Part 2

Daniel smiles. He puts the badge down on the lid of the suitcase.

Next moment, gone.

Where’s it gone?

He looks for it but there’s nothing on the suitcase. There’s no suitcase here. Someone has put a tray on his lap.

Sandwich. How kind.

Elevenses, his neighbour’s daughter says.

Ah, he says. Here again.

I am, she says. It’s Friday.

She misunderstands him, thinks he’s talking about her. No matter.

How are you, Mr Gluck? she says. How was your week?

She means, ask me how my week was, Mr Gluck.

He smiles. She is a kind and lovely and clever girl, though no longer quite the firebrand she was when she was a child. Sometimes Daniel is sad about this, for her. She is in a kind of work that is eating her soul. She is lonely. That’s for certain. It is like watching her being eroded.

Much of a muchness and the muchness is good, he says.

I got back from Siena on Wednesday, she says.

Ah, he says.

I took twenty students there for the day to see the Lorenzetti pictures in the town hall. The Good and the Bad Governance.

I have never seen them, he says.

The Tyrant, she says, has lower jaw teeth sticking out of his mouth like a wild boar’s teeth. And Peace, Fortitude, Prudence. Generosity, Temperance, Justice, all the figures at the centre of Good Governance, are women.

Fortitude in her suit of armour is surrounded by armoured knights.

What else? he says.

The Good Governance wall, she says, has this perfect balance and harmony to it, which is also somehow deeply present in the fact that it’s in amazing condition. Whereas the bad governance wall has deteriorated quite badly.

Tell me one of the pictures, he says.

A good or a bad? she says.

Let’s always choose good governance, he says.

She thumbs her phone.

From memory, he says.

She smiles.

She puts the phone down. She closes her eyes.

Bright architecture under a night sky, she says. Houses, sweet communal living. People selling things, people working, writing, making things. People

getting married. People on horseback, people holding each other by the hand.

A human train or chain, maybe a dance by the children of Venus, maybe just happy people holding on to each other. A peaceful city. Summer has come.

They’re sprightly, the figures. A bit of damage, but not much. Well restored.

Holding its own, still bright down the centuries.

They both open their eyes.

What’s in the paper today, then? she says.

Thugs and showmen in power, he says. Nothing new. A clever virus.

That’s news. The stocks and shares will shake. There’ll be people who do very well out of that. One more time we’ll find out what’s worth more, people or money.

He thinks of his mother’s face. All her family money went in the hyper.

She died old, in her fifties.

I for one don’t want to die young, he says.

His neighbour’s daughter laughs.

What my mother’d say if she were here is, it’s a bit late for that, Mr a Hundred and Four, she says.

Whatever age you are, he says. You still die young.

His neighbour’s daughter beams a smile at him.

His neighbour’s daughter loves him.

My father lived through the Spanish flu, he says. I only once heard him talk about it. He said you had to remember not to take it personally. Then you stopped being scared. Never mind that. What you reading?

Mostly right now I’m reading the news on my phone, she says. But also this.

She holds up a paperback book.

Novel, she says. It’s okay. Sub Woolfian, well. Thinks it is, anyway. It’s about Rilke and Katherine Mansfield. Did you know they lived near each other in Switzerland but never met? Have you read Rilke ever?

Ah, he says. Rilke.

He has things he wants to think about Rilke. But he can’t think of him right now because Cyril is here again kneeling by his side next to this nice chair in his neighbour’s conservatory.

He nods to the ghost of pale Zelig, always there with Cyril. Zelig nods back.

Of course neither of them’s here in the conservatory at all. Zel died in 1947, didn’t stay long, how could he, he’d already been made so old so fast.

Cyril, gone in 1970, was it?

Yet here he is now, bright and alive and next to Daniel as they look out ahead, eyes on the silver sheet of the sea beyond the wire.

His brother had the worse time of it, is all Cyril will say. His brother’s memory, Cyril says, is what gets left after a fire has gutted you and everything in you has melted and changed its shape.

