On the Heroism of Mortals Read online

  The difficulty in remembering the town was indeed its own anonymity, its unexceptional presence in that unchanging landscape. The church, the central square, the plain but solid architecture, the drabness of its citizens, now weighed down by the thing they detested most, the unpredictability of war. He moved amongst them quickly, studying their faces carefully as he went. Survival meant staying in the town for the shortest possible time, and discovering who could help. A man on the run is like a beggar; he learns to read a person’s face, to know who might be compassionate enough to assist if the risk is not too high. A buxom woman with a kindly smile and a little sadness around the eyes was surely a reliable choice. He sidled up with a now well-practised artfulness, a mixture of assertiveness and supplication. Those who survived a month on the run had a good chance of surviving much longer, he would say, only luck could get you through that first month.

  “Madam, could I have a word,” he said in his heavily accented Romanian, but she answered him in German, a language he knew very well. “Yid! Filthy Yid! You’re the people who brought this evil war upon us.” The idiocy of her words only just touched him, while a few years earlier he would have been outraged by such bigotry. His principal thought was that he had misjudged, and now had to escape. She continued, as though addressing everyone around, but they ignored her and continued about their business: “My son volunteered and now he’s dead on the Eastern Front.” Fortunately she now appeared to forget my grandfather as she poured out her grief at her son’s early death. He slipped into a side street and headed towards the church. There were plenty of German and Romanian soldiers around in the border area of Bukovina, where two allies met and the principal language of the people was Ukrainian. A funeral procession appeared and he pushed himself in amongst the mourners. No one appeared to mind or question his presence. Bareheaded, he allowed himself to be drawn along by a crowd of black-suited men all wearing hats, mostly of a similar kind to the one he would hold on his knee as he told this story. It was a homburg, a cheap woollen one but neat in the stitch work attaching the inner leather band around the rim. It was a very dark brown, and shiny with use.

  My grandfather was calm again. He had learned to rapidly regain clear-headedness. Like a hunted animal, his senses could pick up the slightest change in circumstance, which he then swiftly assessed. But what happened next had no slightness about it. When it came, it brought not agitation, but a numbness, a terror, a feeling of complete impotence. An open personnel carrier lurched into the street and German soldiers ran off in all directions. Others halted the procession and only let it continue even more slowly than before, as they randomly selected mourners to show their papers. My grandfather didn’t have any.

  He looked around and it was immediately clear that there was no escape. Surely he would be selected. Just as he let that sense of resignation seep into his consciousness like a cold steel blade, he felt the hat’s rim on his hair. Before the war, that unexpected act would have given him a jump and instinctively he would have turned to see who was responsible, but with his heightened senses he did not react and immediately felt reassured. He was not alone. Someone had come unbidden to his rescue.

  My grandfather judged the distance to the German roadblock and then waited as they shuffled slowly forwards until he had covered half of it. Then he turned to see the hatless man who was his benefactor. He saw an elderly man, smartly dressed for the times. The man had a moustache and goatee beard. Both very grey of course. He looked respectable and slightly severe, a teacher perhaps or even a judge. My grandfather tried to catch his attention, vainly wishing to express his gratitude, but the stiff-backed man refused to allow their eyes to meet. There was no quiver of a smile or acknowledgement of what had passed between them. So convincing was his expressionless face that my grandfather looked around in search of another hatless head, but there were none to be seen. He would never again see that face, “but I would recognise him like a brother if I ever saw him,” he would say with a determination that suggested such a thing could still happen – that he wanted to search the world for a face that could no longer have existed by the time he told me the story.

  Just before my grandfather could reach the soldiers, his benefactor was called out because of his conspicuous hatlessness. They demanded his papers, which he produced with deliberate slowness for a vigorous man, and they grudgingly returned them. By then my grandfather was passing between the soldiers, somehow certain that he was going to be safe. Once he was, he turned only to see the back of the man hurrying up a hill away from the funeral with a sprightly step. His back was turned, and this enigmatic soul disappeared forever. A moment later, my grandfather’s mind returned to the business of keeping alive, but he was always to keep that hat.

  When I was a young child, he would still wear it, but it was becoming very worn, and in his last years he kept it on his desk, on a stand he had specially made. I was seventeen at the time of his death in 1990. As a teenager, I liked to go into his study to chat to him. He was an educated man and a polyglot. He could talk on any subject, often with passion. His ideas reflected his generation: he became a member of the Communist Party once he got to Britain, and he left at the time Hungary was invaded. But he remained a communist for the rest of his life; the Labour Party, of which he was a fully paid-up member until he died at the age of eighty-two, never satisfied his radical belief in humanity. “Too English,” he would say, which expressed his mixture of admiration and contempt for the nation that had provided him with asylum but often seemed to have done so less out of humanist generosity than out of patrician grandness that cannot distinguish between those who do not belong to its class. And he had been useful with his knowledge of nuclear physics, although his politics did stunt his career.

