on Thursday evening at nine. When we went out with colleagues of mine, Lotte would explain again why she couldn’t live in Oxford. The persistence of all those bells disturbed her work, she said. On top of that, one is always being tripped over, shoved, or bumped into by some student scurrying through the streets, or someone riding a bike while engaged in the life of the mind. At least once at every such dinner I would overhear Lotte tell the story of how she saw a woman knocked over by a bus on St. Giles’. One second she was crossing the street, she’d say, her voice rising, and the next she’s slumped against the wheels of a bus. It’s a crime, Lotte would go on, how they turn those children loose in the world with their heads full of Plato and Wittgenstein, but impart to them no sense of how to safely negotiate the dangers of daily life. It was a strange argument to make for someone who spent most of her days closeted in her study inventing stories and searching for ways to make them plausible. But, out of politeness, no one ever pointed that out.
The truth was more complicated, of course. Lotte liked her life in London—liked the anonymity that was hers as soon as she got off the Underground at Covent Garden or King’s Cross, and which would have been impossible in Oxford. She liked the swimming hole and our house in Highgate. And I think she liked being alone while I was off teaching the long-haired youth gathered from Winchester and the polished halls of Eton. On Thursday evenings she would be waiting for me with the car at Paddington, the windows fogged and the motor idling. In those first minutes of the drive home through the dark streets, while she still held in my eyes the clarity of something separate unto herself, I sometimes noticed in her a renewed patience—for our life together, perhaps, or for something else.
Yes, Lotte was a mystery to me, but I took comfort in those little islands I discovered in her, islands that I could always find, no matter how poor the conditions, and use to orient myself. At the center of her was her abysmal loss. She’d been forced to leave her home in Nuremberg when she was seventeen. For a year she’d lived with her parents in a transit camp in Zbaszyn, Poland, in what I can only imagine were atrocious conditions; she never spoke about that time, just as she rarely spoke of her childhood or her parents. In the summer of 1939, with the help of a young Jewish doctor also in the camp, she received a visa to chaperone eighty-six children on a Kindertransport to England. That detail, eighty-six, always struck me, both because the story as she told it had so few details, and also because it seemed such an enormous number. How did she care for so many children, knowing that everything she had ever known, that they’d all ever known, had just been lost forever? The boat left from Gdynia on the Baltic Sea. The voyage which was supposed to take three days took five instead, because halfway through it Stalin signed the pact with Hitler, and the boat had to be diverted to avoid Hamburg. They arrived in Harwich three days before war broke out. The children were scattered to foster homes throughout the country. Lotte waited until every last one of them had departed on a train. And then they were gone, carried away from her, and Lotte disappeared into her life.
No, I couldn’t possibly know what it was she carried in the depths of her. But slowly I discovered certain footholds. When she shouted out in her sleep, it was almost always her father she had been dreaming of. When she was hurt by something I’d said or done, or more often failed to do or say, she became suddenly friendly, although it was a sort of lacquered friendliness, the friendliness of two people who happen to find themselves sitting together on a bus ride, a long one for which only one of them has remembered to bring food. Some days later something little would happen—I would forget to return the tea canister to the shelf, or leave my socks on the floor—and she would explode. The force and volume of her anger were shocking, and the only possible response was to make myself very still, and stick