Part 2

Right now I am also reading most of a volume (I am waiting for someone to finish the broken-off part of it and pass it on to me) of Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy. ‘On a thyme-scented, bird-hatching morning in May.’

We are fortunate in how many really talented and scholarly people speak here and give lectures, just the other day there was a talk on Goethe, there is a professor of Plato here, and an expert on Rilke and of course I thought of you when he was talking of the Rose Bowl, but now you know how to forget about those things because the rose bowl is here before you

and it cannot be forgotten, it is full

of being, the roses leaning forward,

holding out, never giving way, holding their own so we too can go as far as we can, like the roses do How do you like my translation? It is from memory, so might be very wrong. All the speakers here speak from memory. It is quite a feat. The other day I was really thinking of you when the debate we had was: Should The Artist Portray His Own Age. I tell you Hanns there was nearly a fistfight. And you would be so proud of me, because I spoke up and said, but what about the artist portraying her own age, and when I did I was nearly laughed out of the room, but at least it stopped the fistfight and let them all agree with each other and have something in common again. But I am thinking of your pictures a lot too. There are artists here. They are good but it is yours I have in my head. The one with the flowers that I thought had faces discernible, if you looked, in the shapes of their petals, means that now I can’t not see a face in all real flowers am I saying it wrong? She was annoyed when I said the flowers she painted had faces. She is no longer sixteen, she is twenty now, maybe she thinks such things childish and behind her

and one of the other things I have been remembering to tell you is that I am carving you a wooden bird out of a piece of chair leg. I regret to pass on the information too that nowadays I have none of that nice lotion with me that you told me about and had been keeping my skin soft as you said it would, and even worse I no longer have the ointment the doc gave me for the place behind my ear where the wart came off, and so I am using any oil or grease that comes my way, but sparingly, because not often very nicely scented.

I know you will be interested that I went to see Dr Streliska, he is a handwriting expert and graphologist in the camp. Our father had been to see him and Dr S looked at a piece of his handwriting and said, ‘you are a man who loves to grow things.’ So our father felt most pleased.

‘He said nothing about you being a person who likes to suffocate butterflies, open their wings when they’re dead and stick a pin through their torsos, then?’ I said.

I wish above all I had had something written of yours to show Dr S. He would have said, ‘why this is a king of queens! A queen of kings!’ I don’t doubt.

I showed him a piece in my own hand and he said, ‘you are a man for many seasons.’ I am pleased though I have no idea what it means or how he can say such things by looking at scrawl. I was most disappointed that

he didn’t say, you are a great singer and will be famous for your singing.

Of course you remember exactly how good a singer I am. But I am persevering. I am writing a summer song with my friend Mr Klein, he is musically talented, we are planning to record our musical notations on the wire here by hanging our socks on the fence like the fence is our stave and the island’s view our page, and when I have finished it I will dedicate it to you. Its first line is: ‘on a thyme-scented, bird-hatching morning in May.’

Talking of music, I mean the real thing. Mr Rawicz is here. Mr Landauer is at another of the island’s camps. Our camp Commandant asked Mr R to give a concert. Well. Mr R tried out all the old pianos left in the camp and they were all terrible, one fell to pieces literally as he was playing it! (There are paintings now on the wood of its back and sides, the wires are conducting electricity in the technical school, who knows what’s become of the wheels, the ivory keys went to the dentist to be made into teeth.)

Our Commandant is Major Captain Hubert Daniel. He has given the artists studios, given the writers books and paper. He made sure all our mail arrived and arrives. That’s the good chap he is. He had two grand pianos shipped in from Liverpool and a special arrangement sorted between the camps so that Landauer could play at our camp though he is not an internee here.

Rawicz and Landauer! who perform for the King and Queen! They were arrested on their journey home from playing for the King and Queen and brought here to be interned. Now they have played for me too! We sat on the grass and listened to the Viennese Strausses.

The fine people of Douglas crowded in their hundreds up against the wire to listen together with us.

It was a marvellous evening.

Well my Hannsel, this letter is nearly done for today and the Irishman wants what’s left of his pencil back before he goes off duty.

So till we meet again.

Keep your Innerlichtkeit lit and shining in the window for me, as mine is for you

my autumn sister

from

your ever

summer brother

Daniel reads it through.

He unfolds the last sheet of good paper.

