‘To know what is coming,’ said Katerina, ‘and to be able to do nothing about it is not good. When Hitler came to power in 1933 I was nine years old, but already when I was seven I was seeing in my dreams the railhead and the chimneys at the end of the journey. My father was a well-connected lawyer who thought of himself as more German than Jewish. He and my mother did not take my fears seriously, they thought I am a hysteric. When they finally realised what was happening it was already too late.
‘About Auschwitz I tell you only what concerns us now. I was on the list for medical experiments but this did not happen. Dieter Kandis was one of Mengele’s assistants. He helped with the experiments and he helped himself to any females he fancied. His name actually means ‘sugar-candy’. This was in 1942. I was eighteen then and pretty, and after he raped me he took me off the experiment list and installed me in his quarters.
‘He had a piano there and a good collection of music; he himself was not very advanced but when he found that I was he made me play for him every evening. He was particularly fond of Haydn sonatas. So I was a well-fed whore who played the piano while other women were tortured and starved and worked to death. And there was the smell from the crematoria. My parents by then were dead.
‘In 1943 I became pregnant by Kandis and he told me I will go back on the experiment list if I try to abort it. So I didn’t. The child, a son, was born on the fourth of November. Kandis named him Theodor, ‘gift of God’, and handed him over to the eugenics people for research in what they called ‘cross-breeding’. I didn’t see him again and for these many years I didn’t know if he is alive or dead. I don’t think he ever knew who his mother was.
‘Towards the end of 1944 I was again and again seeing Russian soldiers in my dreams. Kandis had me moved to the IG-Farben barracks where the forced-labour women lived. These workers did not get the famous Buna soup but were properly fed. He gave me some money and he said, ‘Thank you for the Haydn. Tschuss.’ Then I didn’t see him again.
‘When the Russians came in January 1945 I walked out of there with the forced-labour women, mostly Poles.’ She rubbed her left wrist. ‘Since then I have tried not to meet anyone else who was at Auschwitz.’
In the light of the blue bell-flower lamp her face was soft and dreamy. Her glass was empty and I filled it again. On her wall Melencolia also had a soft and dreamy look. A whole lot of woman, Melencolia: drawn by Dürer but promising opulence of the Rubens sort under her clothes. The child, perhaps I’d been too hard on him in the past; he was, after all, only a little fellow. Had he been crying? The dog was sleeping as before; the polyhedron flaunted its many facets. The sound of the rain and the drops running down the window panes curtained us in and made the room more cosy. I said to Katerina, ‘When I saw you hurrying to the tube station, did you know then … ’
‘That he was my son? I think I almost knew. In our very first session, when I suddenly pulled my hands away from yours it was because I saw the face of Dieter Kandis bending over me. I have seen his face often in dreams but this was a very strong apparition when I was fully awake. The second time it happened was when you put the bundle of money into my hands. It hit me like a bolt of lightning, I thought my heart would jump out of my body. It happened again when I held the book in my hands. Then, this afternoon, it was like a film in my head: this man with the face of Dieter Kandis on the Wimbledon train coming to Earl’s Court. When I saw him get off the train and I spoke to him, he looked at me as if the name hit him also like a bolt of lightning from the past.’
‘Are you dead certain this was your son?’
‘I have many doubts about many things, Jonathan, but when I know something I know it.’
‘And now he’s dead.’
‘Now he’s dead, yes. But the past doesn’t die.’