A Traitor to Memory

He observed me and I saw that opaqueness in his eyes, that expression that had always succeeded so well in defining a territory whose landscape was ice, bitter wind, and endless smoke-coloured sky. “That's unworthy of you,” he said. “I think you know what I'm talking about.”





“But never to say her name. All those years. To me. Never to say even the words your sister …”





“There would have been profit in that, you think? You would have gained something had Sonia's murder become part of the daily fabric of our lives. Is that your conclusion?”





“I just don't understand—”





He drank down the rest of his espresso and put the cup on the terrace, next to the leg of his chair. His face was as grey as his hair, which swept back from his forehead as my own hair does, with that very same widow's peak in the centre, with those same indentations like fjords on either side. He said, “Your sister was drowned in her bath. She was drowned by a German girl we'd taken into our home.”





“I know—”





“Nothing. That's what you know. You know what the papers might have told you but you don't know what it was to be there. You don't know that Sonia was murdered because she was growing progressively more difficult to care for and because the German girl—”





Katja Wolff, I thought. Why won't he say her name?

“—was pregnant.”





Pregnant. The word was a snap of the fingers in front of my face. The word brought me back to my father's world and what he had lived through and what the present circumstances were asking him to live through again. I thought back to the picture of Katja Wolff smiling dreamily up at the camera in the Kensington Square garden with Sonia in her arms. I thought of the picture of her leaving the police station, stick thin and ill-looking with features sharpened by excessive weight loss. Pregnant.

I murmured, “She didn't look pregnant in the picture,” and I looked away from Dad to one of the other terraces where, I noticed, an Old English sheep dog was watching us curiously. As he saw me take note of him, he rose on his hind legs, front paws on the iron rail that surrounded the terrace. He began to bark. I shivered at the sound. He'd had his vocal cords removed and what remained was a hopeful but pathetic yelp that was air and muscle and mostly cruelty. It made me feel sick.

Dad said, “What picture?” And then he must have reckoned I was speaking of a photo I'd seen in the newspaper, because he said, “It wouldn't have shown. She was deadly ill at the start of her pregnancy, so she didn't put on weight, she lost it. We noticed first that she'd gone off food, that she didn't look well, and we thought it was a lover's spat of some kind. She and the lodger—”





“That would've been James.”





“Yes. James. They were close. Obviously, a hell of a lot closer than we originally assumed. He liked to help her with her English when she had free time. We had no objection to that. Until she came up pregnant.”





“Then what?”





“We told her she'd have to go. We weren't running a home for unmarried mothers, and we needed someone whose attention would be kept on Sonia, not on herself: her illness, her difficulty, her condition, whatever you want to call it. We didn't throw her out on the street or even tell her she had to leave at once. But as soon as she was able to find another … situation, job, she would have to go. That would have taken her away from James, though, and she snapped.”





“Snapped?”





“Tears, anger, hysteria. She couldn't cope. Not with pregnancy, unremitting illness during pregnancy, looming homelessness, and your sister as well. Sonia was just out of hospital at the time. She needed constant care. The German girl snapped.”





“I remember.”





“What?” I could hear the reluctance behind the question, that conflict between Dad's desire to put an end to a reminiscence that was painful for him and his wish to liberate from a prison of mind the son he loved.

“Crises. Sonia being carried to the doctor, to hospital, to … I don't know where else.”