Leaning on his knee, pinning the draft pages of the letter beneath him with his heel where he can see them, he makes a final fair copy in even tinier writing and with (almost) no crossings-out.

Then he sits back against the wall, looks towards the sea beyond the wire.

High above the island, high above the gulls, a bird that’s not a gull. A summer bird? this late in the season? If it is, it’s a very late traveller, possibly lost, quite alone.

Take this letter to my sister, whatever you are, bird up there.

Now he shuffles the three pages, the crossed-out and the fair copy, all together neatly.

He tears them in half.

He tears them in half again then in half again.

He takes the pieces to the kitchen in the House of the Fairy Tales, where he borrows the cook’s matches. He comes back through the bare hall and out the front door.

He makes a little heap of paper on the stone of the house’s front step. He sets light to the edge of one of the pieces of paper.

The others catch.

The heat the fire sends through them strengthens, then wanes.

When the fire’s over and the remains are cool enough, he cleans the burnt stuff up. He rubs the ash of them into his hands, then opens his empty hands and looks at them.

The lines on his hands stand out clear through the blackening.

He puts his hand behind his ear to feel the place where the wart was, three years ago,

no,

eighty years ago.

His ears have wakened.

That wart’s long gone.

But he can still feel the place the doctor took it off and left a line of stitches. He can still feel the line where something was that’s gone, where the gone thing healed.

But wait. Now his eyes have wakened too.

He is in his neighbour’s house, in his neighbour’s daughter’s room.

What time of day is it?

He has had breakfast. He has had a sandwich. He has had soup. It is afternoon. It is still light.

What month is it?

Low sun.

Winter-spring.

There are people outside the house. He can hear them. He can see a car in the driveway through the French windows. People getting out of it are talking and laughing outside the house.

Well, it’s a fine sunny afternoon for the wintertime, and a fine thing to hear people happy out in the air.

They shut the doors of the car and stand talking for a bit longer, young people and older people, a family.

They sound like happy birds.

He thinks of the birds above the scarecrow in the picture. They were moments in ink, and he saw them come to life, and there they still were all the years later in the book he saw, when he saw that book.

One of the young people from the family of visitors comes and looks in through the French windows, stands right up against one of the doors looking in through the reflection.

What Daniel sees then is his sister.

Is it?

Hannah?

It’s Hannah herself standing there looking in.

It is.

It’s her.

It’s her young self.

It’s the copy of her young self.

She opens the window’s door and it’s Hannah, God help him, there in the room, aged twelve, in the shape of a boy.

Oh hello, Daniel says.

Hi, Hannah says.

Where’ve you been all this time? he says.

The traffic was busier than they thought it’d be, Hannah says.

But so very long, Daniel says. I thought time had quite undone us.

On the contrary, time and space are what lace us all up together, Hannah says. What makes us part of the larger picture. Universally speaking. The

problem is, we tend to think we’re separate. But it’s a delusion.

Ah, Daniel says.

Of course I’m quoting Einstein, Hannah says. Well, paraphrasing. He said the only real religion humans can have is the matter of freeing ourselves from the delusion first that we’re separate from each other and second that we’re separate from the universe, and the only peace of mind we’ll ever get, he says, is when we try and overcome this delusion. He said this in a letter to a man whose son, who was eleven, had just died of polio. In exactitude you know if today was February the 12th it would be the seventieth anniversary to the day of Einstein sending this letter to the man. But the actual anniversary will happen on Wednesday this week. In exactitude.

Ah, Daniel says.

Yes, Hannah says. He was actually a man, the man Einstein wrote back to, who had done a lot to help save a lot of children’s lives at the end of the Second World War. But he felt bad because he couldn’t do anything to save his own child from dying from a disease. So he wrote to Einstein and asked him to explain, what was the point, or if there was a point, in being innocent, and gifted, and dying and becoming nothing but dust.

There is no doubt, Daniel says. You really are you.

Yes, Hannah says. I really am me. And you really are you. But if we follow Einstein’s thinking and add together you plus me plus time plus space.

What does that all make?

Then she waits, like she always did, for Daniel finally to catch her up.

What? What does it all make? Daniel says.

It makes you and I more than just you or I, Hannah says. It makes us us.