  He was a man without animosity – a detachment that he learned perhaps from his fearful years on the run. “I was lucky,” he would say, “I never saw the inside of a camp.” However much the conversation ranged from language to literature, from science to religion and from politics to peace, it always came back to that hat that sat on the table, a symbol of the past, of brutal times and the human goodness that had somehow prevailed. He did not just retell the story. He spoke of the man, who he might have been and what he might have done after the war. Where had he gone in that most fluid part of Europe, where everyone was fleeing from one side to the other, often with a moment’s notice? Should he have sought him out? I felt that what tormented him was not so much the fact that he had never been able to thank the man as his desire to find out what kind of man might have made such a gesture. “Any kind of man,” I would say, “surely any man – or woman – is capable of such an act.” But he did not look convinced by my answer. Perhaps he felt that he was going to die without knowing an essential clue to human nature.

  Later still, he started to obsess about the hat itself. “Have you seen that?” he once said. “The hat was made in Vienna. This was a much-travelled man, someone with a cosmopolitan background. An intellectual, no doubt.”

  “You just want him to be someone like yourself,” I countered, “to reassure you that his decency was of your own kind.”

  He took this criticism seriously, and looked at me with genuine admiration.

  “He could easily have been a local squire, who on a single trip to Vienna, the capital before the First World War, took advantage of the opportunity to buy a hat, albeit a hat that you have already defined as cheap,” I expanded on the argument.

  “You’re right,” he muttered as though bending before an unpalatable truth. “He might have been a local, small-town judge, a devout Catholic and full of those minor prejudices so typical of a man of such a station in those times. And yet he could sense the injustice of my plight and took swift action. All it cost him was a cheap hat and a few moments of bother with the German soldiers.”

  “Maybe, but he alone amongst all those people took action. The others resisted passively; he resisted actively. There’s a huge difference.”

  “Only t
hose who were in a radius of a few feet of me could have taken that action. Some of those might also have had no papers or papers that were in some way defective. Those were the times. The difference between him and the others might not have been so great.” And of course he was right. That was the joy of keeping his company: he could pick over the tiny details of life, and that momentary act of generosity fascinated him primarily because of its anonymity.

  “He might have been a bank manager or even an elderly clerk, passed over for promotion precisely because of his intellectual interests,” my grandfather continued to speculate.

  “There you go again,” I argued, “always letting your imagination run away and in a single direction. You are certain that he suffered in some way. Perhaps only in a small way. You think that only someone who has suffered can show compassion, but how can you be sure?”

  “I can’t of course,” he answered darkly, “but statistically it is more probable. When you’re older, you’ll understand.”

  I hated that argument then; I probably use it now.

  “He was not that conventional. This hat has a hard rim,” I pointed out, “and yet he removed it with two fingers and a thumb around the start of the dent running along the top.”

  “My God, you’re right,” he said with a wry but friendly smile. “It is even more worn and shiny in those three spots, pressing under the crease and spoiling the hat’s perfect symmetry. And I always used the brim.”

  “I know, and I expect most Europeans did. Isn’t there something slightly American about that way of putting a hat on one’s head and removing it? Cinematic perhaps?”

  “You’re quite a girl,” he beamed, and I remember those words so well. “You should be a detective.” Then in a faintly troubled tone, he continued, “This only adds to the uncertainty around this enigmatic figure.” His smile returned immediately; this was his favourite subject.

  A week or so after that conversation, he summoned me to his study, which was unusual. He sat down gravely and signalled me to do the same. It was almost like an interview, and certainly quite unlike our customary behaviour. He looked at the ceiling as though he had a clearly defined thought very difficult to put into words even in his head. He then sat up straight to glance at his papers, which turned out to have nothing to do with what he wanted to say, and finally coughed gently. “I wanted to speak to you about something of great importance. I have been thinking for several months about who should be the person to whom I shall leave my most treasured possession.” By then, I knew exactly where he was going, and was feeling a little disappointed. My grandfather owned many beautiful things: books, paintings and various objects collected on his travels to academic conferences. “It will probably come as something of a surprise, but I know you will be delighted that I have chosen you and not one of the other grandchildren. They will want things of value; they’re all a little bourgeois, you know.” I nodded guiltily. “You are … and I feel a little silly telling you this … my favourite grandchild by far. I suppose because I see a lot of myself in you. That’s how it is. Crass, I know. But it comes down to that. I know that by leaving you the hat that saved my life I am declaring my preference, and that might please your mother, but it won’t my other children … and their offspring.” I forgot in that moment my lapse into acquisitiveness and began to feel embarrassment at being crowned with that anonymous hat. A feeling of great pleasure and great awkwardness. What do you say when chosen for such a personal gift? It was as if he had offered to leave me part of his soul.

