In the Blood E-Book

Anna Fodorová

• Herausgeber: Arachne Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Seitenzahl: 373

Beschreibung

London 1988: Agata grew up in post-war Prague and believes that her mother was the only member of her family to survive the Holocaust. But not everyone died. Agata's search for her 'lost' family, set against the background of revolutions in Eastern Europe, threatens to tear apart not only the family she already has, but her own identity.

Leseprobe

First published in UK 2022 by Arachne Press Limited

100 Grierson Road, London, SE23 1NX

www.arachnepress.com

© Anna Fodorova 2022

ISBNs

Print: 978-1-913665-60-9

eBook: 978-1-913665-61-6

The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior written consent in any form or binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

Except for short passages for review purposes no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission of Arachne Press.

Although the key historical events of this book are real and the plot contains autobiographical elements, any resemblance of characters to real people, living or dead, is unintentional.

Thanks to Muireann Grealy for her proofreading.

Cover design: Phil Barnett 2022.

To my family,

to those I am lucky to know and love

and in memory of those I have never met.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:

I want to thank all the members of my two writing groups (there are too many to name) for their time and encouragement over the years. And special thanks to my publisher Cherry Potts for her sharp insight, her attention to detail and her patience.

IN THEBLOOD

1

On waking, Agata’s cheek feels cold. She peels herself away from Richard’s back, and before he draws her into his large warm body, she quickly flips the pillow over so that he won’t notice the damp evidence of her tear ducts working overtime. From what uncharted part of her have those tears sprung? Do they actually belong to her or to someone else? Someone from far back, before her memory can reach, someone she doesn’t know. When she scrunches her eyes, Agata can make out the contour of a cheek, the shadow of a smile.

*

The morning traffic crawls along, slower than usual, and Agata hopes that breakfast with Lily will compensate Mama for being left behind. This after Mama kicked her legs in the air can-can fashion to demonstrate that she has already changed from her home-knitted slippers into her outdoor shoes. Because Mama knows no greater pleasure than driving around London on errands with her daughter.

‘But Mama!’ Agata moaned. ‘I’m only going to the dentist, and I’m already late.’

*

Looking for a space in the hospital car park adds another ten minutes. They are already waiting for her. Agata steps out of her jeans, the nurse stretches a fresh length of paper over the bed, straps Agata’s feet in clamps and turns the ceiling light off. In the glare of the computer screen the radiologist adjusts a condom over a plastic instrument, then tips it with a generous dollop of lubricant jelly. ‘Easy does it.’

The instant the icy gadget slips inside her the room fills with an amplified hum. While the radiologist moves his hand this way and that, they are both quiet: he is concentrating on her internal bumps and cavities and Agata, hardly daring to breathe, on mortifying any response her flesh may be conned into by his expert probing.

‘Now this might just look like a blur, but I assure you, anything nasty would look very different.’ The radiologist flicks a smile to the nurse who, whenever Agata shifts, veils her discreetly with a blanket. And every time she performs this little dance, Agata sniffs her sweet coconut scent. ‘Here, see that area I’m highlighting green?’ The radiologist invites the nurse to peep at the screen and Agata, craning her neck, catches what looks like a hazy weather map. ‘That’s the right ovary… ehum! Looks clear. Left ovary… left ovary…?’ The radiologist’s hand shuffles back and forth and Agata grips the side of the bed. What has he seen there? Is it possible that his probe detected Richard’s recent presence inside her?

‘Have you had anything to eat this morning?’

‘A cup of tea, I only drank half.’

‘Left ovary hidden.’

She knew it! Why hadn’t she refused that toast Mama popped in her hand? Now she’ll have to worry if anything ‘nasty’ has invaded her left ovary. Thank God they removed Mama’s in time, her right breast too. Now Agata reaps the benefits of her mother’s misfortunes. Being in a high risk category guarantees her a yearly ovarian scan: every August, to be precise. Richard books the car in the garage every July; so first the car, then the ovaries. Easy to remember, and no need to trouble Mama with either.

While she is pulling her jeans on the radiologist opens a form. ‘Today is…?’ He checks the tag on the nurse’s breast. ‘Baduwa?’

‘Twenty-first August.’

Exactly to this day, twenty years ago, Russian tanks rolled under our Prague balcony, Mama reminded Agata only this morning. Imagine! Military invasion in central Europe! ‘Now we’ll never see our daughter again, she’ll stay in England,’ your father said – no, he sobbed. Soft. That’s what Pavel was, but here – here they are not interested in what happened to us in 1968, here the radio is interested in some actress from some Corporation Street and her stupid breasts!

‘So Mrs Upton, besides your mother, any other relative with breast cancer in the family?’ Agata shrugs. Every time she comes, there is a new radiologist and a new form to fill. ‘No one else on your mother’s side then?’ No idea, she says. ‘On your father’s side?’ The radiologist’s freshly scrubbed hand hovers above the page. To get the whole thing over she informs him that her father is dead. And so, besides her mother, her daughter and husband, she has no other relatives. ‘None?’ None. The radiologist hesitates, then crosses out several boxes.

