Two of my female colleagues at the university had made the effort to visit the Euston Road. I was touched they thought I was worth the long journey from East Berlin. They still seemed to have a low opinion of me. I either spoke too loudly or too softly or too fast or not fast enough. This time my eyes were not Oceanic.
I thanked them for their help researching the youth movements that had begun in the Rhineland as an alternative to the culture of the Hitler Youth. My colleagues told me they were from the university near Hendon, North-west London. It was close to the North Circular and A41, but Central London was only a thirty-minute journey on the Thameslink rail line and Northern Line. The university was committed to a green transport policy so they had travelled on the train.
My students had signed a card and had a whip-round to buy me a bunch of roses from the Asda on the Edgware Road. The card was of Lenin unfurling the mighty red flag. Someone had drawn a pearl necklace around his neck with a black felt-tip. My colleagues told me about the new vice chancellor at another university somewhere in England. Apparently, he employed a fleet of staff to bring his Coke and sushi to his office on a tray. Three white lace doilies were to be placed on the tray, one for the glass of iced water, one for the plate of fruit, usually grapes and pears, one for the extra glass for his Coke. At teatime, around four in the afternoon, his preference, in addition to a pot of Earl Grey, was for an assortment of Scottish shortbread biscuits, Italian hazelnut biscuits, English biscuits sandwiched together with raspberry jam, an almond-filled finger of sponge tipped with chocolate (no one had heard of it before he arrived, but apparently it was called a Gazelle Horn) and one single brandy snap served with vanilla cream. It was the tea tray that compensated for the austerity of his lunch and most panicked his staff. He owned a private helicopter, they joked, and a summer dacha near Bath Spa which he bought from a Russian oligarch. Many of the academic staff were applying for the more secure job of bringing him his Coke and sushi, but wondered if they should ask for a pay rise to prepare the tea tray. Their humour was similar to the jokes I had heard in East Germany.
After they left I threw the roses in the bin.
Someone took the roses out of the bin.
To my horror it seemed that my father was a kind man. He left small gifts by the side of my bed. A flask of soup. He had made it himself. The leeks and potatoes were so crudely chopped I couldn’t get any of the liquid out of the flask. One day he left a box of fudge called Cornish Clotted Cream. I held the box in my hands and understood he had remembered it was a childhood favourite. It made me feel faint to hold it. I drifted off and it fell from my hand.
Rainer told me it was hard for my elderly father to make the journey to the hospital, but I didn’t want to see him. Or Matt. All the same, Rainer must have relented and allowed them to visit at certain times. His teeth were very straight and white, not at all British, perhaps more German. I couldn’t tell Matt that I had attempted to visit our mother in Heidelberg, because he would mock me for making that kind of journey in the first place. Rainer advised me to give my father a chance, but I did not want to see him. I felt betrayed that he let my father hobble into the ward at various times. Although Rainer was a traitor, he too was so very kind. Like Walter.
I lay on my pillows thinking about the kindness of men.
I was being treated like a child by men who were infinitely gentle, yet I was nearly sixty. What had happened between thirty and fifty-six? Those years were lost to morphine. Matt brought in a black-and-white photograph. It was of ‘us boys’ sitting on a pair of swings in the yard of our Bethnal Green home. I was twelve, he was ten. His hair was blond, mine black. He was called Matthew because that was the name of my father’s best friend at junior school. This friend had come from a Quaker family. According to my father, Matthew’s family were his ‘extra’ family because they believed in the values of social solidarity and human dignity. They enriched his life. Matthew’s mother had taught my father how to read, and, oddly, how to make lemon curd. I think this extra accomplishment, learned from his extra family, made my father feel suave. He made lemon curd all through our childhood. We used to like watching him scrape off the lemon rind with a carrot peeler. My brother, Fat Matt, also called Matty by our mother, had a lot to live up to. Social solidarity and human dignity, just for starters. In the photograph we were both smiling, but we didn’t mean it. Our mother had just died. There was a spectre haunting our house in Bethnal Green, lurking in the kitchen amongst the rotting eggs and chicken bones.
