Asymmetry - Lisa Halliday Page 0,18
to the bathroom and came back looking impressed. “I’d almost forgotten we had asparagus.”
“So . . . there’s no hospital on the island?”
“There’s a hospital in Greenport. And another one in Southampton. But don’t worry. Virgil knows what he’s doing. And anyway”—he flung out a hand—“look at me. I’m fine.” After blinking at her thoughtfully for a moment, he brought his hand back in to look at his watch.
“Have you read this?” She held up the Auschwitz book.
Ezra shook his head. “It’s no good.”
“What do you mean?”
“Too much toilet training.”
“Excuse me?”
“Hitler was toilet-trained too early, Mussolini was left on the pot too long. It’s all Freudian speculation that has nothing to do with anything. If you want to learn about the Holocaust I’ll show you what to read.”
On Sundays, she brooded. How dreary it would be, back in the city, five more days of answering phones, hustling blurbs, unjamming staplers. When Ezra went down to the pool for his Aqua Fitness, Alice stood by the window and watched as he descended to wade back and forth across the sun-dappled shallow end, savoring its resistance. Then the wind picked up, erasing him from view, and the rest of the morning she spent drifting from room to room, picking up books and putting them down again, pouring glasses of lemonade and sitting at the kitchen table to drink them, listening to the bees. The clock over the sink ticked loudly.
He came in a little after two to find her lying on the sofa, a forearm over her eyes.
“Sweetheart, what’s wrong?”
“Nothing. Just thinking.”
“Don’t you want to use the pool?”
“I will, in a bit.”
“What time’s your train?”
“Six eleven.”
“What time do you get in?”
“I should be home by nine thirty.”
“Clete’ll take you to the ferry. As for me . . .” He looked around, as though the room were a mess and he didn’t know where to start. “I’m going to stay out here for a while. At least until the end of September. I’ve got to finish this draft.”
“Okay.”
“It’s giving me trouble.”
“Mm-hmm.”
“I have something for you.” From his shirt pocket he pulled a sheet of paper with three ring holes in it, folded neatly into fourths:
GITTA SERENY, INTO THAT DARKNESS
PRIMO LEVI, SURVIVAL IN AUSCHWITZ
HANNAH ARENDT, EICHMANN IN JERUSALEM
“Thank you,” said Alice.
“You’re velcome,” he said.
• • •
He was born in Altmünster, a small town in Austria, on March 26, 1908. His only sister was then ten, his mother still young and pretty, but his father was already an ageing man.
“He was a nightwatchman by the time I was born, but all he could ever think or talk about were his days in the Dragoons [one of the Austro-Hungarian Imperial élite regiments]. His dragoon uniform, always carefully brushed and pressed, hung in the wardrobe. I was so sick of it, I got to hate uniforms. I knew since I was very small, I don’t remember exactly when, that my father hadn’t really wanted me. I heard them talk. He thought I wasn’t really his. He thought my mother . . . you know. . . .”
“Even so, was he kind to you?”
He laughed without mirth. “He was a Dragoon. Our lives were run on regimental lines. I was scared to death of him. I remember one day—I was about four or five and I’d just been given new slippers. It was a cold winter morning. The people next door to us were moving. The moving van had come—a horse-drawn carriage then, of course. The driver had gone into the house to help get the furniture and there was this wonderful carriage and no one about.
“I ran out through the snow, new slippers and all. The snow came half-way up my legs but I didn’t care. I climbed up and I sat in the driver’s seat, high above the ground. Everything as far as I could see was quiet and white and still. Only far in the distance there was a black spot moving in the whiteness of the new snow. I watched it but I couldn’t recognize what it was until suddenly I realized it was my father coming home. I got down as fast as I could and raced back through the deep snow into the kitchen and hid behind my mother. But he got there almost as fast as I. ‘Where is the boy?’ he asked, and I had to come out. He put me over his knees and leathered me. He had cut his finger some days before and wore a bandage. He