Cyril they just tormented, hardly at all, a bit of goading. He was lucky.

They brought him in to headquarters, punched him in the head and the stomach, told him he was a homosexual and would be hanged, told him he’d seduced too many Aryan girls to be allowed to live, death sentence for undesirables like him so he’d be hanged that afternoon in the yard, told him to sit down then pulled the chair away from under him just as he went to, so he fell to the floor, room of laughing brownshirts. Did it again. Again. Again.

In the end something else happened somewhere else in the building to distract them and they forgot about him. He took the chance and slipped out.

He saw as he went how they were lined up on either side of the corridor with their rifle butts ready for whoever was next to walk their line.

Even just that, being punched, insulted, was terrifying. Even just sitting down on a chair that was never there beneath you, and knowing you’d better make to sit down on it though you knew there’d be no chair, because if you didn’t they’d kill you then and there, was so terrifying, Cyril said, that he nearly lost his mind. But I keep getting up. Every time I hit the floor I get up again. I say inside my head, you can do it, you can be like Chaplin. Up.

On the feet. That’s it. Now. Brush your jacket down.

He is finding it hard to hear what his neighbour’s daughter is saying, or to listen.

BUTLIN’S CLACTON 1939.

He looks down at his slippered feet on the carpet in case it’s fallen.

But of course it’s not going to be here.

It’s somewhere else in time, isn’t it?

Where?

Where and when did he let it slip?

It was such a fine thing for anyone to give anyone.

He is deeply annoyed with himself.

He is a very careless man sometimes.

He can’t articulate enough how much he dislikes himself for forgetting things he can’t remember.

For instance. A girl he loved. One night he woke in the dark in a panic. It wasn’t Rive Gauche she wore! He’s been telling himself it was Rive Gauche for years. But he’s been telling himself wrongly, the wrong name. It was something else!

He lay in the dark ashamed.

He didn’t, he doesn’t, know how to atone. He has to put it right.

But how do you put a memory right?

I’m so, so sorry.

It was another French one she wore. Jolie. Jolie something.

Jolie, it says on one side of the bottle on her sideboard in her room. The other word is on the other side of the bottle. He tries to see round its corner in his head.

No.

Can’t.

She worked at the Soup Kitchen for cash. Then she sold some paintings.

Then she acted, Royal Court, BBC. Then she died.

Soup Kitchen. It wasn’t a soup kitchen, it was a restaurant that served soup. It got more and more fashionable the further away from poverty London got. Artists worked there. The girl artists all got jobs there.

His neighbour’s daughter is saying something more forcefully now.

I’m so sorry, he says. Tell me again.

She’s asking him about the Isle of Man.

Oh.

How do you know about that? he says.

She tells him he was talking about it earlier and Paulina heard.

Oh.

Yes, he says. Well. I was hardly in, in for comparatively no time. And it was awful.

It was exceptional. And it was still awful. But we weren’t in for long.

My father, he’d been interned for near six years, the whole first war.

Wakefield. Lofthouse. Lofthouse was a good camp, high class, fee-paying, my mother paid for it. But still he came out mad, very weak, bleak. Ruined his health. Sick man the rest of his life.

Daniel closes his eyes.

He opens them in the dark of the House of the Fairy Tales. His father has the mattress and the bed. For this he’s given one of his blankets to Daniel.

Daniel is on the floor, one blanket over him, two between him and the floor.

His father’s voice, in the dark:

Wakefield was a holiday place too. For the workers on the local trams.

They like to intern people in the holiday places. Anyway a girl, one day, she was maybe sixteen, a pretty girl, she must’ve been out walking beyond the gorse, and she saw me reaching for meadowsweet. I thought if I could get my hands on it I could put it in water and a drop of sugar, if I could find some, the butterflies love meadowsweet. But I couldn’t reach it, and she saw that, she saw me try, so she came over through the bushes and picked it and very simply gave me it through the wire. I heard she got three months in the Wakefield Prison for that. They very particularly told me. Loitering in government grounds. Consorting with the enemy. My fault. I think of that girl often. I hope it didn’t do harm to her. It was such a gift to me.