Here’s a tale to drive away the time trimly. Once upon etc there was a king or a lord or a duke that had a fair daughter, the fairest that ever was, with hair and skin as white and as red and as gold and as black as etc and once upon etc his daughter was stolen away etc.

Today Hannah Gluck has been trawling the graveyards of the smaller places out of town, cycling between them with flowers in the bicycle’s basket, wheeling the bike past the graves, checking the dates, memorizing the names of the ones who died young.

This is a good source. It’s not completely safe but birth and death certification are usually held in different lists, often in different drawers or cabinets, sometimes even in different buildings if you’re lucky. If you’re lucky, if you’re moving fast, nobody thinks to check both sources, that’s if they check at all.

This’ll change. Change is the nature of luck.

But it’s still working well at the moment.

She has started going out of whichever town or city she’s in, out to the surrounding villages especially. People can be more suspicious though. Or they tend to be, in the smaller places.

No, it’s more that when people see her in the graveyards going from stone to stone they can be either foul or kind. It’s always interesting. You can never tell which way they’ll go.

Who the hell are you?

Can I help?

Hannah Gluck is ready for both.

In this readiness, Hannah Gluck is more than Hannah Gluck. At the moment she is Adrienne Albert, seamstress. Adrienne Albert died at eighteen months old, in Nancy, in 1920, of Spanish influenza. She’s buried there in the same grave as a grandmother who died of the same thing at much the same time. But here she is, regardless, living and breathing and as warm as any living flesh and blood, though just a touch younger than it says on her papers, and today she’s trawling a graveyard and looking to resurrect other lives like her own.

You see the name and the dates on a stone.

You ask a silent permission of the person gone.

You bow your head to their memory.

Then you pass on the gifts, the names and the dates, to the person who needs the new self.

It’s not subterfuge. It’s much more complex. Something real happens, something as metamorphic as caterpillar and butterfly. The gone person is as here and as real and as much a part of the act of balancing against the odds as a girl at a circus Hannah saw years ago, on one toe on one foot on one leg on the back of another girl on the back of two other girls, all on the back of a huge horse going at a lumbering canter you’d have thought it impossible to balance on top of even if there were only one of you on its back, thundering round the ring to a circus band playing Did You Ever See A Dream Walking.

How did they do it?

They did it against the odds.

And, like it or not, we all get ground down to a name and a date and what looks like nothing much in the end.

But when the words that once meant a person meet a living breathing shape, it’s like when a lone bird sings in a tree like that one above her just did, and then a bird many gardens away sings the same song back to it.

Particle sings to particle, crumb of grime to crumb of grime, fragment-hank to fragment. Something connects. A smatter of dust meets the thought of water, and then the thought of oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen, calcium, phosphorus, mercury, potassium, magnesium, ion, so on, molecular alphabet.

Something heats up round the words that once, even so briefly, meant a person.

You don’t know anything, the first thing, about that person. Still, something family happens.

It starts to happen the moment she memorizes the name and the date.

Then she telephones a number, a different one every time, and passes on to someone she doesn’t know and will never meet the things she’s memorized. That person, a kind of cousin, passes these on to the artists, and the artists make the papers that give that name the new life. Something shifts seismically. The dead name takes the new person on, and a live person takes the dead name on. Life happens for someone whose life will otherwise end.

Life happens to a life that didn’t happen. Life enters, graciously, with respect, the unlived life. With luck, with one eye on surviving the cold and the other on thanking the heat, thank you, summer fires, bless our crops and sheep and cattle, may the gods give us a good year, the reborn person will withstand a few more seasons.

So the thing to do, then, she says to herself as she walks the paths watching for the too-soon dead, the pebbled paths of the bigger cemeteries,

the cat-paths and no-paths and grassy plots where the little towns and villages bury their families – the thing to do, when life asks for acrobatics, is behave like that circus girl on the top of the pyramid of girls on the back of that giant farm horse, remember, how she leapt down off the top of the others, somersaulted, landed in the sawdust on her toes, skipped to the place where the ringmaster’d sprayed the paper hoops on the stands with something flammable and set a match to them all, and threw herself through the burning hoops.

Then even the clown, remember. He looked like he’d be useless, clumsy, falling over himself, stupid wig sticking out and wrong size clothes flapping like petrol rags near a furnace. But what an athlete he turned out to be, he dived like a seabird, a champion, Olympian, through the rings of fire not once but twice, then again, and again.

