The Sixth Lamentation Read Free Page B

following years. But always the details from her
grandmother became sparer, begrudging; her mood increasingly unsettled, her
replies sharper, until Lucy learned she was approaching the place of shadows
where she could go no further: where, as Freddie once spat out to his burning
shame, Agnes became ‘La Muette’: the dumb one.
    Of
course the family knew what lay beyond the wire. A town and a village:
Auschwitz and Ravensbrück. As to the why and wherefore, that was a mystery.
Susan often said that only Grandpa Arthur knew where she’d been and why, but
Lucy, as usual, moved as close to the line as possible trying to find out.
    ‘No, I
was never in the Resistance,’ Agnes said wearily to one of Lucy’s unremitting
schoolgirl questions.
    ‘Did
you know anyone who was?’
    ‘Yes, I
did.’
    ‘So you
were involved with them?’
    ‘Not
really I was just on the edge.’
    ‘Were
they brave?’
    ‘Very
brave. ‘
    ‘So you
must have edged towards bravery?’
    Agnes
became very still, distracted. ‘We were all so young, so very young.
    ‘So you
did do something?’ pressed Lucy, eating chocolate.
    ‘Nothing
much to write home about. Now, stop your questions.’
    That
was usually where the probing ceased. But this time Lucy chanced her arm,
pushed into the place of shadows: ‘You can’t have a big secret and not tell us
what happened.’
    Agnes
gave a low animal growl through bared teeth. ‘Enough.’
    It was
Lucy’s first experience of atavistic fear. She became scared of her own
grandmother. For Freddie, who was sitting in the corner, watching over a
collapsed newspaper, it was simply another example of his mother’s hopelessly
introspective temperament. But Lucy, aged fourteen, still possessed the awesome
non-rational percipience of childhood, and was young enough to be acutely
sensitive to something neither she nor anyone else could name or know It was
that which made her shrink instinctively back: a smell on the wind.
    So the
reason for arrest and what had happened during two and a half years of
incarceration lay out of reach.’ The narrative trail resumed, through Lucy’s
persistence, at the moment of Agnes’ release, as if nothing had gone before: ‘A
Russian soldier stood gawping at me. He was no more than a boy, and his gun
looked like a battered toy He couldn’t say anything. I couldn’t speak.’ I was
standing with children on either side. He cried.’ We just watched him.’
Eventually he said in English, “You’re free now.”‘
    Agnes
wearily passed a blue-veined hand through her grey hair, rearranging a silver
clip, and added, ‘I got out of Babylon, but there was no Zion. No promised
land.’
    ‘What’s
that, Gran?’ Lucy enquired, puzzled.
    ‘Just
an old song about homesickness. And hope.’
    ‘By
Boney M?’
    ‘A
psalm.’
    It was
an opaque exchange, and all the more peculiar because Agnes was not a religious
woman.’
     
    After the war Agnes
returned to Paris where she met Captain Arthur Embleton in a hospital. They
were married within two months, staying on in France for the next couple of
years, during which time they had twins: Freddie and Elodie. After leaving the army
Grandpa Arthur brought the family back to a suburban existence in north London.’
He became a solicitor in a large London firm and their life was superficially
comfortable and predictable, except for those who knew otherwise. After Lucy’s
unnerving exchange with her grandmother, Freddie told Lucy about his own
inexplicable childhood memories.
    At
times Agnes was captivating and extrovert, Freddie explained, but could
suddenly and for no apparent reason become swamped by abstraction.’ It was as
if the apparatus of her personality shut down, like a vast generator losing its
source of power. The life in her would drain away until all the lights blinked
and flickered before going out. And then she was gone, even though she was
still in the same room, and everyone else was left adrift and awkward, trying
to