How long d’you think we’ll be in here? Daniel asks him.

(It’s been weeks. The weeks have been like years.) I have real hope, his father says in a quiet voice.

Daniel in the dark, astonished.

He has never known his father carelessly hopeful about anything.

It’s different this time. It’s a different place, now, England, his father says. Its better self has come to the fore. I know, I know, there’s been a bit of whipping-up. Inevitable all that fifth columnist living off the fat of the land stuff, the collar the lot intern the lot stuff, every German’s an enemy agent and so on.

But Mrs Rathbone speaking in the parliament. The Bishop of Chichester speaking in the parliament. Mr Wedgwood, young Mr Foot, so many, even though it looks like invasion, even though everything’s up in the air for them, still taking time in the parliament to talk about us. And Mr Foot, he said they were missing a trick, because we hate the Nazis so much and we know so much, we’ve got special skills, could form an underground army, fight for England, be bloody useful. Nobody said such stuff back then. It couldn’t be more different. They know about fairness now, and why to go to war, and what happens when you do. They know about newspapers that lie for money.

They know you don’t put innocent people in prison. The British are just.

They’re practical. They’re forbearing. They’re not childish. They’re calm, they’re civilized, now. They’ll put it right. We’ll be out of here in no time.

See if I’m wrong.

His father was right.

Daniel got home by the end of January 1941. His father got release papers at the same time.

They went back to Steyning, cut back the roses in time for spring. Daniel had another medical, clear this time, joined up, British subject so no problem, Royal Navy.

His father died that summer. Daniel was already at sea.

Wakefield? his neighbour’s daughter is saying. Where Barbara Hepworth grew up? The artist who made your stone.

Daniel opens his eyes in another century, in the conservatory.

She means what’s left of the mother and child maquette.

A woman he slept with once stole the child piece of stone. She just took it, pocketed it, years ago.

But he still had the mother stone so he didn’t mind. Made it unsaleable though. Which was a good thing. Means when he sold everything else, this he kept. Good. He very much likes it.

He stretches to remember where it is. It’s in his bedroom in (he stretches to remember where he is right now) this house, his neighbour’s house, on top of the bookcase.

Never mind that, Daniel says. Have you seen, by any chance, anywhere around, a little colourful metal thing?

A little metal what? his neighbour’s daughter says.

Shaped like a swimmer, he says. With a glass held to her head like so.

He puts his arm up above the side of his head and cocks his empty teacup to his ear. Jaunty. She laughs.

No, she says. I’m pretty sure I haven’t. What is it?

In any of the years that we’ve known one another, he says, did you ever see, anywhere about my person, or my house, a little flat metal thing, lapel badge shaped like a girl, a girl swimming?

If I did I don’t remember it, his neighbour’s daughter says.

Little thing, Daniel says. Never mind. My loss.

He waits until she’s reading her book again.

Then he surreptitiously checks the floor round his feet, feels with his slippers for anything that might be under them.

—

One fine summer’s morning a man comes to see Daniel at the canteen. It’s the man Daniel saw on their arrival at Douglas port, the man ahead of him in

the march, the man who yelled at the sergeant about how the man in front of him was too old to go faster.

He introduces himself as Mr Uhlman. Fred.

Something about him is very formal, ceremonious. So much so that Daniel can’t think of calling him Fred.

Mr Uhlman says he has heard that the young Mr Gluck is a native English speaker as well as a man who understands German.

Born here, Daniel says, then whisked away, I spoke nothing but German till I was six. After that, nothing but English. My German self is six years old.

I am interested in translations, the man says, and the different things they will find themselves saying, while all trying to say the same thing. With your skill between the languages I like to think you will make an interesting case. I am gathering versions of this little verse.

He gives him a four line poem in German, it’s been handwritten on a very nice thick piece of paper, like paper used to be.

My grandmother liked to repeat it, he says. I would like to hear it in your English.

Daniel reads it.