‘Any death from cancer on your mother’s side… father’s… siblings? Cousins… aunts?’ Agata keeps shrugging and he ploughs on scribbling UNKNOWN. Frowning as if she lost her forbears by her own negligence. This side, that side… How many times will she have to go through this? And how many relatives is one supposed to have? In any case, what business is it of this young man with bitten nails and pimples around his ears, to know how her relatives died?

‘Are you sexually active?’ Now that he is familiar with her innermost parts the radiologist wants to know. She nods and he ticks off the relevant box with almost a sigh of relief, a flourish. Their first definite Yes. He then instructs Baduwa to tighten a rubber band around Agata’s arm.

The blood test signals the end of the procedure.

Straight into the freezer, soon we will be able to tell what’s coming your way, it’s only a question of time, last year’s radiologist said.

Watching her blood slowly climb the glass, thick and dark with bubbles of orange froth, Agata promises herself a cake and a hot chocolate in the cafeteria downstairs. Baduwa corks the vial with a rubber plug, gives it a playful shake and as she passes it to the radiologist she giggles, they must be new to each other. Next: the radiologist’s fingers are grabbing the empty air, the vial hitting the floor and Agata’s blood spilling over the gleaming lino. She watches some dribble down Baduwa’s naked legs, as if it were hers.

*

She skips the cake, heads straight for the car park. Mama’s stomach must be rumbling, it’s almost lunchtime. Less traffic now. Rachmaninov’s concerto, one of the few pieces Agata can identify, is playing on the radio. Each note resonates in her strangely empty interior. She follows a diversion sign and takes a right turn. Now the black arrows on a yellow ground order her to bear left. Now to the right, then left again. Just as well she didn’t tell Mama about the scan; the less she knows the better. Mama probably employs the same tactic with her; they are two spiders knitting a web of, not so much lies as omissions. Holes. As though there was something to tiptoe around. Left, and then right, the arrows guide her. Only there are no secrets, just a habit. A habit of protecting one another. Take that cough Agata heard last night. What if Mama caught a chill at the barbecue, what if…? Must get her a thicker blanket tonight and switch on the heating, Agata reminds herself.

‘Right! It said right!’ Agata yells. ‘The arrow pointed to the right!’ She hears herself protest as a towering wall of red swings in from the left and something slams into the side of the car. Then, as abruptly as it burst into view, the red is gone again and the car is careering forward, Agata hanging onto the wheel, jamming the brakes to slow down the metal gate hurtling towards her, her entrails, as if loosened by the radiologist’s probe, threatening to burst through her back.

When she opens her eyes, the one thing she notices is the radio dangling from the dashboard, still crackling Rachmaninov. Lucky she refused to give the radiologist more blood, she might need every drop of it now.

*

Richard is the first person she runs into at home. He is en route to the studio, in his tatty corduroy waistcoat – the sign he trained them to read as not to be disturbed. She fell in love with Richard because of his colours. Or more accurately – their intriguing absence. When she first saw him in a packed underground train, he was wielding a tube of rolled up papers, a strand of flaxen hair falling over his forehead. Beneath his pale eyelashes his eyes, drops of water at the point of freezing, took her in. They both got off at Charing Cross and, without much being said, headed for St. James’s Park where, in the tangle of the bushes, Richard let go of his designs. At the time, Agata’s erotic experience was limited to a few groping raids in the school cloakroom, and the totality of her English to just a few words, but at the grand age of eighteen she couldn’t wait to get rid of what had become an encumbrance; and that it should be with a stranger whom she was never likely to meet again seemed a bonus. What she didn’t expect in that prickly patch of metropolitan nature was to feel rapturously, breathlessly happy. Richard’s hair smelled of windswept northern steppes, of low skies, of a tribe reassuringly disparate to hers. Yet it was her genes that got the upper hand when a few years down the line a tiny creature with enormous black eyes and a brush of dark hair popped out of her: Lily, their daughter. Lilian, Lily, Lilinka.

‘Sorry I’m late. Please don’t get alarmed,’ she warns him before he notices her rumpled state. ‘I was driving, and they played Rachmaninov.’ She takes care to impart her information in manageable doses. ‘Concerto No. 2, I think.’

‘Rachmaninov is kitsch,’ Richard says, tenderly fingering a microchip he is on his way to install in his computer motherboard. ‘Ask Dora.’

‘Rachmaninov was on the car radio,’ she clarifies. ‘But the car was involved in a little accident.’ Richard freezes in mid-step. ‘Don’t worry, I’m ok,’ she quickly assures him, but he has already leapt to the front door, thrown it open and cast his gaze up and down the street.

