“Later, Ivan says, ‘One reptile will devour another,’” he continued. Rose liked Professor Hillman. He had a plump, kind face that contradicted the stiff striped ties he wore. He was soft-spoken outside of class, seemingly embarrassed if you did as much as say hello, but in class, while lecturing about his beloved Russians, he commanded. She had heard that he had a samovar in his office that he brought out on special occasions for prized students, but although she was doing well in his class, she had never seen it. “What does Dostoyevsky mean by that?” he asked.
Rose, in the front row, shot up her hand. She saw Professor Hillman’s eyes register her, then glance away as he scanned the lecture hall. Rose strained her arm higher, but she knew it was hopeless. Half the time he didn’t call on her. So she raised her hand often? She knew the answer. Shouldn’t that be rewarded? Rose sighed, lowered her arm, and gazed around. The delicate wainscoting of the light blue walls and the ornate marble fireplace that Professor Hillman stood in front of seemed at odds with lecturing. Bombs had demolished a good part of the Bedford College campus during the war, and the university had rented this row of Regent’s Park mansions until rebuilding was complete. Rose imagined dances taking place in this ballroom, dances not unlike the ones described in such vivid, blood-quickening detail in the Russian novels she was reading.
“Miss Gissing?” Professor Hillman said. “Why do you suppose Ivan thinks that reptiles will devour each other?”
Eva Gissing sat one row behind Rose. Rose twisted around to see her blush. “I don’t know,” Eva said. Rose raised her hand again. “I suppose all reptiles devour each other, don’t they?”
“I meant in the context of the text, Miss Gissing,” Professor Hillman said. “You must return to the text.” He nodded at Rose. “Miss Zimmer?”
“Dostoyevsky says that we all have dark, murderous impulses. We all would eat each other if we could. It’s prescient, in a sense, as later—well, when the father is murdered. It’s the irrational side of us that reigns.” Rose didn’t need Dostoyevsky to tell her that, but she found his insistence on the ugliness of the human condition comforting. It made her feel, in no small part, understood.
“Indeed,” Professor Hillman said. “Part of celebrating the Russian soul is celebrating that darkness. We are now fortunate as Englishmen to have access to these great literary powers. Other writers do no more than play at the feet of the giants that are Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. For next week, reread the ‘Grand Inquisitor’ section. And your essays are due next week as well,” he finished as the bell rang.
Books and notebooks were scooped up, scarves and coats gathered. When Rose was at the door, Eva caught up with her. “Do not tell me that you’ve read the entire book,” she said with a theatrical exhalation. Eva, like Rose, was small and dark-haired and fair-skinned; but unlike Rose, she was chatty outside of class, tentative in.
“Then I won’t,” Rose said.
“You know why Dostoyevsky’s novel is so bloody long, don’t you?”
“Why don’t you tell me,” Rose said easily enough. It was hard to take Eva seriously, but knowing this made Rose feel more kindly. They headed together down the marble hall, passed a carved depression in the wall where an organ used to reside in the building’s grander days.
“Serialization.” Eva drew the word out. “If I got paid by the installment, I’d write a long novel too.”
“I’m sure you would,” Rose said.
“Lore and I are going for coffee,” Eva said as they neared the building’s entrance. “Come.”
“I can’t,” Rose said, and she injected a note of remorse that she didn’t quite feel into her tone. “Too much to do.” She gestured down at the load of books she carried.
“You don’t have to actually read everything,” Eva said, as if reading books in their entirety was a sign of silliness, something a child might do. Rose tightened her grip on her books. It wasn’t worth the effort to argue, with Eva especially. She remained astonished and grateful to actually be here at the University of London, doing nothing but studying literature, reading, which she would frankly do on her own. She hadn’t worked at the silk factory on Tottenham Court for almost two years now and still she would sometimes glance at a clock and think: It’s nearly time for elevenses, the shift half over.
The girls walked outside. A light drizzle was falling, the sky pebbly gray and vast, the new green leaves budding bright on the thick-waisted plane trees across the street in Regent’s Park.
“One of these days you should join us,” Eva said. “The coffee is strong, like back home, and there are loads of nice boys there.”
“That sounds splendid,” Rose said, and she opened her umbrella and shifted her books into her other arm. Students streamed up the paths in sandy-colored mackintoshes, their dark umbrellas unfurling. Rose looked for Harriet. She would be easy to spot, what with the purple scarf she always wore loose around her shoulders. But she didn’t see her. She felt dampness at her collar and she sighed, fingered the material beneath the rib of her umbrella. There it was: a tear. “Another time, I’ll join you,” she said.
Eva had said this before to her—back home—and though she knew she was being ungenerous, Rose felt an urge to say, We don’t share the same home. Eva was from Bavaria. At the onset of the war, she and her parents made it to Basel, and managed to make their way to Spain and then to Lisbon, where they waited it out. They were relatively new to England. The first time Eva and Rose chatted outside of class, Eva spoke to her in German. Rose answered in English. She rarely used her German now. Eva’s father had settled in Golders Green, where he taught at a Jewish school. Eva kept inviting Rose over for a Shabbos meal, “or any time at all,” she’d say, but Rose kept finding excuses not to go.
Lore, a few years older, came from a town near Prague, and like Rose, she and her brother had come over on a transport. She didn’t talk about her parents either. She had lived with a family in Manchester’s Cheetham Hill, and then joined the ATS and drove cars for the service during the war. One time early in the year, they had left class together—Eva was sick—and run into a friend of Lore’s, a young man named Walter from Berlin. He invited them to tea. Walter was exceedingly tall with a mop of hair, and a great talker. He joked about England’s incessant dampness, the lack of meat on the black market, the way his landlady had a habit of coming downstairs in her too-short robe. “Oh! So sorry. I keep forgetting there are men in the house,” he imitated her with gusto.
“Walter,” Lore said with a snort and a hand to his forearm. “You are too much.”
Rose smiled faintly. “How do you two know each other?”
“Oh, Lore and I go way back. I was her brother’s keeper for a time. We bunked together on the Isle of Man.”
“The Isle of Man?” Rose repeated.
“You know,” Lore said. “When the men were interned—”
“Less than a year after I arrived,” Walter broke in. “I was eighteen, just made the cutoff. Lucky me.” He grinned, but Rose wasn’t smiling. Now she remembered: the government had rounded up all men from German-speaking countries and held them in an internment camp. Gerhard had been fortunate, on the other side of that cutoff.