Summer Read online

  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 soli
dified 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 –