*

In the tube earlier, she rehearsed a limited version of the event. Why mention that the windscreen looks as if someone shattered it with a hammer into a thousand splinters and then painstakingly glued them back together? Or that she distinctly remembers seeing something like this before: mannequins flung across a car seat, straw poking out of their wounds, dead stare in their glass eyes, bent metal on the wooden plinth, but where…? In a gallery? Faces peered at her. Hands pulled her out. Public not allowed to touch the exhibit, she wanted to warn them. Then the police arrived and notified her that as she had driven into the main road without slowing down and collided with a double decker bus, she might face prosecution for careless driving.

‘Gatushka? Thank God you’re back,’ Mama calls from the landing; to exercise her English, the minute her mother lands at Heathrow she stops speaking Czech, even to Agata. ‘Come, come, we need your help.’ In a quick whisper Agata asks Richard to keep quiet about her misadventure, then follows Mama to the kitchen where she finds a grim-faced Lily struggling to smudge Nutella over one of the circular wafers Mama brought from Prague.

‘Mum!’ Lily greets her with a whine. ‘I need to make a cake for tomorrow’s school fair, but Babi doesn’t know how to bake.’ Lily calls her grandmother Babi – a shortening for Babička – granny in Czech. ‘Babi, what is this called again?’

‘Waffel chocolade torte, darling. You glue Carlsbad wafers together with chocolate, no need to bake.’

‘But Babi, that’s not a cake!’

‘Hey Lily, what about a Victoria sponge?’ Agata infuses her voice with good cheer, and Lily’s face lights up. ‘We have everything we need. Flour, butter, eggs,’ Agata chants, fooling them with her culinary know-how. ‘All bobs and bits, you’re in luck Lilian.’

‘Bits and bobs, you foreigner!’ Lily laughs.

It works; how little it takes to deceive those who are supposed to know you best. Agata clambers onto the stool with the ease of a grasshopper and although the kitchen cabinets spin and sway as if she were on a choppy sea, she starts hauling from an upper shelf bags of flour and sugar. What wouldn’t a mother do to make her daughter happy? Whipping the mixture she meets the bottomless holes of Mama’s eyes sending her the old, knowing look: Yes, Lily is lucky, thank God for that. Ignoring the pain at the root of her neck Agata pours everything into the baking tin, sticks it in the oven, sets the timer, even tidies up the counter. Then excuses herself.

She closes the bedroom door and collapses on the bed. When her jaw begins to tremble, she lets it. Must be a reaction to the shock. Perhaps she should have agreed to go to the hospital, shouldn’t have told the paramedics that she has just come out of one, but she felt no pain and there was no blood. It was only when they took her to retrieve her handbag from the car and Agata saw that the seat next to hers, the passenger’s seat where Mama would have sat, had half disappeared under the car’s squashed metal cheek, that her legs gave way under her.

‘Babi, why don’t you know how to bake?’ She hears the voices from the floor below.

‘My mother never had time to teach me. She worked in a shop,’ Mama replies. ‘We had a girl who cooked for us… Jarmila. In English I don’t think you have such name.’

‘And your sisters, Babi?’

‘Two sisters, darling. Laura and my little sister Annette… We spoke Czech and German. That’s right darling, bilingual. Yes, we had fun. Unfortunately Annette died… And Laura too, they both did, darling.’ Agata listens to her mother tossing Lily the crumbs of her history. A history that as a child she knew not to ask too much about.

‘You’ve never shown me their pictures, Babi.’

‘Oh really? Have I not? Well, I’ll show you next time you come to Prague…’ Mama coos. ‘Me? No, I wasn’t there; I was in France. From there I went by ship to Buenos Aires… Yes, that’s in Argentina, Lilinka. Clever girl.’

A passing train rattles the window, undulates the air. Agata’s legs feel dead and the wall opposite, together with the chest of drawers, keeps charging towards her with dizzying speed. Then something blurred slides in the periphery of her vision.

‘You ok, Agu?’ Richard ruffles her hair. ‘Where’s the car then?’

She finds his hand. ‘I’m sorry Ricky, but it was a write-off, I’m afraid.’

‘Jesus! What happened? Are you alright?’ When Agata puts her finger to her mouth Richard stares at her in disbelief. ‘You crash the car, and we must keep it quiet?’

Then she loses track of time and next thing she knows, Mama is bending over her, a mug in each hand. ‘It’s only Nescafé, I can’t use your complicated machines. Why are you in bed, Gatushka?’

Agata would prefer a shot of something stronger, but how is Mama to know? She drains the tepid liquid in one go, searches for something to say. ‘Why don’t you talk to Lily properly, Mama? Just tell her the truth. Tell her why there are no photos of your sisters. Or of anyone.’

