“What’s the matter, Cousins?” laughs Max. “Can’t take your drink?”
I mime a wobbliness to my head, and their laughter eggs me on to stagger about the room until they are laughing so hard, they’re wiping tears from their eyes.
“Better than Charlie Chaplin!” gasps Bill.
There’s a knock at the door, and Berta comes into the kitchen, looking at our feast laid out on the table. We have tinned fish and beef, most of a loaf each, a big plate of saved-up biscuits and a strange sconelike pudding made from flour, sugar, margarine and jam. We didn’t expect to see Berta today. She should be with her family and must have come straight from church. She’s carrying a plate, covered with a bowl, which she places on our feast table. “I saved a little of our Christmas Eve dinner for you,” she says in Czech, as if to nobody in particular.
Ralph lifts the bowl on a small portion of carp prepared properly and potato salad and more black kuba. Everyone thanks her politely and she wishes us, “Veselé Vánoce,” and hurries away. I begin to wonder if it would be safer for my friends if I just slipped away with Berta when the time comes for us to leave. I don’t think the Nazis would bother searching for me. Not with the whole Red Army bearing down on them. I think perhaps that leaving Bill is the act of ultimate bravery this war demands of me. My ultimate act of resistance. I shake my head. I’ll think about this when Christmas is over.
As soon as the door closes, we fall on the feast, like the starving men we are. I pull Berta’s delicious dinner to me and don’t offer it to anybody else. This is all mine. We eat fast, trying to make up for so many months of hunger.
Conversation is all about Christmases past—anecdotes about uncles who fell asleep after lunch and had tricks played on them, Christmas when it snowed and Christmas when it didn’t. I’m amazed that there could be Christmas without snow. Ralph says, “So what was everyone’s best Christmas ever and best Christmas present? Scotty, you first.”
He thinks for a minute and then says, “I was seven, and me mam and dad were still speaking to each other, an’ I had a pair of roller skates, which was just what I’d asked for, so I truly believed that Father Christmas had brought them to me. My dad drove me into Edinburgh to the roller-skating rink. It was the only time I ever went there, but it seemed such a magical place where people could do things which I kenned were impossible—even turnin’ roond and skating backward.”
“I never tried roller skates, but I went to Central Park to ice-skate once or twice when I was a kid,” says Max. He takes over. “My family couldn’t celebrate Christmas of course, but didn’t celebrate Hanukkah either. Athiests. I always felt as if I was missing out—half my friends had Christian holidays and half had Jewish holidays, and I didn’t have either. All we had was “The Internationale”! But I do remember one Christmas because we looked in a Brooklyn toy store window. There was a big whispered debate, and in the end they took me in and bought me a model airplane. It came all the way to London with me, even though we had to leave the States in a hurry after some strike my dad organized, and it’s still in my room at home. At least, I think it is.” There’s a moment’s silence, and I guess we are all thinking of the last time we saw our homes, wondering if they are still standing.
Then Ralph takes up the thread. “We had lovely Christmases as children. My sisters all used to dress up, and we’d play charades, and there would be delicious food, but I think my best one was going home the year after I’d changed from medicine to classics. It was a joy to know that I’d be going back to a world I finally fitted in.”
“Best present?” prompts Bill.
Ralph thinks hard. “Maybe a train I had when I was a boy. I loved that train. What about you, Bill?”
I think he’ll say something about the pub and Flora and a whole world I’ve never been part of, and I’m prepared to be jealous, but he looks steadily and seriously at me and says, “This is my best-ever Christmas, and my best-ever present is sitting next to me.”
I see Ralph’s eyes are bright with tears as he raises his tin mug. “A toast.”
We raise our mugs as Ralph makes a toast. “To those who’ve found happiness, that they keep it forever, and those who are still looking for it, that we find it in equal measure.”
We bang our mugs and say, “To happiness.”
Bill adds, “And to friends,” and they drink again.
Scotty says, “And to the end of this effing war.”
Bill stands up and raises his cup, and solemnly echoes, “The end of the war.”
Twenty-one
With January comes more snow than Bill has ever seen, and the work in the quarry slows as the marble is buried under drifts. Some days it’s a light enough snowfall for the prisoners to sweep away, but the marble has become slippery, and work soon has to be abandoned. It’s colder than Bill’s ever known it to be. Herr Rauchbach tells Ralph it’s minus 20 centigrade at night, and Ralph says that’s minus 4 Fahrenheit. Bill thinks that’s a long, long way below the freezing point. For days together the men are unable to leave their quarters, and everyone gets on one another’s nerves.
On one never-ending day, Ralph, Bill, Max and Izzy are sitting in their room. Bill has started knitting a new scarf, with a complicated pattern. Ralph asks him the name of the pattern, saying it’s like a cricket sweater, and Bill says, “Cable stitch.”
“Like Cable Street,” says Max. He turns to Izzy. “The most marvelous battle against Mosley’s fascists,” he says, “nineteen thirty-six. We nearly had a Hitler ourselves, you know.”
Bill puts his head down and concentrates hard on the knitting.
Max is enthusiastic. “They were all marching, the Blackshirts, and tried to get into the East End. They were anti-Semites like the Nazis you see, and us Jews all lived in the East End. But we rose up—they say there were twenty thousand of us, Jews, communists, anarchists! We built a barricade, at the Christian Street end—you know it, Bill…?” His eyes glitter.
Bill pretends to be focused on his knitting, knowing what’s coming but with no idea how to avoid it. He’d like to jump up and hurry from the room, but that might look worse.
“The police were trying to let the bastards through, and we were fighting the police with chair legs, broom handles, anything we could find. The women in the houses were emptying piss pots down on the police, and kids were chucking marbles under the hooves of the police horses. Mosley backed down and they left, and we carried on fighting with the police, because they were on the side of the fascists against us. And I was arrested and nearly had my arm twisted off, but it was worth it.”
Ralph asks how long he was in prison, but Max doesn’t answer. He’s looking oddly at Bill. “Were you there, Bill?”
Bill lifts his head from his knitting and gazes long and slow at Max. His heart is thumping, and he knows there’s going to be trouble.
“I was there,” he says in a neutral voice.
Max scratches his head. “You weren’t…you weren’t one of the Blackshirts?”
“No, no, I wasn’t.”