge’s hatch for safety. I picked her up and she was as light as a child half her age. I hurried past the hatch, which I could see was closed.
I heard something fall and realised she had dropped the doll as I picked her up. I didn’t put her down. As I carried her I was weeping so that it was hard to find my way along the rubble-strewn path towards the bridge. She was so light. Just before getting home that evening, I had left a brick on the steps under the bridge. Mercifully, I didn’t have to use it.
When I got back I found the doll lying on the floor near the concierge’s hatch. I took it up to the apartment and went into the kitchen, and taking a knife, I cut it into small and unrecognisable pieces and put it into the bin for the household waste. I did that because my younger daughter would know the girl would not have abandoned it voluntarily.
I went into our bedroom. My wife was waiting for me, and I crawled into the bed fully clothed and put my head against her shoulder and lay like that for several minutes. Neither of us spoke. She just put her hand on the back of my head and pressed me to her.
Eventually I was able to speak. I told her the girl had gone, and we must now hide any sign that she had once been concealed in the attic. So, late as it was, we both got up and started work. I took down the wardrobe door once more, and while I fastened it back where it had come from, my wife searched around and under the joists with the torch until she was sure there was no trace of the girl’s presence there. I put the ladder back in its usual place.
It was after two when we got back into bed. I had expected to feel an enormous sense of relief—as well as other, terrible emotions. I felt nothing. The impact of what I had done did not hit me until several days later, and that was partly, I suppose, because of what happened immediately after I had got into bed that night.
I was only dozing fitfully when, a couple of hours later, I heard a rush of feet up the steps and a loud hammering at the door. There was nothing to hide now, and I opened it as quickly as I could. There were three members of the auxiliary police and an officer in charge, who was from the Special Police. He looked very like the stranger who seemed to have been following me and whom I thought I had spotted in the café and then in the bar and elsewhere, but because he was wearing a uniform I could not tell if it was he.
The officer was perfectly courteous but offered no explanation of who or what they were looking for or why they had come. His men were carrying a step-ladder and first went to the trap-door and searched the attic space. Then they made a thorough examination of every other room.
I was told to wake up everyone in the apartment and assemble them in the living-room. My sleepy younger daughter emerged looking bemused, but when she saw the uniformed men she started in fright. I signalled to her with what I hoped was a reassuring smile that all was well. She, like her sister, must have thought the girl was still in the attic.
The search was lengthy and thorough. Nothing was found, of course. The officer supervised the men very closely while the four of us sat in silence in the living-room waiting for them to finish. The officer did not speak to anyone but myself and certainly said nothing to my elder daughter. Finally, he thanked me for my co-operation and apologised for having disturbed me and ‘my delightful family’.
When they had gone I told my daughters that the previous night I had taken the girl to some of her own people who would help her to get to safety. Neither of them looked at me as I said that.
The fact that the men had gone straight to the trap-door showed that the search was not a random one. It was clear that someone had betrayed us. It could not have been the chauffeur, I was sure, because it was in his interests to milk me for as long as he could. And he would not have known about the hiding-place in the attic.
The more I thought about it, the less probable it seemed that the officer was the man who had appeared to be following me. He was too high-ranking to have done that. And if a stranger had started to spy on me, that simply shifted the mystery to the question: who had tipped him off? I could not stop thinking about the way in which our former domestic had suddenly turned up on the flimsiest pretext. She knew the girl belonged to the alien community, and she had reason to have a grudge against us for having dismissed her. On the other hand, she had never displayed any sign of resentment about that and had always seemed genuinely fond of the two younger girls.
Was it the old man in the joiner’s family? Had he guessed the girl’s origins months ago while she was making frequent visits to his apartment? Had he made an offensive remark to her and was that why she had fled his apartment in tears that day? And had he then, months later, heard her screaming and realised that we were hiding her?
Or had my brother-in-law betrayed me in the desperate hope of somehow rescuing his wife and children? Or was it my former colleague?
The concierge and her son were the most obvious suspects. Realising that I was not going to bribe her to keep quiet, she might have opted to turn me in—perhaps not even knowing of the specific bounty on the girl’s head. And heaven knew what mixture of spite and vanity might have prompted her son. When I talked to the woman in the next few days, I had the impression that she was somewhat chastened. I was sure she felt no guilt towards me, but she might have received a frightening rebuke from the Special Police for sending them on a fruitless mission.
The timing was extraordinary. A few hours earlier, and the searchers would have found what they were looking for.
I am aware that some time later—when the events I’ve recounted became known—people said various things about who had reported the girl’s presence in the apartment, and some of the allegations were cruel and preposterous.
My assumption about the chauffeur was confirmed when he came back just two weeks later. I told him I could not help him any further, and when he began to bluster and threaten, I told him I had been the victim of unfounded allegations that I had hidden someone sought by the authorities. I described the raid by the Special Police and told him he was more than welcome to go to them and ask them to carry out another search. He looked horrified and left quietly.
A few days later I was alone with my elder daughter. We had not mentioned the girl since the day of the raid. Now I talked briefly of what we had been through since we took her into our apartment all those months ago. She listened warily without speaking. I talked of the various issues we had faced and raised the incident of the smashed doll. I said I didn’t believe our domestic had done it. My daughter said nothing.
* * *
I still have nightmares about those few minutes when I carried the girl in my arms that night, and over and over again I wake up shaking with horror and believing that it is my own little daughter I am holding.
* * *
By the time the fighting around the city and the air-raids had intensified about a year later, I was so deeply in debt because of the loan I had raised to pay off the chauffeur that I had no means of sending my wife and children to safety. A few of my colleagues had influence with the authorities, and enough money left after the steep inflation we had suffered, to be able pay for their families to move to the countryside. My indebtedness and my difficulties at work deprived me of that option.
When the War ended, I was still grieving the death of my wife and younger daughter in one of the final bombing-raids. They died in a nearby shelter when it took a direct hit while I was at work in my office. Ironically the apartment-building was undamaged.
My surviving daughter was at work, having found a position in a department store. She is employed there still. She shares an apartment near it with two other girls, and since it is on the other side of the city, I don’t see her very often.
When the concierge and her son denounced me to the Liberation Authority for murder, I had no inclination, at first, to offer any defence. Only in the last few weeks have I found the desire to write this account. My motive has not been to avoid the death penalty, for I have nothing left to live for. My intention has been simply to offer a record of what I went through. Others can make a judgement of my conduct as well as I can.
Acknowledgements
I owe a huge debt of gratitude to my fellow-novelist, Liz Jensen, for her insight and her encouragement.
About the Author
Charles Palliser is an American and an Irish citizen who has lived most of his life in the United Kingdom. He read English at Oxford and after gaining a postgraduate degree, taught at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow. In 1990 he became a full-time writer when his first novel, The Quincunx, was an international best-seller. It was awarded the Sue Kaufman Prize for First Fiction by the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters and has been translated into a dozen languages and sold more than a million copies in English. He has subsequently published four more novels: The Sensationist, Betrayals, The Unburied, and Rustication. He has taught English Literature and Creative Writing at several London universities, at Rutgers University in New Jersey, and at the University of Poitiers in France. He was the first Deputy Editor of The Literary Review when it was founded in 1978. He has had one stage play produced and the BBC has broadcast two radio plays and a short film for television.
Charles Palliser, Sufferance