‘Ach yo.’ Mama slumps heavily besides her. ‘What you want me to do? Tear my hair out? Load it all on that poor child? Besides, I’m sure you already told Lily all there’s to know. A fabulous daughter you have, Gatushka. A great girl.’ She pats Agata’s cheek as she has always done, with verve. ‘See how lucky you are?’

‘Not sure.’

‘Not sure about what?’

‘About telling Lily all there is to know.’

Mama plucks off a few shrivelled leaves from the plant on the bedside table, busies herself searching for somewhere to deposit them. ‘Well, maybe we can discuss this another time.’

‘What other time?’

‘When we’re more relaxed.’

‘I feel totally relaxed,’ says Agata, the pain now radiating from under her shoulder blade – what if something vital has broken in her? She clenches her teeth and sits up. ‘Anyway, how am I supposed to tell her, if you never talk about that stuff?’ Instead of an answer, Mama silently scrutinises the vein pulsating on Agata’s neck. ‘What are you looking at me like that for?’ Agata barks at her. Then seeing her mother pull back startled, she catches her arm. ‘I’m sorry Mama. All I meant was that you could help me break the taboo.’

‘Taboo?’ The word alone makes Mama shudder. She stuffs the dead leaves into the empty mug and stands up. ‘What nonsense you talk, Gatushka, there are no taboos. At least I don’t know of any.’

And then, as if on cue, the phone rings somewhere in the house and they both listen to Lily chatting to a friend, to her shrieks of laughter. Greedily they soak in her happiness.

2

‘Bobbie Greengrass,’ the counsellor introduces herself.

It was Dr Rupinda’s idea that Agata should see this woman, all she wanted to hear from him was that she hasn’t broken any ribs. Dr Rupinda rotated her head, raised her chin, pushed it down.

‘A mild whiplash,’ he said. ‘Let’s get you a collar.’ Wear a collar while Mama is in town?

‘My mother mustn’t know about the accident,’ Agata explained. In fact she has already invented a plausible explanation – an irreparable fault – for the car’s unprecedented disappearance. After a moment of reflection, Dr Rupinda suggested a compromise: wear the collar only in bed at night. Which was when Agata confided in him that in bed at night her eyes water a lot.

‘You mean you cry in your sleep?’ Dr Rupinda said it – not she.

Bobbie Greengrass hands Agata a questionnaire and gestures towards the pea-green armchair. Agata scans the questions: No interest in life; Feeling nervous; Anxious and so forth. The choice is from 0 to 8. Zero means never, eight means all the time. She circles mostly four, assuming that anything below would make her sound trouble free and anything above too unhinged. Further questions: Poor appetite? Also, I’d be better off dead? Here the options are: Not at all or Sometimes or Always. In keeping with her strategy Agata mostly chooses Sometimes. While she scribbles, the counsellor, a middle-aged woman with thick hair and nondescript clothes regards her from her chair. Sitting to one side, she has beside her a little purse and a bunch of keys with a rabbit foot attached to the ring. As if luck has a part to play in this game of questions and answers.

‘Thank you.’ Bobbie Greengrass skims the completed form. ‘Self-employed, I see. Would you mind telling me what you do for a living, Agatha?’

Agata says that she is an animator. She works from home. She animates drawings for children’s TV and for advertising, that sort of a thing.

‘Ah! So you’re an artist.’ The counsellor seems to find this of interest. ‘Perhaps you tell me in your own words what brings you here, Agatha?’

‘Actually, it’s Agata. No h.’

Bobbie Greengrass apologises and cocks her head to let Agata know that she is listening. And Agata feels a rush of hope; finally here is someone trained to help someone like her. She tells Bobbie Greengrass about her night-time tears and that she doesn’t know what they mean; and that her husband Richard, whom she met when she came to work in London as an au pair, finds her nocturnal grief disturbing, even though Agata doesn’t make any noise.

‘Richard was my first man,’ she explains. ‘Well, he still is. So I’ll never know what I’ve missed,’ she smiles at the counsellor. ‘Sometimes,’ Agata adds, ‘I catch myself looking at us three – Richard, our daughter Lily and myself – the way you study your fellow passengers before boarding a plane. In case you spot something that would make them likely air-crash candidates.’

‘Anything violent happened in your childhood, Agata?’ Bobbie Greengrass asks, her face darkly serious.

‘No, no, I had an ok childhood,’ Agata assures her. ‘Well, not entirely, but show me a child who’s always happy. What I couldn’t figure out was that besides my mother, my father and myself, everyone else was dead.’ For a moment Bobbie Greengrass looks perturbed. ‘What I mean is that there was no one left,’ Agata clarifies. ‘And not a single snapshot or an object or anything, as if they never owned a thing, as if they disappeared before the invention of the camera.’