—

One late summer’s morning in 1940 in Lyon a man who looks very like her brother walks past Hannah in the street.

Of course it’s not her brother. That’s obvious almost immediately.

But there’s been a fragment of a second when her brother was there in front of her even though he wasn’t, isn’t, and the man has such a look of him that it makes her turn her head then turn right round on her heel on the street.

It is so nice to see him!

Even though it’s not him.

Even the shape of his back. Even though it’s not his back.

So she follows an inclination, let’s see where it takes us. She follows the man. He goes to the station. She follows him through the station. She joins the ticket queue, stands behind him. She doesn’t hear where he’s buying his ticket for but when she gets to the ticket desk she casts a glance at the man’s back like he’s her husband and they’re having a quarrel and says, Same as him, please.

The ticket woman looks at the going man who’s paid this lady no attention, turns back and gives Hannah the eyebrow. Hannah shrugs her own eyebrows, gives a little shake of the head, keeps her face long-suffering.

The woman charges her half of what it says on the ticket is the price.

Hannah gives the woman her warmest smile.

She sets off after the man who’s not her brother, stays five or six paces behind him.

She sits in the same carriage.

Actually he is nothing at all like her brother. A very slight physical resemblance. Still. Even slight is lovely. She can imagine it’s him and that they’re just sitting in a railway carriage ignoring each other, which is something they quite often did.

The carriage fills with people and luggage. People sit between Hannah and the man who’s not her brother.

From here she can still see the side of his head.

The city flashes past, grey on blue. A woman in a torn poster paddles along a coast on a boat made of the word MENTON, some torn-open mountains in the background, the ripped words Sai d’ té above her head.

BUGAT. Avec Energol démarrage foudroyant en hiv. The hoardings are bright rags placed over the dark. The surface of things is a lie, and everybody who sees the hoardings for what they are knows it.

(Why are you travelling?

My mother is very sick, they think she will die.

Where is your mother?

With her sister, near St Julien.)

Countryside flashes past, sunlight, green on blue, quite migrainous. The summer when she was thirteen, remember, was a summer of migraines. The migraines were partly enjoyable, like a private light-show on the inside of her eyes, the triangles pulsing like cartoon characters, their colours piercing, splendid. Black lines held colour-shape after colour-shape like the shapes were walking a road together, geometry of a travelling band.

The headaches and the vomiting? Much less enjoyable. Worst of all she couldn’t read. Whenever she looked at a page she saw the insides of her own eyes on it, same as on the insides of her eyelids when she shut her eyes. A blank circle formed, round which the geometries pulsed, in the middle of any words she’d try to read, a blur surrounded by words her eye could make out but couldn’t focus on, because trying to focus on them eclipsed them in turn.

So she was spending a fair amount of time in a darkened bedroom.

She lay on the bed. On one side of her head beyond the shut door there was the summer noise of family (her brother and father were back). On the other there was the summer noise of the city through the window shutters, traffic. Happy-sounding people in the daytime. Thug-songs through the night.

What do you make of it all? Daniel said.

He’d come in and was sitting on the side of her bed.

Make of what? she said.

Everything, he said.

He meant what was happening.

Then he pretended he didn’t mean that at all.

What’s it like? he said. In there.

He knocked with his fist, but gently, on her forehead.

She always tried to speak to him in English; she was proud of her English. She read a lot of books in English, all the ones she could find, precisely so that when the summer came round she’d surprise her English brother by speaking exceptionally well to him in the language he spoke every day. Was it rivalry? Yes. Was it love? Yes.

In here? It’s like. Hm. Imagine hand-painted animation at the cinema.

Imagine a team of assiduous (she was pleased to have found a use for the word assiduous, her first time, she hoped she’d said it correctly, so she said it again just for the pleasure) assiduous girl painters sitting at a tinting table in a film factory. And they spend their day colouring by hand, dipping their brushes into pots of paints filled with the colours of blooming English roses, pinks and yellows shining like after a rainshower, then colouring each of the little triangles that’s about to do a dance across my eyes. And each time the frame changes, these colours, and the line of blackness that holds them together, like a road they’re all walking along, vibrate as if electricity is going through not just them but the road they’re on.

Well, he said. Sounds like quite a show.

Truly I rather like it, she said. I’m quite well entertained.