He takes the little stub of pencil kept for the accounts and he sharpens it with the knife. He writes on a sheet of toilet paper. He crosses things out.

He writes the whole thing again and he crosses out the workings.

I’ve had to change the rhyme scheme, and I’ve taken an unforgivable liberty with grammar, he says. A first attempt.

Mr Uhlman reads it.

Don’t say Kaddish, not for me.

Don’t sing Masses, not for I.

Nothing sung or spoken be

On the day that I will die.

It’s a good start! Mr Uhlman says.

He looks pleased.

I don’t know that Heine would agree with you, Daniel says.

And you recognize Heine, Mr Uhlman says. For all your English schooling.

I have a German sister, Daniel says. What do you think? Is it of use to you?

I like it, Mr Uhlman says. I like it very much. Good. Thank you.

Perhaps in exchange, Mr Uhlman, Daniel says, you might lend me three sheets of paper like the paper your Heine is written on. I say lend, because I promise, I’ll give you back three sheets as good or better, as soon as I have them. After the war. I won’t forget.

Mr Uhlman opens his eyes wide.

Daniel puts a tube of toothpaste down on the counter. (Toothpaste, like chocolate, costs.)

And this, a gift to you, he says. Yes?

Mr Uhlman is old, forty at least. He is one of the artists who signed the letter they’re going to send to the press. A copy has been circulating in the camp. SIR, The undersigned artists, painters and sculptors, at present interned in Hutchinson Camp, Douglas, I.O.M., would like to appeal urgently to all our British colleagues and friends. It is only too well known that we have left our homes and our countries as our persons as well as our work were greatly endangered there. We came to England because we believed that here

It continues

last hope of Democracy in Europe indefinite period of time create something greatest use to this country mission of Art.

Art cannot live behind barbed by some newspapers tension under which we live close community with thousands of persons no news for weeks ‘White Paper’ makes provision for all sorts of been forgotten

and it ends

and restore to us – all refugees from Nazi oppression – the one thing no artist can live and work without: FREEDOM.

Mr Uhlman’s wife, Mr Uhlman tells Daniel, gave birth to their first child a few days after he got arrested, a daughter he hasn’t yet met.

Daniel thinks of that artists’ letter.

You will, he says.

Mr Uhlman smiles a sad smile as a thank you. He says he was a lawyer.

He tells Daniel how when he was first qualified and went into work one morning he sat down in his office but there was so much hammering and sawing going on somewhere in the Law Courts that he couldn’t concentrate.

He went down and out into the yard to see what was happening.

Some workmen were erecting a scaffold.

No. It was a guillotine.

He got out in time, went to France, became a painter, went to Spain, met a young English woman who was travelling, daughter of Sir Henry Croft, kind of girl who taught Marx – blasphemy! – to her baby siblings. Then she did the unthinkable, married a penniless Jewish refugee. She’d put some ink and a packet of charcoal in his jacket pocket at the police station. She’d packed a block of this good paper into his suitcase. He draws every day on the block of paper, he says, at least one drawing, sometimes more. It depends on whether he is feeling less depressed or more depressed. Either way, it helps, to.

That evening he comes over to the House of the Fairy Tales before lights out and waits for Daniel at the front door. He hands him three blank sheets of the very good paper.

There is almost nobody to whom I’d give this paper, Mr Gluck, he says.

It is three drawings’ worth.

He smiles.

And see how clean my teeth are, he says.

One day he lets Daniel watch him do his day’s drawing. He sits in his room and leans the paper on the lid of the little suitcase balanced on his knees.

I’m not so keen to paint just now, he says. Drawing is the true thing.

He puts his pen down and gets up off the bed. He opens the case and takes some papers out. He shows Daniel an ink drawing, dark.

It is the bunk room at Ascot! It is so like the bunk room in atmosphere and darkness that Daniel can smell it again. He breaks out in a cold sweat.

Mr Uhlman tells him how he nearly went insane waiting for mail in Ascot.

A month, he says. A whole month. London so close, nothing from anyone.

My child, born any minute.