Bobbie Greengrass keeps nodding, her brown hair with wiry silver streaks – one side shorter than the other as though she lopped it herself with household scissors – grazing her thin shoulders. ‘Thank you, Agata for sharing this with me,’ she says, scribbling something in her notepad. ‘However, I need to explain, if it hasn’t been made clear, that I provide Cognitive Behaviour Therapy, or CBT for short. In the NHS, this is a new treatment. An effective therapy that, rather than exploring the past, focuses on the present.’ She stops to check if Agata is taking it all in. ‘I can only offer you eight sessions I’m afraid, with a possible addition of another two. Would this be all right with you, Agata?’

Despite her fixed smile, Bobbie Greengrass seems not fully at ease. If Agata were in a position to pay, she’d have asked Dr Rupinda to refer her to someone else. Someone who has more time to give and nods less, but with Richard only ever on one exhibition design job at a time, and not paid, sometimes, for months, and with the studios sending cartoons to be animated in China for peanuts instead of paying the likes of Agata, they are often strapped for cash.

‘What did she say?’ After the first appointment Richard was eager to know. When Agata told him that the counsellor has sketched a worry tree for her, he looked nonplussed.

*

This is her third session. ‘Today we need to talk about how to create a worry-free zone, even if just a brief one,’ Bobbie Greengrass suggests. ‘Can you think of an activity that would lend itself to this? Something easy, like… like waiting for the kettle to boil.’

Worry-free zone? Waiting for the kettle? What Agata needs urgently is to tell the counsellor how, on the rare occasions her mother mentioned a name like Annette or Hugo or Laura, something prevented her from going on. A sound at the back of her throat. ‘You can’t imagine how terrified I used to be that she was choking,’ she tells Bobbie Greengrass. ‘Laura was one of my mother’s sisters, the older one. It also happens to be my second name, I’m Agata Laura,’ Agata hears her voice rising, thinning out… The counsellor sighs and hands her a tissue. ‘And Hugo was that sister’s little son, I think they moved to another town, but since I never met any of them, I can never be sure who was who and so… and so…’ Agata scrunches the tissue, squeezes it into her palm. So why, she longs to ask Bobbie Greengrass with her rabbit claw and her trout grey eyes, why am I missing them?

In the window behind them, the sky is turning scarlet. How many sunsets can you catch in a lifetime? For little Hugo, probably only a few.

‘And your first name? Was it also given to you after a deceased relative?’

‘Exterminated, not deceased.’ Agata puts her right; after all it’s her therapy.

‘Exterminated.’ Bobbie Greengrass duly corrects herself.

‘You must understand, we were a tiny family, exposed on all sides, nothing to hold on to, no buffer of others connected by blood. Just an absence. So anything could knock us out, any little chip a larger family would heal over would shatter us fatally.’ Agata soldiers on, phlegm dripping down her throat. Poor, poor Agata, making a spectacle of herself. If Mama could see the state of her, if she knew.

Checking the clock, Bobbie Greengrass’s left eyebrow twitches. An involuntary mini-disturbance that Agata noticed before and that endears Bobbie Greengrass to her. The counsellor’s gaze drifts past Agata’s head, its inward look signalling that something behind that pale forehead is taking shape. Bobbie Greengrass draws a breath and, gravely pausing between each word, says, ‘Yes. I can see. This must have been very…’ Agata hangs on her lips. She knows what she longs for Bobbie Greengrass to say: she wants her to say that this cannot be; that this must be some kind of a misunderstanding; that no one could be so alone in the world. ‘It must have been deeply… deeply unsettling,’ Bobbie Greengrass concludes. Sensing Agata’s disappointment she quickly adds, ‘for a child.’

Agata stumbles down the corridor, the flecked carpet swimming under her feet, her cheeks damp. The receptionist, who had looked a little under the weather on Agata’s way in now smiles at her, all dimples and shine. Same story outside. A patch of pansies, an hour ago a mere salad of leaves, have also benefited from the passage of time; their smug little features erupting in colours, ogling the sun. Then a shadow falls over them, an arm slips under Agata’s and a voice whispers in her ear: ‘Cured?’

*

When the session is over, Agata usually walks around to gather herself. Except today Mama is here, pinching Agata’s waist, as if making sure that she is real, chuckling at her surprise. ‘I’m inviting you to an exhibition. Ancient faces: Mummy portraits from Roman Egypt.’ She produces a newspaper clipping with a picture of a young woman. A slim face with an aquiline nose meets Agata’s gaze: prominent brows, pearl earrings, a halo of rich curls depicted in a surprisingly lifelike manner. ‘See her expression? As if she was here only yesterday. And her hair! A bit like yours, isn’t it, Gatushka?’

In a show of goodwill, Agata studies the woman’s features. What did she die of all those millennia back? Was she as young as she appears? One thing is apparent: in ancient Egypt they didn’t have hair products to tame frizz.

‘Amazing, don’t you think? After more than two thousand years we can still see their portraits, even their beds and chairs. While our people…’ Mama pins her gaze on Agata, waiting for her response. Colonising her thoughts. Locking her in a cage with her.

