And the old Jew said, “Well, I got no use for Chekists or camps. Who does? But you want I should take a young girl into mine house? Into this?” His wave took in all the neglect. “And a German girl? Vey iz mir!”
“She’s not that young, David Samuelovich. She’s my age, give or take a little,” Vasili said. “Believe me, next to the camps, what you’ve got here is great. And see? You’ll be able to talk to her better than I can. You can call her your niece or your cousin or something, visiting from the real Russia.”
“She’s your age? That’s young. Believe me, that’s young,” Berman said. “But I’ll do it. If she gets caught, we all go to the gulag. For you, for her, it’s a worry. For me? I don’t care what happens to me no more.”
“I’ll bring tonight,” Vasili said. “You can keep her a secret till she grows some hair and gets some clothes that don’t have a number on them.”
He feared Maria Bauer would have fallen asleep by the time he came back up the road whistling his song. But she came out at once and walked to Smidovich with him. “A Jew?” she said when he told her David Berman’s name. “I go to a Jew?” She laughed.
“He thinks it’s funny, too,” Vasili told her, which didn’t stretch things…too far.
He knocked on Berman’s door. The old man opened it. Maria stumbled inside. Vasili went away. Either he’d just done something marvelous or he’d wrecked three lives. Well, you could only try.
–
Simon Perkins was already at work compounding medicines when Daisy Baxter came downstairs. Grinding away with a big brass mortar and pestle, he might have fallen through time from the Middle Ages. Even the faintly camphory, faintly sulfurous odor of the chemist’s shop suggested bygone days. Only his waistcoat, necktie, and gold-framed bifocals argued for 1952.
“Good morning, Mr. Perkins,” she said, as cheerfully as she could. She didn’t feel she knew him well enough to use his Christian name. She wondered if anyone in the world did.
“Good morning, Mrs. Baxter,” he answered, not stopping what he was doing.
Did he bear down a bit on the title that showed she was, or at least had been, a married woman? She didn’t want him to be difficult. Yes, he was generous, to give shelter to someone who’d lived through the disaster that crushed Fakenham. But couldn’t he leave it there?
Evidently he couldn’t, because he went on, “You got in late last night-or I should say, this morning.”
“I’m ever so sorry if I bothered you coming up the stairs,” Daisy said, pretending not to hear any larger meanings in his remark. “I tried to be as quiet as I could.”
“I wasn’t awake very long,” he said grudgingly. “But what can you and your Yank be doing that keeps you out till half past two?”
He sounded as if he honestly had no idea. Daisy didn’t know whether that made her want to laugh or to cry or to do both at once. What are we doing? We’re screwing like bunnies was the first thing that leaped into her mind. However tempting it was, though, it would only make things worse.
“We have a good time,” she said. “We enjoy each other’s company.” And the North Sea was damp, and the flash when an atom bomb went off was bright. Words were useless for some things. If you hadn’t experienced them, they couldn’t mean anything to you. She did try to sound as innocent as she could. For that, words were worth something.
“I daresay,” Simon Perkins replied. Perhaps she sounded less innocent than she hoped.
“It’s really between Bruce and me, don’t you think?” she said. Before he could tell her whether he did think that-she would have bet against it-she added, “I’m going out for some breakfast. I’ll see you later.”
Out she went. She could feel his eyes boring into the small of her back like awls. She was glad to close the door behind her. She wondered whether she ought to look for another room. She didn’t want to. Even with as little in the way of worldly goods as she had, moving was a bloody nuisance. But if Mr. Perkins was going to get his nose out of joint whenever she and Bruce spent time together, she might not have a choice.
She bought scrambled eggs and chips and her morning cuppa at a place around the corner from the chemist’s shop. She had a hot plate in her room; she could brew tea there. She could even cook if she had no other choice, but a little experimenting had shown that anything beyond tea or heating tinned soup was more trouble than it was worth.
The town hall had gone up in the 1880s. It was brick and granite, built with smug Victorian confidence that it would still be an important place two hundred years from when it went up. Back then, the British Empire had been the unchallenged, the unchallengeable, mistress of the world. Here it was, only a lifetime later, and the Empire was a tattered ruin of its grander self. The home country, still in the grip of crippling austerity after the last war, had been hit again, harder, by this new one.
People nowadays laughed at how smug and certain their grandparents had been. No one now was certain about anything-and how could you be, when the town where you lived might get seared out of existence in the next moment? But that sureness that their achievements would last forever made Daisy envy her ancestors…and also made her want to weep at the foundering of all their hopes.
Inside the hall, signs with arrows directed people to where they needed to go. By now, she knew which window to visit without resorting to them. The window had a newly printed sign held in place above it by sticky tape: FAKENHAM SURVIVOR BENEFITS. This was where the government gave what it could spare to the townsfolk the Russians hadn’t managed to murder with their atom bomb.
The clerk looked up from a form he’d been filling in. “Ah, Mrs. Baxter,” he said. “How are you this morning?” His smile and something in his voice told her he liked the way she looked.
She smiled back, not quite with the same warmth. He was polite, which made his regard more a compliment than an annoyance. She wanted to keep it that way. “I’m fine, Mr. Jarvis, thanks,” she said. “And you?”
“I’m very well, very well indeed,” he replied. “You’ve come for the weekly allotment?”
“That’s right.” She wondered why else she or anyone else would come to this tan-painted, poorly lit corridor. Unless you had to be here, you’d stay as far away as you could.
“Here you are.” He handed her an envelope. She looked inside to make sure the money the state said she was entitled to was in there. When she saw it was, she signed the line on the allotment roster that also held her typewritten name. She turned to go, but Mr. Jarvis said, “Wait a moment, please.”
“Yes?” Now she didn’t sound one bit warm. Was he going to prove a bother after all?
But all he did was hand her another envelope. “This came in for you yesterday. As you’ll know, the post to Fakenham has been, ah, rather badly disrupted since the, ah, unfortunate incident.”
“The A-bomb, you mean,” she said. Government officials thought they could hide the mushroom cloud behind a thicker cloud of meaningless words.
“Well, yes.” Mr. Jarvis didn’t care to admit it but couldn’t very well deny it.
“Thank you very much,” she said, giving him credit for admitting it and more because he wasn’t in fact trying to urge himself on her.
Sure enough, the envelope had gone to the Owl and Unicorn’s address in ruined Fakenham. It was from her insurance company. Bloody took them long enough, she thought as she opened it.
It has come to our attention that the property at the above-mentioned address may have been adversely affected by the unfortunate events of 11 September 1951, she read. A soft snort escaped her. The insurers talked as if they wanted to be bureaucrats. She waded through a couple of paragraphs of turgid drivel before she got to the meat. As acts of war and acts of God are specifically disallowed under the provisions of Clause 6.2.3.a.3 of your policy, we regret to inform you that we have no financial obligation in the matter of damages suffered on or about the above-mentioned date in regard to the unfortunate events thereof.