He shows Daniel some more of the pictures he’s working on. They are dedicated to his new born child. In many of them a small girl holding a balloon bobbing on a string is walking through hell. All the way through hell the balloon stays in the air above her and the girl walks about, curious, detached, untouched, and just as powerful as – increasingly more powerful, as the drawings multiply, than – any of the hellish things happening round her.

There are ruined buildings, scaffolds and gibbets, people hanging off trees in bits,

homage to Goya, look, Mr Uhlman says pointing,

and the child walks through the gutted landscape past heaped-up hills of skulls. She passes a hanged woman. The horror doesn’t touch her. She does a dance with a jolly skeleton.

The day he lets Daniel watch him draw, Mr Uhlman is adding birds to a picture of a hayfield with a scarecrow in it. A path cuts through the picture.

The girl with the balloon has walked down it, met some other children, and they’re all smiling beneath the scarecrow, a bloated dead soldier, because he has a small bird singing on his hat.

Are you a lover of art, Mr Gluck? Mr Uhlman says.

I know nothing about it, Mr Uhlman, Daniel says. My sister is sometimes a painter. But I know nothing.

Do you like to see things as they are and as they aren’t? Mr Uhlman says.

I can’t not see both, Daniel says. Sometimes I wish it were otherwise.

But I can’t not.

Then congratulations. You are one step away from artist, Mr Uhlman says.

I fear you’re mistaking me for someone I’ll never be, Daniel says.

Mr Uhlman laughs.

He talks about a carnival he went to in the 1920s hyper.

And suddenly everyone in town was dance mad, it was a contagion of dance, Mr Uhlman says. The whole town danced and danced, because of madness and poverty. Driven to joy.

He draws more birds. The pen hardly moves on the paper and the birds congregate above the field.

Another day, Mr Uhlman is so depressed he can hardly draw.

I fought against Hitler while the Cliveden people fraternized and flirted with him, he says.

He says it gently enough but he is full of rancour.

Then he changes his demeanour. He says,

would it give you some pleasure, Mr Gluck, to meet Kurt?

Kurt is notorious. He’s the artist who barks like a dog in the evenings and his barks can be heard all across the camp’s streets. He sleeps in a basket, they say, like a dog, not in a bed. Daniel was there in the artist’s cafe when he did the thing with the cup and the saucer. Pretty rare to find a cup that matches a saucer anyway, but Kurt had, and was sitting at the table in the cafe surrounded by people talking to each other and slowly the room went more and more quiet because of the hum of Kurt’s voice and what he was doing, he

was circling the cup and the saucer slowly round and round in front of him, and he was saying the word lies, lies, lies, over and over again. No, it was German, the German word leise, a word that means quiet, as in be quiet please, and he was saying it very very quietly leise leise leise over and over, until people leise round him were quiet and listening, and the leise quietness spread like a ring in water leise widening through the room as he said it leise with a little more force leise slightly more loudly each time leise leise leise until the whole room leise was listening to him saying it leise more and more loudly LEISE now he was shouting it L E I S E then he was shouting it at the top of his voice as loud as he could L E I S E with his whole body thrown into the shouts and on his feet now still circling the cup and the saucer in the air – and then he smashed both saucer and cup down hard and they hit the ground hard and they shattered.

Silence.

Everybody in the room, shocked.

Then everybody shouting, laughing, angry, happy. All of these at once.

What Daniel felt was himself breathing fully for the first time in, he didn’t know. Since before they got arrested? Since, years, nearly ten years?

The time before days got terrible?

Everybody in the camp knows Kurt’s had work ridiculed by Hitler himself.

If we ever get out of this here, and we get out of it alive and not dead, Cyril said listening one evening to the dusk barking, I will buy a dog and I will call it Kurt. It has real usefulness, the barkings of Kurt. When that old fellow in the next room to ours wakes up shouting for help and how they’re coming to kill him, go back to sleep I tell myself or I tell Zel, because it is just someone barking back in reply to Kurt the dachshund.

Kurt takes Daniel’s hand in both of his with great firmness.