Is it doing it now? he said.

No, she said. Kino Hanno is closed for now.

How does it feel now, then? he said.

Now then, she said. An interesting verbal construct.

A what what? he said.

The past and the present together, she said. Now. Then.

A bewildered silence came off him.

He went to sit on the window seat across the darkened room.

She’d gone too fast for him again. She forgot. He is not flippant like she is. He is not quicksilver. His energy is steady, something like a tree root.

Now? I’m all right, she said. Then? It’s like something wild, which is eating me whole, decides it doesn’t want me after all and so it regurgitates me. That’s my now and my then. Most of all I regret that I’m missing some good summer days.

He looked through the little gap in the shutter where the slice of light came in.

You aren’t missing so much, he said.

He thinks I’ve shut myself in here because things are changed out there, she thought. He thinks I’m frightened. He didn’t see it coming, hasn’t seen it happen, not like we have. He doesn’t know the everyday nature of it. He must be frightened.

I’m not frightened, she said.

I didn’t say you were, he said. I’d never assume such a thing, not of you.

Good, she said.

Though it may be the case that your head is acting scared without telling you, he said.

I do not give it permission to do that, she said. Neither should you. So. If I may, I’ll ask of you the same question you asked of me.

What question? he said.

What you’re making of it all, she said.

Ah, he said. I’m not much of a maker of anything, me. You know that.

He jumped up. He went to the door.

(He was agitated.

She was right.)

I’ll leave you to get the rest you need, he said.

I’ll alter the question a little, she said. What will you make of it all?

He shut the door.

He heard her. He can’t not have.

(Also, she was particularly proud of her use, there, of the future tense.) The next afternoon her brother opened the door of the bedroom and carried in something dark and heavy, bulky, something under a blanket.

You have the shape of a pregnant woman, she said from the bed.

But she’d embarrassed him by the word pregnant. She could hear it in his awkwardness.

Anyway he put the bulky thing on the chair and unwrapped it from its cover. He stood holding the cover as if unsure whether to fold it or not. He did, very neatly. He unwound from the machine a wire and a plug.

The whole room began to whirr. A circle of light, like a square moon, a square of sun, appeared on the bedroom wall.

She put her hand over her eyes.

Too bright for you? he said.

No, she said. What is it?

Kino Danno, he said. You don’t need a ticket. Today you’re our guest.

She peeked through her fingers and watched as he adjusted the focus.

Chaplin. Der Einwanderer.

A ship, a lot of people lying seasick on the deck and on each other, groaning in silence.

A shot of someone bent over the side of the ship, convulsing, being what looks like sick over the side. But no – it’s Chaplin, and he isn’t being sick, he’s catching and landing a live fish, which he turns to show them both with a brilliant smile.

Hannah laughed.

She took her hands away from her eyes.

She laughed and laughed when the people all over the ship who are acting so seasick hear the dinner bell get rung and rush to get to the dining room before anyone else.

She laughed as they arrive in America and Chaplin kicks the behind of an officious customs man who cordons them all off with a rope.

A title came up in English. Later – hungry and broke.

(It was exciting to see the other language.)

Is broke the same as broken? Hannah said.

No, her brother said. It means you’ve no money left.

Hannah memorized it. Broke. Broke.

As she did, Chaplin with his sweet white face on Hannah’s bedroom wall (the little moustache Hitler has been canny enough to copy as if to suggest he’s benign and endear himself to the world’s millions, and to the kind of millions that Chaplin makes, too) finds a dollar on the American street. Then he finds Edna, the girl he fell in love with and was kind to on the ship. They eat a meal in a restaurant. But a funny plot happens round whether the money he found is real or not, which of course it isn’t, and they have no money and can’t afford to pay for the meal. The waiter, a monster of a man, has a habit of beating people to within an inch of their lives when they can’t pay.

But an artist in the restaurant thinks their faces are remarkable and very meaningful, faces symbolic of the time he’s living in.

He wants them to model for him.

He pays them in advance.

Happy ending in the pouring rain.

Her brother knew she loved Chaplin.

Where did you get your cinema from? she said.

Camera shop. I had to carry it here, and I’ve to carry it back tomorrow.

Chaplin’s not all that’s on today’s bill, he said. I’ve one more little thing of wonder here.