  After he died, there was another strange event – a kind of informal ceremony – at which my mother and my aunts and uncles handed over the precious hat with its stand. “It’s a man’s hat,” my mother’s brother stated the obvious. “In a delicate state,” my mother added. They were not discourteous, but much was left unsaid. I was in no doubt that they found my grandfather’s decision quite bewildering; they perhaps had not noticed our closeness. As often happens in families, no one observes what’s going on under their noses. Family relationships are often based on the intimacy of mutual incomprehension. My mother’s eldest brother was the most generous – in the manner of older siblings – and never lost an opportunity for judicious advice. “My father has paid you a great honour,” he said as he placed a patriarchal arm around my shoulder while leaving the other hand free to wave a finger authoritatively, “one that might quite reasonably have been due to me. But my father was a very good judge of character, and if he chose you, he did so for a good reason. You must show yourself worthy of the trust he has placed in you.”

  So the hat was moved from his desk to my bedroom and then to the various studies that I have had in various homes. I have not been in the habit of speaking about it to many people, but it is the thing that holds me to my grandfather, to whom I was closer than to my own parents – with their perennial squabbling, their competitiveness between themselves and jointly with others, and their great love of possessions. For strangely, when that hat became part of me, I lost all my hankering for other things. With it I also inherited from my grandfather’s very limited needs – excepting the greedy and insatiable need to understand, which is of course no small thing and requires the right kind of job and the right kind of mind.

  I have failed in life. Of course. We all do.

  I have failed as an academic. I have failed to formulate my ideas and pass them on to others. I have failed to engage with colleagues, so fixated was I with my own research. I rejected all those compromises you have to make if you’re to get anywhere, but compromised with those outside work who made demands upon my time. Somehow I have betrayed my talents, when that was the thing I least wanted to do. How is it that my grandfather got all these things right, even after those years of suffering? He thought that I was like him; how wrong he was.

  I have failed as a wife, thank God. I was critical of my parents’ shallow marriage, and wanted something much better for myself. I was the first to marry a non-Jew, although my parents were both atheists, as was my grandfather. Oddly my parents – particularly my mother – were against my marrying outside – outside what exactly? The race? That’s nonsense. They would, it appears, have preferred me to marry a practising Jew, in spite of their contempt for such people. And yet I cannot deny that they had their part of the truth, however absurd it might seem. When I look at my husband, my “English” husband … but how can I say that? What am I, if not English? When I look at my English husband, I feel this instinctive irritation at the magnitude of his complacency. He is not a bad man – not a particularly good one either, I now think. He’s not uneducated – a qualified GP – but he shares that anti-intellectualism of the English middle classes. He wants nothing that disturbs his views, his certainties, and the pleasantness of his life. His beer, his football matches, his car, his climbing, his son perhaps, and oh, his wife. Once he found me an asset: good-looking, sharp, well educated, he thought. Definitely an asset. But the world has changed and now he finds me a little extravagant – and not so pretty as I was. He calls me selfish, because I follow my career, and now that assertion has no effect on me whatsoever. It is not the emptiness of my marriage that worries me; it is my lack of belief in ever finding a man worthy of my love. I think that I want someone like my grandfather, who I thought a not uncommon type. I want a man who is passionate about ideas but calm about his needs and his relationships, exactly as my grandfather was. But do such men grow in this land of cloistered consumerism? Do they only grow from the more acidic earth into which blood has been spilt in vast quantities? What can we expect of a country that hasn’t known the misery of warfare since the English Revolution briefly turned it on its head? My husband comes home and talks brightly of nothing, and when I stare at him with disenchantment clearly stated in my eyes, he accuses me of being moody and neurotic. Those words! If only he knew what a compliment they are; so much better than the other ones he showers on me all sugared with condescension. I know that I will leave him once my son has finished his studies. N
ot long now he is eighteen years of age.

  I have failed as a parent. God forgive my soul! I had such hopes for him. I wanted him to be called Thaddeus, but my husband insisted on Geoffrey. Nomen omen. I do not know him now, and that is why I write. I came home last night and Geoffrey was in his room with a girl. I heard them laughing as I climbed the stairs, and was going to leave them alone, but he called out to me, “Mum, come in here. You’re going to love this.” Of course, the statement contained an obvious menace, but parenthood involves these things now. I was expecting a humiliation. Still I knocked on the door. I was actually expecting a teenage display of inappropriate sexual behaviour – inappropriate for other people’s eyes, that is. “Come in, come in, Mum! Nothing naughty going on here, is there Jill? Well, not yet anyway.” Jill produced a roar of unrestrained laughter that contained only a hint of unease when at last I stood in the doorway. She must have noticed my expression of horror, but she could not have understood the reason.

  Though slightly drunk, Geoffrey knew immediately that he had gone too far. He adopted a defensive attitude that I knew was going to be stubborn. Jill’s laughter slowly died down. “What do you think you’re doing?” I sneered coldly, snarled perhaps. Something broke within me. He pretended not to understand, “Just having a little fun with Jill. Nothing serious, you know. Just a little fun.”

  “Jill can go to hell, for all I care,” I said.