I feel lucky and happy to make your acquaintance, he says. You are a man with luck and happiness always with you.

He shakes Daniel’s hand.

Now I have shaken the youthful hand of happy luck, he says. Now I’ll make it out of this war. And you work in the canteen. Which is why I asked to meet you. I have a request.

He takes Daniel up to show him the studio.

He is making a collage. It looks like it is made of iridescent lace.

Daniel sees that what it’s made of is fish skin.

The room smells strange, high, sweet. Then Daniel remembers the story that went round the camp about Kurt kicking over his chamberpot and panicking that the several days’ worth of what was in it would seep through the floorboards and down into the room below and because of this his studio would be taken away from him.

(The story goes that Kurt tore off his clothes to mop up the spill.

And then he put them all back on him again, Cyril says.) All round the room, balanced on broken lumps of wood, some on the broken-off legs of an old piano, are the greeny-blue-coloured sculptures of heads, beasts, indefinable shapes. They are lumpy, gritty-looking. Something about them is strangely familiar.

Kurt asks Daniel if he will have the kindness to put aside and pass on to him anything in the canteen or the store that nobody wants to use or to eat, the things often thrown away. Empty cigarette and toothpaste packets, chocolate wrappers. The gone-off leaves of cabbages. Also he most urgently wants any porridge that goes uneaten, if there’s any that he comes across left in a dustbin after a breakfast.

That’s when Daniel sees that the sculptures are made of solidified porridge and that the porridge they’re made of has gone so mouldy that each of the sculptures is sprouting green hair.

These sculptures are alive, he says.

Kurt frowns.

There is no higher accolade, he says.

His frown is a kind of smile.

Daniel opens his eyes.

You’ve been in the wars, his neighbour’s daughter says.

Her hand is on his shoulder.

Tossing and turning and calling out, she says.

She’s brought him some soup on the tray.

I was, he says. I really was.

Where were you? she says. What did you dream?

I was walking along in Douglas town, Daniel says, we all were, we were off down to the Picture House, and the guard who was with us, he gave me his gun to carry because he was tired.

You could’ve escaped, then, in your dream, she says. You had a gun. You could’ve held up that guard with his own gun and all made a run for it.

He laughs.

Oh, it wasn’t a dream, he says. It happened. Escape to what? Only fascists tried to escape.

He puts the spoon down on the tray.

Afterwards I met Mr Uhlman on Charing Cross Road. We said hello, we shook hands, how are you? Then after that, what do you say? Nothing to say.

So I pointed to the bookshop. I said, I heard your book of the drawings you did in Hutchinson came out, I haven’t seen it yet myself, though, and I’m looking forward to it.

He laughed.

Looking forward, he said. Such a phrase. Everyone was looking so forward that nobody bought that book. Nobody wanted anything about the war any more. Nobody wanted it as soon as it was published.

I owe you three pieces of good paper, I said.

I cancel your debt, he said.

We wished each other a cheery goodbye.

I never saw him again.

But I saw a copy of his book years later, after he died, I saw all the pictures, some I’d seen before, and I remembered, I remembered as if someone had etched them into my head, and that little girl with the balloon in the pictures, the daughter, the child just born, she keeps going through hell, right to the end of the book, and in the last pages she –

he starts to laugh

– what she does is, she takes hold of the bottom of, you know, what churchmen wear,

A, a – cassock? his neighbour’s daughter says.

Yes, exactly that, the cassock, and she tips, there’s a giant churchman, his cross is a swastika, she takes hold of him by the hem of his cassock and just, easy as that, she tips him over. Then she stands, with one foot off the ground, like a circus dancer or an acrobat, hand on her hip, and she balances on his vast stomach, and her balloon is high in the sky.

I wish I’d been able to tell Mr Uhlman I saw that, and to thank him.

And did you say you went to the cinema in your dream? his neighbour’s daughter says.