‘Sorry, I’m not in the mood.’

‘Not in the mood?’ Mama repeats, as if doubting she has caught the right words. Not in the mood? What sort of a daughter would use such words to her elderly mother who has come to take her to a fascinating show?

‘You and Dora and your secrets, it’s pathological,’ Richard said, when Agata asked him not to mention her sessions. If Richard had kept his mouth shut, Mama would have gone off to the museum by herself. And Agata wouldn’t be standing here shaking with an insane urge to smash that cage, that lonely prison of theirs, the two remaining exhibits from the not so ancient past.

To make it up to her, she drags Mama, now monosyllabic, to the place she knows Mama adores: Kensington Garden café, where the breeze ripples the water teeming with birds, and elderly ladies, in chiffon scarves which match their hair, sip tea. They take their tray to a table occupied by just such a specimen. Before sitting down, after a polite pantomime assuring each other of their good intent, Mama positions her chair to face the entrance. ‘An old habit of mine,’ she informs the lady, ‘should the secret police burst in.’

‘Indeed,’ the lady murmurs her gentle agreement.

An hour later, leaving the park with arms intertwined, Mama confides in Agata how much she has come to love this city: the courtesy of its people, the dramatic skies, the swish of the pigeons, the ever-present wind, the sea so near.

‘When the sea is near, why would one want to travel somewhere exotic?’ The exotic travel is purely hypothetical, since any time Mama wants to come, she has to apply for an exit permit, and provide a document of formal invitation signed by Agata in front of a commissioner of oaths, certifying she has enough funds to cover all her mother’s expenses including, in the unfortunate case of her sudden demise, the cost of a coffin to transport her back to Prague. Mama adores the sea and hopes to see it again, even if only for a few hours.

‘You mustn’t forget, Gatushka, that back home we have no sea.’ And Agata, ashamed of having neglected even such a humble wish, promises to right this wrong as soon as possible; mother and daughter, they are like a positive and a negative, slipping in and out of alignment.

Chatting, they stroll down Exhibition Road. As they pass the Goethe Institute, Agata notices a banner above the door: Tonight’s Lecture: The Impact of the Holocaust on the Second Generation.

‘Second generation?’ Mama seems intrigued. ‘Who do they mean?’

‘Perhaps someone like me,’ Agata ventures.

‘You?’ Her mother looks puzzled. ‘But nothing happened to your generation, Gatushka, you were born after it was all over.’

Agata goes to enquire if there are still tickets left. There are. Should they go in?

Mama only wags her finger. ‘Tzz…tzz… I already know more than enough about the subject, thank-you-very-much. You go in, Gatushka, find a good seat. And don’t worry, I know how to get back. If you’re late, I will put Lily to bed.’ And she marches off, the way she always does, without turning.

3

The hall is packed, mostly by people of Mama’s generation. Mostly women. They make an odd gathering: lined faces caked with makeup, hair dyed bright, gnarled bodies in garish clothes, as if to say: Look at us! We have no precedent how to age, we’ve been robbed of the chance to see those before us growing old graciously, so what the hell!

The main speaker, a psychoanalyst, sits on the podium in a cherry red jacket. She is in her late seventies, as are most of the audience. Agata has never heard of this woman, but the moment she opens her mouth, Agata knows she is talking to her. Transfixed, she soaks in every word: Disavowal. Shared silence. Delayed mourning…

During the question time an elderly lady in a tailored suit raises her hand. ‘I have a question,’ she announces. ‘I have been asking it for nearly fifty years, I’ve read all the literature, even went to Germany to find an answer.’

‘What is the question?’ Someone calls. Several people laugh.

‘Why did they do it?’ The woman demands quietly. The audience shifts. ‘Why?’

‘Unfortunately there’s always someone lowering the quality of the discussion,’ whispers the young, smoothly shaven man with round glasses sitting next to Agata. ‘There are plenty of books on the subject,’ he calls out. The audience joins him:

‘Next question!’

‘I’ve looked.’ The woman stands her ground. She has read all the books she could find and not a single one explained this hatred to her. Not one.

At the very back an old man gets up. ‘I’m an Auschwitz survivor.’ The audience turns to him. ‘My granddaughter is twelve.’ The man’s Adam’s apple slides nervously up and down. ‘What should I tell her to prevent her anguish?’

Agata’s neighbour purses his lips. ‘Please!’ he groans, this time only for her ears. ‘Isn’t this supposed to be about the effect on the second generation?’ His English is impeccable in the manner post-war Germans learned it in their newly-built schools. ‘My doctoral dissertation is about the inter-generational transfer of trauma,’ he explains. ‘But the second generation seems to be under-represented here tonight.’

‘How do we protect our grandchildren?’ The old man’s Adam’s apple threatens to rip his skin, sharp as the rolling Rs of his adopted tongue.

