‘I wonder how Frank made it through, sometimes.’
She said, ‘My brother had difficulties as well. All his life. Though that did not stop our government sending him to fight in Russia.’
‘I’m sorry. I didn’t know.’
She gave a sad smile and looked away, to where a farmer was working a field, two big carthorses pulling an ancient plough. She turned back to him. ‘There seem to be certain people who have some quirk in them, something they cannot surmount.’
‘I think a lot of things went wrong in Frank’s early life.’
She stopped, watched the carthorses. ‘With my brother something inside him was different from the start. But he had a right to live.’ She looked at David with sudden fierceness. ‘A right to live, like everybody.’
David hesitated, then said, ‘You told me your government helped load the Jews onto trains.’
‘Yes, they did.’
The fate of the Jews was a subject David avoided. But Natalia knew, something at least, of what had happened to them in Europe. He asked, ‘Do you know where they went?’
‘Nobody knows for sure. But I think somewhere bad.’
‘We don’t really know anything about it over here. We’ve been told about comfortable labour camps.’
She began walking again. ‘We had many Jews in Bratislava before the war. I had several Jewish friends.’ David nodded and smiled, encouraging her to continue. ‘It happened in steps; restricting where the Jews could work, then taking away their businesses, turning the screw, bit by bit.’
‘As is happening here.’
‘In 1941 they were all expelled from Bratislava.’ Her voice was flat and unemotional again, and David began to realize what it cost her to keep it so. ‘There was a family in our street, the man was a baker. One morning I was woken by the sound of breaking glass. I looked out of the window and saw men from the Hlinka Guard – our Fascist paramilitaries – pulling them out of the house, kicking and hitting them. They threw them in a van and drove them away. Some of the Hlinka men stayed behind, and I heard them in the house, breaking things and coming out with armfuls of clothes and ornaments. Later we learned the same thing was happening all over town. One of the Hlinka people and his family moved into the bakery and started it going again, as though it had always been theirs. That is what most of these Fascists are, thieves waiting for loot.’
David shivered. ‘Did nobody protest?’
She gave him a sudden fierce look. ‘What should I have done that day, gone and told the Hlinka Guard to stop? What you think they would have done to me?’
‘No, of course you couldn’t have done anything.’
‘And it was all done so quickly. Some people did protest after it started, even some priests, which embarrassed Tiso. They stopped the deportations for a while. Though I heard they resumed later.’ She sighed. ‘I wish I could have done something.’
‘You couldn’t. I’m sorry; I know you couldn’t.’
She smiled, looking suddenly vulnerable. ‘No. People should know though. It is good you are interested.’
‘And they were put on trains?’
‘That was a year later. We’d been told the Jews were in work camps somewhere in the remote countryside, we didn’t know where. People were starting to forget them. Then one day, it was a beautiful summer day, my fiance and I went for a long drive. He had a car, not many do in Slovakia. We drove a long way. A long way.’ She looked into the middle distance. ‘We had a picnic on a hillside, I remember some deer came out of the woods nearby and drank at a stream. We sat watching them. Afterwards we went for a hike. We went over fields and meadows, saw the mountains in the distance.’ So she had a fiance, David thought. What had happened to him?
‘We crossed a big hill. On the other side was the railway line that goes over the mountains into Poland. We hadn’t realized we had come so far.’ Her voice had slowed. ‘And there was a train standing there, in the middle of nowhere, there must have been an obstruction on the line somewhere. A huge goods train, wagon after wagon, just standing there in the sunshine. We wouldn’t have thought anything of it, but we heard noises.’ She shook her head slightly, closing her eyes. ‘All the wagons had small ventilation windows and barbed wire across them. We heard voices, calling to us in Yiddish. We didn’t understand what we were seeing, Gustav and I, so we walked down a little, towards the train, and then we caught this terrible smell – I don’t know how long those people had been travelling but it must have been a long time in the heat.’
‘How many were on the train?’
‘I don’t know. Hundreds. One woman was calling to us over and over, begging for water. Then two men in the black Hlinka uniform, with rifles, came round the end of the train – they must have been patrolling the other side – and waved and shouted at us to go away. So we walked back. I was frightened we might get a bullet in the back for what we had seen. But I think they would not have hurt us, because of Gustav’s uniform.’
‘Was he a soldier?’
She answered, quiet defiance in her voice, ‘Yes. He was German.’
David glanced at her in surprise. She said, suddenly defensive, ‘He was with German Army Intelligence, the Abwehr. He hadn’t known what was going on, he was very junior, it shook him. We both knew that if people were transported in that state, by the time they reached their destination many would be dead.’ She turned and stared at him. ‘The British, like the French, say they are proud of protecting their own Jews, only deporting foreign ones. But that is what happened to those they did deport.’
‘My God, it’s terrible.’
‘I know.’ She smiled wryly. ‘I have not told many people this story.’
‘It must be hard to tell.’
‘It is.’
‘What happened to your fiance?’
‘I married him. And now he is dead.’ Her tone changed, that flat finality again. She turned away, stubbing her cigarette on the tarmac. ‘And now we should get back on the road. Focus on your friend Frank.’
FRANK SAT IN HIS USUAL ARMCHAIR, staring out at the grounds. There was a slight mist this morning. It was Sunday and some of the patients had gone to the church service, so it was quiet on the ward.
David was coming today. After Frank had telephoned him yesterday he had felt agitated; talking to his friend had got all his feelings jangled up, about how he had ended up in here and about what he knew. He was frightened that somehow he might let his secret slip. Sitting in his chair he found his mind wandering back to school. Maybe because he had only just had his Largactil dose, for once he found himself thinking of his time there in a detached way, almost as though it had all happened to someone else.
By Frank’s second and third year at Strangmans things had settled into a strange routine. Everyone pretty much shunned him, although the boys still shouted ‘Monkey’ after him in the corridors, ‘Give us yer grin, chimp’, and other things, too; names like Spastic and Weed and, occasionally, ‘English Cunt’. There were several other boys from England at the school but it was another stick to beat Frank with – metaphorically, for the school believed firmly that though sticks and stones could break your bones, names could never hurt you. In the bug-hut sometimes the sheets would be stolen from his bed, or someone would piss in his bedside glass of water, but he had his books and most of the time he lived, or existed, in a world of his own. Yet the knowledge that the other boys and most of the masters despised him left him with a deep, heartbroken sorrow.
At the beginning of his fourth year, when he was fourteen, things got worse again. Edgar had just gone to university and the boys in his year were changing. It was not just their bodies, which were getting larger and sprouting hair, as Frank’s was. Their personalities were changing too, some becoming withdrawn while others seemed to fizz with angry energy. Frank would overhear them, in class before the teacher came, talking about girls and sex, sticking their cocks up women. Frank had his own sexual imaginings but they were different, oddly romantic and untroubling. During the school holidays in Esher he often went to the cinema on his own. It was 1931, the talkies had come in. The romantic elements in the films Frank saw there, usually pure and chaste, stirred him; it was a strange window into a world of happiness.
Lumsden, the boy who had caused Frank trouble in his first year, now came back into his life. He was big