Oh, it wasn’t a dream. We went in real life, he says. They took us. Two guards. Four hundred of us. A day in November. The Picture House. It had a mock tudor front. Very pretty. The Great Dictator. Chaplin the barber loved a fine-looking girl. Same name as my sister, the girl. It was really something,

taking on Hitler like that. And back to the camp to a concert that evening.

Schubert, I believe.

It sounds very unlike a prison, she says.

A prison is a prison, he says. Whatever you fill the time with.

He finishes the soup.

Thank you, he says. You are so kind.

You are so welcome, she says.

She helps him through to the bed for the lie down he has in the afternoons.

And Mr Gluck, she says. Can I just ask. Did you say you have. You had.

A sister?

I did, he says.

He doesn’t say anything else.

I’ll wake you a little before the people are due to arrive, she says.

People, he says.

The people who are coming to visit you today, she says. The man. You knew his mother. Remember?

Daniel shakes his head.

Oh yes, he says.

She goes to pull the curtains shut over the French windows.

Let’s leave them open, he says. It’s good light out there today.

She opens them again.

Thank you, he says.

He closes his eyes.

He is seventeen. His sister is twelve, a mere child. It’s in the front room in the Berlin flat, he is there for his summer, they are leaning next to each other out of the big open window with their elbows on the sill, both watching the afternoon traffic below.

They are arguing. They always do.

He says Max Linder is the better comedian.

She is all for Chaplin.

Yes, but Linder’s the one that’ll last, he is saying. No question.

Sophisticated, inventive. A social comedian, a man with social intelligence.

Chaplin’s a mere clown, a shadow-boxer to Linder. Thinks he can steal someone else’s tricks and be as good as the original. And he can’t, because he isn’t. Linder’s the source. Linder’s the real thing.

Hannah shakes her head like she’s sorry for Daniel.

Social comedian, she says.

She laughs like he’s said something naive.

Chaplin is evergreen, she says in English. Max Linder is one of those pretty things that last only a year. Wait and see, summer brother.

She has lately taken to calling him this, like he isn’t really her brother.

Like he’s only a brother one season a year.

He put on his most superior air.

We’ll wait and see, he says.

Whether we do or we don’t, she says. The tramp will outlive the dandy, I reckon, and do it by thousands of years.

—

On a morning in late summer, still fine and warm in the daytime, cold at night, well, late September, Daniel sits in the sun behind the House of the Fairy Tales and unfolds the sheets of paper.

There are three.

He takes two of them and holds them on his knee against the breeze while he rolls the third up again and tucks it back into his inside pocket.

The young guard with the bright red hair (Daniel calls him the Irishman, he calls Daniel the Englishman) has lent him a good sized piece of a pencil.

He has the kitchen fruitknife, for sharpening.

My dear little Hanns

he writes, very small, small as he can and still make it out, at the top of the first page. Hanns is what he calls Hannah when she is most determined to do what she likes regardless of whether the world will let her how is it where you are my wander-vogue?

she will like that, wander-vogue for wandervogel or will she just think him immature?

his handwriting is execrable

My handwriting is execrable, my apologies, I am out of practice, I don’t do much with my hands now that involves many words cross out everything from I don’t to words

I am working to improve this though as I will tell you and you will see in the course of this letter. Which comes with a smile and a laugh to say a hello to you, how are you? are you getting some fight practice in? I am thinking of you. Father is

in reasonable spirits

weak

a terrible roommate and it is a very small room

in reasonable spirits, sometimes he is even hopeful yes

If he knew I were writing to you he would send his love. One good outcome of coming here is that they took his killing fluid away from him in Brighton so the butterflies of the Isle of Man are free to come and go on both sides of the wire like ‘the souls of summer hours’ that the Poet Laureate says they are. There, I have remembered that piece of poetry to tell you, are you impressed?

he can see her handwriting in his head, clever, flowing, sharp, leaning like she does when she’s on a bicycle right over the handlebars as if leaning will make it go faster

here I am, sick for home, not just standing amid the bewildered alien corn, no I am the bewildered alien corn, and very corny too, yes, thank-you she will like the poetry what-have-you, she will appreciate it forlorn! as John Keats would say and tolling away to myself like a poetic bell I’m on the lookout for a more melodious plot but where we are and what I’ve got will have to

no. Cross out the forlorn and the tolling. Cross it all out from here I am to will have to