‘Talk to them,’ the psychoanalyst suggests. ‘That’s the only way.’ Then someone shouts, ‘What’s the point of being Jewish anyway?’ and someone else, perhaps to lighten the atmosphere, shares a joke about a Jewish refugee who lost everything except his accent, which brings up a few chuckles but mostly a wave of protest. And to her surprise, Agata feels at home among these ancient faces. They remind her of her childhood, of hearing her parents and their friends arguing politics around their kitchen table long into the night. Later she learned that each of them had returned from wartime exile or from the camps, uncles and aunts to dead children, siblings of ghosts. She takes out her notepad, a small book with hard red edges she bought on Bobbie Greengrass’s advice to record her thoughts. To turn a radar on them, to observe but not to judge.

‘Are you also an academic?’ her neighbour asks. She shakes her head. ‘You must be the second generation then, correct?’ She nods and instantly feels exposed. ‘Super. Why don’t you tell them what it’s like? Here! Excuse me!’ The young man waves his arm and before Agata can protest, a microphone is thrust into her hand and everyone turns in her direction.

‘I… I was born in Prague.’ She rises slowly, frantically trying to come up with what to say next. The audience hums with approval, she even hears someone call, ‘So was I’, and someone else ‘Ach, the golden Praha’. Everything swirls around her; the blood rushes to her temples and she wonders if she will faint. She has never stood in front of a crowd, never felt so many eyes on her. ‘So that makes me a Czech. At least that’s what I thought,’ she goes on. ‘But when I was about ten, a boy at school shouted in my ear You shitty Jew. You see, my parents forgot to tell me that’s what we were.’ Quite a few laughs, not derisive, more in sympathy. She takes them as a prompt. ‘I can’t remember why he said it, although I knew it was an insult, but why pick on me? I went home and asked my parents. Even before I finished, I felt their fear. It sat with us in the room. My parents, they never told me about the Menorah or Passover, nothing like that, but in that moment, I understood that I now belonged in that heap of scary matchstick people I saw once in a book. I was horrified. Please, let me not be it, I begged my parents. Please!’ she tells the sea of ancient faces, the first time she has ever spoken of this to anyone. The hall is now filled with uneasy silence. Only her neighbour, his glasses glinting with excitement, gives her a little salute.

*

How she came to be in this cosy Kensington drinking hole with a young man half her age Agata can’t now recall – but here she is, lounging on a papal red velvet settee on her second glass of white wine. Klaus Tuttenhoffer of thinning hair, smooth cheeks and brownish moccasins is on his fourth. It turns out he doesn’t come from Germany, but from an Austrian village on the banks of the Danube where the slopes ripple with vineyards and every house has a vaulted wine cellar. Klaus seems to expect her to have a great insight into the mentality of the second generation and Agata, feeling obliged, offers him a few personal anecdotes from her early years: for instance how her parents tried to boost her confidence with examples of Jewish excellence, Einstein and Chagall and Freud and Marx and Ilya Ehrenburg, but Agata doesn’t care about these people she’d never met. What mattered to Agata was that in Czech a chair was called žid-le and a Jew was called žid. Which meant that any time someone said, ‘Take this žid-le,’ instead of sitting down, she panicked.

‘That’s it, Agata! That’s what trauma does.’ Klaus sounds thrilled as though she has given him a present. ‘You’re talking about trauma, the deep trauma you inherited from your parents.’

To Agata this sounds unnecessarily melodramatic. She asks if Klaus has invited her out so he can use her in his research. ‘I’m hoping,’ he says with such earnestness that Agata has to laugh. She has already warned Klaus that she is no good at drinking and he has informed her that back home they drank Riesling like it was water. With every gulp she finds her new friend more amusing; his teeth are tiny and uneven as if he never managed to grow an adult set, and are as endearing as his early baldness.

It doesn’t take long before Klaus offers a trauma of his own. His dates back to the night when he, maybe five at the time, witnessed his grandpa, his Opa, breathe his last under a thick eiderdown. His Mutti, his mother, closed Opa’s eyes, then fastened a kerchief around her head, grabbed a pickaxe and hurried out to grandpa’s vegetable garden where, in the cold twilight, Klaus saw her digging everything out: every carrot, every onion, every leek, every Rote Beete, every Weisskraut, every Rotkraut, every imaginable kraut, till there was nothing left but raw black soil that she turned over twice. ‘Komisch, isn’t it?’ Klaus chortles, squinting through his specs and Agata, unsure where all this is going, laughs and clinks glasses with him.

From the window Klaus watched his Mutti chuck everything on a pile, douse it with petrol and light a match. The flames burst out like fireworks, there was a sound of popping and a thick smoke, although young Klaus knew better than to shout hurra! Already he understood that this had nothing to do with the vegetables. This act of destruction had to do with something else. Something much larger than the biggest turnip.