He ran the Chaplin film back through the projector – it was funny backwards too, in a whole other way. When the end of the film flicked out and round and round itself even that was a bit thrilling.

He switched off the projector, replaced the film with another, switched the square of inner sunlight / moonlight back on (this time it didn’t hurt her eyes at all) and threaded the film through the reel wheel.

This time the film was covered in even more scratches and looked like it was from some other century. It was.

A man in a room full of roman-looking statues, like a gallery or an artist’s studio, is chiselling at a statue that’s not even a statue, it’s just a drawing, of a fine lady or a goddess holding a jug and a cup.

Then the drawing turns into a real person. It offers the artist a drink from its jug and its cup but he’s too shocked to accept, so it steps down off its pedestal and walks across the room to a pedestal on the other side, where it takes up a pose with a harp which it starts to play. The artist goes to throw his arms round it, but it vanishes to nothing and he falls over himself. The goddess appears behind him. He goes to grab it again and it turns into – a turban!

The turban is the size of a small child. It walks about the room by itself.

The artist catches the turban and picks it up, puts it on one of the pedestals. But the living statue appears again. The artist runs to hug it. It vanishes, jaunts across the room, mounts the first pedestal (the little walking turban has vanished too) and returns to being nothing but a drawing. The artist puts his hands to his head and collapses on the floor of his gallery.

Hannah laughed. She clapped her hands.

The artist’s envy of the muse, she said.

The what? Daniel said.

It’s a version of the story of Pygmalion, she says.

Oh, Daniel said.

In this case both the muse and the artwork out-artist the artist, Hannah said.

But did you like it? Daniel said.

Very much, she said.

He ran the film backwards, unplugged the projector.

Now he was lying at the foot of her bed in the dark telling her what Mr Wirtz at the camera shop had told him about the early filmmaker who made the vanishing statue film.

He was filming one day in a street in Paris, Daniel said. And something in the camera stuck, the film stuck, the apparatus wasn’t working, so he opened the box and he sorted it and started filming again. And when he got home and watched the film he’d made, in front of his eyes a bus full of passengers suddenly turned into a hearse, and people on the street vanished, horses just vanished, and new people appeared there who hadn’t been there before, men turned into women, women turned into men, people turned into horses, horses into people. And the filmmaker thought, I have found a way not just to witness and record time but also to conjure with time.

Something wakes Hannah.

The woman sitting next to her on the train has jogged her elbow.

(ALBERT Adrienne, seamstress)

The train has arrived. Everybody off.

Because it’s near the border the checks here are chaotic. Good.

She says a silent goodbye to the back of the man who looked for a moment a little like her brother.

She chooses a poorly dressed old woman carrying a pile of sacking and an empty wicker box, the kind that holds hens. She places herself directly behind the old woman.

My mother’s ill. I don’t know. That woman you’ve just let through, she is taking me, she was sent by my aunt to fetch me from the station, I’ve come from Lyon and I don’t know this place and she may not wait for me, she’s deaf, look, she’s going without me and I won’t know where to go.

She holds her arms out from herself. She gives the uniform the man’s wearing her most beautiful angry look. The man blushes red, hands her back her papers without looking at her and nods her through.

She breathes fully in, then out.

She quickens her pace as if to catch up with the old woman. She follows her at a distance through the busy streets to the less busy streets, past houses until there are no houses, nothing but gouged-up grass and dried mud where trucks have turned in the road, to the edge of the town then out beyond the town where the fields begin.

She can see the military grey and the signage, the roadblocks skirting the border.

They walk a lower road through a scatter of farmland.

When the woman turns away from the hills rather than towards them, Hannah stops and stands under a tree, takes off her shoe and looks inside it as if to find a stone. She lets the woman disappear towards a cluster of houses.

She sets off herself in the opposite direction along the side of a meadow.

It is a completely beautiful evening. Heavy summer light. She walks until she comes to the place a signpost has been removed from a village. She walks past its houses like she knows where she’s going. The people working see her and leave her alone. She walks between fields for over an hour on a dirt road in the birdsong, the evening’s grassy air.

Then there’s a house by itself with a yard full of geese settling themselves for the night, the mountains rising behind it.

She opens its gate.

A dog barks.

A woman comes to the door and opens it, holds the dog by the scruff of its neck.

What do you want? the woman says.