Here in this Island of Men on the Isle of Man your brother is pleased to be able to report to you he has friends, I have in fact made a real pal, a jolly chap, we pal around together and it is a comfort to have a friend in this strange Zwangsgemeinschaft of a mineshaft she will like that, good,

though he won’t tell her

(or anyone)

about how Cyril knows exactly how to take him and hold him till he comes, which he now does for Daniel and Daniel for him most days of the week. He can see her now in his head. If she saw, she’d know. She would not disapprove. He knows that she would laugh and laugh, empty herself laughing, at the rumour that the camp authorities are now lacing the porridge with bromide to help them all control their urges, the main result of which is that most people don’t eat the porridge any more, the secondary result of which is all the more material for Kurt

here Hanns it feels far away, but we are all in anticipation all the time cross that all out

here Hanns though it feels far away I find myself among such artists and clever folk that I am sure you would approve, and say, you’re a lucky boy, Dani, in fact I’d go so far as to say if you were here yourself you’d be in your element. If the element wasn’t a prison put a line through that last sentence

remember when she wrote to him after their mother died and said that the people left behind after someone has died are liable to become inhabitants of Grief Island and must be sure to carry an inflatable life jacket with them to help them swim away if the weather roughens and they haven’t got access to a boat.

She is so clever. She has always said, always been able to say the unsayables. He is a poor substitute, especially for a letter writer.

But he will pass on no fear, he crosses out

we are now much less fearful of an invasion than we were as soon as he writes it

he will not mention the lurch in the stomach, the fairground swing of hope

/ despair, he won’t say anything about the boredom, she’d just scorn him for being it, he will not even write the beautiful line he was so proud of thinking up

we have been here behind the wire all through the bright open door of the summer

even though it seems to him a beautiful sequence of words. He will not mention how easy it would have been for him or their father to find themselves on a ship to Canada or Australia just by the accident of being in one room or another when the selections were made, and he will not write about the boat that was torpedoed, or how red the sky went over Liverpool burning, even all that distance away. He will not say how time is not recognizable as time any more, how he can’t bring himself to eat sometimes, how sometimes he finds he is walking about like Uncle Ernst did when Ernst was drunk.

Ernst. Dead now or alive?

We tell nobody your name or where we imagine you might be. There are ears everywhere and they are not always listening for a Keatsian melodious plot

is a paragraph he will not write in her letter

instead

I have been reading for you in case you are right now too busy or otherwise preoccupied or not getting the chance to read for yourself, most unlikely I know, but there we are, and it is like we are companionable when I do, and because our camp Commandant is such a fine fellow he has said there can be some books in the camp, so there are some old volumes doing the rounds, they fall more apart the more more and more people read them he’ll have to sort that, there are too many mores but I have read in a pretty good copy David Copperfield by Charles Dickens. I would tell you my favourite quotations from it but now some other fellow has it and is no doubt enjoying it. I must say when the mother holds the baby brother up high in the air to show him to David when David is being driven away to school, at that point in the story I thought of you. I am grown sentimental in my older age but there you have it. I have also read Kafka. The story of the brother and sister who go past the gate of the manor house and maybe knock on the gate or maybe don’t. It is more true, that tiny story, than many a thing I have read and it has gone deep leave Dickens but cross out everything Kafka, replace with and a little Christmas story by Dickens too where a man asks a ghost to take his memory away so he will stop feeling sad about painful things he remembers. So the ghost does, it removes all the memories that cause the man pain. But the pain itself doesn’t go away, though the knowledge of why there IS pain has vanished. Then the man becomes bitter and angry and bewildered as to why he feels pain. And then, like a contagion, this bitterness and anger and the loss of memory of difficult things infect everyone the man comes in contact with, and soon everybody in the town is angry and bitter with no idea why.