‘You looked like a beautiful girl,’ Matt said. ‘Look at your long eyelashes.’
I drifted off, only to discover my father was there too.
‘Dad made those swings for us.’
I glanced again at the photograph of the swings that Matt was so shamelessly holding under my eyes.
The swings were swinging back and forth. Our shoes dragging on the ground. The back door to the house in Bethnal Green was open. Soon we would have to go inside. Our mother’s clothes were still in the wardrobe. A pair of her shoes lay under the kitchen table. I was wearing her pearl necklace under my T-shirt. Matt jumped off his swing. And then he pushed me on my swing until I was flying high in the air. He started to shout like a maniac, wanting me to jump off the swing while I was six feet in the air. I would not jump. I would not get off that swing. I would not walk into that house. Jump. Jump. Jump. His red face. His dead eyes. His screaming mouth. His big hands. Jump. Jump.
My father walked into the yard. His shoulders were bent. His hair unbrushed. His hands covered in dried plaster. He had been working all day with his hawk and his trowel. Matt kicked the backs of my legs every time the swing swung his way. My legs were thin and delicate and he hated them. At the same time, he pushed the swing with such force it was coming off its hinges. Jump. Jump. My father just watched him. He was not vigilant on my behalf, but he was aggressive in his passivity amongst the pots of geraniums and daffodils. My father stared into the distance while my brother kicked and pushed me at the same time. He reminded me of the guard near the lake in the GDR. The man who stood on the wooden platform in a tree, passive in his aggressive vigilance on behalf of the regime. Jump. Jump. It might be that I would have to jump to save myself from the swing that was about to crash to the ground. In the end the neighbour had to intervene. She knew we had just lost our mother and my father had lost his wife. She pulled Matt away from the swing. He fought her but she held him down, while my father watched in silence. I got off my swing and ran into the house where my mother was no longer there to see off my predators, the men who were mortified by my freakish beauty. Was I one of them or what? My brother saved his revenge for later.
I turned to Matt.
‘Where was I when I was forty?’
He thought about this for a while.
‘We never saw much of you. Sometimes you sent us a postcard from your holidays.’
‘Yes,’ my father wheezed, ‘you liked the pastries in Lisbon and the museums in Paris.’
Matt took over. ‘You sent us a postcard of Van Gogh’s starry night when you were in Arles with Claudia.’
I looked to my side to see if Jennifer was there. To my relief the only sign that she had been at my side was the torn-out page of her drawing of the sleeping dogs in Heidelberg. Except all the dogs had their eyes wide open.
My father and brother began to name the countries I had visited. Matt collected the stamps from the postcards I had sent him. He had two children to support and spent all his money doing up their home in Britain. His favourite stamp was from Bombay, but he liked the Greek stamps too. I knew they were trying desperately hard to avoid mentioning the postcard I had sent them from Cape Cod, Massachusetts.
‘And then you got a bit of a paunch,’ Matt said. ‘You spent more time in your cottage in Suffolk and started to grow two kinds of tomatoes.’
I waggled my fingers at him.
‘Three.’
‘Yes,’ Matt said. ‘The usual plum, then San Marzano and the big ones, here goes, Cost-ol-uto Fior-ent-ino.’
I could hear my father guffawing. ‘Yes, those ones. You were always the bourgeois in the family and Matt the Bolshevik.’
They were still working hard to avoid arriving in Cape Cod.
My father tapped his false teeth.
‘And then there is Jack, of course.’
I lifted my arm over my eyes. Where was Jack? There were so many people around me, making sure I did not slip out of this world. Jack would understand that no one had asked for my own opinion on this endeavour.
My father lowered his voice.
‘Son, you mentioned you buried me in a matchbox.’
I nodded.
‘I think you were remembering a very small coffin.’
His old hand reached for my hand and he squeezed it.
We had finally arrived in Cape Cod, Massachusetts.
After a while my brother led my father away.