A man is standing behind the woman and the dog in a doorway that leads through to the rest of the house.

I was wondering if I might trouble you for a glass of water, Hannah says.

A glass of water, the woman says.

I have a little money, if you’d take recompense for the kindness, Hannah says.

She smiles her smile.

The woman turns to look at the man.

Yes, a warm evening, and you’ve been walking, the man says.

I’ve quite a way to go, Hannah says. But there’s still light in the sky.

We’ll gladly give you something to eat, too, if you can pay us something small towards it as you suggest, the man says.

It’s kind of you, Hannah says.

She sits at the table. The man says something to the dog. It stops agitating.

The woman puts a spoon on the table in front of Hannah.

Thank you, Hannah says.

They put bread down, and a glass of water filled from a jug, then a bowl of some kind of stew. It tastes good. She tells them. The woman straightens

herself with pride.

Hannah tells them her name is Adrienne and says the name of the place she bought the train ticket to.

That’s more than an hour on foot from here, the woman says. And the curfew. We can give you blankets, you’re welcome to sleep in the barn if you’d like to wait till the morning.

It is a real kindness, she says. It’s my very good luck that I knocked on your door.

She puts two banknotes on the table.

I’ll set off as soon as it’s light, she says. I won’t trouble you more.

You’re no trouble to us, the woman says.

Hannah goes out to the barn with the man, who carries a roll of blankets.

The dog walks peaceably beside them both.

The mountains, she says. It doesn’t matter what time of the day or evening it is. Such beauty.

Yes, the man says. We’ve always thought of them as our own.

He smiles at her.

Where does France end and Switzerland begin? she asks.

The man takes her beyond the barn and points to a small muddy yard full of goats at the back of the house in the dusk. He takes her to the edge of the yard. He slides one foot through the wire in the fence.

I am now in two countries, he says. My goats, when they put their heads through this fence, benefit from the good grass of more than one country. They always have. We get excellent milk.

He pulls his leg back through. He stands in his yard and looks at her with utter candour.

How lucky you are, she says.

He crinkles his well-sunned face.

If I were to bring family, just every so often, especially the little ones, there are many children in my family, just now and then, to visit you to enjoy your beautiful view, she says. Or perhaps send a cousin with some family of mine. Perhaps you would be as kind to them as you’ve been to me. Of course, for a little recompense for such kindness.

We’ll always be happy to receive visits from your family, the man says.

And there,

(he points beyond the fence across a grassy expanse which ends in a forest)

that’s where a path through the woods begins. Just one high fence, and my goats get under it easily if they try. Beautiful wildlife, those woods. It’s a very nice hike. I also know a man in town. He’s the mayor. He is himself a great lover of family life. I will leave you a note addressed to him telling him you and I are old friends, I’ll leave it on the doorstep for the morning, you can take it with you.

When the man has gone back into the house and the sun is down, she folds the blankets on top of each other in the corner of the barn where there’s a tall bank of hay. She sits back against the haywall on the blankets, flicks a tiny fly away from her nose. She checks for her cash. She checks for her papers. She settles her hands in her pockets and closes her eyes.

Good people.

Lucky break.

Claude will make it work.

Claude got her the papers, good ones, real artistry. When the park was overrun with flowers and the city first overrun with thugs, she’d sat in the park with a book in her hand, Rimbaud, Illuminations. He came and sat beside her. He was good-looking, he was serious but smiling, he spoke with a lightness. O saisons, he said, o chateaux. What soul has no faults? I’ve done an enchanted study of it, happiness, it won’t pass us by, long may it live, with de Gaulle to wake us.

When she’d turned to him and smiled, he’d said the word: yes?

Yes, she said.

They watched people strolling about the park, women on the arms of the Luftwaffe like everything wasn’t happening. They sat among the flowers, flowers falling over themselves, and he told her with the same light demeanour three things he’d seen.

He’d seen a casino in Nice that was no longer a casino, had become a mattress store, you couldn’t move for the high piles of them that local people had donated to give to refugees to sleep on.

He’d seen people shot by the planes dead on the sides of the road out of the city.

He’d seen a mother and child who’d been executed, shot into the same grave. The mother’d been made to take her clothes off, the child the thugs had buried clothed, tossed it in on top of the mother.

Now you don’t need to tell me anything else, she said.