I packed my bag, checked out, and caught the next plane back to London.
It was late by the time the taxi pulled up in front of our house in Highgate, but what I could see of it filled me with joy—its familiar outline against the sky, the streetlights falling through the leaves, the lights burning yellow in the windows, yellow as they only ever look from the outside looking in, yellow like the windows in that painting by Magritte. Then and there I decided that I would forgive Lotte anything. So long as life could go on as it had. So long as the chair that was there when we went to sleep was there again in the morning, I didn’t care what happened to it as we slept side by side, didn’t care if it was the same chair or a thousand different chairs, or if, during the long night, it ceased to exist at all—so long as when I sat down on it to put on my shoes, as I did every morning, it would hold my weight. I didn’t need to know everything. I only needed to know that our life would go on together as it always had. With shaking hands, I paid the driver and searched for my keys.
I called out Lotte’s name. A pause, and then I heard her footsteps on the stairs. She was alone. As soon as I saw her expression, I understood that the boy had gone for good. I don’t know how I knew, but I did. Something wordless was exchanged between us. We embraced. When she asked me how the conference had gone, and why I had come home a day early, I told her it had been fine, nothing interesting, and that I had missed her. We made a late dinner together, and as we ate I searched Lotte’s face and voice for some sign of how things had ended with Varsky, but the way was barred: in the days that followed Lotte was subdued, lost in thought, and I let her be, as I always have.
It was months before I realized that she had given him her desk. I only found out because I noticed that a table we kept in the cellar was missing. I asked her if she’d seen it, and she told me she was using it as a desk. But you have a desk, I said, stupidly. I gave it away, she said. Gave it away? I said, unbelieving. To Daniel, she said. He admired it, and so I gave it to him.
Yes, Lotte was a mystery to me, but a mystery through which I somehow found my way. She was the only child with her parents when the SS rung their bell that October night of 1938 and rounded them up with the other Polish Jews. Her brothers and sisters were all older than she—one sister was studying law in Warsaw, one brother was the editor of a communist paper in Paris, another was a music teacher in Minsk. For a year she clung to her elderly parents and they to her inside the sealed compartment of that rapidly moving nightmare. When her chaperone visa came through, it must have felt like a miracle. Of course it would have been unimaginable not to take it and go. But it must have been equally unimaginable to leave her parents. I don’t think Lotte ever forgave herself for it. I always believed it was her only real regret in life, but a regret of such vast proportions that it couldn’t be dealt with straight on. It reared its head in unlikely places. For example, I thought that what really bothered Lotte about the woman who was hit by a bus on St. Giles’ was how she herself had reacted in the moment. She had watched it happen—the woman stepping into the street, the screech of brakes, the terrible, inanimate thud—and as a crowd gathered around the fallen woman, she had turned and continued on her way. She hadn’t mentioned it until that night, when we were reading. She told me the story, and of course I’d asked what anyone would have—whether the woman had been all right. A certain look came over Lotte’s face, a look I’d seen many times before, and which I can only describe as a kind of stillness, as if everything that normally existed near the surface had retreated into the depths. A moment passed. I felt something one from