*

Light under Mama’s door – she has been waiting up for her, she always does. Agata knocks quietly.

‘Gatushka! Come in, come in, I’m still up.’ Mama sits in bed, an open newspaper in front of her. Agata bends to kiss her hair – the bob Mama has kept all her life – and settles at the other end of the bed to hide her alcoholic breath.

‘Hello there,’ she says, hugging the two small humps under the duvet. Her mother wriggles her toes in her hands. They always do that. You know what’s worst about prison? That your feet are always icy cold, Mama once told her.

‘I see you made some new second-generation friends,’ Mama says, glancing at her watch before looking back at her paper. ‘Now listen to this, Gatushka: Thousands of striking shipyard workers carried pro-Solidarity banners during a pilgrimage to Poland’s holiest shrine. Those Poles. Such bigots, but still, they protest. Same in Hungary and Germany. Even in Russia. Only we keep silent.’ She lays her paper down. ‘But guess what? Mr Ricardo offered to show me the designs for his exhibition. You never told me it was about froggies.’

‘It is an educational exhibition about Reptiles, Amphibians and Inter…’ Agata struggles to straighten her words: ‘Invertebrates.’ But she is pleased that Richard and Mama talked, they probably get on much better when she isn’t around.

‘Yes, Miss.’ Mama arches her brows and Agata wonders if Richard has mentioned that the biologist in charge of the exhibition is a hopeless drunk, which means that Richard has to make all the decisions by himself, but then, Richard soaks in knowledge like sand absorbs rain.

‘So how was your evening? Educational?’

Cautious not to alarm her, Agata tries to describe what she heard: how the children of parents whose families were killed in the war, identify with their murdered relatives. Or how they feel obliged to be replacements for those unknown dead for their parents. Or how…

‘You poor thing!’ Mama interrupts her, irony having always been her forte. ‘All this analysing… Perhaps it’s fashionable now. I suppose the times have changed.’

‘But Mama, wasn’t Freud around during your time?’ she pulls out of her bag the abstract of the talk. ‘Here, have a look at it and see what you make of it.’

Mama pushes her hand back. ‘Sorry, I’m too old for this.’

‘The psychoanalyst must’ve been about your age,’ Agata points out. She helped Agata realise that she isn’t alone, that others too have grown up in such families. There was an American girl she mentioned, born in New York, the same year as Agata, who would sneak out to eat garbage from the trash cans at night.

‘Garbage?’ This intrigues Mama. ‘You want to eat garbage from the dustbins?’

‘No, I don’t, but that girl did, although she didn’t have a clue why, she wasn’t poor or anything. Then, during her analysis it came out that her aunt died in a concentration camp. No one ever told her, but that girl needed to do this.’

‘That’s ridiculous!’ Mama guffaws. ‘That girl was obviously meshugge.’ She pats Agata’s hand, her own light as parchment. ‘You do dramatise, don’t you, Gatushka? Even Lily agrees with me. She taught me a new expression: OTT.’ When Mama laughs her eyes twitch back and forth, urging others to join in. ‘Tonight you’d be pleased with me – I talked to Lilinka about my family. I told her how my father pricked himself with a sewing needle and how the tip of it broke off and got lodged in his wrist. He claimed he could feel it traveling around his veins. Hurry up, he would call us girls: it’s here in my leg, come and touch it. He believed that one day it would reach his heart and kill him. Hmm… He should’ve been so fortunate.’ In her buttoned up pyjamas, hair neatly combed – every night one hundred strokes to get the brain-blood flowing – Mama looks like a child ready for a goodnight kiss. ‘I also told Lily how my mother worked for her rich brother-in-law, her sister’s husband. They had two children – Franz and Ruth, my cousins. One day I came to their jewellery shop and saw that brat Ruth ordering my mother to go and fetch something from the window, it was snowing heavily outside. So I whacked her and told her to go get it herself.’ Agata chuckles, this being one of a handful of stories Mama has ever volunteered. ‘Lily thought it served her right. I bumped into him soon after the war, we had nothing to say to each other. Ach yo,’ Mama sighs, ‘we’ve been getting along here so well while you were out, Gatushka.’

‘Into whom? You bumped into whom after the war?’ Agata assumes that Mama has moved on to someone else.

Her mother brushes an invisible something from the cover. ‘Into that Franz, who else?’

‘Mama?! Your cousin Franz, he didn’t die in a camp?’

‘Oh no, not him and his sister, their parents sent them to England, hung with gold.’

‘So they… you mean they may be living here in England?’

‘Hey, calm down. You’ve gone all red.’ Mama picks up her newspaper again, thumbs through the pages as if to remember where she was before Agata interrupted her. ‘Frankly, I don’t care where they live. Or if they’re alive or dead.’

‘But they are our relatives,’ Agata reminds her. ‘Our family.’